by S A Gardner
As soon as we disembarked from our vehicles, we were flooded by people, mostly Afro-Colombian women and youngsters, the ones who constituted most of the tugurios’ inhabitants. They tugged at us, shaking our hands, introducing themselves, chattering, welcoming. I got lost in the smiling faces, my own smile so sustained that my muscles ached under its weight, an ache resonating with the ever-present one in my chest.
I looked around. Where was Damian in this instant translation emergency? Had he been anywhere in the open he would have stood out like a lighthouse. So where had he disappeared to? Still with the paras? I wondered what they made of him, what story he’d given them. Not that I needed to worry about him.
Worry about yourself now.
I grabbed Rafael, kept him beside me throughout. His translation services left a lot to be desired, transmitting the bare essence, skipping all details.
Then four people, three women and one man, were forging their way through the milling crowd. From the way it parted for them, the way they carried themselves, it was unmistakable. They were the community leaders, people elected by the displaced, to form an organizing committee that got the place running as smoothly as possible, based on their leadership qualities and skills. And they, thankfully, spoke English—sort of.
Another thing distinguished them from the others. They were nowhere near as enthusiastic or welcoming.
Hmm. Only one explanation for the poles-apart reaction here. Those four, being in a place of authority, and therefore of knowledge, knew stuff that made them unable to see our arrival as the boon the others thought it was. They were almost scared.
I got that just looking at them. Then we talked. And whoa, these people were spooked. And it wasn’t us. This just reeked of the proverb, “Scalded by soup, blowing in yogurt.”
Which led to the next logical conclusion.
Maybe what they knew, what they were so afraid of, was directly linked to my friends’ affliction.
It made sense. Or I desperately wanted it to. But really, why else wouldn’t they be happy to receive aid? Unless a previous aid mission, or something parading as one, sanctioned by their jailers, as we seemed to be, had resulted in costly, irrevocable damage.
Ask them. Who came before us? Who offered aid that turned out to be a curse? What happened? Where did it happen? Who got affected? Where are they now? Tell me, show me!
Down, girl. The paras hadn’t even left the place yet. Even when they shoved off, I couldn’t show my hand. Had to let things unfold naturally.
Yeah, and go mad the same way.
Struggling with the corroding urge to find out now, now, I instead told them our mission goals. Basically: “We’re here to take care of seriously ill people.”
Yeah. This was the sum total of my investigative approach, betting I’d find those who shared my friends’ conditions among the inexplicably ill. It would be a legitimate diagnostic and treatment effort to dig as deeply into the origin of their affliction as needed. And get my answers.
Had to make sure they understood what I meant by “seriously ill.” Couldn’t afford to waste our allotted time with irrelevant cases.
“Seriously ill are those in danger of dying and quickly. Please, bring us only those. We have four days here, and we only have three surgeons, two emergency doctors and six surgical and trauma nurses. We will be conducting exams around the clock and we want to make our stay here count.”
One of the women, the oldest, the one transmitting the best vibes، and the one I thought was in charge, came forward. “We get you sickest people in morning.”
Morning? Was she kidding? I captured her wavering eyes, wouldn’t let go. “I want them right now! Those people have no time to lose.”
Twenty-Five
I was about to lose it. All of it. Dinner. Cool. Hope. Mind.
It was four a.m. and Savannah and I were the last ones standing. Even Al had taken that first-shift sleep offer two hours ago. Good thing, too, since he’d have to be on call here in three hours.
We’d been receiving—or I should say drowning—in patients for the past eight hours. According to our accumulated numbers, we’d examined over four hundred people. And no sign of anyone with anything resembling my friends’ condition.
Sure, there were serious cases, hordes of them, all urgent surgical intervention indications, from the potentially catastrophic down to the chronically suffering. But none had had explosive mood changes or convulsions. None was in a coma—or had ever been in one.
God! What did that mean? Were we chasing the wrong lead, after all? A mirage? This wasn’t where my friends got infected? It had been a coincidence? If that was true, then—then what? Where to go from here?
