by Steven James
The door to the hallway opened and Dr. Malhotra appeared, accompanied by two orderlies in scrubs, rolling a gurney.
“The people . . . I work for . . .” Thad struggled to get that much out, but then his voice faded away into silence.
Byrne nodded and continued Thad’s sentence as if he were the one who’d started it: “Have spoken with me, and we all agreed you’d make a suitable subject. Good musculature, adequate intelligence, no close family. No one to miss you.”
No, this wasn’t happening, this could not be happening.
They’re going to paralyze you.
They’re going to—
“Technically, you’ll be a C4 tetraplegic, or a quadriplegic, if you prefer that term. We’re aiming for neck movement, so you should be able to turn your head, maybe even shrug slightly. You’ll need assistance, of course, with dressing, bathing, self-care; you’ll no longer be able to control your bowel or bladder functions, but we’ll have people here to attend to you. With the implants, you should be able to learn to control your exolimbs. With time.”
Thad struggled to move but couldn’t even lift his arms.
The men lowered the gurney.
“On three,” the colonel said.
No, please, no—
They positioned themselves around him.
“One. Two. Three.”
The men eased Thad onto the gurney. As a precaution, they firmly secured his wrists and ankles with the wide leather straps riveted to the sides of the gurney, and then raised it again so they could wheel him out of the room.
He tugged desperately at the restraints, but it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere. “I swear,” he mumbled, “I’ll . . .”
Byrne put a hand reassuringly on his arm. “Just relax, Thad. My people know what they’re doing. I’ll see you after your surgery.”
Then he walked to the table and, using only his thoughts, made the robotic arm set down the cup, pick up the spoon, dip out some of the gray powder, mix it into the drink, and then hand it to him.
From where he lay, Thad saw it all.
The colonel was sipping the coffee when the orderlies wheeled Thad past the bodies of the two men he’d brought to protect him, and rolled him down the hallway toward the operating room.
Thad tried to scream out curses, threats, even a final cry for mercy, but it was too late for any of that. He could only make soft, unintelligible gurgling sounds that no one paid any attention to.
They stationed the gurney beneath a wide, bright light in the operating theater where they had done the implant procedures on the monkeys.
As the men prepared for surgery, Thad heard a woman’s voice: “Lemme see him.”
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he recognized that—
Leaning over him, she came into view.
Yes, he did know her: a stunning blonde in her mid-twenties, nubile, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, a woman with a quiet, simple laugh and a svelte, well-toned body.
She was the escort he’d hired last night, the woman he and his men had shared. She called herself Calista, but he had no idea if that was her real name.
“Can you keep him awake while you do it?” she asked Dr. Malhotra.
“We should be able to get by with a local anesthetic. Sure.”
She trailed her finger along Thad’s cheek. “That’d be cool. He was totally rude to me last night. I wanna see the look in his eyes when it happens.”
One more time Thad tried and failed to beg them to stop.
He felt a sting in the back of his neck as they injected the anesthetic. Then Dr. Malhotra began the surgery of severing his spinal column while Calista watched curiously and, admittedly, somewhat grossed out, holding Thad’s hand in hers while it all went down.
Part II
Venom
35 days later
Thursday, February 7
Northern Luzon, Republic of the Philippines
Dusk
The sun dips wearily into the evening mist hovering above the mountains as I watch my friend Emilio Benigno get buried alive.
One man cuffs his hands behind his back, two others lay him in the wooden coffin, and a fourth drops four Sri Lankan cobras in with him. They nail the lid securely shut, then lower him into the shallow grave and start shoveling dirt onto the coffin’s lid.
We’re in a cemetery, surrounded by ancient grave markers being slowly reclaimed by the jungle. Filipinos typically place their dead in cement tombs above the ground, but in remote areas like this, that isn’t always feasible, so they’re forced to plant their dead. Somehow this strip of cleared land beside the jungle seems glad to have the opportunity of swallowing this village’s corpses.
Despite a recent downpour, the air is still thick and heavy with humidity. Puddles lie around us and dense clouds obscure the peaks of the nearby mountains. The rainforest that surrounds the village of thirty huts hums with unseen insects calling anxiously for night to come.
The evening is cool for this time of year, and a faint breeze fingers its way past the drenched rice fields and through the cemetery. The air is smudged with the sharp tinge of smoke from the wood fires of people cooking dinner in their bamboo huts. Everything smells damp and earthy and weary of the day.
One of the men who’s standing beside the grave lights a kerosene lantern. Even though darkness hasn’t devoured the jungle yet, the day is dim enough for the lantern to cast a blur of uneven light across the ground.
I picture Emilio lying motionless in the coffin, trying to calm his breathing. It would be pitch-black in there, the dirt sealing out any light that might be trying to sneak through the cracks between the lid and the sides of the coffin.
I imagine what it’s like for him, hearing the sound of the soil landing on the wood just inches above his face, the noise getting more and more muffled with each shovelful of earth.
I’ve been in tightly enclosed spaces myself, struggled with claustrophobia for almost a year and a half now, and I know what it feels like when the walls seem to be closing in and there’s nowhere to go and nothing you can do to stop them.
