“Decayed.
“Be-trayed.”
“Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah—”
There was a crash of a cymbal. The crowd gasped. The Taliban-dude dropped his drink. “Rickie!” shouted Shayla.
I turned. I saw Rick slumped in his seat, sticks dropped to the floor. Shayla was cradling his head. Vlad and I rushed back to him. He was breathing, but his face was pale. Pale as death, white as Ivory Soap. Except for the green and blue dots appearing beside his nostrils like hipster's zits.
“Amanita,” Vlad said.
Shayla was kissing him. I pulled her away. “He needs me,” she said.
“What, to piss Ali off ?”
Ali and his Mafioso had pushed their way to the stage. “We go now,” Ali said.
Shayla called someone on her cell.
“You will not let the Submission Faction rescue us!” Ali said.
“You Armenian. They are not the Submission Faction. They are friends of my father and the Turkish Army.”
“Infiltrated by the Submission Faction! Come, Vlad! Come, Dennis! She will take you to the hell!”
Omar came up to us. He patted Ali on the shoulder. “My friend is drunk. Go with Shayla.”
* * * *
Outside, an ambulance with Red Crescent insignia drove up. Before it drove an armored jeep and behind it rumbled an armored Humvee with a heavy machine gun and the flag of Turkish Cyprus waving.
“All are mad,” said Ali.
“Stay with Omar, then,” replied Shayla.
Two medical technicians brought out a gurney. They had to lift it over a woman prone in the street whom I believed died not from the Amanita stalk growing out of her neck but the bullet hole in the crown of her head.
The med techs hoisted Rick onto the gurney and then carried him into the ambulance. Shayla motioned us to follow, and we did—all but Ali, who hesitated with his Mafioso. Then a man staggered down the street, his face neon green with Amanita. He shouted something at the Turkish Army humvee. The soldier in the humvee turned his machine gun on the green man and shot him so thoroughly he was nearly severed at the waist.
This decided Ali. He pushed his Mafioso back into the club, then came toward the ambulance, hands raised. The machine gunner turned his gun in Ali's direction. Ali did not slow. He stepped over the dead woman and then joined us in the ambulance.
“Even the drunkard has moments of sanity,” Shayla said.
“Houris,” Ali said, laughing weakly, as if to mock himself.
We sat together tightly, me pressed between Ali and Shayla, Vlad beside the tech who had clamped an oxygen mask on Rick's mouth and was now inserting an IV tube into his right wrist.
There was the smell of disinfectant and Ali's drink and Shayla's perfume and I wished I could trade seats with Vlad.
The other tech was taping electrodes to Rick's chest and we heard his heartbeat beating too slowly.
The ambulance moved through the night. Lights, pockets of darkness, flames. Small-arms fire followed by the familiar and frightening roar of the Humvee machine gun. Vlad was pale and watching the tech who was adjusting the saline drip. Rick's eyes were slits and I could see only the whites. The saline tech, whose forearms I noticed were covered with coarse black hairs, shone a light in Rick's eye, then frowned and brought out a syringe from a cabinet, filled it from a vial, then injected it into the IV tube. An amber fluid long as an earthworm progressed down the tube into Rick's body.
Shayla asked the tech something in Greek and the man answered.
“It's adrenaline,” Shayla said.
“Do they know he's a Xanax junkie?” I asked.
Shayla says, “I will let them know. They are afraid his lungs will stop taking oxygen because of the Amanita.”
“Will you tell him how much drug you fed him tonight?” Ali asks.
“Should I tell them how much you drink tonight?” she asks.
They glared at each other. I breathed. Vlad said: “Could you two chill just for a few minutes?”
Shayla turned and spoke to the tech. I heard the word “alprazolam,” which is the generic name for Xanax. We hit a pothole and one tech steadied Rick's arm as the saline tech held the heart monitor and the IV stand. The saline tech then brought out another vial and syringe, which he half-filled before adding it to the IV tube.
“Clonazapem,” Shayla said.
A slow-acting benzo. I was worried it might push Rick into a coma or stop his heart entirely, but the tech knew what he was doing; he achieved a balance between the stimulant and the sedative and Rick's pulse stabilized.
