there. He pulled slowly out of the compound, the gate shutting automatically after him.
Inside, I emptied the bag my friend had packed for me and stowed my few belongings in places that seemed sensible. This process took all of five minutes. Then I shakily made a pot of coffee, took it to the table in the center of the room, and prepared to wait out the rest of my life.
A week after I arrived, I received a parcel from Phieta, the woman who’d brought me there. It contained some more clothes, a couple of paperbacks, and a large quantity of Rapt. No note. I never heard from her again.
It was three months before I got my first call. I just sat in the main room for most of that time, staring into space and periodically frying my brains to dust. Now and then I’d go out into the compound. The view in front showed a gradually sloping hillside, dotted with trees, that eventually led to the outskirts of Roanoke. You could see points of yellow through the trees at night, proof that—somewhere in the distance—life was going on. I wished it well and hoped it would stay the hell away from me. I soon found I couldn’t enjoy the sight of the steep hillside behind the compound as much as I should. There were far more trees in that direction, and at that stage I still occasionally thought they moved and distrusted their leaves. Sometimes I thought I could see blue light coming out of fissures in the rock, beams of blue sunlight piercing up toward the sky. I couldn’t, of course. The tunnels were deep in the rock and lined with concrete.
Then one day, at around three o’clock, a siren went off and ten minutes later an ambulance arrived. Two doctors made their way immediately to the operating room, and I warily accompanied an orderly into one ofthe tunnels. It was the first time I’d been past the heavy doors.
I stepped into a cramped, wet space, claustrophobic with humidity and thick with the smell of damp bodies and excrement. Naked children lay all over the floor, curled into fetal positions, sprawled on top of each other or huddled upright against the walls. I carefully stepped over them as I tried to find the particular spare we needed. The orderly kicked them out of the way with the casual impatience of a butcher walking through a slaughterhouse. The older spares seemed to know what was coming, and flinched and squirmed as we approached, turning their faces to the walls or attempting to burrow underneath other bodies. My heart started to beat unnaturally hard, and I began to sweat not entirely from the heat. I felt unsafe. Not because the spares were threatening—they were docile, brainless, without purpose of any kind. It was the tunnel itself that triggered bad memories in me, memories I didn’t want to place. The smell was at the back of it, I guess, and the absence of hope.
In the end we found the right one, Conrad Two, and the orderly took him away. Half an hour later he was returned without his right eye. The crater where it had once sat had been roughly stitched together, painted with antiseptic and carelessly bandaged. As the orderly shoved him past me back into the tunnel a smell I recognized crept into my mind, and my stomach cramped violently. It was the sweet, sickly odor of skinFix, a material used to seal incisions when cosmetic niceties are not an issue. I’d never heard of it being used anywhere outside the army, and hadn’t smelt it in over a decade. It’s not something you forget.
After the ambulance left I returned to the corridor tunnel, and stood for a while in front of one of the windows. In the blue, the bodies staggered and crawled like blind grubs, disturbed by the periodic moans of the spare who’d just had part of his face ripped out The body nearest the window looked up suddenly, a motionthat was random and meaningless. She had only one arm, and the skin on the left side of her face was red and churned where a graft had been removed. Her eyes flicked across the window and her mouth moved
Inside, I emptied the bag my friend had packed for me and stowed my few belongings in places that seemed sensible. This process took all of five minutes. Then I shakily made a pot of coffee, took it to the table in the center of the room, and prepared to wait out the rest of my life.
A week after I arrived, I received a parcel from Phieta, the woman who’d brought me there. It contained some more clothes, a couple of paperbacks, and a large quantity of Rapt. No note. I never heard from her again.
It was three months before I got my first call. I just sat in the main room for most of that time, staring into space and periodically frying my brains to dust. Now and then I’d go out into the compound. The view in front showed a gradually sloping hillside, dotted with trees, that eventually led to the outskirts of Roanoke. You could see points of yellow through the trees at night, proof that—somewhere in the distance—life was going on. I wished it well and hoped it would stay the hell away from me. I soon found I couldn’t enjoy the sight of the steep hillside behind the compound as much as I should. There were far more trees in that direction, and at that stage I still occasionally thought they moved and distrusted their leaves. Sometimes I thought I could see blue light coming out of fissures in the rock, beams of blue sunlight piercing up toward the sky. I couldn’t, of course. The tunnels were deep in the rock and lined with concrete.
Then one day, at around three o’clock, a siren went off and ten minutes later an ambulance arrived. Two doctors made their way immediately to the operating room, and I warily accompanied an orderly into one ofthe tunnels. It was the first time I’d been past the heavy doors.
I stepped into a cramped, wet space, claustrophobic with humidity and thick with the smell of damp bodies and excrement. Naked children lay all over the floor, curled into fetal positions, sprawled on top of each other or huddled upright against the walls. I carefully stepped over them as I tried to find the particular spare we needed. The orderly kicked them out of the way with the casual impatience of a butcher walking through a slaughterhouse. The older spares seemed to know what was coming, and flinched and squirmed as we approached, turning their faces to the walls or attempting to burrow underneath other bodies. My heart started to beat unnaturally hard, and I began to sweat not entirely from the heat. I felt unsafe. Not because the spares were threatening—they were docile, brainless, without purpose of any kind. It was the tunnel itself that triggered bad memories in me, memories I didn’t want to place. The smell was at the back of it, I guess, and the absence of hope.
In the end we found the right one, Conrad Two, and the orderly took him away. Half an hour later he was returned without his right eye. The crater where it had once sat had been roughly stitched together, painted with antiseptic and carelessly bandaged. As the orderly shoved him past me back into the tunnel a smell I recognized crept into my mind, and my stomach cramped violently. It was the sweet, sickly odor of skinFix, a material used to seal incisions when cosmetic niceties are not an issue. I’d never heard of it being used anywhere outside the army, and hadn’t smelt it in over a decade. It’s not something you forget.
After the ambulance left I returned to the corridor tunnel, and stood for a while in front of one of the windows. In the blue, the bodies staggered and crawled like blind grubs, disturbed by the periodic moans of the spare who’d just had part of his face ripped out The body nearest the window looked up suddenly, a motionthat was random and meaningless. She had only one arm, and the skin on the left side of her face was red and churned where a graft had been removed. Her eyes flicked across the window and her mouth moved
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