by Dario Solera
Did they even need her? Everything looked organized, scheduled, and prepared with military accuracy. Léa glanced around. Perhaps she could wander off toward another medical tent and see if she could be of more help there. She was able to drill into people’s heads and fix their brains, all the while talking to them, but instead she was stuck stitching up cuts and dressing wounds.
But the weight of the previous days was hard on her shoulders, and she discarded the idea.
In her tent were three other doctors sleeping, and a nurse was fumbling inside a cabinet.
“Hi,” she said in a whisper.
“Hello. I’m Léa.”
“Claire. Nice to meet you.” The woman was young, perhaps twenty-five. She was trying to clean a few stains of blood from her white coat. “Busy day, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I was hoping to get a few hours of sleep.”
“Me too. I came to help from Lausanne. Where are you from?”
“Geneva.”
“Really? A guy in the army told me we had thousands of deaths. Is it true?”
Thousands. It was the first time that she heard an estimate like that—or one at all. “I don’t know. I mean, the city’s been hit hundreds of times. I worked in my hospital for two days straight and I’m not sure what happened outside. The wounded kept coming in. Then the army came and moved us here.”
“The camp is full now. Twenty thousand people. They are unloading the last trucks. There’s a lot to do. I’m assigned to the surgery unit. You?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Are you a pediatrician? I heard we need one.”
“Nope. Training neurosurgeon.”
“I see. Look, I better go to sleep now.”
“Me too.”
Léa walked to her bunk and pulled the curtain shut around it.
She made her bed quickly, tossing the blankets and cover over the bare mattress. She undressed, ignoring the shivers and goose bumps, and then collapsed on the cot. Its springs squeaked and bit into her back, but she fell asleep in no time.
***
There were voices outside—yells.
She listened for a moment, trying to make out what was being said. The bed was warm inside, but chilling air caressed her face. The tarp walls of the tent flapped a little in the breeze.
Léa found herself in the same position under the covers, lying on her back with arms over her belly. Her muscles ached everywhere, and her stomach was so empty that she almost needed to vomit.
The voices outside continued, but they were too distant for her to discern the actual words. Two men were arguing with each other, that much she could guess.
According to her wristwatch, Léa had slept for six hours. She got up from the bunk and, as soundlessly as she could, shuffled into her dirty clothes. Sneaking outside in silence, she sent glances left and right at the sleeping doctors.
Léa followed the voices and walked toward the back of the camp. Some of the refugees were walking around with bags, bottles of water, or other small loads, uninterested in their surroundings and watching the ground in front of them. The flow of incoming humanity had ceased.
Behind a corner, just three or four blocks down the grated alley, she saw a little crowd assembled in a circle. Something lay on the ground at the center, obscured by the forest of legs, with only a few glimpses of bright colors visible. No one was talking now.
She was still shaking off sleep’s clumsiness as she made her way through the standing people. Her arms fended against the crowd so she could squeeze into the group.
Her instinct took over and she kneeled on the grass to help the unconscious little girl, who looked tiny inside her pink jacket. “What happened?” she asked with a harsh tone.
No one spoke. Blood seeped through the child’s golden hair.
“What happened?” she yelled at the people.
The girl’s wrist had no pulse. Leaning in, she put her ear to the child’s mouth. She was dead, and her pretty little face was starting to turn white.
A pair of soldiers broke into the crowd with their SMGs. This time, at their demand for explanation, someone did speak.
“It was an accident,” a shocked man said. “I didn’t mean to—I—she was…” Tears appeared at his eyes and his body was quivering.
“Did you kill her?” one soldier asked, getting closer to him.
He stood there, staring at the small, still body in front of him.
The other soldier nodded at Léa. “Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what happened?”
She shook her head.
After looking at the girl for a short time, he spoke something into the mouthpiece of the radio strapped on the shoulder of his uniform. In a few seconds, six more armed men arrived on the scene.
Gagnier joined them a moment later, just as the offender was dragged away by two soldiers.
“Dr. Bosshart, what happened here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyone?” he asked to the crowd, fury in his eyes.
“That man was kneeling near the girl,” someone said.
“Did anyone see him killing her?”
Heads shook.
“Does anyone know her name?”
“Lily!” a woman cried as she pushed away people to get through. “Lily! Oh my God!” She fell on her knees, calling the girl’s name and trying to shake her awake.
But the girl didn’t open her eyes as the woman grabbed her and hugged her, weeping and repeating her name.
The crowd, the soldiers, everyone watched as she rocked back and forth with the tiny body in her embrace. The girl’s limbs hung lifeless.
Another man ran closer and crouched near the woman. “Lily,” he whispered. He remained there, still and speechless, with his eyes fixed on the pale face of the child. He then stood with a slow movement. His face changed from grave to furious before he scurried away.
“Follow him,” Gagnier ordered with discretion to two of his men.
