So… tired… chorus really wipes you out once you’ve finished singing for two hours straight and done all of your schoolwork.

So, I have to do 5000/day now every day until the end of NaNoWriMo. Which might be a little crazy, considering I expect this to go a little bit above 100,000 words (possibly a few thousand). I’ll write until I can’t write no more! I’ll be bringing my laptop now with a copy of Spawn throughout school, and will write at every change I get. This is Jason waging war on his word count – it’s time to get to 100,000! Four days to do it.

With that said… Word Count: 80,147 

And like that, my opinion of him changed dramatically. He was no longer a friendly doctor and partner, but a man who I need to give constant attention to. He had some sort of plan worked out, and I was left out of the loop. I expected him to invite me to this event soon enough. He’d said it was a wake – had one of his family members perished? Before the day was over, I would find out.

He approached me near the end of my work day, asked me to go with him to a remote area of the hospital so that he could invite me to whatever he’d been talking about earlier. “Ethan,” he began, “I would like you to attend a very special event I have been planning for some time now.” I smiled; I was almost flattered that he would want me to attend a special event when I’d only been working at the hospital for a few days. “In two days there will be a wake. I was going to question you about it, but there have been too many requests to see it done. I should have said it was not only I who was planning it. All of the people currently incapacitated with our friendly disease, they are dead, yes? The families know this. They think there is no hope for anybody. The community held a petition to bring all of the dead out onto Dal Lake and display them before giving them a proper burial.”

Suddenly I was no longer happy. “That’s ridiculous,” I told him. “We cannot risk these people’s lives just because everybody else believes that they’re dead. I won’t have it, and you shouldn’t have it either. You’re in charge around here; you should be speaking up for all of the ill, not exploiting them because of some petition. I refuse to participate.”

“It’s not an option. We are bound by law to participate – I’ve received an order to carry out this wake. We must assemble the community and attend the wake. We have no choice, or else we will be prosecuted.” When he put it that way, I couldn’t argue with him. I didn’t want to go to jail – not while I still had the chance to spread my antibiotic, and not while I had the chance to return to my normal life back home once all of this was through. I was, however, beginning to see that I might never return to my old like, that Athan’s Disease had taken total control over every aspect of my past, present, and now my future. Athan’s now dictated that I must attend the community’s wake or be arrested for not hosting it. In two days the wake would take place. The entire community would gather on one of the largest boats to ever sail upon the Dal. The boat was already there – a large, flat vessel that could hold thousands of people. It was as large as a stadium, and in two days would host our community-wide wake.

The goal of this wake was to show everybody that their friends and family were dead, and then discreetly take the bodies back to the hospital on the grounds that they were still not fully examined. That way the SMHS could keep control over the bodies until at least one person woke up. That was the plan, until something entirely different happened.

The next day rolled by quickly. I was not the only one informed about the wake. Rochak had pulled most every doctor in the SMHS aside to let them know about the next day’s event. Although it was hastily put together, Rochak knew what he was talking about. Eventually, he distributed a day plan, and every doctor in the hospital knew exactly what was going to happen. Some were better versed in the schedule than others; several could make no sense of Rochak’s discombobulated handwriting. Luckily I understood nearly every word, although it was written in a slanted style of English just for me. Rochak could speak English clearly, but he obviously was not well-versed in the art of penmanship.

We tended to the dead that day. My antibiotic continued to have no effect on the patient. But Rochak insisted that I continue giving them more medicine, again and again. Every time he recommended higher doses. As his subordinate I did what I was told, but it should have been me commanding my own medicine, not he. It should have been me in charge of the hospital, not Rochak. Rochak, while intelligent, was coming across as far too arrogant. Yes, he knew so much and was a brilliant fellow, but as the wake approached he became stressed and pushy. He began acting like a prideful fool., barking orders to everybody around him simply to assert that the wake was his event to command, just as the hospital was his toy house, and he was the puppet master of all the plastic dolls that moved around inside.

