Some tyrants don't know when to die
Comandante Eternal
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Mike Kilgore (C) 2014Creative Commons License
Dr. Jaime Fernandez didn't look up when Famosa entered his ramshackle office. This was partly because Fernandez had delved deeply into his stack of paperwork, and partly because Famosa did not knock. Then again, Famosa never knocked.
"Drop all that stuff and come with me," Famosa said with no preamble. "Right now."
Fernandez looked up, half-glasses slipping down his nose. "What is it? The Lopez woman?" Magalys Lopez was failing quickly; uterine cancer was rarely treatable on the island, especially among elderly women.
Famosa rolled his eyes. "No. Not her. Come on, I mean it. Right now, and no questions."
Right now and no questions rarely meant anything good. But long practice quickly squelched any visible reaction. Fernandez moved to stand as Famosa swiveled in the doorway, ordering, "Bring your bag."
Fernandez nearly turned down the wrong corridor in pursuit. He'd assumed Famosa was leading him to the intensive care unit. Instead the hospital director made for the nearest exit. Fernandez almost opened his mouth to ask the obvious, then clamped his jaw carefully shut.
Outside, Fernandez automatically raised a hand to shade his eyes from the tropical sun. He would normally wear a hat, but he'd left it on the battered filing cabinet in his haste. Once again he almost missed Famosa, who had not turned towards the tiny row of parking for the hospital's senior officials.
Instead, the director walked straight up to a new (new!?) Army truck, engine running, parked on the side of the cracked street and flanked by two blank-faced soldiers with slung machine guns.
Fernandez halted in his tracks.
"Oh, come on," Famosa snorted. It's not that. Would I be coming with you?"
At a loss for a response, Fernandez clambered into the back of the truck along with his boss. The canvas-domed truckbed was full of seated, armed soldiers, none of whom offered either doctor a hand, or moved to make room as they squeezed onto the crowded benches on either side.
The truck wound quickly through the decomposing maze of Centro Habana, rumbled its way east towards the bay, then turned north. Fernandez caught a glimpse of blue water through the flap in the rear tarp. Then, with a jerk, the nose of the truck sharply descended, and the late afternoon sunlight streaming in from above was extinguished.
Fernandez was rocked against Famosa on one side and the burly biceps of a soldier on the other as the vehicle descended a spiraling ramp. He could no longer make out the details of the walls or ceiling beyond the tailgate. The tunnel they were in contained no lights.
After a very few minutes, the truck decelerated sharply and came to a dead stop. Through the rear opening, Fernandez could see a reflection of headlights against a solid wall, but that light went out almost immediately. Then another small, crimson light appeared, flickering back and forth across the truck bed.
"Andale, doctors. Come out, right now," came a voice from behind the reddened flashlight.
Famosa dug an elbow into Fernandez's ribs. "Come on, let's go." None of the soldiers moved. The two physicians clambered over the tailgate and out of the truck.
Fernandez felt hard rock beneath his shoes' worn soles. They barely had time to touch the ground before the gruff voice barked, "This way, follow me. No talking!"
The lensed flashlight darted towards a steady red glow in the wall facing the silent truck. A single bare bulb painted the color of blood hung inside a steel cage, bolted to a rough stone wall. Below it stood a metal door, bound at the edges and across its center in heavy, riveted bands.
The colonel--for judging by his epaulets, that is what he was, if Fernandez's fading memory of his own Army service was any guide--banged on the door with the butt of his flashlight.
Fernandez felt more than saw a slash of dim light, also red, as a slot barely three centimeters wide slid open at eye level. The colonel leaned in close and muttered a single, unintelligible word, then stepped back. The light behind the door blinked out, and the eye slit slammed shut.
With the sound of metal scraping against rock, the door squealed open. The doorway was wide--wide enough to allow at least three men to enter abreast. But the colonel held up a hand, then motioned first Famosa and then Fernandez to go in, calling out their names to the unseen presences beyond. Fernandez squared his shoulders and nodded in the near-darkness, as if acknowledging a long-awaited moment, and followed his superior into the gloom.
Fernandez was barely three steps inside before he heard the heavy door slam shut behind him, and a brilliant light was suddenly staring him in the face. He was unable to resist flinching as his irises recoiled against the glare. An unknown voice in front of him barked out his name, and papers rustled ahead and to his left.
