Dr. Anfisa Muratova discovered Synphotryptic while researching the analgesic effects of various street drugs. Synph was a psychoactive substance that affected neurotransmitters in the limbic system; it literally crippled one’s emotional response. Thus, a soldier could engage in acts of war, genocide, without qualm, without guilt. Synph was made available to the SRA before testing was complete, and many soldiers turned to it in order to desensitize themselves to the terrors they inflicted. In moderation, the effects would have worn off within hours. But when taken in excess, it rendered the soldiers permanently emotionless.
And without emotion, they died inside.
They became the Dead Ones.
To see them—these ragged-faced things, these once-men … armed with M77s, knives, apathy. Dressed in their dour fatigues and torturing without expression, killing without feeling. They didn’t even wash the blood from their hands. They marched through the war, stained and silent, as deep as shadows. There were whispers among the living that they were cold to the touch, and that even their hearts had stopped beating.
* * *
Raif has no idea who saved him. Not Branka, his wife. She was long dead by that time. Perhaps Jasmila, his best friend’s sister, though he will never be sure. A female, almost certainly, who dared the village square in the small hours and cut his binds with a piece of glass. Raif staggered into the woods and hid beneath leaves for three days, venturing out only to drink rainwater from scoops of bark or to eat fungus and seeds.
He lost track of time. Could have been in the woods three days or three weeks. Once strong enough, he moved to the mountains and lived in a cave for another painful stretch of time. Ate dead wildlife while he watched fires rage through not only his but distant villages. Heard every scream and gunshot. Found strength in every new breath.
Healing brought with it a surge of anger. The unquenchable thirst for revenge. Everything he loved, and had worked for, had been taken from him. His wife and son had been murdered in front of his eyes. He had nothing left to lose.
And so he resolved to return to his village and kill as many SRA monsters—there was no other word for them—as he could. Maybe he’d find Jergović, if he was still alive, and barter for a firearm. Even a machete. He would attack at night, with the element of surprise, and would cut and bludgeon and kill until the last breath had been ripped from his lungs. One thousand monsters would not be enough. To see their pain. To have them feel—if only for a moment—a fraction of the suffering that they had inflicted.
Raif stayed another two days in the mountains, eating wildlife, berries, drinking spring water, trying to build his strength. He had been full of muscle once. Another shadow of what used to be, and never would be again. It took him a further two days to traverse the rocky slopes and journey through the woods to his village. Watchful. Always hurting. He returned to emptiness. The SRA had moved on, leaving skeleton buildings, still smoldering. Bodies in the streets. People Raif had known and loved. Hanging from trees and streetlights. Piled like wood. There were a few survivors scattered among the ruin. Most had gathered in the remains of the mosque, on their knees, their backs forming perfect domes. Raif passed them by. He had no desire for prayer. He staggered to the debris that used to be his farmhouse and saw one of his son’s shoes among the ruin. Held it and wept. Then he heard the sounds from the barn.
Not all the SRA soldiers had moved on. Raif saw, approaching his barn, two long figures dressed in stained fatigues, methodically beating a naked girl. So involved in what they were doing that they didn’t see or hear him. He entered via a side door hanging from one hinge. He thought his tools would have been destroyed, and most of them were, but he noticed on the wall a pitchfork with rusted tines and grabbed it. Shuffled toward the Dead Ones from behind. One of them turned as he approached and Raif saw nothing on his face. No expression of surprise or dread. Only glassy eyes and a flat, open mouth. All of Raif’s anger—his taste for revenge—erupted. He cried out and drove forward with the pitchfork. One tine punctured the soldier’s throat. The other popped through his skull just above the right eye. Still no expression. No pain. No fear. Raif pulled back on the pitchfork, drove forward again. The tines found the soldier’s chest this time. Punched deep and pushed him backward. He staggered over the bleeding girl and fell hard but got up again.
