The World Without Flags

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  “Unh,” Eric says. He’s still on the ground, his face pressed onto the concrete floor.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “Me too. All of them.”

  80

  When I settle down and stand Eric in the corner of the room, I have time to think. The rain pounds on the steel roof, filling our prison with a raucous sound, like standing underneath a waterfall. Eric is on the tips of his toes, straining upward at the sound of water, as if he doesn’t understand he can’t fly. It’s good to have Eric near me again, even though the smell of him in this confined space is nothing less than an abomination. I’m glad he’s avoided any permanent harm like that poor woman, but I don’t feel good about any of this. I don’t know why they’ve taken Eric alive, or myself for that matter. But it can’t be good. I have to think of a way out of here before it’s too late.

  “Unh,” Eric grunts, straining up toward the water.

  “I’m thirsty too,” I tell him.

  After exploring my surround and a few hours of thinking, I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to help us escape. The door is securely locked. There’s a slit of a window near the roof of the cell, but it’s too small for a cat to climb out of, let alone two grown people. The door is too firm to force open, and even if it weren’t, all the noise we would make by breaking it down would only bring them running. The floor is made of concrete, so there’s no digging our way out, and the ceiling is steel. We’re basically sealed in here. I can’t think of any way to force our way out. Even if I were to trick one of them into opening the door, even if I were able to overpower them without getting hurt, even if all this noise didn’t bring more, how could I lead Eric out unseen? He won’t run. He won’t hide. He won’t do anything, but be an obvious zombie. Even if you couldn’t smell him from half a mile away, just by glancing at the way he moves that he has the Worm. I was lucky with Boston and Sidney, they still hadn’t heard about the return of the Vaca B. All these bastards know. They can spot a zombie a mile away.

  I look over to Eric. I shouldn’t think of him as a zombie, I really shouldn’t. I study him, looking for signs of the man I knew, who raised me, but it’s like trying to see the bottom of a lake through muddy water.

  But in the past few days, I’m more grateful to him than I was before. I was never stupid about the way people looked at me, about the way they saw me because of my skin. How they always wanted to touch my hair. How people would look at me when they thought I wasn’t paying attention, not with hate exactly, but just studying me, like I was something strange that they were always trying to understand. At the Homestead, people never treated me like these bandits had. Even the ones that came to trade, even the ones who looked at me with eyes of hate, they didn’t dare say anything, not in front of Eric, who was so obviously my protector. No, they were always good to me. Because of Eric, I never had to endure the hatred, the pure animosity that I feel from these bandits. I wasn’t naïve or anything, I mean, I knew people were like this. Eric had always told me that I had to be careful, that there were people who wouldn’t like me because of the color of my skin, that there were those who would want to hurt me because of it. But it’s one thing to know it in your mind, to know it’s true, to see little glimpses of it hidden in the attitudes of strangers, and it was something else completely to see it naked and revealed and shameless.

  As I sit and think of it, remembering the hatred in their voices, the sparkle of joy in their eyes at the prospect of causing me pain, I wonder maybe if Eric has protected me too much. I look over to him. He’s turned around, as if facing the other way might help me reach up past the steel roof to the rain crashing down. His face is covered by his filth-encrusted beard. The band around his eyes that used to be crimson red is now entirely black, and I can’t help imagining the dark pits beneath, writhing with worms. What would he say to me if he could?

  He would say he wanted the best for me. I’m sure of it as I think it. Why expose me to the very thing that hurts me? It’s like poisoning someone because you’re afraid of them being poisoned. He did what he did because he loved me.

  Loves me.

  He’s in there somewhere. I won’t think he’s not. I won’t.

  “Unh,” Eric says. Suddenly his body goes rigid and then he coughs loudly. A ball of black bile rolls out of his mouth, writhing with worms. It rolls down his chin and beard, then down his overalls before landing wetly on the concrete beneath it.

  “Gross, Eric,” I tell him. Then I go over to him and reach in his pocket to get his drooly towel, which thankfully is still tucked in a pocket. I wipe his mouth carefully.

  “Unh,” Eric says, his tongue reaching out toward the ceiling.

