Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

The next day I realized I was having hallucinations. I might have been having them all along, but it took me until then to see that my mind wasn’t completely clear. I woke with vultures tearing at my left leg, tearing huge chunks out of it. I sat up and tried to shoo them away, but they were massive, ugly, bold creatures that paused merely to look at me with contempt and continue their abominable activity. I screamed and thrashed wildly and still the birds hung on. I swung at them with my fists, and I overbalanced and fell off the low branch and onto the forest floor. I stared about and, of course, there were no vultures at all. I cracked up then, sobbed, and sat there for a long time. To have got out of the prison, clean away, and then to have made it through a hurricane only to die of fever in the jungle. It hardly seemed fair.

How was I going to get to America, to carry out my plan?

How indeed? I was lost. I was sick. My leg ached. And most important, my mind was not clear. I tried to think, but everything inside my head was sluggish. Christ, was I really going mad?

I drove away the panic and breathed and tried to get some thoughts together. I could either stay here and hope someone came by, or I could go on and try to find help. If it meant giving myself up to the authorities, so be it. Surely that would be better than dying insane out here in the tropical rain forest.

I tried to get up, but it was impossible.

I found a stick. I heaved myself up and started walking, going a third the speed of previous days and looking always at the ground to make my way easier. I went half a day like this and collapsed, exhausted, drenched with sweat and bleeding from scrapes on my arms and feet. It rained that night and woke me, and I lay with my mouth open trying to drink a little.

In the morning, I couldn’t get up and I decided I would have to crawl. Crawling was a bit easier than walking, and I actually made better progress. On my hands and knees I could negotiate better the fallen trees and vines. I went like this that day and into the next. To my surprise, the jungle began to thin a little and I could see huge patches of sky through the canopy.

That night I had terrible hallucinations about snakes biting at my ankles and trying to eat my leg whole. They were wrapped around me and suffocating me. I screamed the whole of the night and begged them to stop, but they only fled with the dawn.

In appalling fear, I crawled away from the place I’d slept. I moved blind now, for my eyes didn’t open. I crawled for hours, and I fell on my face and slept that way. During the night, I crawled again and I thought the end must be coming soon. I’m not overly defeatist, but I am a realist, and I could see that I was in trouble. I could see that I was in mortal shape. I crawled on, expecting, soon, paroxysm and death.

I was wrong, though. Old Atropos wasn’t hovering overhead that evening and wouldn’t be for some time to come. But it was night and the daughters of Nyx must have been guiding me, because if I’d turned a slightly different way to the left or right I would never have made it to the pig pen. I would have veered off into the jungle and died sometime in the next few days. But as I say, the Gods or the Fates or involved beings who’d heard about my story, about my narrative, about my plan, realized that to continue the show, they had to preserve me and so, out of the jungle, they made a pig pen with small, black, friendly pigs, and they allowed me to crawl up to it and stop and collapse and wait.

It wasn’t long. The pigs snuffed my face and licked it. There were children’s voices first, distracted, singing, and then silence for a while and whispers and then the sound of running. Not long after that, the voice of an older woman whispering at first too, and then barking instructions. And then arms, a dozen arms lifting me up. I was thinking that if this was another hallucination it was one I liked. Tiny arms lifting me, half-dragging me, not very far into darkness.

Water on my lips and questions in Spanish, many questions.

¿Quién es usted? ¿De dónde ha venido usted? ¿Qué sucedió a su pie?

More water, and then voices raised. A man arguing with two women, clearly about me. He was opposed to my presence, but I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. Someone began washing me and taking off my clothes and tiny fingers were picking the lice out of my hair. At the same time, a soothing voice fed me water and in the water there was ground maize. They cleaned me and put a blanket over me, and I shivered still and slept.

During the night I cried, and first the man and then the two women sat up with me, holding my hand, dripping water onto my lips.

Estamos consiguiendo a un buen hombre, él es médico , the woman said. The word médico stuck in my head.

I need Bridget, I said, she’ll help me.

The woman talked to me in Spanish and sang to me a little, and I think I slept. In the morning there was another voice, stern and almost angry. He was talking to the women and the man. He asked me questions, but I could say nothing. Then suddenly, violently, he poked at my foot and I cried out. It seemed to confirm everything that he’d been saying, and he sighed and went outside.

Later, they fed me beans and water and milk and they bathed me again, wiping me down with wet rags and then wrapping me in a blanket. The woman spoke to me for hours, soothing me and comforting me, and then the angry man came back. He had brought other men with him. I was falling in and out of consciousness. I couldn’t see. The word médico came up again.

I want Bridget, she’s a good nurse, I want her. She’ll look after me. She looked after Andy. He’s in good shape. Get Bridget, please, please, I really want to see her. I want to see her.

The angry man came over, his voice mellow now, kind.

It is ok, he said in English.

I tried to open my eyes, and I did for a second or two, but everything was out of focus. I felt strong arms hold me down on the cot and then the blanket was removed. I was naked under the blanket and I was self-conscious. I tried to cover myself, but the arms held me by my side. Someone was pouring brandy into my mouth. I recognized it. How in the name of God had they gotten brandy? They forced a stick between my teeth and then I realized what it was they were about. I yelled and thrashed my arms, but they held me fast. I struggled for only about a minute and then I calmed my mind and resigned myself. The man holding my shoulders was the very first man. He kissed me on the forehead and whispered things in my ear in Spanish: it would be ok, it would be ok. I would be brave and it would be ok. The angry man, too, soothed me in broken English.

Please not worry, it is fast.

Then in a soft voice the older woman explained in slow and simple Spanish how everything would go. I got none of it, but her demeanor helped quiet me further.

Sí, sí , I said and nodded to show that I understood now. There were murmurs of approval. I was in a small hut and their breaths were close to mine. I bit down on the stick, and I was ready.

It was a hacksaw, but it had been sharpened. I felt it go in above my ankle and I was relieved, because I thought they might do it below my knee. The whole thing must have taken less than twenty minutes. The actual sawing under two. What he did down there, I don’t know, but he stopped the flow of blood and mended the wounds and halted the screaming of the nerve endings. They gave me a sweet drink and told me to sleep, and after a while I did.

The next day I could open my eyes, and I saw that I was in a hut with a thatched roof and a hard dirt floor. It was swept and clean but hardly hygienic and not the place I would have chosen to recover from major surgery. I had the will to survive but will can’t do everything, will can’t do the job of antibiotics; just ask any of those prematurely dead Christian Scientists.