I got to my feet, slowly, allowing sips of daylight through the cracks of my fingers, until I was able to remove my hand completely. The vastness of the rainforest stretched around me and I suffered a long moment of disorientation. Everything was green. I staggered in circles, struggling for focus. Eventually I was able to move in a straight line and with huge relief I started away from the caves, away from the creatures. Every step eased my soul. I was sobbing. I felt reborn.
The sun leaked through the thick canopy. I could see its flare, at first directly above me, and then sinking to my right, to the west. I decided to head east, trusting to the logic that we had taken off from Manaus and were headed west, for Carauari. We were not long into our journey when our plane went down. I surmised—incorrectly, as it turned out—that I was submerged in the Amazon to the west of Manaus. I was simply going back the way I had come, one step at a time, using distinctive landmarks (fallen trees, colourful bromeliads, odd-shaped leaves) as waypoints. I waded through rivers and crashed through snarls of foliage, determined to maintain an even line. When the sun touched the horizon and the jungle was fat with purple light, I thought of resting for the night. But that was when I heard their crying, tormented whoops. The sound didn’t carry across the miles; it was in my head. I was a part of them. I shared their blood, and understood them.
They were coming for me.
I peeled through the darkness, snapping through ferns and vines with no regard for direction. Their advance was like a pendulum in my mind, swinging from one side of my skull to the other, until I could hear them on the outside—their wings slapping the air, their frustrated shrieks. I never looked back. I never stopped. Everything was hurting and my heart brimmed with dread. I crossed a wide river, kicking my legs and working my one arm, finally reaching the other side, where a female caiman snapped her huge jaws and whipped away from me. I broke into the jungle, startling sprays of sleeping macaws. The creatures were behind me, closer now. Their powerful cries filled the sky like stars.
Trying to outrun them was futile; I was weak, and they were too quick. My only hope was to hide, and I found a place in the dense understorey, low to the ground, where I knew they would have difficulty moving their wings. I wriggled amongst the vines clinging to the trunk of a strangler fig, shivering as they came closer. At one point I heard their cries directly overhead and dared a glance. I could see fragments of the night sky through the skeletal fingers of the canopy and shuddered, watching their shapes pass over the stars . . . long, hooked wings and thin, almost-human bodies. They circled above my hiding place, occasionally swooping lower so that their talons scraped the treetops, but they never broke through the canopy. I waited, my heart blistering in my chest, and eventually they swept away from me. Wounded shrieks ripped from their bodies, fading into the night.
I could still hear them, though—in my mind. Their cries trailed into my sleep and underlined my dreams. I awoke at dawn. Bursts of green seeped through my wounded eyes and a line of orange light bled through the understorey in the east. The air was clean, fat with oxygen, and I sucked in long, grateful breaths as my nightmares dispersed. I started to snake my body through the vines but stopped when I saw the jaguar poised on a fallen tree trunk, less than seven feet away. It glared at me, yellow eyes glimmering, and I watched the muscles in its flank ripple as it readied itself to pounce. Instinct swept away all fear—hateful, animal instinct—and I roared at the beast, baring my teeth, stamping my one fist into the ground. The jaguar hissed, backed along the trunk, then turned and fled. It rustled amongst the understorey and disappeared.
Sweat glistened on my brow. I wiped it away with a trembling hand, got to my feet, and walked toward the light.
My body cried at me, buckled with thirst. I knew what it wanted—what it thirsted for—but tried to deny it. I splashed chilled water down my throat, gagging, hating it, and couldn’t keep it down.
What have I become?
By chance I stumbled upon an injured tapir. Its front leg was lame and it struggled to walk, snuffling at the grass, trembling when it saw me. I caught it easily, wrapped my arm around its neck, and twisted. There was no fight in the creature; its body flexed once against my side, and then it was still. I opened its throat with a sharp stone. Hot blood poured out and my stomach made convulsive clenches. I didn’t deny it a moment longer. I lowered my mouth to the steaming wound and drank. The taste was immediately satisfying and I felt my strength returning. I drank until there was no blood left—just a slaughtered husk lying in the grass. I licked my lips, half-weeping with some unknown emotion, and stumbled on.
