by Bobby Adair
“An injection?” Paul asked. “Of what?”
“It’s a cocktail of anticoagulants and vitamins and some other stuff. It thins the blood to make the harvest go smoother and keeps the volunteers healthy.”
Paul didn’t like the idea of giving shots.
Marazzi continued. “You hook them up to the plasmapheresis machines—”
Paul stopped Marazzi with a raised hand. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ll show you but you better learn quick, or you can work upstairs burning bodies with the other dumbasses.”
Paul grimaced.
Marazzi exaggerated a patient breath. “You hook them up to the machines.” Marazzi patted the crook of his elbow with two fingers. “One line. It pumps the blood out, processes a bit and pumps it back in. Then repeats until it’s done. Takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour to get a full bag of plasma out. You tape up the hole, get the guards, and bring the volunteers back to the silo for another three. That’s it. That’s all you do. Throughout the day, a dipshit named Larry Dean will come by and haul the plasma to the processing center. Got it?”
“The processing center?”
“They do stuff to the plasma before it ships. After that, it’s called serum. Don’t worry about that part. You just get the plasma. Got it?”
“I guess.” Lots of gaps still existed in Paul’s picture of his day. “What time do I come to work?”
“You start when I drop off the list.”
“When?”
“When I get there.”
“Where will that be?” Paul asked. “You’ll bring them to my…where do I sleep?”
“You sleep in the clinic.”
Paul’s face showed what he thought of that. He didn’t like it one bit.
“You got three beds in there. If you’d rather sleep in a cage with the volunteers, I can arrange that.”
That sounded worse. Paul shook his head. “I stay in the clinic, then? I sleep there. I work there. Can I leave?”
“Colonel Holloway told you about the fence?”
Paul nodded.
Marazzi shrugged. “Go where you like. But be there in the morning when I drop off the list. Don’t screw around during the day. Drain your reconvalescent donor volunteers every day. Everyone on the daily list. Got it?”
Paul nodded.
Marazzi marched up the tunnel. The place reminded Paul of the plastic cage he kept hamsters in as a kid, only human-sized and covered in apocalyptic rot.
Paul followed. “Why do you call it a clinic?”
“Reasons.”
Paul waited for more of an answer but Marazzi didn’t offer anything else. He looked around and noticed a significant crack in one of the curved support beams. “These things have been empty a long time.”
“I guess.” Marazzi looked at the walls but didn’t break his stride.
“Why here?”
“Why here what?” Marazzi was becoming irritated with answering questions. He probably didn’t even like talking.
“Why put the camp here? Why put some of us down in the silos?”
“Started with a minimum-security prison closer to town. Riots.”
Paul tried to recall news of prison riots, but then lots of stuff didn’t make the news these days. “The prisoners rioted?”
“No. The people who lived nearby.”
“When I was walking across the compound it looked like we were out in the middle of a prairie.”
“That’s why they chose this place,” said Marazzi. “Nothing out here but grass and mud. Nobody can get close.”
“Did Holloway really give orders to shoot?”
Marazzi smiled for the first time. “One way to find out. Go ahead if you like. The guards down here won’t stop you. If you were wearing an orange jumpsuit like the volunteers, they’d shoot you if they saw you outside your cell by yourself. Be happy you’re not one of those guys. Around camp, those are the rules. Outside the perimeter fence is no man’s land.”
“Anybody try it yet?” Paul asked.
“You go ahead. Just do it before I spend half of my day telling you what your job is. I don’t like wasting my time.”
“No, no,” Paul said quickly. “I’m curious. I don’t plan to take a chance that way. What’s the deal down here? Why do some detainees get to stay up top and others have to come down here?”
“Reasons.”
They reached a huge steel door. Two guards sat in chairs, feet propped on the curved wall, rifles across their laps. One got up and heaved on the door to pull it open. Paul gave a friendly nod to the guard as he followed Marazzi into the silo.
It smelled like a portable toilet in the summertime, overused and un-serviced. It sounded like a zoo for apes and foul-mouthed transients. It felt like a huge mistake when Paul grasped a rail and yanked his hand back to see something brownish and green on his fingers.
A man in a cage along the wall, two levels up, flung his penis out between the metal bars of his cage and pissed while he shouted Marazzi’s name.
Chapter 5
Strings of lights kept the silo in a dull glow that only changed when a bulb plinked dead or when the guards remembered to unplug a few cords at night. The curved concrete walls, streaked with rust from unused metal fittings, cascaded with mold where water seeped through and ran down. The mold absorbed light. The rust reflected enough orange to make Salim’s skin appear the color of rotting pumpkin.
The metal blast door—built to withstand the worst of Soviet nuclear might and the super-pressure rocket exhaust of US missiles—clanged a deep tone, revealing the weight of steel beneath its time-crusted surface, announcing to all caged volunteers that someone was coming into the silo.
Salim peered down through the scaffolding tubes that had been hastily welded into a creaking and flexing tower of stairs, catwalks, ladders, and cages—stacks and stacks of cages. All constructed to a scheme with only two flexible rules: keep the cages around the perimeter and the walkways and stairs in the center. The result, a tube of cages anchored to the inside walls of the concrete missile tube by bailing wire—probably heisted from a local farm—wherever a piece of old metal embedment protruded far enough from the wall to twist wire around.