The other Dead One had turned by this point. Equally blank eyes. A flop of dirty red hair. He pulled an M57 from his holster and took aim. Raif swiped at the gun with the pitchfork and it went off with a flash. The report shook dust from the loft and the bullet went astray, ricocheted, hit Raif in the lower leg. He screamed and dropped to one knee but managed to thrust forward with the pitchfork. It plunged into the soldier’s stomach and he folded, dropped the gun. Raif picked it up and swiveled. The other Dead One moved toward him. Dark holes in his chest, in his throat and forehead. No blood. Still no emotion. Raif framed his vacant face in the M57’s sights.
“For my family.”
Pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit him just below the nose and tore through cartilage and bone and the altered material of his brain. Smashed through the back of his skull, wide as a fist. The soldier crumpled, twitched once, and was still.
Too much adrenaline to feel pain. Raif got to his feet and wheeled, gun ready, dragging his wounded leg. The Dead One with the flop of red hair lurched toward him, and Raif parked the M57’s muzzle point-blank in the middle of his forehead.
“For my people.”
His finger curled around the trigger and exerted pressure but not enough to discharge a round. He wiped a bloody tear from his blind eye and then his finger relaxed completely. Where was the satisfaction in taking this man’s life while he remained emotionless? A void in his brain where feeling had been.
“What are you?” Raif asked, exhibiting enough emotion for them both. A storm of hurt and anger. Grief piled high, like the ruins of his farmhouse. Fear, solid inside him, something he could hold, like his son’s empty shoe.
No response from the Dead One. Not a flicker in his eye.
“What are you feeling?”
Nothing.
Raif struck him with the butt of the gun and his head rocked sideways and his red hair flopped and when he turned his eyes back to Raif they were still expressionless.
“You have nothing inside.”
To kill him now wouldn’t be revenge, it would be mercy. So he lowered the M57’s sights and put a bullet in the soldier’s thigh. He dropped hard and tried to get back up but Raif was on top of him, knee between his shoulder blades. Raif pulled off his shirt and used the sleeves like a rope, wrapped around the soldier’s throat. Dragged him across the barn floor to a trapdoor hidden by loose hay. Opened it and threw him down the steps to the mud floor below. Followed. And with his heart still raging and tears flowing from his eyes, he stripped the soldier naked and used his uniform to bind him.
It was while removing his clothing that the photograph fluttered out. Raif picked it up and looked at it. A man—the soldier—with his wife and son. The wife had a swirl of auburn hair. The son was grinning, tooth missing, holding a book.
“This is your family,” Raif said. He held the photograph for the soldier to see but there was no sign of recognition. “Do you miss them? Do you wish to love your wife again? Feel her in your arms? Hold your son and read to him?”
The soldier said nothing. Eyes like stones.
Raif hit him hard and his hair flopped again, to the other side. He pushed the photograph into his face.
“Feel something,” his hissed. “Something.”
He could be just another block of wood. Or a leaf, fallen from the tree, retaining shape and color but severed from life.
Raif pocketed the photograph and struggled up the cellar steps. Bolted the trapdoor behind him. Concealed it with hay. Went to the girl. She shrieked and shied from him and tried to cover her nakedness.
“I won’t hurt you.”
He drew water from the well and cleaned her
wounds. Wrapped her in a blanket he had taken from what used to be his bedroom. She wept and trembled and her emotion overwhelmed him. She was human, and he held her.
* * *
Raif’s village lived, then, in a state of fear, flinching at every loud sound and hiding in the shadows, until the UN finally intervened and Kojo was removed from power. His statue toppled to yells of triumph. Fists striking the air. Flags high. His execution was secretly filmed with a Motorola cell phone. Went viral. A billion hits on YouTube.
The SRA faded into the very land they had burned. The Dead Ones drifted aimlessly. Most were disabled by UN peacekeepers.
Raif spent his days helping in the village. Clearing rubble. Digging graves. Nursing the sick. International aid was a long way off. Nothing they could depend on. The world was bereft and so many sought help. They salvaged what they could and tried to heal. Raif sectioned off a small plot of land and fertilized the soil and grew vegetables, plants with medicinal properties. He hunted wildlife and gathered berries and seeds from the woods. Every three or four days he would put together a package and distribute it among the villagers.