I wondered if I was more animal than human—more like the creatures that inhabited the cave than the professional photographer who owned an expensive studio apartment in São Paulo. I still don’t know the answer. My thoughts are certainly human, yet I know there is something different inside me. Something huge and living. And terrifying.
My appetite for blood is unquenchable.
What have I become?
I staggered through the jungle for days—weeks, even, killing whatever I was quick enough to catch. I feared nothing. I encountered the worst the Amazon had to offer, and bested it all. I always had blood on my hands.
And at last . . . civilization: lights flickering in the distance.
I washed the blood from my body and staggered, naked as the day I was born, into the municipality of Pauini.
Close to you.
City lights blaze around me, but I hold to the shadows and move like vapour. I reach out—mental arms yearning to touch you—and feel the vague flicker of your presence. It touches me like sunlight.
Here I come.
Favela Rocinha.
The buildings were like the random thoughts that occur on the cusp of sleep, haphazardly piled on top of one another. Concrete and clapboard. Brick and tin. No order. Barely a semblance of structure. They challenged physics, leaning at angles, creaking and shifting in the wind. Electric lights hummed behind shuttered windows.
It was easy for Fernando to move unnoticed. He was just another stray; trash blown by the wind. He whispered through the shanty, past the stalls selling bottled water and old fruit and clay statuettes of Christ the Redeemer. Fires flickered on street corners, fuelled by children with dirty faces and scuffed knees. He could smell churrasco and sewerage. The streets were wet with rain. He could hear it dripping from one tin roof to another.
Closer.
A thin man sat on a concrete step playing a guitar with three strings, finding a melody even though his fingers, out of habit, touched empty places on the fretboard. He didn’t notice Fernando, who flitted by, as light as an insect’s wing. A woman danced barefoot in the gutter, holding her skirt above her knees, like a little girl paddling. She didn’t lose a step as Fernando swept around her. He followed a pack of stray dogs to the end of the street, where a faulty traffic signal buzzed indecisively between stop and go. Mosquitoes flicked between colours, like living glitter.
Fernando paused in the doorway of an exhausted building, where the wind whistled in the gaps between bricks and the windows rattled like old toys. He closed his eyes and cast his instinct into the night. He was rewarded with a feeling—as light, yet real, as the beat of his pulse—from the northwest, further up the hill, where Rocinha’s streets were more jaded, but where its lights burned brighter.
“Avô Vinícius . . .” He caught another wave of instinct and his promise trailed away. This was deep and cold, rushing to him from the south, bringing dread, whistling and rattling, like the wind through the tired building. His mind danced with terrible images. Clown faces leered at him. Endless rainbow legs bounded through the cramped streets.
Closer. But now the word was terrifying.
Fernando peeled out of the doorway and dared a glance over one shoulder. He couldn’t see them, but they were coming . . . they were close. He turned back to the lights towering in the streets above him.
The signal stuttered. Only green. Only go.
; Translation taken from the Journal of Vinícius Araújo Valentim.
(September 19th 2032.)
This must end.
I have torn through civilization, bringing pain and death and disease. I have burned with devastation, and seen cities—countries—spill countless infected to the streets, and then fall crippled to their knees. I am the cloud over the sun. I am the falling rain. I am the disease.
They cannot catch me. I am too quick, too strong, and always one move ahead. They come for me in São Paulo, yet I am in Florianópolis. They are weeks, months, cities behind. I drink to stay alive. I spread the infection. All I can hear is screaming.
They come for me—an army: one thousand strong. They batter down doors in Brasilia. I am in Teresina.
I drink. I live. I grow stronger.
How long before the world is beaten? How long before the continents are ravaged and buckled and slide screaming into the oceans? Because of me. I am the grandfather of ruin.
It must end.
