the mortis (8 page)

The situation in Cãlo doesn
’t much matter either way.  Even if the town kept its gates wide open to the world, Park would still have to cross La Sielve to get there, which he simply can’t do, at least not on foot.  The route cuts through more than fifty miles of treacherous, untouched jungle landscape.  The only civilizing influence on La Sielve over the last hundred years has been the single dirt road, the murram, carved haphazardly down the middle.  Otherwise it’s nothing but an expanse of wild terrain, impassable to anyone but the most seasoned Mirasai women and men.  That’s also just rumor, something he’s heard during his time here, but he believes all of it.

Park clambers out of the ravine, and then there
’s only a short stretch of woodland standing between him and Lavelha.  He takes the walk carefully.  He keeps his head turning, eyes wide. 

W
hen he looks out at the main resort beachfront through the treeline, it’s like witnessing a killing field.  The assemblage of corpses, strewn in their ghastly configurations, the final postures.  Above it all, a dark brume hangs on the air—a swarthy pall, like soot smoke—created by the cloud of insects come to feed, wheeling and chirring. 

All of this purposeless death.  He tears another strip of fabric from the hem of his undershirt and ties it, bandit-like, over his lower face.  He steps out of the brake of trees.

As he walks, he tries not to look around at the wasted shoreline.  Eyes kept forward, he crosses the sand, stepping gingerly over body after body, using one arm to bat away the swarm of insects.  The sound of thousands of wings beating, humming, from every side.  He walks past the wrackline to the rough steps hewn out of a low ridge overlooking the water, the weather-beaten railroad ties lain crossways for traction, half-buried in the sand like fossil finds. He takes one step at a time, pausing at each before he mounts the next.  Watching.  To his left and right, green marram grass is growing reed-like out of the dune side.  Rigid and brickle-stalked.  Rattling, waving together after the wind. 

He crests the makeshift stairs and takes a tile footpath overlain with blue cork sheeting.  Halfway along, there is a marb
le dais with an inset hotel map—You Are Here—and he stops to scan the diagram of the grounds, pausing to look up and down the path once in a while, listening.  The sound of his own breath, muffled by the rag on his face, choppy from fear and the work of the climb.  He turns back to the map where he finds the Makoa Tower on the southeast end, toward the front lobby, and in his mind he plots out a rough course. 

As he continues on the path, he passes a booth with open shower heads for washing off the sand, and by habit he wheels open all the stopcocks.  Nothing.  He moves on, passing a few open-air kiosks that used to sell
the things tourists thought they needed—parasailing tours, bicycle rentals, swimsuits and beachwear.  Grilled crayfish with rice, tilapia wrapped in injera flatbread.  Everything has been upended and ransacked of all valuables. 

Park chooses one of the kiosks—the sign says flavored snow-ice—and he
vaults over the dutch door, crouches behind the counter and looks around, first outside and then in.  The empty glass syrup bottles and the white napkins with green tortoise logos, scattered.  A tower of conical paper cups is still standing next to the register.  He checks the flooring and finds a broken bottle, picks it up by its long neck, shards pointed out, and tests it, getting a feel.  Thickly blown glass.  Stout and weighty in the hand, substantial.  He decides to carry it for a while.  There is an open door leading to a back room, For Employees Only, and he decides to go in.

One summer when he was a boy, Park visited the machine shop where his father worked as a machinist on a turret mill.  A local shop, nothing franchised or fancy.  Maybe twelve men on the floor at a given shift.  He was eight or nine years old at the time.

He remembers his father telling him to stand clear back.  An optimal safe distance is at least six feet, his father said.  Now take a good look at this thing.  Really see it, son.  You don’t want to get yourself mixed up in the workings there—you don’t want no part of that.  His father handed him a clear face shield, just a headband with a hard plastic visor.  Put it on, his father said.  Shield comes down whenever the beast is running.  Always.  And then his father socketed off the spindle brake and started up the machine with his thumb on a green button.

There was the motor
’s immediate droning.  The pule of the rotary unit sent on its revolutions.  A sound like a circular saw peeling through timber.  Park remembers watching his father work underneath the overhead tube fluorescents.  The look of the burr quill as it bored its way into the leaden blank, a grey filament curling from the cut site, corkscrewing, like a helix.  The safety glasses his father wore over his eyes.  A gloved hand steady on the helve of the feed. 

Park watched his father that way for a good while, until he heard a different kind of sound over the mechanical clangor of the shop floor.  It was a man
’s scream—sharp and abbreviated.  He turned around and there was a jobber in a grey bib apron standing two machines down from them.  His shirt sleeve entirely torn off, the fabric tangled around a rotor shaft, flagging down, spinning lazily.  The man’s left hand was gone at the wrist.  The knob of the radial bone, delicate and wet like the head of a small animal at birth.  Park remembers the way the man stood still as though posing for one of those old-time photographs.  Arm at his side, sending out a red flow like a ruptured drainpipe.  Motionless.  Pale as paper is.  All of the machines on the floor were quickly powered off, and for a moment the only sound was liquid against concrete.  Park remembers that he didn’t know what to do, not at all, and he understands now that he hasn’t really known since.