His nights were spent in the barn cellar.
“What are you feeling?”
The Dead One, chained to the wall, felt nothing. His wounds didn’t bleed. He didn’t eat. Didn’t weep. Didn’t die. Raif made it his goal—tried everything—to elicit some emotion. Showed him the photograph every night. Held it in front of his eyes until the lamp burned out. He put down food and water, just out of reach, but the Dead One made no move for it. Asked about his family, his home, his life before the war, hoping to trigger some memory.
Hoping for pain.
Tortured him. Took a stick to his body. Broke his fingers with a hammer. Pounded nails through his wrists and ankles and left them there until they corroded.
“What are you feeling?”
Two years. Twenty-six months, to be exact. The village looked from beneath its shadow and saw a cold gray emptiness but learned to breathe again. The world stretched into more crises and downloaded apps and watched “reality” TV and considered the side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs. A new war in Afghanistan. A newer, slimmer iPad. Genocide in West Africa. The new Chevy Silverado with its biggest payload yet. Flash floods in Mexico. A coke-addled sitcom star back in rehab. Avian flu in China, killing thousands.
The Dead One chained to the wall in Raif’s cellar, feeling nothing.
Nothing at all.
* * *
The lamplight flashes and presses deep orange flowers on the floor and walls. Raif sits opposite the Dead One, cross-legged, holding the photograph for him to see. Crisp and colorful when it had fluttered from his pocket. Now creased, peeling, faded. All is silent but for the wind hissing through the barn above. The rain chattering on its roof.
The Dead One sits head low and body cracked. His spine and rib cage resemble something partially uncovered at a dig site. Wrapped in a skin of dust. His mouth is as black and dry as a coal chute.
“She’s beautiful,” Raif says. “Your wife.”
The Dead One blinks and shifts across the floor and his pelvic bones roll like something under water.
“And your son. Four, five years old?”
He draws his knees close and hangs his head again.
“Your eyes. Your jaw.”
Stillness. Silence.
“I had a wife,” Raif says. His chin dimples as he tries to keep his mouth from quivering. “She was beautiful, too. Not a day—not a minute—goes by when I don’t think about her. The way her eyes would grow wide when she laughed. The shape of her hips. Her lisp, which she hated, but which I thought made her sound adorable. And my son. Five years old. The same age as your son, perhaps. So bright, and so happy. He wanted to learn everything—would always ask questions. ‘Why is the sun so hot, Daddy? Why do trees have leaves? Why can ducks swim and fly?’ I was certain he would grow up to be a great man. An academic, who would teach people and help make the world stronger.”
The Dead One shifts again and the chain securing him to the wall clangs. The lamplight etches a warm tattoo on his skin.
“Yes, our life was good and rich. Simple. Loving. And then you came. Your … army.” Raif stops. Wipes his eyes. He takes a deep breath that shudders in his chest as if it has edges. “Took everything away. Destroyed my village. My life. You made my wife and son watch while you tied me to a post and beat me like a dog. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, you killed her in front of me. Butchered her and dragged her body through the dirt. Killed my son, too. Cut off his hands. His head. And I saw a million unanswered questions in his terrified eyes, each one beginning with the word why.”
Raif turns the photograph around and looks at it. Touches the woman’s hair. The boy’s face.
“Why?”
Clang goes the chain.
Raif flips the photograph like a magician flipping a playing card and it spins through the air and lands, face up, at the Dead One’s feet, where he can see it.
“Every day I hurt. The pain … the sorrow. It tears me apart. And the only thing that keeps me going—that has stopped me from suicide—is the promise of making you feel the same. After all, why should you, who have caused all this hurt, go without pain?”
The barn creaks above them, wind talking through the gaps in the boards in haunted sounds. Raif closes his eyes and thinks of nights spent with Branka, an open fire, the silhouettes of branches dancing in the windows. Naked with Branka. Her hair coiled in his hand as the fire pops and glows.