"Yes, that's him. Let's go." The spotlight left Fernandez's face, and as his eyes adjusted yet again he eventually saw that he was standing in a small room, furnished only with a dozen blank-faced men in uniform, all of whom were carrying heavy automatic weapons.
The only exits visible in the dim red light were the door immediately behind him, and its double, embedded in the right-hand wall. Another colonel, mustachioed and relatively squat, motioned the two doctors towards it. "Move along. No time to waste." He banged on the new door sharply, and entered as it opened without looking back. Famosa and Fernandez followed, accompanied by about half of the enlisted men from the guard chamber.
They were led through a maze of stone corridors, lit by more blood-red light bulbs mounted at regular intervals. At several points, Fernandez could make out recessed alcoves with more heavy doors along the walls. He did not think they led to banquet halls or infirmaries.
At long last the corridors ended in another metal door. But this one was different from its fellows. The surface was much brighter, though tarnished in an oddly random fashion, the coruscating purples of its face broken by a very bright and reflective patch at the level where a man's hand would be expected to push it open. In addition, instead of the now-familiar double rectangles cut out by bands of steel across the edges and center, this entry was banded from top to bottom, with another heavy band crossing the first at shoulder-level.
The squat colonel banged against it, and it opened with no further preamble. He motioned the two doctors inside, then pulled the door shut behind them, remaining in the corridor with his men.
Fernandez found himself in another stone room, larger than the original entry chamber but still small enough to be claustrophobic. Once the door clanged shut, modern fluorescent lights flickered to life in the ceiling. As his eyes adjusted once again to the change, Fernandez could see a chest-high barrier to his right, behind which a pair of soldiers were studying the glow of television monitors embedded within their side of the barrier. Neither so much as glanced at Fernandez or Famosa.
Yet another Army colonel, this one tall, aquiline and pale complexioned, stood before them. Fernandez stared at him with open astonishment. The pistol holstered on his right hip was not surprising, but a heavy silver cross on his chest, held by an equally brilliant silver chain, was as out of place as a new American sports car on the streets of Havana.
The colonel was holding a heavy sheaf of papers, the topmost of which were apparently affixed with photographs, and his eyes darted back and forth as he studied their visages with exaggerated care. Finally he spoke.
"Jaime Jimenez Fernandez, physician, born second December 1962, unmarried, assigned to Freyre de Andrade Hospital. Not a member of the Party." The colonel's lip twisted slightly at this last. He continued, "You have been summoned to perform a service to the Revolution and your country. You are hereby forbidden to ever speak of where you are, what you see, and what you will do in this place. Your silence shall last for the rest of your life." He paused. "However long--or short--that may be. Do you understand?"
After a moment, Fernandez found his voice. "I do not understand why I am here or what I am to do." Almost imperceptibly, Famosa's body jerked at his presumption. "But I do understand your instructions, Comrade Colonel."
The colonel fixed him with a glare, then nodded slowly. "That will do." He nodded at the papers in his hands. "You--and your relations--are bound to your duty. Do it well, and you will be rewarded." He did not bother to explain the consequences for unsatisfactory performance. There was no need.
The officer stepped aside to reveal another wide, tarnished, metal-crossed door embedded in the rock, and rapped upon it with a gloved hand.
"Then enter, and do your duty."
The door swung open, and Fernandez stepped into a room the likes of which he had never even imagined.
Even though his eyes had now adjusted to normal light, he had to restrain himself from lifting a hand to shade them from the glare. For a few moments, all he could see were the bright, shimmering reflections of white light against highly polished silver. Everywhere against the far wall, and a large door at its center, was the glint of the precious metal, far more of it than Fernandez had ever seen in his life.
Even more remarkable were the shapes into which it had been wrought. Stars of David, bas-reliefs of the Blessed Mother, and crucifixes, everywhere crucifixes: carved, stamped, embedded against the wall and in the door at its center. Numerous platters of what had to be gold, centered with intricately painted portraits of Christian saints, martyrs, and most of all, pietas and images of the crucifixion, were also mounted against the silvered walls.
"Quite a sight, isn't it?" rang a voice from the left side of the room.
As he turned to face the speaker, Fernandez was unable to keep his jaw from falling open. Like everyone else on the island, he knew that voice as well as his own.