The whole event is being filmed, is being streamed live on the Internet. I have no idea how many people around the world might be watching, but based on the buzz leading up to today and the insatiable nature of human curiosity, the number might well be in the millions.
My friend is in the coffin, shrouded in the dark.
With his hands restrained behind him, Emilio is helpless to stop the four cobras from slithering across his body.
Though I’m no expert on snakes, my friend Xavier Wray knows his reptiles, and before we arrived here tonight, when all of this was still a possibility and not yet a reality, he told me about Sri Lankan cobras.
They’re curious snakes and right now they would be exploring the confines of the coffin, passing over Emilio’s legs, his chest, his neck and face. He’s almost certainly being careful not to move too much, not to let the sense of their thick, rope-like bodies startle him, or he might thrash around and agitate the snakes.
Sri Lankan cobras have one of the most toxic venoms of any subspecies of cobras. It’s a neurotoxin that can cause respiratory failure.
But tonight their venom won’t kill Emilio; this time if they bite him he will survive.
I tell myself this, try to comfort myself with this fact.
I’m guessing that now, as the men continue to toss the soil onto the coffin, Emilio is already out of the handcuffs, that he has slipped on the gloves he had hidden beneath his shirt to protect him if the snakes—which have had their venom glands removed but still have their fangs—were to bite him.
I glance at my watch.
He’s been in the coffin for three minutes.
At any moment he’ll be starting to dig.
His clothes are thicker than they appear, but with the amount of force the snakes are able to generate at the tip of their fangs, they would still be able to easily pierce the fabric. Any bites would still be painful. Venomous sna
kes can strike up to three times per second and if he responded impulsively or jerked from the bite of one of the snakes, it could make the rest of them aggressive—not at all what he would want, being sealed in a coffin with them.
We rehearsed for that, but you can never cover every contingency and you have to be able to respond when things don’t go as planned.
Besides, his neck and face were still vulnerable.
Emilio even let himself get bitten by a cobra with its venom glands removed to see if he could remain calm and controlled. I know only a handful of escape artists who would be willing to go that far.
It took three months for me to train him for this escape. He’s twenty-three, ten years younger than I am. He’s been doing illusions and escapes since he was twelve, but he hasn’t worked with snakes before.
I have—and I’ve been bitten: twice by rattlers and once by an Egyptian cobra. Those snakes hadn’t had their venom glands removed, and I spent nearly a month recovering each time. I almost lost two fingers to the swelling in my left hand from the cobra bite.
Now, Charlene Antioch, my assistant in my stage show as well as the woman I’m seeing, squeezes my hand, just for a moment. A small gesture that speaks volumes.
Her walnut-colored hair makes me think of a rich, chocolaty waterfall. A year younger than me, she has an agelessness about her and could pass for twenty if she needed to.
We’ve worked together for going on seven years, and recently our relationship has blossomed into much more than just the platonic friendship we had before my wife committed suicide a year ago last September.
A born actress, Charlene has the uncanny ability to transform herself into whatever kind of woman the situation calls for, which is an amazing gift for her to have during the quick change segments in my show. With the bat of an eye she can move from cute to flat-out irresistible.
Charlene is experienced in emergency first aid, and even though the snakes have had their venom glands removed, I don’t like to take any chances when the lives of other people hang in the balance, so she has several vials of antivenin with her in case something goes wrong.
Five minutes and forty seconds.
The men we’ve hired for this effect continue to shovel the earth onto the coffin that my friend Xavier designed.
Nearby, the snake wrangler, a Filipino man named Tomás Agcaoili, holds the canvas bag containing additional cobras. We told him we only needed four, but he insisted on bringing more to show the crowd and to “add more drama effect” for the video.
The crowd of nearly fifty people watches anxiously. Charlene, Xavier, and I are the only Caucasians here.
I glance toward Xavier, my effect designer. As a longtime veteran of working pyrotechnics for stage shows in Las Vegas, he met up with me just over three years ago when my show was doing a run on the Strip. He’s fifty-two, lives by himself in an RV, still rocks out to the Grateful Dead, and has listened to every episode of Coast to Coast AM that’s ever been aired. His job is to come up with effects that defy imagination and explanation. To, in essence, reverse engineer the impossible.
Bald, with a slightly graying goatee and mischievous yet steely eyes, Xav somehow looks both imposing and harmless at the same time. He’s a wizard with anything electronic or incendiary and is a little antsy today because he hasn’t blown anything up or burned anything down in over a week.
The coffin’s side has a release mechanism that Xavier came up with, and to provide additional oxygen, a one-inch-wide plastic air tube runs down through the earth out of sight of the onlookers.
Emilio will press himself all the way against the left side of the coffin, swing the right side panel in, allowing dirt inside. Then, as he digs his way out, he’ll continue to push the soil behind him and use his legs to kick it into the coffin so that, as he makes his way up through the earth, he fills the coffin behind him with the dirt he’s digging through. We would retrieve the snakes later after the conclusion of the effect.