The back room of the kiosk isn
’t much more than a kitchenette—a couple of sterno burners and a double sink and a fridge-freezer combo unit, its doors opened.  A few rows of cabinets, all of them emptied.  Paper scraps and crushed cardboard containers and boxes. 

On the metal countertop is an industrial-sized machine for freezing ice blocks and shaving them down.  A flexible black hose-line snakes from the back, and the other end attaches to a fitting in the plasterboard wall.  He picks his way through the shambles, takes hold of the hose, and pulls it from the wall bibbing.  He puts the opening in his cupped palm.  Immediately, there is a trickle of clear water. 

He raises the hose high to stop the flow and drinks from his hand greedily, and when he finishes he puts the end of the hose in his mouth, drawing hard, siphoning.  There isn’t much—only the residual amount left trapped in the freezing chamber.  When it comes up dry he goes to the refrigerator unit and puts a cupped palm underneath the front dispenser spout and presses the lever tab.  Nothing. 

He
sets down the broken bottle, takes hold of the fridge with both hands, and rolls it away from the wall.  Kicking trash out of the path.  He turns it, exposing the back side.  The thin grey feeder-hose is visible at the top of the unit, and he pulls it from the bibbing and siphons out the last drops.  When he’s finished, he lets the hose fall. 

He stops and breathes a moment, eyes closed.  He swallows a few times, and for the first time in we
eks, his throat is slick-wet—he realizes that he feels better than he has in a long while.  It was only half a cup of water, maybe, but it helped; every little bit does.  Every bit.  If you survive this world long enough, you may start to discover that the smallest amounts of a good thing can feel like enough, if you’re lucky, because your level of desire is dwindling right along with the level of supply.  He’s almost certain of that. 

He opens his eyes and turns around to pick up the bottle, but he stops mid-reach.  There is a silhouetted figure standing, framed, in the open entryway. 

The features are shadowed by backlight, but it’s clearly a man.  Look at the build, the posture.  The use of all available space.  In spite of his emaciation, his gaunt lines, the man takes up most of the doorframe.  Just standing motionless.  No sound.

Park keeps his own
movements slow—around these people, you have to.  He tries making himself smaller than he is.  He reaches out for the broken bottle with the same care you might use extending your hand to a stray animal.  The man seems to be watching but doesn’t move, and Park slowly takes hold of the bottleneck and brings it down to his side. 

They each stay wh
ere they are for a good while, and Park doesn’t look directly at the man.  After a few minutes, the man backs away from the doorway, and Park waits where he is, half-expecting the man to return, charging, but he’s gone.

These monsters could still be pe
ople, real humans, underneath—their humanity ebbing, pulsing weakly somewhere in a confined space inside of their wracked bodies.  A pocket of air buried underneath a collapse.  It’s possible. 

There could be something trapped inside that can still be salvaged.  As far as he knows, the sickness may just be a temporary condition, something reversible, and maybe it can be entirely eradicated in the same way they used to say polio was eradicated, but hell, it could just as easily be the case that this is the new normal.  Get yourself accustomed to it.  The latest incurable epidemic rolls in, makes its claim on a handful of the population, changes them into monsters and unleashes them.  And even if that particular disease moves on, another comes, and more than likely it
’s the same one as before, just with a slightly different build or with symptoms that sound different on paper.  Give it a new name.  Then repeat. 

Park just isn
’t sure one way or the other.  Maybe these monsters are just inborn devils, pure, and the disease is just an excuse to show their true colors.  Maybe they’re all the way lost, irrecoverable, and maybe they deserve all of the compassion that can be found in a quick death.

He moves on from the kiosk, keeping course across the ruined grounds toward the Makoa,
quickening his pace.  In the wild you learn how to stay low, almost crouched, even while moving.  Sometimes you may have to put a hand down for balance, but otherwise you’ll find that you can stay close to the ground and still move quickly, efficiently.  After a time it even starts to feel natural—the defensive posture of your arms, the bend in your back—as though you’ve simply reclaimed the loping gait of something simian.  The primate that you’ve always had inside of you.  Think of it as remembering, not reverting.   

There is a central promenade—glazed ceramic tiling in shades of blue—that winds directly through the interior of the resort, a vein to the
heart, but Park avoids that.  Instead, he keeps to the covered routes as much as he’s able.  The shaded walkways that run alongside building facades, the discreet paths taken by maintenance workers and housekeeping staff.  He never breaks cover without scanning the surroundings first, but he sees no one—no visible life afield of him other than the insects, a cloud swarming over the profusion of bodies.  Wheeling around furiously, madly chirring.  Their deposits of larvae are writhing in the soft remains.  He picks his way past it all: the overturned garbage bins, an empty beach tote bag, a full wallet, a pair of children’s sandals.  He pauses to breathe.  If the rag over his face is helping at all with the air, he can’t tell.

