Word Count: 85,021

In the beginning it was all quite normal. People walked around the ship looking at their dead relatives and chatting with their living ones. Many people were leaning in to kiss the corpses as a final goodbye, while others wouldn’t touch any part of a cadaver for fear of smearing the “makeup” which was generally used to keep such bodies looking neat and tidy. In truth there was no such makeup, and the bodies were laid outside exactly as they had been in the hospital. At the SMHS, they’d been scattered far beyond the morgue. The morgue was small there, quite a contrast to my hospital back home. It seemed people hardly ever died in the SMHS; it was a breeding ground for remarkable surgeons and especially skilled doctors. It was the agar plate for a culture of savants.

So many said their good-byes that day; I don’t think I’ve ever heard, to this day even, a repetition of the word so great as on that day. We must have put out five thousand bodies. They had rolled into the harbor with little effort. It was not only the doctor who aided the construction of this event, but all manner of people who had volunteered to help move the bodies, including the funeral homes nearby. We had had an entire workforce of people moving every dead body in the hospital, all so that their families could look at them for a few hours. I shuddered at the amount of work it would take to bring all of those bodies back to the hospital – how much manpower was wasted on this fruitless event mandated by law.

Lunch was served on the ship, which by that time was in the middle of Dal Lake. It was not any sort of high-class event, so the lunch was mostly, as I’d heard, buffet-style goods we had put out along the edges of the ship. I say “so I’d heard” only because I and the other doctors were ordered not to be on the ship by the nearby police. It had also been described in the schedule that Rochak had sloppily written that all hospital staff would refrain from actually being on the ship during the wake, which would last nearly the rest of the day. Several hospital staff traveled back to the building, while others like Dr. Rochak, and myself, stayed behind to watch the wake unfold. To ensure that our precious cadavers weren’t going anywhere.

But they had already gone somewhere, and it was out in the middle of Dal Lake. We on the sidelines were helpless to bring it back; we had sent the bodies out against our will, and now we would never see them again. We would never see them again because not long after that lunch the ship began to sink. It was subtle at first, but by evening the entire boat would collapse.

Everybody had been calmly talking with his or her friends when it all happened. Something lurched; something felt wrong. It was as though the ship had gotten a flat tie – the seas were suddenly choppy, and the boat had trouble sustaining itself. Everybody on the boat immediately, almost instinctively, rushed to the edge of the boat to grab life jackets, sensing something was wrong. It looked supernatural; every person’s movement was completely synchronized. The dead were still, the living were stepping in perfect form to the edges of the boat where life vests were under the buffet tables. From the dock it all looked like an elaborate and ornate Broadway show. They pulled out their life jackets in unison. They put them on; they even tightened the straps all at the same time. Now that the boat was sinking, they abandoned their loved ones. I saw Dr. Rochak move closer to the edge of the dock. He moved even closer to the edge than I’d been standing. I only stood where I had because I didn’t want to be hit by the incoming metal steps of any other large vessel that chose to dock in the harbor; many came and went, delivering fish and other goods from the lake and rivers surrounding Srinagar. Dr. Rochak was not only intelligent, but also brave. He lavished the sight of everybody on board fetching his or her life jacket. I could sense him taking it all in, relishing the moment, feeding off of it.

And then, hour by hour, minute by minute, the boat fell into the ocean. At around eight o’clock, the boat began to flood. It was met with dancing and cheers. “Jaya!” they said at the end of the song. “Jaya! Jaya!”

They were not afraid.

Citizens who had boarded the ship that afternoon cheered as the entire boat broke down before them. Even Dr. Rochak smiled when he saw the boat go down; when all of the infected fell into the sea. Everybody cheered. It was universal. The boat cracked, and gave – plunged down into the deep, taking every body with it. It split into two pieces down the middle, but only the bodies fell into that trench of despair. Everybody else rushed up the sides of the boat and jumped off the other end. They remained floating in the water, using their lifejackets. Some fell asleep to the tune of the sinking ship. Everybody had seemed so prepared for it; they still cheered the sinking ship, begging it to go down even faster. I watched the spectacle open-mouthed. All my hard work had sunk to the bottom of the lake.

Even the caterers were cheering.