I could take my own life, but I lack the courage. I could return to the caves in Amazonia, where I was saved—reborn—and be with my kindred, but the thought of being back there, with their cold, leathery bodies so close to mine, fills me with terror. I can do that no more than I could throw myself from the highest building in Brazil.
I want to be normal.
I will find a place where all hope is fragile, and where prayers are always spoken. I will blend in with the desperation—lose myself there. I will surround myself with darkness and live by meager means, until I grow old and weak. Until I die.
And if they find me . . . it will all be over. Leave it to fate. Let God decide.
I am the cause. The most virulent strain. But my part in this horror is done.
Let me find darkness.
Please, God.
The light inside.
Fernando’s body ached and boomed and he pressed on, doubled over, heaving up steep, uneven streets. His jacket caught the wind and flowered behind him, and he shook it off so that it wouldn’t slow him down. It flapped and tumbled down the streets, followed by a stream of excited children with naked, polished skin. He held the butterfly to his face. Tears flashed behind its delicate wings. His instinct shimmered, but he couldn’t tell if it was because he was close to Avô Vinícius, or because the Psycho Cowboys were closing in.
Graffiti bled on the walls. Faded colours. Doors and shutters applauded in the breeze. The buildings leaned above him, time-washed greens and reds and blues, stacked like boxes. He ascended a corkscrew of crumbling steps, gasped the name of his saviour, and fell to his knees. He closed his eyes for a second and saw rainbows. The image terrified him—pushed him to his feet. He pressed onward. Rocinha glittered below him: a puddle on the earth, reflecting stars.
And all at once he was there. The shack was small and dark, with rotted slats of wood and flaps of tarpaulin filling the gaps in the brickwork. Simple light flickered inside. It was weak, decrepit, but for Fernando, it was everything he ever hoped to see.
“I am here,” he said.
The Psycho Cowboys were close now. Fernando staggered to the shack. His heart was the light inside, flickering and bleeding through the gaps in the weakened frame.
We’re not normally so kind.
“What have you become?”
“Less than a shadow.”
“I thought you’d be . . . more.”
“I am nothing.”
The thing on the bed was barely human, and barely alive—a broken creature with pale eyes and sallow skin. Fernando could define the bow of his ribcage and the buckled knots of his spine. Thin lips receded from endless teeth. Purple veins jumped with uncertain rhythm, wrapped around loose muscle.
“Avô Vinícius, I have—”
The thing spat: “I am not your grandfather.”
Fernando shook his head. Hope scattered from his heart. The strength moved from his legs and he collapsed—as frail as the monster on the bed. He had travelled so long, and risked certain death, to be here . . . to find salvation.
The creature pulled this thought from his mind and responded, “I am not your saviour. I am the disease. I am death.”
“We can be strong again.”
“Everything dies.” A syrupy yellow substance leaked from his eyes, into the shallows of his face. “Find your own destiny, and leave me alone.”
“You are my destiny.” Fernando crawled toward Avô Vinícius. He grasped his meager body and pulled him close. So light. A devastated, useless thing. His head lolled pathetically on his stick neck.
Sounds from outside: doors thrown open, raised voices, people crying out.
“They are here,” Fernando said.
“Let them take you,” Avô Vinícius hissed. He shifted in Fernando’s arms, twisting his skeletal frame, the stump of his left arm twitching. “Look at me, and tell me . . . is this really what you want? I am the pestilence that runs through your blood. I have nothing good to give. And neither do you.”
“I have to survive.”
“That’s not a reason to live.”
The sounds outside were louder. Closer.
“I was born into this,” Fernando said. “It’s all I know.”
A grotesque smile touched his lips. Fernando, aghast, threw him back onto the bed. A stuttering tangle of bones.
“A good reason to die, then,” the creature said. The door crashed open. The Psycho Cowboys were there. Six of them. Tall, ungainly men with stretched faces. One of them pulled a handgun and fired three times. Fernando felt the heat of the bullets. They missed him by inches.