“So what do you think?” Savannah looked over my shoulder at my patient.
I looked again, too, almost didn’t see the woman. I’d examined her, taken X-rays, written notes—and hadn’t connected my findings into a possible diagnosis.
Focus. Think.
All right. Skin-on-bones, constant, crippling bowel pain, rectal bleeding. Terminal malignancy? Crohn’s disease? No—she had arthritis, rashes, eye inflammation, liver disease. All that accompanied ulcerative colitis. Horrible, incapacitating and emaciating, but still much better than the first two choices. It at least had a surgical treatment.
I told Savannah so, and she nodded. “I think you’re right. But I actually meant the question in a more general sense.”
I closed stinging eyes over grating sand. “You mean what do I think about not encountering any condition to prove a link to our peoples’ conditions, to prove my theory?”
“Yeah.” She helped the patient dress, patted her on the back as she escorted her out while I filled in her report. Savannah came back, swaying with exhaustion where she stood. “If these are their sickest people…”
“You’re suggesting they may be hiding the ones we need to see?”
Her shoulders rose, fell in one of those elegant movements of hers. “Maybe. I don’t know. No. It wouldn’t make sense. But then, what does? It just feels like a dead end.”
Tell me about it. Would I find the origin to this phantom illness before it was too late?
If it wasn’t too late already, for my friends.
I sighed. “One thing I learned about dead ends, Savvy. You just smash your way through them and keep going, dig deeper and wider and hope to strike something.”
“Someone tell me what we’re doing here again.”
I didn’t remove my eyes from my task at Al’s sighing comment, went on cutting through the inflamed mesentery, the sheath covering the bowels, releasing them, then carefully dissecting their intricate network of blood vessels.
Each of us was at an operating station, deep in a surgery. This was my seventeenth today, Señora Perez with the ulcerative colitis. I’d had a mean time of forty minutes per surgery, with the rest of the eighteen-hour working day spent preparing for and wrapping up procedures. Al and Savannah had my record beat at twenty-one surgeries each. But they’d had simpler cases—until the ones they left for last. The others were dealing with minor surgical procedures and serious nonsurgical conditions. We were keeping only the most serious and fragile cases in our IC. The rest were outside in the field hospital we’d set up. Among us, we’ve had over one-thirty surgical and one-fifty nonsurgical serious cases today.
“We’re presumably saving lives, Al.” That was Lucia from another surgical station, helping Savvy with a bypass surgery. Yeah, single-handedly. The impossible girl had refused to budge, popping analgesics and trooping on with the rest of us.
I waited for my surgical nurse, and part-time muscleman and guard, Ben Hanson, to expose the arteries for me before I ligated them, tying them up to stop severe bleeding when we moved to the next step, removing the diseased colon.
Savannah murmured for a vascular clamp. Al sighed again after he asked for suction. “Yeah. We wake up two days ago to endless queues of patients and here we go. But much as I’d love to eradicate all disease and suffering in the tugur
ios, this isn’t why we’re here. So, Cali, is this a new plan or what?”
He had a point. A huge one. We’d strayed. For the past two days we hadn’t even thought about our mission. Okay, we had, but I’d done nothing to further it, to get back on track. The track was obscured, lost in the IDPs’ overwhelming need for us. We couldn’t have ignored them if we tried.
So we’d taken care of business, doing what we’d originally signed on in this world to do, healing where we could.
Funny how things happened, though. I’d been thinking “gloomy end of the tunnel” when I’d seen a ray of hope. A flimsy, flickering one. But one nonetheless.
I started cutting out the colon after stapling it shut so the contents wouldn’t pollute the peritoneum. “It’s probably a new plan, just nothing I voluntarily did. Or yeah, sort of, all of us did it. Seems our performances for the past days have gained us what nothing else could—voluntary information!”
Every head in the STS snapped up.