All prepared for the hospital’s closing the next day, including myself. I locked away all of my medicine, praying that I wouldn’t have to touch another bottle of the liquid for a long time. I wanted everybody only to be well. Now I was unsure if I’d made any sort of accomplishment at all. R. Rochak, when I asked him, told me that I had. That my accomplishments were more than immense, and that I was saving all of Srinagar. What a grandiose lie that was! I saved nobody – I could not have saved them from what came next. What came next was only a taste of what the entire world might have been experiencing at the time.

I walked home that night. It was a long walk, and I was afraid that I might not see my hotel until early morning, walking home those many miles. But I did see it, and before midnight as well. With hardly any people out on the streets anymore, I had plenty of room to move around in the night. I could see everything in Srinagar by walking that one route. To my left was always Dal Lake, and to my right always the Jhelum River. All around me people snored and slumbered. I listened to their hushed sounds and soft breaths, and was reassured that people truly did live in Srinagar, and that not everybody lived in hiding as they had in Westendorf. I imagined that many people were still outside in the old district, clamoring around buildings to buy goods that they were told would keep them safe. Buying that special “insurance” that would guarantee their loved ones dead would come back to repay them in monetary form. They would be all around, unlike the nearly empty new city. And before I knew it, my wandering eye had brought me to my hotel.

I walked inside. The lights on the shielding shimmered brighter than ever before, and the circular room seemed to spin. It spun majestically, in a way that did not make me dizzy, although I must have been dizzy for it to be spinning in the first place. The lobby had a decorative floor that pointed towards the center, where a marble white table stood filled with a large bouquet of flowers. I touched them – they were real. Everything pointed towards these flowers; everything in the room was designed specifically to go towards the center. Anything that moves in a circle has a difficult time leave its circular path.

Upstairs, my room was still dirty from the night before. Nobody had come to clean it, which made me slightly depressed, but not as depressed as the thought of what would go on the next day made me. I imagined the wake – every corpse from the hospital lying out, in the open air, for all to see on a massive boat customized for the very occasion. Although the bodies were presentable (they always had been, because they never rotted), they looik3d exceedingly awkward. In my vision of the wake, one man noticed his father’s twinkling, fiery eyes, and thought that the man might be alive. In my dreams that night, the same man’s father actually came to life, startling several passengers so much that they literally fell overboard in surprise. My dreams were becoming less awkward and more realistic. I didn’t realize just how realistic they had become.

Citizens of old and new Srinagar had already assembled at Dal Lake as early at seven o’clock in the morning to watch myself and the other hospital workers prepare the large boat for the oncoming wake. The whole city seemed to be watching us by ten o’clock, and by eleven people were trying to shove their way onto the vessel to get a closer look at their family members, most of which had been brought by truck to the dock site. The boat was almost completely prepared by noon; I was tired by that time. Rochak had been ordering everybody around as usual, ensuring that the day would run smoothly. The boat was larger than I had ever imagined. It was a flat surface, all of it, and underneath rested two hulls. It reminded me of an ancient battleship I’d once read about. This ship was supposedly nearly indestructible, but I’d always imagined that a blow through the center, in between the two hulls, would bring the entire boat crashing down.

                The wake began an hour after noon, at one o’clock, and people had been trying rather unsuccessfully to board the ship long before then. One man had managed to escape onto the ship, but was quickly escorted off by the many doctors and morticians on board. Everybody meant to be on board wore special blue clothing with the hospital insignia patch ironed on above their heart. We could easily identify anybody not meant to be on the ship. My job was to ensure that none of the corpses were about to awaken. It seemed like few of the general population knew that their relatives would wake up – although I was sure some knew. The ones that knew obviously had no reason to come to the wake, if their loved ones were already back from the dead, alive once again. However, I half-expected there to be a greater panic at the wake, judging from what had become of Westendorf as a result of the spread of Athan’s Disease.

Unfortunately, I was more than right. There was a need for panic on that ship; it just hadn’t been created yet. But it would come. Nobody knew about it, but it would come.