Rick opened his eyes. He looked at the techs, then at Vlad and me, and then at Shayla, at whom he smiled. Ali stiffened beside me. I understood his jealousy. I wondered if Shayla's injudicious supplying of Xanax to Rick had weakened my friend's immune system.
I looked at Ali for confirmation, but Ali had pulled forth another flask of whiskey and as he sipped stared forward as if envisioning the further horrors we might encounter that night.
We hit another pothole.
But it was not a pothole; it was a round of bullets that ripped holes in the ambulance inches above Vlad's head. A piece of metal stuck in my right arm, a needle-shaped shard of glass pierced Ali square in the forehead. “Fuckers,” Ali said, though he did not remove the needle. He started arguing with Shayla in Turkish as blood ran down his nose.
The Humvee machine gun roared behind us and there was no more small-arms fire to be heard.
Vlad was trembling. I had never seen him tremble before. Ali handed him the flask and he drank, and then I took the flask and I drank too. Ali did not offer it to Shayla.
“We go through the desert to cross into the Greek Cyprus,” Ali said. “It will not matter, because we will all be dead soon.”
Shayla yanked the needle from his forehead.
* * * *
After an hour of evermore sporadic gunfire we reached the Green Line. The Humvee and the jeep fell back and the ambulance crossed at a place where the barbed-wired fence had been flattened. We drove for a minute more, then stopped. The door opened. A man in UN body armor stood there with a gun and Ali, laughing maniacally, raised his hands in surrender. “Ave Maria,” he said.
“He is drunk,” Shayla said.
“Why do none of you wear the masks?” Felix Ataturk said, resolving from the darkness.
“We were rocking,” Shayla said. “Ali was drinking.”
Ali swore at her in Turkish.
Ataturk gave orders to one tech in Greek. The tech supplied us with fresh masks. Then Ataturk said, “Come, you will be safer in the car.”
We climbed out. Though it was night, the dry air was hot and the parched earth crunched beneath our feet. We saw a tank beside the UN SUV that we had been in before. Something glowed in the open turret of the tank. Ali whispered, “Though I walk in the shadow of darkness, I shall fear no evil.”
If this was to meant to provoke Shayla she did not react.
I stopped by the tank. The glowing thing was a dead man who'd climbed halfway out of his turret. His skin was spotted green, and dayglo yellow stalks of Amanita had pushed his night vision goggles away from his face like the protruding eyes of an insect.
Ali turned to vomit quietly.
“I'm riding in the ambulance,” I said.
“Ride with us in safety,” Ataturk said. “We all go to the hospital.”
“I cannot leave my friend alone,” I said.
Vlad came back with me toward the still-open doors of the ambulance.
As we climbed in, Rick smiled weakly and gave us the peace sign.
* * * *
We crossed the Green Line. Darkness from the windows, though occasionally I could see the brake lights of Ataturk's UN SUV. The road was rutted and potholed, and each time we hit a bump, Rick jerked on his gurney as though he were seizing and not just being jostled by the vehicle. I held him sometimes. His body was hot, and his eyes were wide open. “We rocked, didn't we,” he said through his oxygen mas
k.
“We delivered our message,” I said.
As he smiled, I saw the glow of his freckles tinted his mask green, like it brought him swamp gas, not oxygen.
“Did you get it from Shayla?” I asked.
He stopped smiling and his heart raced and Vlad grabbed my arm. “Leave him alone, dude.”
* * * *
As we paralleled the Green Line, back toward Nicosia, I thought we might simply be reversing our course, returning to the club and the dead bodies glowing in the street. I heard gunfire, saw buildings burning, and even saw when we were in line at a checkpoint an Amanita-sufferer press his face against the window with the bullethole in it, his lips ringed green as if by a gaudy lipstick and his nostrils flared so that the yellow-tipped stalks emerging there might have space to grow.
The ambulance driver weaved to throw him off.
“Pooeene Turkish Cyprus?” Vlad asked one tech. Where?
The tech spread his arms wide, as if to say, I don't understand.
Or maybe: does it matter?