At this late hour, Dr. Rochak left his station at the edge of the dock. He walked by me, singing “Jaya, jaya, jaya…”

People swam back to the dock, where a ladder had been set up for them to climb up. Everybody came out of the lake smiling. They were disgustingly wet, but also disgustingly happy. I had never seen an entire village so joyous that way before. They laughed with their relatives. “Good riddance!” one of them said. How could they say that? They had just witnessed the killing of their mother, or father, or sister or son! And yet they emerged unscathed, laughing the fact.

I cringed; my face contorted. This was not the face of death that I was familiar with. Now the face of death had become a smile. Everybody on that ship had wanted his or her relatives gone. I should never have assumed that these people didn’t know what was going to happen to those people. I should have never assumed that because I had yet to see a single person spawn that nobody had ever done so. Clearly Srinagar had a history that I had never been told. People who roamed the streets may have been one of the infected, walking around infecting others. Once more I heard Rochak on the phone – a nearby payphone; I presumed he’d called somebody to tell them about what had just happened, and how all of the wake plans had been utterly destroyed – in the background, amidst all the cheering people. He was speaking to some foreign man whose voice was incredibly loud, and neither of the two would stop talking. But, as usual, I caught a trace of his words…

“Athan’s, yes… they’re all…”

I thought something had been amiss before when he’d stuttered, but now I knew. He knew the Athan’s name – he’s either been reading my thoughts, or he was somehow in connection with Dr. Doradwe. I wouldn’t doubt it; many powerful doctors were. At least, according to the research I’d done before I met him. I started doubting its accuracy. I’d doubted a lot of things lately; the truth of the written word was just one of those things. Now it was Dr. Rochak as well. It was also all of Srinagar, who had let all of those helpless people fall into the lake. They would suffocate and never rise from the dead, as they should have. They would never again appear inside the hospital where I could at least attempt to treat them. No, now they were at the bottom of Dal Lake! I watched the reflections on the water ripple through the dock, through the homes on stilts that lined the edge of the Dal. The lake was full of my tears – tears shed for all the thousands of people now lost to the lake.

But it had been no accident.

Dr. Rochak was still jabbering along on the payphone. I wondered when he would hang up and tell me that he knew Dr. Doradwe. I wondered if he would tell me that he had planned for the ship to sink; that the boat had been sabotaged the night before. Or perhaps he would simply tell me to leave Srinagar; that my work was done now that his bodies had been so neatly disposed of. He was no better than the man from Westendorf. He was looking only to get rid of those with Athan’s Disease. How he perceived these people I still don’t know, but after the wake sunk deep into Dal Lake I convinced myself that it must have been the man in charge of the hospital also in charge of the operation to sink all of its patients into the nearby lake.

People were leaving the scene now, some laughing. Only one man wept – he seemed to be the only uninformed man among the thousands to attend. I approached Rochak, who was still on the phone. He put his hand up to me and stuck up a solitary finger, telling me to wait just one second. I would have to battle the phone for his attention. Did he not realize we just lost thousands of corpses? I knew he realized it. That’s why he had gone to the phone, right? I thought.

Listening further, I realized that he had not gone to the phone to talk about the sunken wake. He did not tell me whom he had spoken to until much later, but I slowly figured it out on my own. Once he had said the name of the disease, it wasn’t hard to figure out who was speaking with. I just couldn’t be sure if it was Doradwe himself, or one of his associates. Doradwe’s secret society stretched across the entire world – it was astounding, and how he built up such connections I still cannot fathom to this day. I walked away from Rochak, who was so busy at the phone for the next half an hour that he could not pay attention to anybody around him. I focused on helping the rest of the people out of the water. There were so many people in the lake that it was taking an hour and a half to get everybody out. There was only one ladder, and several people lacked the ability to climb it with any sense of urgency whatsoever.

The private owners of the dock, and the many people who owned lakefront property, had instantly heard about the collapse of the ship and rushed out to watch its remains sink into the lake. The dockworkers were stunned. They seemed uninformed, unlike the passengers who seemed to have had full knowledge of the alleged sinking. By half passed nine in the evening, there were only ten people remaining in the lake.