The bearded figure, sitting in a cushioned wheelchair and wearing incongruous western-style exercise clothes, was at once more gaunt and more corpulent than in the innumerable portraits that stared out of every conceivable space on the island. An intravenous drip bag hung behind the chair, its tube taped to the man's right forearm, and a compressed-gas tank hissed alongside. A noseplug-notched oxygen tube hung loosely near the bottom of the old man's beard. Age and illness had stripped the heartiness from his face while decades of luxuries had provided an ample paunch. But his dark eyes had lost none of their vitality.
"So what do you think, Doctor?" The old ruler waved at the wall of icons and crucifixes. "All that treasure, and there's far more than what you see here. It covers the entire outer surface of the next room, including the roof and the floor. There is nothing else quite like it in the world." He paused. "At least, not anymore."
Fernandez said the first thing that sprang into his mind. "I could never have dreamed of its like, Presidente. What is it?"
Fidel Alejandro Castro laughed, but not heartily. He stopped just short of falling into a fit of coughing. Finally he replied, "It is a cage, doctor. A cage for what the yumas would call an insurance policy." He chuckled again. "But first, doctor, here is your patient." The dictator gestured at his own chest. "I am in your care from now on--or at least for so long as I am in need of it."
At the time, Fernandez wondered at the feral smile beneath the bushy grey beard. The man before him did not look as though he would be recovering to full health in this world, but Castro's smile was not that of a man who had come to terms with his mortality. It looked more like the smile of a predator in sight of its prey.
Famosa bustled over--Fernandez had almost forgotten he was there--and shoved a heavy stack of medical charts into his hands. Fernandez blinked at Castro, then adjusted his spectacles and looked down at the pages. He flipped through them rapidly. The dictator was a decidedly sick old man: diverticulitis, severe peritonitis, repeated resistant infections, recurrent internal hemorrhaging, further surgery very dangerous. Finally he looked up at Famosa.
"I don't understand," he said. "I am not a gastric surgeon. Why me?"
"You are here," Castro replied, "because despite your reluctance to embrace the Party, you are the leading geriatric physician on this island, and you have a background in emergency medicine besides." He fixed Fernandez with a glare. "Your nation will be in need of both skills very soon."
Castro abruptly shifted his gaze from Fernandez to Colonel Lima, who had followed the two doctors into the treasure-lined chamber.
"Show him. Now."
Lima stepped forward, producing a large, archaic iron key from within his pocket. He unlocked the door at the center of the shining wall, pushed it open, and stepped in, motioning for Fernandez to follow. After a second's hesitation, he obeyed.
He found himself in a tiny antechamber, lit by a single caged, red bulb. Another silver-encrusted door was directly opposite. Every surface of the small chamber was covered with silver and religious artifacts. Lima reached across Fernandez's body to pull the entry door closed and lock it. He then retrieved a different large key from his pocket, and turned to the opposite portal.
He rapped harshly on the door with the key's pommel, then flipped it in his hand and inserted it in the keyhole. "It should be waking by now," he muttered.
The door opened inwards on oiled hinges. The light within was yellow and dim, but as the door swung wide, Fernandez could see that the interior was plain stone, with none of the garish ornamentation of the two outer chambers.
Then he saw it.
The figure was upright, hanging slightly forward from the far wall by short, thick chains manacled to its thin wrists. Its ankles were similarly confined. The tall body was clothed in gray rags that might once have been black. The feet were bare, the head covered with matted ash-white hair. At first glance, Fernandez thought it was the most pitiful and wretched man he had ever seen.
Then it raised its head, opened its eyes, and smiled, and Fernandez could not stifle a scream.
The eyes were wide, hollow, and yellowed, but the pupils were dead black, and shone all out of proportion to the faint electric light. Its teeth were long and sharp, and as white as polished marble, and they stood out against a thin oval face with sunken cheeks. The thing's lips were peeled back in a rictus-like grin, and it leered at Fernandez.
Fernandez managed to hold his ground for long moments, until the thing's mouth opened, and it spoke. He couldn't understand the words; they were at once guttural and soft, and they rang with harsh consonants that would later remind him of the Russian he'd been forced to learn as a schoolboy. But for the moment he was hardly capable of making any such association.
He was racked with a sudden, wrenching indecision. Every instinct screamed at him to turn and run away from the abomination. But as the low, harsh voice continued to speak, Fernandez also felt a gnawing compulsion to step inside, walk across the stone floor, and come face to face with the terrible, hideous...fascinating thing.
