World War Z(5)

You say they didn’t call for a doctor, that they were afraid they’d be sent back, but then why try to find a cure in the West?

You really don’t understand a refugee’s heart, do you? These people were desperate. They were trapped between their infections and being rounded up and “treated” by their own government. If you had a loved one, a family member, a child, who was infected, and you thought there was a shred of hope in some other country, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to get there? Wouldn’t you want to believe there was hope?

You said that man’s wife, along with the other renshe, vanished into thin air.

It has always been this way, even before the outbreaks. Some stay with family, some with friends. Many of the poorer ones had to work off their bao 3 to the local Chinese mafia. The majority of them simply melted into the host country’s underbelly.

The low-income areas?

If that’s what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos?

It’s been said that many shetou propagated the myth of a miracle cure in other countries.

Some.

Did you?

[Pause.]



No.



[Another pause.]

How did Flight 575 change air smuggling?

Restrictions were tightened, but only in certain countries. Airline shetou were careful but they were also resourceful. They used to have this saying, “every rich man’s house has a servant’s entrance.”

What does that mean?

If western Europe has increased its security, go through eastern Europe. If the U.S. won’t let you in, go through Mexico. I’m sure it helped make the rich white countries feel safer, even though they had infestations already bubbling within their borders. This is not my area of expertise, you remember, I was primarily land transport, and my target countries were in central Asia.

Were they easier to enter?

They practically begged us for the business. Those countries were in such economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they actually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our fee. There were even shetou, or whatever they called them in their barbarian babble, who worked with us to get renshe across the old Soviet republics into countries like India or Russia, even Iran, although I never asked or wanted to know where any of the renshe were going. My job ended at the border. Just get their papers stamped, their vehicles tagged, pay the guards off, and take my cut.

Did you see many infected?

Not in the beginning. The blight worked too fast. It wasn’t like air travel. It might take weeks to reach Kashi, and even the slowest of burns, I’ve been told, couldn’t last longer than a few days. Infected clients usually reanimated somewhere on the road, where they would be recognized and collected by the local police. Later, as the infestations multiplied and the police became overwhelmed, I began to see a lot of infected on my route.

Were they dangerous?

Rarely. Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You’d see something moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy blankets. You’d hear banging from a car’s boot, or, later, from crates with airholes in the backs of vans. Airholes…they really didn’t know what was happening to their loved ones.

Did you?

By then, yes, but I knew trying to explain it to them would be a hopeless cause. I just took their money and sent them on their way. I was lucky. I never had to deal with the problems of sea smuggling.

That was more difficult?

And dangerous. My associates from the coastal provinces were the ones who had to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds and contaminating the entire hold.

What did they do?

I’ve heard of various “solutions.” Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast—it didn’t matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast—and “unload” the infected renshe onto the beach. I’ve heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early cases of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or why you’d hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walking out of the surf. At least I never had to deal with that.

I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time to quit. There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi’an. He’d made a lot of money buying up American credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The man’s Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every day. The driver’s eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn’t going to be much good for much longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all I could do.