  “Don’t,” I tell him. “Stop it.”

  His tongue waggles for a second before calming down. I finish wiping his face clean of the little worms before tucking the drooly towel back in his overalls and then going to sit down.

  “Unh,” Eric says.

  “I don’t know what to do either,” I answer.

  81

  I don’t know how long we’re kept in the cell before Squint comes for us. It might have been a day or two. It’s impossible to keep track of time. The rain doesn’t hardly let up in all that time. I try to get Eric to sit and relax, but he won’t. He continues to stretch with all of his strength toward the rain and water he can’t possibly reach. I give up trying to get him to relax. The desire for water is far too elemental. It seems to be the only thing that makes him aware. I just sit there with my back against the cold concrete, thinking, trying to figure some way for us to get out of there. But when Squint comes for us again, I still haven’t got a clue.

  Squint comes alone, with a torch. His dark hair is slicked back and his clothes are new and clean. He smells like soap. When I smell it, I can’t help but feel jealous and a little angry. I can’t remember the last time I was able to wash with soap. It seems a small thing, but freshly cleaned, I feel more human. Squint opens the padlock with a little brass key that I see he slips into his front shirt pocket and then looks at me without emotion. “The Doctor wants to see you,” he says.

  A feel a shiver of fear and a desperation takes me. I picture myself wildly flying out the door, and my muscles tense to leap. But if I do that, I will almost certainly be killed. Even if I do make it, I’ll leave Eric alone. I have to do this if we’re both going to survive. Eric would do it for me.

  “Come on,” Squint tells me. “Get up. Don’t make me get you.” He says this last in a dangerous tone. I can’t feel my legs very well, but I get to my feet somehow.

  “What does he want?” I ask. I hate that my voice is shaking from fear, but I can’t hide it.

  “You’ll see,” Squint says. He steps back from the door. “Move slow.”

  I’m moving forward, but I’m trembling, and, hating myself a little for it, I hear myself whimper a little. A real whimper. It escapes from me before I can stop it. When Squint hears it, he chuckles.

  “You oughta be scared,” he says and gives me a shove.

  I see the door shut behind me, a final glimpse of Eric with his legs splayed out in front of him, then Squint’s face, smirking a little now, and before I know it, before I’m even close to ready, there’s a door, and I have to push it open. A short hallway, flickering from torchlight, and then another door, this one bigger, with a handle. I hear Squint tell me to open it. I hear him saying it, but I can’t do it, my hands are shaking. I feel a shove at my back and another chuckle from Squint, and I watch as I move my arm and then my hands touch the handle. I can’t feel. I can’t feel anything I’m so scared. I hear the click as I push the handle and then I’m stepping into blinding light. I close my eyes the light is so painful. I hear the distant thrumming of a generator. The room is hot.

  I can’t focus. I can’t see anything in the light, but I feel Squint’s steel grip on my arm. His fingers are sickeningly thin, like the branches of trees in the winter. I feel myself dragged forward and then shoved into a wooden chair. My wrists are put inside co
ld steel shackles. I smell something familiar, something horrible, like old urine.

  “Thank you,” says a low, calm voice. “You can leave.”

  “Sure thing, Doc,” says Squint.

  I blink. My eyes are beginning to focus. I hear a steel door shut and I know that Squint has left me alone with the Doctor.

  “Hello,” I hear. “My name is Doctor Bragg.”

  82

  His face is the first thing I see. It’s lean and long and reminds me of a lizard somehow. His nose is squashed and flat, like it’s been broken in the past. The Doctor has long, glossy black hair that goes down to his shoulders. His eyes are heavy-lidded, like he’s tired or bored, and strangely lifeless, as if nothing in the world really interests him anymore. Even though he’s looking at me, his eyes seem to focus somewhere behind me, like he’s looking through me. He’s young, probably Eric’s age.

  “Good evening,” he says.

  Behind him, over his shoulder, I see the woman who was on the cart with Eric. I must’ve been sleeping harder than I thought. They came and got her without waking me up. She’s strapped down with wide canvas straps to an aluminum table. Even her head is strapped down so she can’t move. Her one good eye is facing me, and I can see she’s staring up at the ceiling through dark eyes, still alive.