His left foot shuffled forwards.
Lima grabbed Fernandez by the collar and yanked him back into the tiny antechamber. The face of the thing against the wall twisted with sudden rage, and it spat unintelligibles at the colonel, hissing and screaming now, the low and somehow more terrible tones banished in a torrent of obvious abuse.
With Fernandez stumbling behind him, Lima reached for the totem hanging from his own neck and held it out before him. "Quiet, wretch! This one is not for you!"
The thing screamed, its words now rolling into an extended howl as Lima grabbed the door handle and pulled it shut, closing off the cell and its gibbering inmate.
Fernandez heard rather than felt a muffled slap as his buttocks and shoulder blades whacked against the far door. His eyes were as wide as those of the thing in the next chamber. Lima regarded him coolly, waiting for the doctor to regain enough composure to speak.
"What... what is that?" he finally managed.
Lima shook his head. "Not for me to say. He will tell you what you need to know." The tall colonel nodded past the shaking physician's shoulder. "I think he will tell you very soon, but it is not enough to be told. First you must see."
Fernandez started to turn towards the exit door, anxious to put as much distance between himself and the thing in the cell as possible. But Lima caught him by a shoulder and firmly turned the doctor back around. "Not yet. First I have two questions for you, and unless you want to see that thing much closer up, I suggest you answer them truthfully." Fernandez stared, then nodded curtly.
"First," Lima said, "do you have one of these?" He gestured with the heavy crucifix, still gripped in his left hand.
Fernandez paused, thinking. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. "I may, but... I'm not sure," he repeated.
"Well, get one," Lima replied, "preferably from your brother."
Fernandez started briefly, then inwardly shrugged. Of course they know, why be surprised?
"Second," Lima continued, "and this is the most important question you will ever be asked, Doctor: Do you believe?" he asked, shaking the silver cross.
Fernandez did not answer. Decades of conditioning against speaking truthfully on matters such as this stopped the words from leaving his mouth more effectively than any gag.
"Don't be a fool!" Lima snapped. "I'm not some DGI shithead trying to make my informant quota. This is important! Your life depends upon it. Now--do you believe?"
After a long moment, Fernandez simply nodded, and Lima nodded back. "Good. We thought so. You are close to your brother, after all. Now, get one of these, immediately"--Lima shook the crucifix again--"and never set foot in that room again without it. Understand?"
Fernandez nodded, this time more enthusiastically. "I do, Comrade Colonel. Is this why... why me?"
Now it was Lima's turn to nod. "Yes, Doctor. Not only are you the ideal physician for this... project... you also have the means to protect yourself. Many others--like that fool Famosa--do not."
Lima dropped the crucifix, then reached for Fernandez's shoulder again, this time more gently. "Step aside, doctor, so I can let us out of this place."
They had scarcely stepped back into the outer room before Castro turned in his wheelchair to fixed Fernandez with an avid gaze. "So, Doctor, what do you think? Quite a sight isn't it!"
Fernandez stared mutely for a moment, then finally said, "What is it?"
Castro smiled broadly, his eyes hard. "Why, I told you before, it is seguro, Doctor. What the nortenos call an insurance policy." The dictator settled back against his cushions. "Ceaucescu's insurance policy, to be more precise."
"Ceaucescu... ?" Fernandez trailed off.
"Oh, yes," Castro continued. "Nicolae's insurance policy, and his greatest secret, one he kept from Stalin himself." Now even Fidel shuddered a bit. "Thank every god who never lived that he was able to do that!
Ceaucescu found this thing, somewhere deep in his wretched country, way back in the mountains," the old comandante went on, his voice now as animated as if he were haranguing the crowd in the Plaza de la Revolucion.
"It was just after the war ended, we think. We never learned how he captured it, but somehow he did, and he kept it locked up, just as we have here, for forty years.
He planned to use it to cheat death," Castro mused, "but the fool waited too long. He let the gusanos take him, and they put so many bullets in him, even that thing in there couldn't have got more than a mouthful of blood!"
Castro spat in contempt. "The weakling. Lined up and shot by peasants--with his wife! Pah!"
Now Castro's smile was hard. "We learned much from our fraternal allies over the years. More than Ceaucescu ever suspected! And when he died there against a wall, when Romania fell to the gusanos, we were ready." He thumped the armrest of the wheelchair. "I was ready!