“Quite a show, eh?” said one old man climbing up the ladder. He was a strong old man, and looked like he ought to have been from Westendorf. He was certainly not from around Srinagar; he wasn’t Indian, and that said enough. Is English was also too fluid.

“It was exhilarating. I cannot wait for the next one.” A young woman had said that. She had said that in reference to escaping a sinking ship while thousands of corpses fell into the lake below her! This was the majority opinion of the bunch, but after hearing it for the umpteenth time I resolved to investigate just why everybody was so happy.

Jaya, jaya, jaya.

I turned around. “Hello,” said Dr. Rochak. “I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re thinking because I was speaking to a man who knows you better than I do. But I did not orchestrate this event. What happened today was a surprise to me as well. I’m not going to stick my nose into the issue, but I have the feeling that you are.” His look was stern and strong. I could see it in his eyes; he was not lying. But he lacked the surprise he spoke about. He looked unsurprised on every level. He stance was cold and fierce, his face lacking all manner of heat and passion. He had lost his patients, and possibly his job now that there was nobody left to treat.

“I don’t understand how could can stand so calmly and speak without any vigor or passion. Do you realize what you’ve lost? And you stand there without a care about who is responsible for all of this! Somebody obviously tampered with the boat. Just look at those passengers – they’re all happy. They’re so happy to see all of those corpses gone, like they knew that they were all bound to wake up. They don’t know, do they?”

“Of course they know,” he said, bluntly. I couldn’t very well respond to that. It should have been obvious to me, reflecting back upon it now, that everybody in Srinagar was well aware of Athan’s Disease and everything about it by the time I arrived. People had known about it way back in Westendorf – why would there be any reason for them not to in Srinagar? And what was Dal Lake? Dal Lake was nothing but Srinagar’s mountaintop. That was why everybody had been so happy – they were ridding themselves of the “monsters” that had plagued Srinagar. I wondered what had become of the first people to wake up. Had they been exiled as well, and were living outside the city on meager restitutions? Or were they lurking within the city, doing chores and daily errands in order to pretend that nothing had ever happened to them. Because, surely, they knew what had become of them after their own death. They were the spawned. “I might not have known that this was going to happen,” Dr. Rochak told me after about a minute of silence, “but I have absolutely no problem with it.”

I huffed and walked away. “I’ll meet you at the hospital later. Probably tomorrow,” I said.

“Alright. Don’t do anything rash until then. I promise you that we will sort things out; do not worry about anything at all.” I turned around to see him smiling. It was a false smile; he had no talent for faking expressions. I wished that he did. It would have made me feel better about those people, now all at the bottom of the lake. I doubted that the Dal enjoyed the less-than-tasty snack.

The path to the hotel was filled with dozens of wet Srinagarians still chattering about what had just happened. It would certainly be in the newspapers tomorrow, one said. It was the first of many great things to happen in Srinagar, another said. It’s a shame that they’re gone, but at least the city can be safe now, one more said. The obvious divide between the infected and the healthy was, for me, appearing clearer with every passing moment. And, finally, I heard my most favorite comment: “I’m so glad everybody agreed to take down that boat full of mutants. Srinagar is much better off without them. Now we only need to figure a way to get rid of the ones who are alive so that the rest of us can remain as we are.” Granted, that was not one master comment, and I was not eavesdropping purposefully. Rather, that was what I pasted together from about four comments I heard within a ten minute period walking back to the hotel.

Hearing this, I wondered what those in the old city were talking about. I detoured and crossed the Jhelum in order to find out. A surprising amount of people had been on the streets in the new city area, but it was nothing compared to the amount of people chattering about in the old city. It was always lively, but every citizen looked at outsiders the way a ferocious canine observes intruders on its territory – viciously, ready to attack and dispense of those who do not belong. My fear resurfaced; I would soon find out why. I heard the cries of a woman who had been denied her special “insurance.” These people must have known about the plan to sink the wake, or at the very least had recently found out, for every man, woman and child was gathered in large groups to buy this strange life insurance. Some people seemed to be selling pardons from “Srinagar’s best” that would waver the buyer’s cruel drowning in the lake if he or she fell ill and died.