This part of the resort is where the fires swept through during the early weeks. 
Park can see where the flames licked and crawled up the white walls, blackening them almost like paint would, and the corpses have been reduced to a dark slag by the heat.  All of the vegetation is brittle and ash-colored and curled down.  From this distance, the Makoa is visible ahead, maybe a few hundred yards further.  Its crisp white structure marks the firebreak line—somehow the building stayed untouched in the middle of the blaze. 

The last stretch to the Makoa passes through the atrium.  It isn
’t a choice.  From where he is now, the atrium path is the only paved route to the suites, and he needs solid ground underneath him, not landscaping, in case he has to run.  He checks the perimeter and then walks along the wall of an open-air hallway leading in. 

Tota Sao is what they call
it, or at least they used to.  The Tota Sao atrium—the words mean Welcome in the Mirasai language.  Tota Sao is an expansive, open space adjacent to the front lobby, directly on the other side of a glass entryway.  It was the first sight you’d see after you checked in at the front desk, once they took away your luggage on a trolley-cart and you walked into the Lavelha proper and you understood that this place could make you forget entirely about your home.  Wherever you came from, whoever you left there.  Its faux waterfall cycling endlessly and the sunlight shafting in from overhead and your echoed footfalls.  The domelike wrought-iron cage, black, at the courtyard centerpoint.  Before the collapse, there were five or six squalling blue and green macaws living inside it. 

In spite of himself, Park remembers standing at the vista point carved out at the south end of the atrium.  The balcony overlook.  A couple of pedestal tables and wicker bar stools.  He remembers leaning over the ironwork of the railing.  Day two, day three of the trip, around that time, right before everything around them went to hell.  At the time, he was holding a cardboard coffee cup girded with a heat sleeve. 

He waited for Lee.  She was off in some gift shop or another, but he knew that it wasn’t going to be enough; she would want to browse the stores in the Trap afterward.  Not buy anything, mind you, just browse.  Walk in and out of the sun, maybe feed the indri lemurs just so she could say that she had.  And he was right about all of it—those were the exact events of that day, at least in his memory—and as they walked together on the cobbled roads of the Trap, Park had said something about the islet being paradise, but she had disagreed with him flatly.  She’d told him that paradise is only paradise if the land is willing to welcome more than just your tourist dollars.  Only if you can settle on it for generations, only if you are able to own lawfully some small portion of this heaven as property, and only if you can walk through its townships without the locals showing you
mal de ojo
.  It was classic Lee, the entire diatribe.

The memory of such a simple time is too much for him to carry, and he has to stop along the atrium wall and pause a moment.  He looks around aimlessly.  Without electricity the waterfall won
’t run.  In the plunge basin there is a layer of red algae blooming on the rank surface.  He looks toward the cage.  The door has been pried open and there are maybe five bodies inside, piled together on one end as though they died trying to escape from some terrible thing. 

Park crosses the atrium without
incident, without catching sight of any movement, and he exits on the far end.  Still not another soul.  It seems wrong somehow, the complete absence of living beings.  There should be more of the sick here, milling around, he knows that.  At the very least, he should be able to hear them. 

    He approaches the facade of the Makoa and kneels next to a valet stand just off-path.  He pull
s the mask down from his face and unties the makeshift bandage from his head, wrings the sweat out into his mouth, and swallows it.  There is a red floret spreading on the grey fabric.  He dabs at the wound—the bleeding has slowed down.  He ties the rag back on and pulls the mask up over his mouth and nose. 

At the base of the Makoa building are the remains of a restaurant terrace, the place where he used to eat meals with his wife, where Melo used to work.  Park scans the area, and when nothing moves, he decides to go in.

The dead are cast across the restaurant patio; Park steps over them.  The only benefit to living longer is that you become more and more adept at ignoring the things that can’t be changed.  It’s gotten to the point where he barely even registers these kinds of sights—the significance of one mass open grave after another. 

In the wild, the worth of any single thing can be measured in terms of the advantage it can or can
’t deliver to you personally.  Right now, at this moment, how does it help me that this body at my feet was once animated, that it was likely once a mother or daughter to someone?  This body, the one that I’m stepping over now, once did meaningful work that put food on a table.  This body was needed, wanted.  Someone once held and fed and whispered to that small, empty white shell in the corner of the patio.  None of it makes any difference now.  The only questions worth considering in the wild are the ones whose answers affect your ability to find and intake calories, to drink something relatively clean, to run the path with the fewest obstructions, and to sleep in a place where waking up again is most probable.  The only tangible realities here are the various states of decay, how advanced they are, and the catalogue of all the many things that are beyond hope of saving, beyond all human help.  You measure the worth of those realities.  And then as you pick your way through them, you find yourself thinking of the terrace as being empty.