I removed the colon, pulled on the ileum, the very end of the small bowel, using about twenty centimeters to form the J-pouch that would replace the colon in function. “Señora Perez’s daughter is one of the spooked community leaders. She was so thankful her mother’s condition wasn’t terminal and that surgery would cure her, called us ’angels’ and started talking. Uh—Ben, you can hold the intestines away for me anytime now.”
He blinked, tore expectant eyes away and did it, clearing the surgical field as I communicated the insides of the segments to form a larger reservoir. “She confessed how afraid she was when we first arrived, how the last time people came here to vaccinate them was followed by a wave of violent illnesses.”
“And they suspect our team of that?” Al exclaimed.
“Circumstantial evidence,” I said. “She couldn’t positively link it to our people, since most of those who succumbed weren’t vaccinated. Still, they think our people’s presence must have had something to do with the mysterious sickness.”
“Anything resembling our cases?” Savannah asked.
I exhaled. “Wasn’t clear on this one. Her English is dodgy and when I suggested getting one of you Spanish speakers, she panicked. But the interesting part? I understood that every previous community leader had been among those who got ill. She’s one of their replacements. And those are the only ones scared of our presence, because only they knew about their predecessors’ illness, having put a lid on it to avoid widespread panic.”
“Great!” Al clapped his hands, reached for scissors. “We’re getting somewhere here. So where are they hiding their sick?”
“Underground. Literally. They’re all dead.”
The noises of suction, the anesthesia and heart-lung machines took over the next minute.
I finally sighed. “They were all dead within four days.”
Another minute, then Al said, “If it was the same thing—and it’s too much of a coincidence for it not to be—their quick deaths aren’t surprising, with their deteriorated health and nonexistent health care as opposed to our friends’ superb physical condition and the superior supportive measures they’re getting.”
I shook my head. “Yeah. Neat and tidy explanation. If those people hadn’t died only a week after Matt and the others left.”
Another minute, then two and three of silence.
Savannah was the one to end it. “How could they have been infected or affected by the same thing at the same time and have an almost two-month difference in time of onset?”
“Could their deteriorated health and lack of immunity account for that, too?” Lucia put in. “Matt did manifest earlier than the others after severe exertion.”
Ben spoke up for the first time. “Or maybe they weren’t infected with the same thing.”
“Two agents?” I chewed my lips under my mask. “At the same place, probably the same time? Guess anything’s possible—but it just doesn’t ring true. Still, it chimes better than my ‘two possibilities’ theory. First possibility being the agent is biological and they had already used up their incubation period when they infected our people. But, that would mean everyone exposed to them should have manifested by now, and since they haven’t, it makes no sense. Second possibility is it’s a chemical agent engineered to have a slow and rapid release form, explaining the delay. But then, how come two sets of people exposed at the same time end up with one and not the other so selectively?”
In answer to those theories, silence reigned—for the rest of the surgeries and beyond.
After transferring our patients to the appropriate recovery stations, I paid Constanza, Señora Perez’s daughter, a visit. A gross euphemism for waking her up in terror thinking it was her turn to be “made an example of”!
After rivers of apologies and reassurances, I had a long, communication-challenged conversation with her. Scared her out of her wits while at it. But somehow I convinced her I wasn’t crazy. I made a superlative show of masquerading as a sane and logical being. So much so, she ended up agreeing that my plans were the only thing to do in the situation, and thanking me for being here to do them. Madness was probably infectious.
I stepped out of her hut delirious with exhaustion. Yeah, yeah. You and everyone else. Get over it. The ticking clock wasn’t slowing down for me to fit in recharging. We had two more days. The paras had been breathing down our necks. Had to go ahead and put plans in action now….
“What’s up, Doc?”
I jerked with that jolt of perpetual chemistry. With the missing that never let up. Damian.
I hadn’t seen him since we arrived, not really. While we’d been deluged by patients, he’d run circles around the three-times-a-day-patrolling paras, diverting them from us, from any suspicions of our link to the massacre outside their territory.
Rafael said he’d been helping him. When Damian hadn’t received his input with a grin and a thank you, Rafael had reminded him the PR job would have been his if Damian hadn’t crashed our party. Bet that made for cheery chats.