He leaned forward again, with the relish of one telling a tale long concealed. "My people knew where the thing was, and when the army deserted and the Securitate ran to hide from the peasants' revenge, they went in and took it! Took it out of that cold hellhole, locked it in a silver-lined box, and smuggled it to the Adriatic. Then a submarine, a long voyage--a very unusual voyage--and finally... here. To Havana. Where it remains.
"Ceaucescu's insurance policy." Castro smiled again, his eyes cold. "My insurance policy."
"But all this is ancient history, Doctor," Castro said after a long moment. "And the past is not your concern. What you do need to know, you will learn over there." He pointed across the room to the unoccupied end of a long metal table, where two blank-faced soldiers were studying small television monitors. A thick, hand-bound file sat on that end of the table, a ring in its spine padlocked to a heavy chain that was locked in turn to a larger ring on the cell's floor.
"Go on, get reading!" Famosa said, shuffling forward. "The summary is in the front, the rest is test reports."
Fernandez stepped numbly to the long table, and slumped into a hard wooden chair. The binder's cover was stamped with a profusion of security markings and dire warnings against unauthorized access. I suppose I'm cleared for this, he thought wildly, and opened to the first page.
The summary referred to the thing in the cell simply as "the Subject," and after only a few minutes, Fernandez grew to hate that simple word. A page of charts showed declining bodily functions--heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, EEG--over a period of days. The charts were built from statistical analysis of what the report referred to as "donors."
There appeared to have been a great many donors, but only one Subject.
The donors' vital signs diminished steadily after three highlighted inflection points--marked "donations" in still more coldly bureaucratic notes. They seemed to stabilize, always at a lower level of health, until the third "donation." After that, the charts showed flatlines on all of the telemetry, over a time scale that made no sense to Fernandez. Why continue to measure long after the patient is clearly dead? His skin began to crawl as he guessed the answer.
The final page of analysis proved his fears correct: first the pulse returned, then the EEG, and finally the ghost of a signal in respiration. After about twelve hours, the hearts and lungs and brains of the dead donors had resumed function, albeit at bizarre rates with nonsensical gaps and inexplicable surges. The patients were certainly not normal, but they were alive.
The last section described the donors' behavior during and after their ordeals. Phrases like "highly susceptible to commands from the Subject," "sensitivity to ultraviolet light," "increasing hostility towards guards and physicians," "considerable strength despite physical infirmities," and "physiological changes accompanied by overwhelming hunger" abounded. The conclusion noted, "Donors euthanized by the usual method after observations were completed."
Fernandez continued to review the report for the better part of an hour, lost in horror and sick fascination as he picked through the vast compilation of test data that made up the bulk of the file. He scarcely noted Castro and Lima conferring over folders of their own, or Lima muttering orders that were ferried out of the room by a uniformed aide.
Finally he closed the file, and self-consciously wiped his hands on his trousers. Castro noted the motion and smiled his cold smile. "So, Doctor. What do you think of our little research project?"
Fernandez could not meet the dictator's eyes. "How... how many... donors were used in the research?" he stammered.
Castro laughed heartily. "Oh, enough, quite enough! Ha ha ha!" He waved a hand airily, trailing a length of plastic IV tubing. "Don't concern yourself with that, Doctor." The smile grew wider still. "We will not run out of them. There are always more gusanos."
Shortly afterwards, Fernandez was ushered out of the dungeon (he could think of it in no other terms) and driven back to the hospital. Before he climbed down out of the truck, Famosa hissed to him, "We will begin tomorrow at sundown. Be ready!" The night was warm, but Fernandez shivered all the same.
He staggered into his office, where he learned that Magalys Lopez was dead.
*
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Aerospace engineer and writer Will Collier made his first professional sale in 1987, sold his first book in 1995, and started his first blog in 1997. He lives in metro Atlanta.
Review by DenisonWill
Jun 27 2014
Like This?
Well worth reading
Horrifying! Disgusting! But ultimately refreshing and deeply reassuring.
I think this short story is really well done.
I'm not even Catholic and I loved it.
(But next time I resolve to notice the genre heading before I start reading...)
I think this short story is really well done.
I'm not even Catholic and I loved it.
(But next time I resolve to notice the genre heading before I start reading...)