* * * *
The traffic stayed heavy. Buildings burned nearby, but more of them in the distance to our left, where the dark hills were lit as if by signal fires. As if to communicate distress in an ancient land where electricity was unknown. Some streetlights still worked on our road. Soon we were in a built-up area, sound of gunfire echoing off the buildings. Rocks and small caliber bullets pelted our ambulance, and the four of us huddled each in a corner of the ambulance to protect us from flying glass. The techs covered Rick to the chin with a heavy woolen blanket. He laughed weakly as a sliver of glass pierced his pillow inches from his cheek. “Anybody hungry for Rick kabobs?”
We took a right turn, then drove further from the Green Line. From my perch beneath a shelf of medical equipment I could not see the buildings well, but I saw more lights and heard more sounds of other traffic and there was the echo one associates with large closely-spaced buildings. We took more turns, heard some gunfire, but more often the sound of Rick's ventilation system and his heart whose electronic beat was mercifully steady.
* * * *
We stopped at the hospital. It was a six-story brick building whose emergency room entrance was cordoned off by two dozen soldiers in UN helmets and hazmat uniforms. Amanita was here, too: hands with crimson six fingers reached imploringly between soldiers, a man with a corkscrew-shaped stalk that grew out of his ear, one woman plucked the bulbs that grew like an ungainly hair transplant from her scalp and tried to push the bloody stalks into the bore holes of the weapons the soldiers carried. People shouted and threatened and pleaded to be allowed entrance, in English and in Greek and in Turkish too.
The luminescence from the assembled crowd gave a festive shine to the tall windows of the old hospital.
Ataturk and Ali led us between the cordon, Vlad and I following the techs as they pushed Rick on his gurney.
There were screams and curses and someone threw a vial which broke open on the ground and splashed my Converses with blood.
“Uniting East and West?” said one of the soldiers. It was the Brit Ali knew.
Ali sang, “What else should I say?”
* * * *
Inside seemed just as crowded. There was a reception room that was standing room only with healthy-looking people fingering prayer beads or arguing with the nurse behind her glass wall and what appeared to be one of the Girlz Gone Wilde! curled up asleep on a couch, leaning against a young American man in a Red Sox cap. An old doctor with hair dyed orange and a walrus mustache introduced himself as Dr. Ahmet, then led us through two swinging doors. The techs took Rick through yet another set of doors, then we were told to sit in yet another waiting room, this one less crowded.
Each of us sat on comfortable chairs and watched a soccer game between Manchester United and Brazil. Dr. Ahmet stayed with us. He had a black bag and a set of syringes and he went to each of us, injecting us in the shoulder. “Is this some tranquilizer?” Vlad asked.
“It's Mortilox,” Dr. Ahmet said. “It's experimental. It retards the early-stage growth of Amanita.” Dr. Ahmet's accent sounded American; he had gone to medical school at Stanford, as I later learned. “And yes, you have all been exposed. You should have left Cyprus as soon as you could.”
Shayla turned away as Dr. Ahmet injected her in her bicep. I asked, “Can you be a carrier of the disease without showing symptoms?”
“Maybe if you'd already taken Mortilox,” Dr. Ahmet said.
Ali laughed, bringing out his whiskey flask. “Mortilox is how you say, a placenta. A sugar pill so pharmacies can make the riches off the poor dumb Cypriots.”
“If you would rather wait in the other room, continue talking so,” Mr. Ataturk said.
“Apologies.”
Dr. Ahmet pulled Ali's whiskey flask away from him. “This is a fine way to weaken your immune system.”
“We're all dead, Mortilox or no Mortilox,” Ali said, but quietly, as if not to provoke Ataturk again. Nor did he fight to keep his whiskey. Then he took his shot.
Dr. Ahmet shot me last. Physical pain gives a brief respite from the greater pain of fear.
* * * *
The soccer game ended, then began again (it was a video loop), and I thought, disconsolately, how dull watching soccer was, how for all my commitment to uniting East and West, I couldn't even give a shit for the world's most popular sport.
Kurt would have laughed at me.
Dr. Ahmet spoke quietly to Mr. Ataturk, then donned his mask, which was a gas mask like the UN soldiers had been wearing, and he walked to an elevator.
I followed him and tugged at his surgical smock. “Will Rick make it?”
Ahmet shrugged. “Pray for your friend.”
Then he went up the elevator.