The first bullet tore through Avô Vinícius’s chest. The second entered his right eye and exited the rear left portion of his skull, splashing thick pink matter onto the wall. The third bullet ripped through his throat with terrible force, severing what remained of his head and sending it tumbling into the corner.
The Cowboys stepped into the shack. The one with the gun (he was at least seven feet tall) looked at Fernando and grinned.
“Why do you think we let you run?”
Fernando sneered. “You couldn’t catch me.”
“Wrong.” The Psycho Cowboy pointed the gun at the broken, bleeding shape on the bed. Tendrils of smoke eased from the barrel. “We wanted you to lead us to him. The Pathogen. The root of all evil. Now he is dead, and the war is over.”
Fernando got to his feet. The Butterfly trembled on his face.
“What happens to me?” he asked.
Their grins were identical: yellow teeth set in grey faces.
“We killed him quickly,” the one with the gun said, holstering his weapon. “We’re not normally so kind.”
We are the revenge.
With the first wave of pain he knew he was not dreaming. No dream could bring such agony, although everything else . . .
Naked, his thin body coloured with bruises. Blood raced from his shattered nose and mouth. It was thick in his throat. His eyelids flickered. He could hear laughter—a chattering, bubbling sound that pulled him to full alertness, and yet made him want to faint away forever.
He could see wild colour.
“No one will cry for you.”
He was chained between two posts, his arms pulled wide, cruciform, so like the famous statue. The tips of his toes scuffed the concrete floor. He blinked tears from his eyes and rattled the chains. There was no give in them. Heavy breaths worked from his lungs. He snapped his head around and could see that he was in a large room—it looked like an abandoned warehouse—with a row of dusty windows along one side and loading doors at the far end. Ultraviolet lights glared like wide eyes, making strange shadows.
The Psycho Cowboys formed a semi-circle around him. They had changed out of their drab suits and into the regalia of cruelty: not quite the rainbows and clown faces he had seen in his dreams, but close. They wore fluorescent costumes—flamboyant colours amplified by the ultraviolet lights. Their faces were alive with luminescent paint. Nightmarish designs. They gl
owed like a child’s Halloween joke.
They brandished their torture implements. Three of them carried batons. Two wielded picanas that were wired into car batteries. The sixth Cowboy (the tallest of them—the one who had shot Avô Vinícius) had an oily chainsaw hoisted on one shoulder.
“Let me tell you what happened to me,” he said. The chainsaw looked heavy, judging from the way he adjusted his body to support the weight. “My family was killed in front of my eyes. I was seven years old at the time. Two of your kind broke into my house and slaughtered them all. My mother, father, and my two sisters. I hid in the closet and watched. Terrified, but vowing revenge. My associates . . .” he gestured at the Cowboys gathered around him, “. . . have similar stories. So do many hundreds of thousands of people in this country—in this continent. Innocent people torn to pieces by your disease. That’s why we’re here. We are not the cure. We are the revenge.”
Fernando opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He had nothing to say. He knew his fate, and would accept it silently. His heart ached with the failure, but it ached more with the knowledge—even though he had always expected it—that he would never see his beautiful Giovanna again. Her face burgeoned in his mind for a second. A beautiful flower, with petals so bright they threw the Psycho Cowboys’ colour into shade.
I’m so sorry, Giovanna, he thought. He glimpsed his mask, lying on the floor behind the Psycho Cowboys. Its wings were crushed. The pieces shimmered in the ultraviolet light, like rare minerals. He closed his eyes. She faded from his mind.
“You were strong once,” the Cowboy said. His voice creaked like wet leather. The colours of his face were orange and pink. Sunrise colours. They accentuated the blackness of his eyes. “You were virulent. You killed millions. But you’re not strong anymore.”
Another Cowboy stepped forward. His face was obscenely bright—painted with red, tribal whorls that reached to the back of his bald head. His baton was happy-yellow. He raised it . . . brought it forward in a sunshine arc . . . smashed it against Fernando’s ribcage. The pain was alive and furious. It writhed and kicked. Fernando heard his ribs shatter. He felt them break loose inside his body.
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