But not seeing Damian hadn’t meant not feeling him, in my senses, in my blood…
He straightened from the tree and our affinity engulfed me. As always. Then I was up against him, our mouths mating. My doing. And after I’d smacked his hands off in our last standoff. I deserved every bit of the mocking “Missed me that much?” that slid down my throat, washed down by his lust-laden groans.
I allowed myself one more plunge into our bond, gulping him down like a bolstering elixir. I needed all his life and vigor for what I was about to do.
Then I pushed out of his crushing embrace, grabbed his hand, towed him behind me to our services trailer. He tried to follow inside.
Thinking this was an invitation, huh? In the services trailer? Yeah. He had good cause to think anything. I stopped him, dodged inside, came out thirty seconds later with the tools we’d need for this specific type of surgery.
I jumped down, shoved a shovel into his hands. He stared at it, then back at me, eyebrows raised.
I dragged him behind me. “Let’s go dig up some bodies.”
Twenty-Six
“Autopsies are supposed to shed light, not more shadows, y’know?” I coughed again. And again. Trying to clear my lungs, my vision. Wasn’t working. Everything remained stifled, distorted. The surgical mask felt welded to my flesh, sealing all outlets to a worldful of life-sustaining oxygen.
Man. What a time to discover I was a wimp.
Char raised her eyes—amused? Couldn’t she have the decency to look horrified-but-holding-it-in like the HazMat pro that she was? Sure, she’d seen it all in her time, victims of every diabolical weapon ever spawned by sick minds. Must be tough as granite. Still, this—!
Maybe I was imagining the amusement, hearing things. Probably. The whine of the bone saw was messing up my gray matter.
““I don’t know, Cali,” Char said. “After vomiting three times, I think seeing shadows is just about natural.”
I gaped at her as I helped her remove th
e vault of the cadaver’s skull. “You vomited, too?”
“Talking about you, kiddo.” She reached inside the open skull, removed the shriveled brain, our last autopsy item. “Would never have thought you had a touchy stomach, seeing how you blasted those mercenaries without turning a hair.”
I shuddered again. “Oh, I turn hairs, every one I have. But then there was this we’ll-all-die-if-I-don’t stuff. Now, it’s just…just…”
Just a nightmarish dip into the future. My friends’ future. They could be dying right now. I could return to perform a similar procedure on them— My stomach heaved again.
Char’s glance saw it all, what made the grisly task unbearable. She cocked her head. “This your first autopsy?”
I hiccuped. “Nah. Just my first exhumation!”
She started dissecting the brain. “You get used to them.”
Yeah. Sure. Like I’d want to! “Don’t tell me—absence of any gross pathological findings.”
That was gross pathology’s verdict so far. Apart from the obvious injuries incurred by their violent attack before they were restrained, there was no gross tissue response to viral or bacterial infections or toxic substances in all organs. Absolutely no reason why those people, who looked to have been far healthier than the average refugee, should be dead.
“Actually,” she murmured as she made another incision, “from your baffling clinical experience, and with all those negative tests, I wasn’t holding my breath for something grossly enlightening. But I’d say this is our first bingo moment.”
I jumped, tried to get a look around her impressive frame.
“See this?” She pointed at paper-thin meninges, a corroded brain cortex. “Pathologic changes of severe encephalomyelitis galore, the severest I’ve ever seen. The meninges and brain are practically cooked. There’s your cause of death.”
It sure was. Oh God! “My friends are displaying signs of encephalomyelitis, too. But no investigations corroborate our clinical diagnosis.” And their brains could be looking like that now! I subsided on my stool. “But what about the absence of systemic response? Something that potent had to cause multi-organ effects before reaching the brain. Enlarged lymph nodes, throat and joint inflammation and edema—I mean, what kind of infectious agent or toxin bypasses the blood and every organ and targets only the brain? And what about the prodrome of violence and hallucinations? Even the most acute inflammation doesn’t result in such manic behavior. This still reeks of poisoning!”