As I looked around the old city more and more, I noticed how weary everybody living there was. They were not as energetic as those in the new city, even if most of the new city remained indoors almost all of the time. But I never once expected that the old city was a home for all the sick, that the divide had become so grand that the ill were literally forced into the old city by their new city counterparts. I discovered this after speaking with one person on the street, who was clamoring with everybody else to buy a pardon. “Please!” the person shouted. “It is for my son. He lives in the new city – he is one of the healthy. But I must protect him, just in case. I do not want him to become me! He deserves a life in the new city, not in this horrible slum. Give him a life!” I heard other people say the same thing.

Everybody living in the old city was ill with Athan’s Disease! Before, they had only been forecasted as ill. When I first arrived in Srinagar, I hadn’t noticed. The man I’d met had never mentioned anything, and the people I’d seen had never looked sick. But now I saw that the entire population had weakened, not due to an unknown force, but because they were slowly dying. They were now busy preparing for their own deaths, so that they might live through it and wake up safely. They might live in exile, divided from the healthy by the river Jhelum, but they would, at least, be alive. That was everybody’s top priority now in the old city. And who were those selling the pardons, allowing the ill to escape a horrible fate at the bottom of Dal Lake? None other than the spawned. Some of them had made deals with the healthy ones across the river, people like those who had boarded the wake, like those who had planned to sink the wake. Anybody found with one of these special laminated passes in their pocket would not suffer the same fate at the many thousands of people recently had.

These were sold at nearly every other household. But what I thought was far more striking was that the number of ill, infected people far exceeded the number of healthy, uninfected ones. It seemed that the minority was once again in power, as history always deems it. This healthy minority held its power over the heads of the infected, waiting for just the right moment to clear them out of town – when they were dead. Then they would strike and get rid of them all. And why? Because somehow, in some way, they’d learned or assumed that these people were “monsters.” That they who rose from the dead were despicable creatures not deserving of their sympathy or pity, but only of their hatred and malice. Down they went into the lake.

I left the old city. I couldn’t bear to be around any of those people knowing that their money was not going to any sort of pardon, or any special insurance. It was a hoax, and I could see through it – but to one desperate enough for life, it might have seemed less obviously a trap. The healthy only wanted the money of those who were infected. I had no doubt that those selling the insurance and the murder pardons were delivering this money to somebody on the opposite side of the Jhelum River. Once that person had their money, they would more than likely ignore the silly laminated pass that came at such an expensive price, and send the seemingly-dead person to their true death, underwater.

I rested that night to strange dreams. I had finally escaped the valley I’d been stuck in so long ago. Joyously, I found Dal Lake, and swam to the bottom. There were no bodies there – only the fish and the algae. But there was something else down at the bottom. It was such a generic-looking treasure chest that I had to examine it and pick it up. Inside were the skulls of all the people in the world with Athan’s Disease. They flooded out into the lake. The lake rose, and rose, until the homes on stilts were all gone, and the rest of the city washed away. Srinagar was reduced to rubble before the lake moved away from the city. And nearby all of this destruction was a new lake. A lake of the dead – a lake of skulls, thousands of skulls. Millions of skulls. There may have been a billion skulls, because the treasure chest never ceased overflowing. I climbed my way out of the ocean and saw everybody in Srinagar, happy and healthy. The only ones left were those who were immune to it. They were not immune because they weren’t ill with the disease, but because they constantly carried it with them everywhere they went. They were the cause of infection. They brought death to others. They were the modern-day grim reapers, but they knew nothing of it, and would never admit that they carried the only thing that could truly destroy a person’s life.

I woke at three in the morning, and tried as hard as possible to put myself to sleep once more, but could not muster the energy to go back to sleep. As odd as it sounds, I could not find the energy to sleep. Sleep, normally, requires no energy – it’s a way to gain back the energy you’ve lost over the course of a day. But now, in the presence of bad dreams, sleep required more energy than it was worth. It took my energy away to have those dreams, dreams that constantly had sad endings. The carriers in that dream spoke horrible words. They frowned upon everything around them. But they ruled the world. They ruled Srinagar, and that was as far as I could see. I took that as a metaphor for the entire world. It might as well have been. I had all the time in the world to mull over the uninfected’s takeover of the world. I wouldn’t have to be at the SMHS Hospital until nine in the morning. With all of our to-be living patients gone, there would be far less work and far more discussion amongst the hospital staff.