I’ve done similar escapes and the digging is terrifically exhausting work, made more difficult by the cramped quarters and, in this case, the presence of the cobras, which isn’t going to allow him to make any quick movements that might make them aggressive.
I coached Emilio, taught him how to do this. He’s good and has practiced each part of this escape dozens of times; I wouldn’t be here encouraging him if I wasn’t confident he had the skill to get out. But staying calm is just as vital as the technical aspects of an escape, and that’s the hardest thing to teach—and to master—especially when the pressure is on.
Six minutes, fifty-eight seconds.
My attention is focused on the grave, but I notice Tomás pass to the back of the crowd.
Xavier gives me a look that to anyone else would mean nothing, but we’ve worked together enough for me to know that something is up.
A shadow of worry.
That’s what I see cross his face.
He has a radio transmitter disguised as a nail in the side of the coffin, and in his earpiece he can hear everything that’s going on inside.
Unobtrusively, he walks over and eyes the ground at the end of the tube we hid earlier, the one that leads to the coffin and could be accessed by pushing out a carefully concealed knot in the wood on the side panel.
As soon as Emilio’s hands were free he would be able to pop the fake knot out, access the air tube, and get as much air as he needs.
Before we flew here to the Philippines I told him, “It’s amazing how fast you use up air when you’re digging—faster than you can imagine. You’ll need the extra oxygen. So if you want me to help arrange this for you, we’re going to use an air tube and we’re removing the snakes’ venom.”
At last he agreed, Xavier and his team worked out the logistics, and here we are.
Soil quickly swallows the cries of people who are buried alive. Knowing Emilio, I don’t think he will scream, but as the dirt piles higher, I hear a faint pounding sound, kicking. He’s thrashing around inside the coffin.
“Hang on,” I tell the men. “Ihinto. Stop.”
I walk closer and listen carefully.
Xavier stands beside me. Things are quiet now beneath the earth. “Something’s wrong,” he says stiffly.
I turn to the men. “Dig him up.”
“But—” one of the men objects.
“Do it.”
They hesitate and I grab one of the shovels. “I said, dig. Now.”
Xavier points to the person filming this. “Turn off the camera.”
At last the men join me and the soil flies quickly. There aren’t any shovels left for Xavier, so he gets on his knees and with his bare hands drags the soil aside.
“Turn off that camera!” he repeats roughly.
The crowd looks shaken. A few women hold their hands over their mouths.
After a few moments of furious digging, I drive my shovel into the earth and hear a dull thunk as the blade finds the top of the coffin. I call to Emilio but he doesn’t answer. The soft, muted sound of the snakes hissing is faint, but even through the coffin I can hear it.
Yes, they’re agitated alright.
“Emilio?”
No reply.
“Get this lid off!”
The men shoveling beside me look at each other uneasily, but I yell again for them to help me get the cover off.
Xavier and I brush dirt off the lid.
I can see that the right side of the coffin is tilted slightly inward, telling me that Emilio released it and started to dig, but with the angle I can’t open the top yet. I’ll need to get the cover off.
The release mechanism Xavier installed only works to open one side of it, not the top. Now he appears with a hammer to pry loose the nails holding down the lid. I take it from him and set to work.
“I’m coming, Emilio. I’m right here!” But he doesn’t respond. And having rehearsed this so much together, I know he would if he could.
The nails were hammered all the way in, but the wood is
slightly beveled, giving me enough space for the claw end of the hammer, and I go at the nails.
Did a cobra get mixed in there that still had its venom?
Charlene has already joined us and has the syringe of antivenin ready.
I don’t see the snake wrangler close by. “Get Tomás over here,” I shout, then scoot to the far end of the coffin and pry the final nail loose, edge over, plant my feet next to the coffin, and throw open the lid.
Inside the coffin I can see two, three—yes, all four of the cobras. One rears its head up at me as if to strike, but Xavier grabs a shovel from one of the men beside us and bats the snake violently away, then brings the blade down across its neck to stop it for good.
Emilio is still alive, his eyes are open and so is his mouth, but his lips are already turning bluish. His fingers twitch faintly.
Then I see it.
A baby cobra wriggles free from the end of the air tube, and as Charlene drops to one knee to open Emilio’s airway and to get him the antivenin, another baby cobra eases out from between his lips. She jerks back involuntarily, but I move in, grab the snake, and fling it aside.
“Help me get him out,” I shout to the men beside me.
We lift Emilio out of the coffin. Gasps rise from the crowd, and the men scramble backward toward safety.
“Where’s Tomás?” I call urgently to the men. “Get him over here. Now.”
The other snakes are already trying to find their way out of the coffin.
I can hear Xavier behind me taking care of the cobras before they get free—after all, if they still do have their venom we can’t let them get loose with all these people around.
Charlene leans in beside me. “Jev, I’ve got it.” She gives him the injection.
“You’re going to be fine,” I tell Emilio, but know it’s probably a lie even as I say it.
The air tube. He put his lips up to it, sucked in to get air into his lungs, and a cobra ended up in his mouth instead.