A loud commotion was taking place a few dozen meters farther. Male voices were shouting. When most of the crowd had turned to watch, a single gunshot came through the cold air, sending the camp into complete silence. Even the weeping woman detached her eyes from the lost child.
Gagnier’s radio crackled and he listened at it for a moment. “They’ve killed him,” he said to no one in particular.
“Who?” Léa asked.
“They have killed the murderer.” He talked some more into his radio and waited for the reply. “Five in custody. Two deaths. One of my men wounded. And we’ve been here for less than twenty-four hours.”
***
“There’s something strange happening, Dr. Bosshart.” Gagnier was walking with Léa to the headquarters at the front of the camp.
The face of the girl had flushed out of her memory already, but her pink coat was right in front of her eyes. “Léa. Call me Léa,” she said after a moment.
He smiled. “OK. Léa.”
They continued in silence for another minute. Truth was that they would never find out why the girl had died. Maybe an accident. Perhaps the act of a monster.
Léa sighed. “What’s happening?”
“People are missing. Refugees, I mean.”
“Refugees. That’s what we are, then?”
“I’m afraid.” He paused. “Today at noon, an entire tent was found empty. All occupants and their personal belongings were gone. Then we discovered that a truck was missing as well.”
“Someone took it?”
“It’s probable that the refugees stole it.”
“Where did they go?”
“We don’t know.”
“Don’t you have GPS or something?”
Gagnier snickered. “This is not a movie, Dr. Boss—Léa. It was just an old, rusty, heavy-duty military vehicle.”
“Did you search outside the camp?”
“Not enough men or helicopters for a proper search mission, as we didn’t know where to
look. There’s a lot to do inside the camp. You’ve seen that.”
“Yeah.”
“We only checked near the camp and found no one. If they got farther, we wouldn’t have seen them.”
“So that’s it. People can go away like that?”
“Well, this is not a prison. We might be a little harsh in our manners, but everybody is still free to do whatever they want. What they cannot do, however, is steal our trucks.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The problem is that more refugees are missing. A married couple in sector three, a young man in seven. And the list grows every hour.”
“Perhaps they are trying to reach their families.”
“Yes, that’s one possibility. But there are strange stories coming through from Geneva.”
“Like what?”
Gagnier stopped walking. “Thirty minutes ago, a scheduled patrol spotted a small group of civilians in the middle of nowhere north of Geneva.”
“It’s them?”
“We are going there to find out, and you’re with us. We need a medic. You know, just in case.”
Nine
“Frank, I need your car.”
“What for?”
“I’m going to have a closer look.”
“No way.”
“Come on, don’t be such a jerk.”
“We’ve got work to do.”
“It can wait a few hours.”
“You haven’t driven a car for—how long?”
“A couple of years. I’ll be fine. It’s like riding a bicycle.”
He held the keys in his hand for a moment and then tossed them at Sarah. “Treat it well.”
She smiled. “Thanks. I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Yeah.”
***
“Damned manual transmission,” she muttered as she released the clutch as slowly as she could to avoid grinding the gearbox for the hundredth time.
Traffic was terrible. The morning’s plane crash had sent the city into chaos, with several roads blocked off by police barriers. Officers waved for drivers to continue forward, but there was nowhere to go, with the entire width of the road full of vehicles.
Carefully releasing the clutch pedal, she gave some gas, listening to the sound of the engine and watching the RPM gauge. The motor stuttered and the SUV jerked, but she moved a couple of meters before hitting the brakes once more and waiting another thirty seconds for the car in front of her to move.
The satnav predicted an hour and a half of driving time.
“Bad idea,” she told herself. She envied the passengers of the helicopter that flew high above the city.
Blue flashing lights blinked a few blocks ahead and traffic slowed down even more. The clock on the dashboard read 11:10. She had already spent half an hour in the car, and her fingers tapped on the steering wheel. While she waited, minding that she wasting fuel, she turned on the radio, which transmitted reports and comments of the morning’s incidents.
An unnamed anchorman was interviewing a police officer. “Are these two events correlated?”
“I don’t know, but I doubt it. I’m sure that as soon as we recover the aircraft’s flight recorder, we’ll figure out what happened.”
“Do we know anything about the people appearing in the fields north of Geneva?”
“We identified most of them, and they are from Geneva and suburbs. They seem to be shocked and their statements are somewhat confused.”
“Can they explain what happened to them?”
“As I said, their explanations don’t make much sense. I cannot go into the details yet.”
The car in front progressed half a meter.
Sarah’s phone chirped with an incoming text: “We saw what happened. Are you OK?”
It was her adoptive mother. Sarah hadn’t thought of her that way for a while, but the discussion with Will the night before had somehow made her question her own feelings and how she considered her parents. She was Mom, and yet…
“I’m fine. Saw as it was happening. Not even a scratch,” she replied.
