Like now.
It’s 2:46 a.m. I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep. Waqar’s starting to rave.
ENTRY 65
I don’t like this one bit. Waqar’s semiconscious. He’s still raving in Urdu, but from time to time, he goes into a kind of trance and has seizures. The wound on his arm is swollen and red and is leaking a clear liquid with a repulsive smell. When I tried to wipe it with gauze, he came to, screaming in pain, blindly pulling away from me. That reaction isn’t normal for someone with internal bleeding. I studied the wound more carefully. It’s more like a deep scratch on the inside of his arm, about eight inches long.
I can’t help thinking the worst. I don’t remember seeing the scratch when we pulled him out of the van. He must have gotten it later, and I can only think of one way. I looked up from the wound. Viktor’s blue eyes were wide, watching me intently. I didn’t have to say anything. He knows what I’m thinking. It’s just a scratch…could it be enough to change him? Waqar passed out again.
ENTRY 66
About twenty minutes ago, Waqar started death rattles. The gruesome wound on his arm is still oozing smelly pus. His insides must be getting worse. A reddish fluid is flowing from his intestines; he lost control of his bowels a long time ago. His panting sounds like a steam freight train climbing a mountain. He stops breathing suddenly, then gasps for breath as if he were drowning. His agony has put everyone on edge.
I take some comfort in knowing that he lost consciousness a couple of hours. If he were awake, his suffering would be horrible.
I feel absolutely helpless. A human life is ending before my very eyes, and I have no drugs or knowledge to prevent it.
Usman and Shafiq recite
Violent death isn’t a pretty sight like in the movies, where the hero falls with a smile and some last words for his beloved. Death is terrible, dirty, and very painful, if you’ve got what Waqar has. Those guys don’t seem to know that. I didn’t know that either a few weeks ago, but I saw a few dead on the way here, and that hardened me.
Viktor and I have a very serious problem. We know, or suspect, what will happen to Waqar in a few hours, but we’ve decided not to do anything for now. In the first place, we’re unarmed. That severely limits our possibilities. In the second place, neither Usman or Shafiq will shoot Waqar. Not surprising. He’s their friend, after all.
I laughed bitterly at that. The group from the Safe Haven must’ve felt the same way when they left that poor devil locked in the bathroom. Now, thanks to their “love for their fellow man,” we have this freak show on our hands.
Kritzinev is totally drunk and out of it. He keeps mumbling incoherently in Russian. From time to time, he laughs, doubled over with tears running down his cheeks into his beard, as if someone’s told him an extremely funny joke. At one point he screamed like a madman at the gate, where the undead are still pounding away outside. He pulled out his gun, but Pritchenko leaped up like a deer and grabbed it before he could shoot. Kritzinev glared at him and then collapsed, unconscious, drunk as a skunk. Just as well.
Now we have a weapon. Neither Usman or Shafiq made any move to take it away. That’s something.
The undead are still out there, mercilessly beating against the door. It’s an awful, grating sound. I think their numbers are growing, but I have no way of knowing for sure.
Waqar’s death rattles are becoming more frequent, one every ten minutes or so. The end is near.
ENTRY 67
The sun is coming up. Faint rays of sunlight filter through slits in the metal gate. From time to time those things’ shadows block the light as they wander back and forth. The store smells of blood, shit, sweat, fear, and pus. Waqar died ten minutes ago in terrible agony. Usman and Shafiq are reciting a funeral oration that sounds like a mantra. They keep watch on the body with one hand on their AK-47s and the other on a Koran. Pritchenko and I are keeping watch, too, but for other reasons.
Waqar will rise again any time now. Or something that looks like Waqar. There are no words to define our anguish as we wait. My hand is trembling as I write this in my journal. It looks like a six-year-old’s handwriting.
Viktor and I are breathing fast, and our hearts are racing. We know we’ll see one of those things born from a comrade-in-arms, if not a friend. When he returns, he’ll be the predator, and we’ll be his prey.
Waqar’s agony has been horrific. Two hours after he lost consciousness, small purple spots, the size of a dime, spread all over his body. Waqar’s circulatory system failed. It couldn’t send oxygen throughout his body, so he slowly suffocated.
Three hours later, something creepy happened. Delicate capillaries and veins in Waqar’s circulatory system became visible on his skin. You could trace them perfectly, like in a med-school drawing. I had no way to measure his blood pressure, but I’d estimate he was running hot. His heartbeat was wildly irregular. Sweat poured off him, but I wouldn’t let Pritchenko dry him off without gloves. If the Ebola virus is transmitted by contact with sweat, this disease must be too.
The sad truth is, nobody knows shit about this disease. In another time, in a better world, this kid would’ve been fighting for his life, quarantined in an ICU, monitored by a regiment of doctors and nurses. Now he lay there in agony, in his own excrement, on the floor of a looted, dirty store in the middle of a city abandoned and dead. Like all of Europe and the whole fucking world.
At three and a half hours, his veins became visible; the vena cava and aorta were like thick cables. Excessive blood pressure burst the small, delicate veins under his skin. Waqar was starting to look an awful lot like the things that have tormented me for months. By now, we all knew, even the Pakistanis, that Waqar was becoming one of them.
After four and a half hours, he lost consciousness and started bleeding profusely from the mouth, ears, and eyes, and I suspect the anus and penis (no one had the courage to check). Except for Kritzinev, who was passed out, we watched that terrifying spectacle, frozen, not saying a word, too scared to react. In the background, a chorus of groans and thumps against the increasingly weakened gate greeted the birth of a new member of the legion of the undead.
At four hours and forty minutes, Waqar shook with spasms that looked like an epileptic seizure. His body arched to incredible heights, and his limbs flailed away on the ground. His head pounded rhythmically against the concrete. We couldn’t do anything. With each contraction, with each jolt of his limbs, he sprayed blood mixed with pus and excrement into the four corners of the room. Unless I’m mistaken, if even a drop of that goo came in contact with an exposed part of the body, it could be lethal.
I ordered Pritchenko and the Pakistanis to stay back in the front room while I used an old Plexiglas display