  “I hope they’ve not treated you too badly,” the Doctor says. His face drops. “I know what we do here is not kind, but there’s no need to be cruel.” A smile flickers across his face like a wind through grass. “I’ll allow what I do is not civilized, exactly, but that’s no excuse for incivility.” I get the feeling these little jokes are rehearsed and he’s testing them. Although I’m trembling with fear, I try to smile, try to make some connection with this guy that might help me. “There,” he says, seeing my smile. “This does not have to be a terrible ordeal. We’re not going to cause you any pain, I swear it.” He holds up one blue-gloved hand and smiles again. This time the smile stays, greasily, upon his face.

  “Wh-wh-at,” I stammer. I breathe in and try to control myself. My mouth is horribly dry. I close my eyes, concentrate. Try to listen to my own heartbeat. Keep it together, Birdie. If I lose it, I won’t be a help to anyone, not me, not Eric, not anyone. I open my eyes and wet my lips with a dry tongue. “What are you going to do to me?” I ask. I feel myself sweating all over.

  Doctor Bragg seems to be waiting for something. I have a feeling that I need to let him decide the rhythm of the conversation or there probably won’t be one. While he’s thinking or waiting or doing whatever the hell he’s doing, I notice that we’re in a large room, like a garage, with a high ceiling, crisscrossed by metal girders. On the sides of the room are long benches and shelves that disappear into shadows. In the corner of the room behind me, just barely visible in my line of sight, I see there’s another door, opposite to the one we entered. In front of me, behind the woman on the operating table, there are rows of metal shelves. A menagerie of glass jars sit on the shelves filled with some dark liquid. I can’t stop shaking. I’m shackled tight to the chair.

  “What am I going to do?” Doctor Bragg asks. “Study, experiment, learn.”

  “Experiment?” I ask, trembling.

  He looks at me and comes closer. “I won’t cause you any pain,” he says. “But I think it’s best if you think of yourself as a hero. A hero in the fight for human survival.”

  “Hero?” I ask shakily.

  “Oh yes,” Doctor Bragg tells me, nodding his head. “Without you and people like you, we wouldn’t know as much as we do. You’re saving lives. That’s what I call a hero.” He steps away from me and walks to the woman on the surgical table. “Look at this poor woman,” he says. Then he looks up at me. “She’s been taken by the Worm. Like so many billions of others before her. Maybe you’re too young to remember. But I remember.” His eyes suddenly become more hollow than before, dark, horrible pits, and I see clearly that he’s as lost as the woman on the table in front of him, just as lifeless, but with even less hope. The woman might survive the Worm, if she’s cared for. There’s no returning from where Doctor Bragg has gone.

  “I remember,” I tell him.

  He nods solemnly. “We remember,” he says. “And we never understood why. We never understood the Vaca Beber, we never knew anything. It just came and nearly destroyed us and then vanished. So we could never learn about it. We could never prepare if it came back. It just disappeared.” The Doctor snapped his fingers, which made a strange rubbery sound because his hands were in gloves. I noticed then that there was a scalpel in one of his hands, its edge glinting dangerously in the light. “It came and it took everything from us and then it went away. But we need to know. I searched and I searched and I experimented and finally, finally, I coaxed them back to life. From nothing. From skin and bones.”

  “You brought the Worm back?” My skin crawls with revulsion.

  He looks at me. “You think that it was gone forever? You think it wouldn’t come back on its own, stronger, more resilient?”

  I don’t know what to say.

  Bragg moves to the shelves and picks up one of the glass jars. “I wish you could understand,” he says, under his breath. He carries the jar toward me. I see that it’s filled with Worms, all floating in some amber liquid, like overcooked spaghetti in root beer. He holds the jar to my face, and I smell some strange, acrid, chemical smell. Inside, I see the Worms are dead, and I can see their star-shaped mouths and the vile hooks I imagine are designed to sink into our brains. I shudder and turn my head away. “Yes,” Doctor Bragg says. “They are horrible, nasty creatures. They took everything from me.” If pure, consuming hatred had a face, it would be Dr. Bragg’s at that moment as he stared at the contents of the jar. “I will eradicate them forever.” His voice is somehow both acidic and empty of emotion at once. He turns toward me and lowers the jar. “I wish you could understand what we do. I wish you could.”