He lowers his head and weeps, and when he looks up, quite some time later, the Dead One still hasn’t moved.
“I tried to find out more about you,” Raif says, voice cracking. “I hoped to find your wife and son. Bring them here. I thought for sure they could unlock that missing part of your brain. But you carried no ID. Just a number stitched into your uniform. Like a prisoner.”
Raif grabs his cane and stretches it across the floor. Taps the photograph.
“That is all I have. Everything I know about you is right there.”
The Dead One’s mouth opens and closes silently.
“So, if I cannot bring your family…” Raif unbuttons his jacket, reaches inside, and takes out the package he received from Jergović in exchange for two weeks’ worth of fruit and vegetables. He unwraps the newspaper and the sound makes the Dead One look up but still his eyes are zeros. Raif tosses the wrapping to one side and holds up the object for the Dead One to see. The colors—burning reds, blues, and yellows—are instantly engaging, designed to draw a child’s attention. Raif had hoped to see a shred of recognition in the Dead One’s eyes but there is nothing at all.
“The Happy Bird,” Raif says, reading the bouncy, oversize words on the cover. It is the same book the Dead One’s son is clutching in the photograph. It has taken Jergović eleven months to find a copy. But here it is, at last, in Raif’s hands. A thing of happiness. And, for the Dead One, of memory.
Yet, his zero eyes flick away and he shifts and his chain makes a dull sound.
“This is your son’s favorite book, isn’t it?” Raif opens the cover and flips through a few pages and they all bleed color. “I bet you read this to him over and over again. You’d reach the end and have to go right back to the beginning, wouldn’t you? I know … I must have read Šerif and the Magic Flower to my son a thousand times. Every word is printed on my mind. Just like every word of The Happy Bird is printed on yours. I bet you could recite it to him without having to turn a single page. But your son liked the pictures, didn’t he? This one … the bird singing as he flies over the bright red tractor. And this one … the squirrel waving. Look at his funny little teeth.”
The Dead One glances at him. Not at the book—the picture of the squirrel with his funny little teeth—but at him.
“What are you feeling now?”
Away go the eyes again.
Raif’s heart flashes like the lamplight and another tear runs from his eye. He is close to the
end now, one way or another, and his emotion surges. He presses a knuckle to his mouth. Wipes his face. Flips to page one and begins reading.
The Happy Bird
It was another beautiful morning in Evergreen Wood. The sun was shining brightly, and all the trees and flowers swayed like they were dancing to music. Obrad the sparrow woke up early. He fluttered out of his nest, chirping happily, then swooped low and said hello to all his friends.
“Good morning, Obrad,” said the bears and rabbits, blinking their sleepy eyes.
“Sing us a happy song, Obrad,” said the squirrels, waving from the branches.
Obrad liked to sing. It was one of his favorite things.
“Cheep-cheep,” he sang, and flew in a big, bright circle.
Afterward, Obrad decided to visit a different wood to see if the animals there were just as friendly. However, he hadn’t flown far before realizing that not everywhere was as happy as Evergreen Wood.…
In the next field he spotted a little red tractor sitting all on its own. He fluttered down and landed on its steering wheel, and saw that the tractor was very sad indeed.
“Why are you so sad, Mr. Tractor?” Obrad asked.
“My engine is old and has stopped working,” the tractor huffed and grumbled. “And the farmer doesn’t use me anymore.”
Obrad felt sad for the tractor, but he knew just what to do!
“I’ll sing you a happy song,” he said. “Cheep-cheep.” And he flew in a big, bright circle.
The tractor smiled and tooted his horn. “Thank you, Obrad. I feel a little better now.”
Next, Obrad flew over the playground, where he spotted a little girl with tears in her eyes. He fluttered down and landed on her shoulder.
“Why are you crying, little girl?” he asked.
The little girl wiped her bright blue eyes. “My best friend moved to a new town, and I’ve got nobody to play with.”
Obrad didn’t like to see the little girl so lonely, but he knew just what to do!
21st Century Dead Page 33