Ten levels of cages held just over ninety volunteers, most of those from the Colorado prison system; the rest—those up in the top levels with Salim—were recent detainees, suspects, and those presumed guilty because of the sounds of their names and the stamps on their passports.
Whether any of the others in the top levels were guilty of a crime, Salim didn’t know. Salim knew he was. His list of sins was long and growing by the day. The seeds of his felonies were so vital they’d procreate through the population long after society’s righteous punishment soaked the last bit of recompense from his veins and tossed the dried husk of his body onto a funeral pyre to mix anonymously with the ashes of other criminals who happened to die the same day. The cold winter wind would then carry Salim’s powdery gray remnants across Colorado’s and Kansas’ grassy hills, erasing Salim Pitafi as effectively as the world could.
And that was okay. Every day, as Salim sat in his cage watching mold grow down the walls, seeing men confined in metal-barred boxes around him slowly turning into animals, pissing on those below and spitting on those beside, he had time to think through his choices. He had time to feel the grasp of his mother’s dead hand on his conscience. His dead sister’s wispy ghost, wrapped in a disintegrating blanket and winding duct tape, sat in his cage next to the waste bucket. With the word ‘why’ on her cracking lips and with dirty tears streaked on her face, she stared at him. And his father pointed a crooked finger to remind Salim of a guilt so heavy he would bear the burden through a thousand lifetimes.
Men were moving below, one talking, one following. One was that bald-headed sergeant who ran the place. The pair was climbing the stairs. Some of the volunteers on the lower levels were spitting insults. Others dipped their hands into waste buckets to express their unh
appiness in a more memorable way.
No guards were with the sergeant and the other man. Salim guessed that after two days of having no volunteers taken out for donations after the previous technician died, the sergeant was showing a replacement through the facility. Donations would soon start again.
Chapter 6
“Honey, I’ll tell you what, that was the greatest sermon I’ve heard since before I went over the hill and rolled down the other side.” The old woman laughed, and the layer of mismatched, flesh-toned makeup flexed over the crevices on her face. A mountain of brown-dyed hair on her head jiggled but didn’t lose its form.
Larry Dean smiled. It was a useful gesture in the relative privacy of the small warehouse where Millie delivered. In violation of laws and policies, neither of them wore their masks. They both had Ebola antibodies in their blood. Larry had all of them. He was sure of that. He stole a bag of serum and ran it into his veins every time he saw a bag with a letter that designated a strain he hadn’t yet received, and a matching blood type. He kept track of the letters on a piece of paper he kept in his pocket.
“You been going to church?” Millie asked the question every time she saw Larry.
Larry shook his head, fascinated by the jiggling hair as he wondered how anybody who’d lived as long as Millie could be so relentlessly happy. He wondered how the wiry little thing could drive the big truck that delivered dry goods three times a week. “You know they closed the churches.”
A happy witch cackle followed. “You know I’m talking about online church.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Larry pumped the handle on the pallet jack to raise the forks and the pallet off the floor. He heaved to get the stack moving out of the semi-trailer.
Millie watched Larry roll the pallet. She looked around the warehouse floor for the boxes she’d expected to take back with her. They were absent. The happiness on her face melted into lines that looked like anger. “Larry?”
Larry didn’t look at her as he parked the pallet next to the others on the loading dock. “You know what Jimmy said.”
Millie took several quick steps in Larry Dean’s direction.
“Stop. You know the rules.” Larry raised an open hand for emphasis.
“I need—”
“You stole from Jimmy.”
“You have to give me my load.”
“Millie, this isn’t up to me. You made your deal with Jimmy. He’s the boss. You do what he tells you. I do what he tells me.”
“I thought you were partners with Jimmy?” Millie’s voice was harsh. It reminded Larry of his berating mother and her dissatisfaction with everything he ever did.
“The truck is empty. You need to go.” Larry turned his back on her and walked away. “You can’t linger. You know the rules.”
“Please?” Millie changed her tactic to begging. “You know I have grandbabies. I had to get some serum for them. Jimmy’s greedy. He doesn’t give me my fair share.”
“You got your fair share.” Larry spun, and his anger toward Millie was at least a half-measure of pent-up leftovers from his mother, but that was the kind of crap that always bubbled under the surface when Larry’s anger came out to show itself off.
He clenched his jaw and pursed his lips. Damn Millie.
He was stuck for words because, in his heart, he agreed with Millie. She and Larry were taking all the risk. At least it seemed that way to both of them. They’d talked about it during their transactions at least a dozen times. They both felt cheated that Jimmy was taking the lion’s share of the profits and leaving them with a handful of nothing and a big thank you. Still, when Larry did speak, it was Jimmy’s words that came out of his mouth. “You get one bag a week. That’s the agreement. I give you boxes with the bags of plasma. You smuggle the boxes to Jimmy. It’s that simple. Do you think we don’t count them? Do you think I don’t call Jimmy and tell him how many bags are in the boxes?”