  “I do,” I say, nodding my head. “I do.” I need him to be on my side, to feel some connection to me.

  He smiles weakly before he turns away, walks back to the shelf, and returns the jar from where he took it.

  “They took everything from me too,” I continue. I note the desperation and fear in my voice, but there’s no way I can hide it. “They took my mother and father and my whole family. I do understand!”

  The Doctor turns back to me slowly. He looks resigned. Then he looks away. “Yes,” he says, “you say you understand. But you won’t make the sacrifice. You’ll scream like all the others.”

  The sentence makes me tremble again. My mouth clamps shut. My mind seems to shut down in terror. I look at the scalpel in his hand. The Doctor moves to the woman on the table. I see that he’s put a blue sheet over her and there’s a square cut out exposing her stomach. He stands facing me, lifts his scalpel, and then, so quickly I can’t look away, cuts deeply into her skin and slices open a long slit across her belly. The woman’s body lurches and she makes a gurgling, screeching sound that doesn’t sound human at all. I cry out in surprise and tug uselessly at my shackles.

  “I need tests,” Doctor Bragg says. He reaches his hand inside the living zombie and continues talking. “The Vaca B is a very complex organism. It doesn’t engender one kind of worm but four, actually six if you count the microscopic ones. Little maggot-like Worms in the stomach, thin, nematode-like Worms in the eyes, long, hooked Worms for the brain that are very much like marine arrow worms. There’s a thin, flat Worm of the ear that I don’t understand. Somehow they all work together.” His hands are moving inside her body and she is making a low, gurgling groaning sound. Her whole body twitches. The Doctor continues pitilessly, talking as he works. “How do they communicate? Which type of Worm is the most efficient at infection? How do they produce different types of Worms and when? Do they work the same in all populations? Women, children, Asians, Africans? So many questions.” The Doctor suddenly reaches down into the red hole he has cut in the poor woman and makes another cut. With horror, I watch
as he pulls out a handful of small, wriggling, maggot-like Worms from her stomach. He walks toward me, a fistful in his hand, dripping them behind him. “These are questions that we need to answer. We will answer them, but it will take sacrifice. Heroes.” He leans in closer to me. “Heroes like you.” He looks at me. “I need diverse specimens to study. We don’t see many like you. Young female with African ancestry. We need you.”

  My eyes are wide with horror. The smell coming from the woman now is noxious. He wants to infect me I realize. I’m shaking as the Doctor returns to the table. My heart throbs as he picks up a strange, plastic tube with a plunger on one end, like a gigantic needle, and begins to put live Worms in it. I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.

  “No, no,” I say, trembling.

  “I need specimens,” he repeats. “I can watch what it does to you. You can save countless people. You can be the hero.”

  “Please,” I say, my lip trembling with fear.

  “I know I’m not the hero,” he says without feeling. “That is my sacrifice.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” I plead, but my voice is hardly a whisper.

  He straightens up and examines the wriggling worms inside the tube. “This is when the screaming starts,” he says.

  I open my mouth to scream, when I see that Doctor Bragg is looking down at the corpse of the woman. He prods her once. I clamp my mouth shut, watching. “When did she die?” he asks, annoyed. He looks at me. “Was she dead before or after I acquired the Worms?”

  I look at him speechless.

  Doctor Bragg puts down the maggot-filled tube and examines the dead woman. His shoulders slump. He sighs and then looks up at me, almost apologetically. “I had to acquire the Worms from a live host.” He seems embarrassed by the mistake, or like I should feel pity for him. Relief hits me so hard that I begin to weep. Doctor Bragg leans over the corpse. “If I hadn’t been talking to the girl,” he mutters. “If I was more professional and not so. . .” he trails off into inaudible muttering.