The Zombie Survival Guide - Max Brooks [23]
No … but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen! When I think about how many transplants I performed, all those patients from Europe, the Arab world, even the self-righteous United States. Few of you Yankees asked where your new kidney or pancreas was coming from, be it a slum kid from the City of God or some unlucky student in a Chinese political prison. You didn’t know, you didn’t care. You just signed your traveler’s checks, went under the knife, then went home to Miami or New York or wherever.
Did you ever try to track these patients down, warn them?
No, I didn’t. I was trying to recover from a scandal, rebuild my reputation, my client base, my bank account. I wanted to forget what happened, not investigate it further. By the time I realized the danger, it was scratching at my front door.
BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION
[I was told to expect a “tall ship,” although the “sails” of IS Imfingo refer to the four vertical wind turbines rising from her sleek, trimaran hull. When coupled with banks of PEM, or proton exchange membrane, fuel cells, a technology that converts sea-water into electricity, it is easy to see why the prefix “IS” stands for “Infinity Ship.” Hailed as the undisputed future of maritime transport, it is still rare to see one sailing under anything but a government flag. The Imfingo is privately owned and operated. Jacob Nyathi is her captain.]
I was born about the same time as the new, postapartheid South Africa. In those euphoric days, the new government not only promised the democracy of “one man, one vote,” but employment and housing to the entire country. My father thought that meant immediately. He didn’t understand that these were long-term goals to be achieved after years—generations—of hard work. He thought that if we abandoned our tribal homeland and relocated to a city, there would be a brand-new house and high-paying jobs just sitting there waiting for us. My father was a simple man, a day laborer. I can’t blame him for his lack of formal education, his dream of a better life for his family. And so we settled in Khayelitsha, one of the four main townships outside of Cape Town. It was a life of grinding, hopeless, humiliating poverty. It was my childhood.
The night it happened, I was walking home from the bus stop. It was around five A.M. and I’d just finished my shift waiting tables at the T.G.I. Friday’s at Victoria Wharf. It had been a good night. The tips were big, and news from the Tri Nations was enough to make any South African feel ten feet tall. The Springboks were trouncing the All Blacks … again!
[He smiles with the memory.]
Maybe those thoughts were what distracted me at first, maybe it was simply being so knackered, but I felt my body instinctively react before I consciously heard the shots. Gunfire was not unusual, not in my neighborhood, not in those days. “One man, one gun,” that was the slogan of my life in Khayelitsha. Like a combat veteran, you develop almost genetic survival skills. Mine were razor sharp. I crouched, tried to triangulate the sound, and at the same time look for the hardest surface to hide behind. Most of the homes were just makeshift shanties, wood scraps or corrugated tin, or just sheets of plastic fastened to barely standing beams. Fire ravaged these lean-tos at least once a year, and bullets could pass through them as easily as open air.
I sprinted and crouched behind a barbershop, which had been constructed from a car-sized shipping container. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for a few seconds, long enough to hole up and wait for the shooting to die down. Only it didn’t. Pistols, shotguns, and that clatter you never forget, the kind that tells you someone has a Kalashnikov. This was lasting much too long to be just an ordinary gang row. Now there were screams, shouts. I began to smell smoke. I heard the stirrings of a crowd. I peeked out from around the corner. Dozens of people, most of them in their night-clothes, all shouting “Run! Get out of there! They’re coming!” House