* * * *
Ataturk talked on a cell phone, the only other sounds the low-volume Greek commentary on the soccer game and sounds from Ali and Shayla, who alternated fits of coughing, like bitter rivals competing in a guitar solo contest.
I wondered if Shayla had Amanita and if she had given it to both Rick and Ali.
“Dude, we made the news,” Vlad said. He showed me a Time magazine. It was in Greek but there were pictures from Como, including one where the girl with the burned-off hair was screaming while Vlad, all coolness, held Rick's drum-kit dolly in one hand and was trying to comfort the girl with the other.
Now Vlad's hands trembled as he showed me the magazine.
“Do you think Rick will die?” I asked.
“Dude, what you think upon will be manifest, right? Close your eyes and meditate.”
I closed my eyes and breathed carefully, and after a moment the gallery of horrors faded and I could see my koi pond and my Buddha sitting above it with his serene and wise smile. I tried to picture Rick there too, in a lotus position, not popping Xanax but at peace nonetheless.
“Mr. Dennis,” someone said. It was Ataturk, standing beside me. “I have arranged for my yacht to leave the port of Larnaca at 4 AM. We will sail to Pyraeus, where I know a immigration official who will be glad to stamp your passports. Dr. Ahmet will sign health forms so that you and Vlad will be able to fly out of Athens. Or you can stay with Andros and Maria.”
“But Rick,” I said.
Ataturk shrugged. “Rick cannot travel.”
“That's shit,” Vlad said. “We got him here.”
“He is in very critical condition.” Ataturk glanced at his watch. “We will leave in two hours.”
“But I need to take care of Rick,” I said.
“They will keep him on a low dosage of the Xanax, if that worries you.”
* * * *
I paced, tried to turn down the volume on the damn soccer game but it seemed to be controlled by a remote, listened to Ali and Shayla shout at each other in Turkish until finally I could take no more of that and sat down between them.
Ali stunk of whiskey and Shayla smelled of a perfume so rich its very scent aroused me. They both glared at me as i
f angry that I had denied them the pleasure of their antagonism.
Both had taken off their masks earlier, the better to shout apparently, but pulled the masks back on after a minute.
Ataturk talked on his cell phone much of the time, with the dignified quiet of a man who had no need to prove himself with volume.
A little before midnight Dr. Ahmet came down. He pulled off his gas mask, then said to me, “You, you need to come see your friend, in the ICU.”
“Is he dying?”
“Come see him.” Ahmet's eyes were baggy from exhaustion and his cheeks were scored red by the pressure of the mask. “And you as well.” He looked toward Vlad.
Shayla stood. She was wobbly and I steadied her. “I come too.”
Ataturk snapped his cell shut. “Ohi. I forbid it.”
“What? You think I will strip-tease for Rickie?”
Ali said something so offensive that Ataturk took a step toward him.
“Please, gentlemen,” Dr. Ahmet said. “The surgery ward is full tonight already. And Felix, I think it would be wise for Shayla to come as well.”
* * * *
We exited on the fourth floor. Fluorescent lights flickered above a nurse's station. The nurse wore the white cap and white dress like nurses used to when I was a kid. There was a bank of monitors beside her that showed EKGs like a child's green outline drawings of mountain ranges. Two EKGs were flat and the LEDs flashed zero. Names were displayed in each monitor, but I did not want to get close enough to read them.
“Busy night, huh?” Vlad asked, leaning on the desk.
I had not noticed that the nurse was young and cute; the nurse pretended not to notice Vlad. Or maybe she simply didn't speak English. Dr. Ahmet spoke to her in Greek, and she nodded, then pulled two of the gas masks out from a cabinet drawer and handed them to Ahmet.
He gave one to me and one to Vlad.
“Why not one for me, doctor? Because I am a woman?”
“No,” Dr. Ahmet said. His eyes watered. “Because you have the spore already.”
* * * *
We walked into the ICU. I felt sick. The air through the mask smelled of rubber and disinfectant; the goggles gave me tunnel vision.
And I realized that the ICU was the ward I'd seen on TV this morning, of the tall windows and green-tile walls and the patients separated by flimsy cotton curtains.
Asimov's SF, December 2008 Page 19