A car honked from behind, prompting her to release the brakes and hit the gas pedal, but nothing happened. Caught off guard, she pressed the clutch and put the car in gear, but then she released the leftmost pedal too fast and the engine stopped, causing more honking from queued vehicles.
“Fuck you,” she said as she turned the ignition. The SUV jerked forward.
“Glad,” her mother wrote.
“Why up so early? It’s 5 am there.”
“Early morning snowstorm.”
“Happy shoveling then. Kisses.”
“Love you.”
***
An hour later, snow-clad fields and farms lined the road, which now had very light traffic. The sky had held and no more snow had fallen, but she cringed at the prospect of driving on icy roads with her rusty skills and a manual transmission.
She switched off the radio, tired of hearing the same uninformed blabber over and over, and listened to the sounds of the car.
Her destination was only five kilometers away now. She followed the GPS’s instructions on a countryside dirt road, proceeding slowly, until the navigator gave up and declared her arrived.
A rusty barrier blocked the way. Getting out of the SUV, she noticed that a few dozen meters farther the road faded into a snowy meadow. A padlock secured the bar and a “Private Property” sign warned off trespassers.
“What now?”
Trying to see through the mist, she spotted tree shapes looming in the distance, but other than that nothing was visible. Silence was total. She got back into the car and managed to maneuver it to the right shoulder of the road, just in case, then got out and walked into the field.
Snow and icy grass crunched below her boots. Walking proved a little straining, with the grass grabbing and holding her feet at each step.
After a few minutes, she turned. Her car was only a shadow in the mist a couple hundred meters behind her and slightly to her left.
“What am I doing?”
Continuing on, she reached a line of trees along a ditch. The car was not visible anymore, and there were no bridges or passages that she could see. She pictured the act of jumping over the gully. It was a meter and a half wide, so perhaps with a good run-up and a big push she could make it.
“Three options,” she said to herself. “Jumping, jumping and breaking a leg, or finding a bridge.” She glanced up and down the ditch through the fog, without spotting an end on either side. “There must be a passage somewhere.”
Sarah peeked inside the trench, studying the tiny stream of water. At first it looked still, perhaps even frozen, but then a leaf flowed from left to right. Her gut told her that a bridge was to be expected upstream. When a few minutes later she found a way across, she smiled to herself. It was just a large cement pipe thrown into the ditch and covered with earth. More than enough. With renewed energy, she passed the tiny stream of water and pushed on in the snow.
As the cold bit into her limbs, she felt a fool. There were paramedics and ambulances in the area—she had seen them in pictures and heard about them on the radio—but there was no trace of them here. They must have come from another, better road. “Damn navigator.”
She stopped walking and started to turn back, but a shape caught her eyes in the distance. It looked quite close, and step after step the contour became clearer. It was a small, boxy building, enclosed inside a tall fence with barbed wire on top.
In the fence was a gate with a lock and a sign that had the name of the Institute and a high-voltage warning. Moving around the perimeter, she found a closed door in the building labeled with “PA-9.” It was one of the inspection shafts of the particle accelerator, and it meant that she was near her destination.
Her phone came in handy to load a map of the area. “Yes!” The detector used in the experiment was only a couple of kilometers forward.
***
The fog was thick and white, blinding.
Walking was difficult, with all the foot-dragging in the snow, and despite the cold her body was warm, on the brink of sweating.
Her legs stopped a couple dozen meters away from another small building that hid one of the access shafts to the accelerator’s tunnel. Blue flashing lights blared in the distance, perhaps half a kilometer ahead. That was her destination.
Right when she began marching again, a woman and a child, holding hands, walked in front of her from behind the fence.
She motioned with her arms. “Hey,” she called.
With a timid motion, the woman waved back.
Sarah jogged forward and reached them.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
“Sarah. What are you doing here?”
“Where is here?”
The kid seemed scared but fine. “North of Geneva. Where are you from?”
“Geneva,” the woman said with a lost expression.
“Look, there are doctors there. Can you walk a few hundred meters?”
“I think so.”
They walked with slow paces in the snow, following the blue lights in the distance.
“What are your names?”
“I’m Christine, and this is my son, Luc.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“My husband is missing,” she added.
“Oh.” The frankness in the woman’s voice didn’t convey the graveness of what she had just said. “I am sorry, Christine.”
The shape of an ambulance appeared through the mist, with paramedics busy near its back.
“How did you get there in the field?”
“I stole a car and drove. And then we walked.”
A paramedic spotted them and called for help. Two men dressed in bright orange uniforms ran in their direction.
“Why did you go there?”
She didn’t have the time to answer as two medics reached them and began asking questions with hurried voices.
“Are you wounded?”
“What’s your name?”
“Where are you from?”
“I found them down there,” Sarah said, pointing at the small building.