Tears crawled out of Millie’s old eyes and navigated the ravines down her cheeks. “How am I supposed to pick? Do you hear what I’m telling you, Larry? You’re a good-hearted man, I can see it, but tell me, how am I supposed to look at my grandbabies and pick which one gets a cure and which one gets to live?”
“Jimmy looked you up on Facebook. You only have three grandchildren.”
Millie chose defiance next. “What are they supposed to do without their parents?”
“Millie.” Jimmy was getting tired of it. “You’ve earned enough already for all of your kids and grandkids. At least for the ones who aren’t dead.” Larry rubbed that word in. He knew it would hurt. He was mad about the situation and Millie was eager to receive whatever wrath he could put into words. “You’re selling the serum you steal from us. That’s what you’re doing.”
“There are other kids in the neighborhood who need this too. You can’t be so heartless as that. Besides you steal all you want from this place. You don’t miss it.”
“Here’s the deal.” Larry started to tell her exactly what the deal was but more of Jimmy’s words lined up to repeat themselves, and the taste of them on Larry’s tongue made him angrier. So while Larry’s mouth opened and closed, his tongue moved, no sound came out.
“Larry?”
He wanted to shut Millie up. His primary goal was to say something that would do that, but he wanted to say something to douse all the anger burning over his frustrations. Why the hell was he living and working in an Ebola colony out in the farmland with nothing to do for fun but piss on fences and masturbate to old fantasies while Jimmy held onto all the money and lived in town where he could eat whatever he wanted, be with whomever he wanted?
After a long awkward silence, Millie crackled through a plea as she waggled a bony finger at the trailer. “You need me and you need my rig. How will you get the serum to Jimmy if I don’t take it?”
“You’re not the only truck driver,” Larry told her. “We got others.”
Millie’s face showed her sadness and the false outline of lipstick beyond the edge of her thin lips looked clownish until an idea sparked a smile that stretched wide over her yellow dentures. “There’s got to be a thousand people in the camp now. I’ll bet you can steal more serum than Jimmy can ever sell. Why don’t you partner with me too? Give me the surplus that Jimmy can’t sell, and you and me will split the profits fifty-fifty.”
Larry snorted. “It’s not that easy.” He strutted around in a circle while he thought about it. “This place is run by a bunch of dipshits, and they keep changing the rules. They keep making it harder. They keep pumping more people’s blood and shipping more serum out. But they’re trying to account for every last bag. All the empty ones have a barcode when they come in. They get scanned into the system. When a bag disappears now, the dipshits know it. The plasma techs in the clinics are losing their nerve. They’re getting in trouble. And I gotta keep ‘em producing.” Larry got up in front of Millie and towered over her while his voice rose with frustration. “This is harder than you think. You and Jimmy both.”
Millie put her hands on Larry’s shoulders and stroked. “It’s okay, Larry. I know how hard you work. I appreciate it. I really do. Let me ask you something. If I could solve your problem with the bags, could we go into business, you and me, partners?”
“How?”
“I know where they make the bags.” Millie straightened herself with as much confidence as she could pump into her frail bones. “I’ll bet I can get some cases of those bags before they get delivered here, before they go into your system. If you had some bags that never got accounted for, I’ll bet you could get them filled. I’ll bet I could trade a bag of serum for a hundred empty bags. Then I could bring them in with my regular delivery. That solves your problem, doesn’t it, Larry?”
Larry shook his head. “The plasma has to go through the processing center first. I don’t know what they do in that building but they say after it comes out then it’s serum. It’s not dangerous. It’s good to use. I don’t have access to the processing center.”
“Bypass it.” Millie smiled at her spark of brilliance.
“I can’t. You’re not listening.”
“Larry, I may be old but don’t think I’m stupid. I read about this on the Internet. Of course you can use the plasma before it gets processed. It’s a little bit more risky, but just a little bit. It’ll still save somebody from Ebola, they might get a cold or something to boot. But that’s it. That’s all the processing does. Take the bags. Have the plasma techs fill them and don’t take them to the processing center. Nobody will ever know but us.”
Larry turned and paced. He scratched the razor stubble on his chin. She was right. Getting the empty bags would solve a problem. Right now, a barcode label was affixed to every legitimate bag upon arrival. That part of the process was outside of Larry’s control. The truck that brought the bags and the workers that put them into the system did so under the supervision of one of Colonel Holloway’s officers at the moment the trucks arrived.
Larry’s eyes narrowed. “If I have bags of serum with no barcode labels, and somebody stops me, things won’t go well.”
“I can get fake barcode labels put on the bags.” Millie nodded in an attempt to get Larry to agree.
“If you can do that, it might work. As long as they don’t get scanned into our system.”
Millie showed her yellow teeth in a smile. “I’ll have your bags when I come back the day after tomorrow.”
Chapter 7
Mitch didn’t have any qualms about driving the Ugandan backcountry with no protection from his mercenaries. He was armed. He had the skills he needed to take care of himself. He didn’t expect to come across any organized band of belligerents. With the virus intent on scouring East Africa of humanity, those who weren’t already dead had figured out that keeping a distance between themselves and other people—potential sources of infection—was a good policy.