So, at eight thirty I left the hotel and boarded the bus leading to the hospital. It was still the only place where the busses travelled, but there were no longer lines. Less and less were falling sick with Athan’s Disease. Or, if they were falling sick with it, they weren’t in the new city district anymore.

The hospital was busy only with staff. I caught Dr. Rochak in his office on the second floor, filling out some strange form that was irrelevant to Athan’s Disease. He looked up from his papers. “I want to thank you,” he said, “for helping all of us help all of those people, even if they are now gone from this world. You did a wonderful thing, giving them that antibiotic. I know you must feel horrible that you were keeping them dead, but I assure you that they’ll stay that way at the bottom of the lake. Without your medicine there were riots outside the hospital. For a while we thought that people outside would destroy the building, until you arrived to quiet those sick patients.”

I was lost; I hadn’t a clue what he meant. I’d quieted them? No, that couldn’t be right, I thought. I’d been giving them medicine to purge Athan’s Disease from their bodies. The medicine simply wasn’t working. They’d all been dead already; they should have woken up after I gave them the antibiotic.

“Dr. Hemmings, did you hear what I said? I was thanking you.” He looked up and stared at me from his desk without getting up.

“Oh, you’re welcome, sir. But I don’t understand what you mean. Why did you say I ‘kept them quiet’?”

“I was talking about your medicine. You concocted it; do you not know the effects of your own antibiotic? Do you not know its purpose?” He laughed. “That is a funny joke, Dr. Hemmings.” He stood up, and patted me on the shoulder, to acknowledge my “funny joke.” I was completely lost now. What was this man talking about? I wanted to know.

“Doctor, my medicine was created to purge Athan’s Disease, and cure those people.”

He stood still, and then laughed again. It was funny to him. I didn’t understand it – why was it so funny that I wanted to cure the sick? “Dr. Hemmings, there is no cure for this disease. Why are you joking so much? Up until now you have been very serious. Please be serious with me now. You created the medicine to help us get rid of those with Athan’s Disease.”

“How do you know that name?” I asked immediately after he stated it. It was the first time he’d said the name of the disease to my face – and only one group of people had given it a name. It was nothing official, so there was no way he could know it.

“I picked it up from a friend. He told me that that was the name of the disease. Actually, I was speaking to that friend just yesterday. I was on the phone with him; he knows you very well. Perhaps you’re familiar with Mr. Seaton? He used to work in an electronics store, apparently in a city nearby to where you live.”

Why was Dr. Rochak speaking with the warehouse worker, or now “Mr. Seaton”? Something had gone horribly awry. The medicine I had delivered was not the medicine I had created, although it looked as was labeled exactly the same. Pharand might have shipped the wrong box of medicine, and given Dr. Rochak misinformation at the same time. As unlikely as it was, it could have happened. I rally hoped that was what had happened, but my hoped were dashed away by Dr. Rochak’s statements. He spoke more and more about “keeping the dead ones dead,” and I learned why it had seemed so acceptable to plunge those bodies into the sea. I had not been administering the drug I thought I had been, but another drug, concocted by somebody other than myself. I had been giving every person some sort of powerful anesthetic that kept them within their death-sleep temporarily. It was a fear I once had but never gave credit to, and now I thought that I should have given more attention to that theory. Because in just five minutes I found out that “my” medicine – by my hands – had killed thousands of people. It had kept them dead long enough to allow the crazed inhabitants of Srinagar to drown every last one of them.

“The last doctor you worked for also called me to tell you that he thanks you as well. It seems you are becoming very popular, Dr. Hemmings. This hospital is truly blessed to have you here. How long as you planning to stay, again? I’d like to know so I can plan ahead and order more antibiotic.”

He was joking – he must have been the one joking. It couldn’t have been I that was the jester in this insane throne room. It was he who was the jester, playing tricks on me, pretending that something was terribly wrong when nothing was wrong. The citizens of Srinagar had committed a horrible crime, and nobody but they were at fault. But if what he spoke about was true, then I would refuse to lay my hands on that medicine again. It was not my own creation. I had no right, after all, to use it. To gain that right, one of us would have to admit to being the jester – and I wasn’t about to be played for a fool.