Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

“What am I going to do?” Doctor Bragg asks. “Study, experiment, learn.”

“Experiment?” I ask, trembling.

He looks at me and comes closer. “I won’t cause you any pain,” he says. “But I think it’s best if you think of yourself as a hero. A hero in the fight for human survival.”

“Hero?” I ask shakily.

“Oh yes,” Doctor Bragg tells me, nodding his head. “Without you and people like you, we wouldn’t know as much as we do. You’re saving lives. That’s what I call a hero.” He steps away from me and walks to the woman on the surgical table. “Look at this poor woman,” he says. Then he looks up at me. “She’s been taken by the Worm. Like so many billions of others before her. Maybe you’re too young to remember. But I remember.” His eyes suddenly become more hollow than before, dark, horrible pits, and I see clearly that he’s as lost as the woman on the table in front of him, just as lifeless, but with even less hope. The woman might survive the Worm, if she’s cared for. There’s no returning from where Doctor Bragg has gone.

“I remember,” I tell him.

He nods solemnly. “We remember,” he says. “And we never understood why. We never understood the Vaca Beber, we never knew anything. It just came and nearly destroyed us and then vanished. So we could never learn about it. We could never prepare if it came back. It just disappeared.” The Doctor snapped his fingers, which made a strange rubbery sound because his hands were in gloves. I noticed then that there was a scalpel in one of his hands, its edge glinting dangerously in the light. “It came and it took everything from us and then it went away. But we need to know. I searched and I searched and I experimented and finally, finally, I coaxed them back to life. From nothing. From skin and bones.”

“You brought the Worm back?” My skin crawls with revulsion.

He looks at me. “You think that it was gone forever? You think it wouldn’t come back on its own, stronger, more resilient?”

I don’t know what to say.

Bragg moves to the shelves and picks up one of the glass jars. “I wish you could understand,” he says, under his breath. He carries the jar toward me. I see that it’s filled with Worms, all floating in some amber liquid, like overcooked spaghetti in root beer. He holds the jar to my face, and I smell some strange, acrid, chemical smell. Inside, I see the Worms are dead, and I can see their star-shaped mouths and the vile hooks I imagine are designed to sink into our brains. I shudder and turn my head away. “Yes,” Doctor Bragg says. “They are horrible, nasty creatures. They took everything from me.” If pure, consuming hatred had a face, it would be Dr. Bragg’s at that moment as he stared at the contents of the jar. “I will eradicate them forever.” His voice is somehow both acidic and empty of emotion at once. He turns toward me and lowers the jar. “I wish you could understand what we do. I wish you could.”

“I do,” I say, nodding my head. “I do.” I need him to be on my side, to feel some connection to me.

He smiles weakly before he turns away, walks back to the shelf, and returns the jar from where he took it.

“They took everything from me too,” I continue. I note the desperation and fear in my voice, but there’s no way I can hide it. “They took my mother and father and my whole family. I do understand!”

The Doctor turns back to me slowly. He looks resigned. Then he looks away. “Yes,” he says, “you say you understand. But you won’t make the sacrifice. You’ll scream like all the others.”

The sentence makes me tremble again. My mouth clamps shut. My mind seems to shut down in terror. I look at the scalpel in his hand. The Doctor moves to the woman on the table. I see that he’s put a blue sheet over her and there’s a square cut out exposing her stomach. He stands facing me, lifts his scalpel, and then, so quickly I can’t look away, cuts deeply into her skin and slices open a long slit across her belly. The woman’s body lurches and she makes a gurgling, screeching sound that doesn’t sound human at all. I cry out in surprise and tug uselessly at my shackles.

“I need tests,” Doctor Bragg says. He reaches his hand inside the living zombie and continues talking. “The Vaca B is a very complex organism. It doesn’t engender one kind of worm but four, actually six if you count the microscopic ones. Little maggot-like Worms in the stomach, thin, nematode-like Worms in the eyes, long, hooked Worms for the brain that are very much like marine arrow worms. There’s a thin, flat Worm of the ear that I don’t understand. Somehow they all work together.” His hands are moving inside her body and she is making a low, gurgling groaning sound. Her whole body twitches. The Doctor continues pitilessly, talking as he works. “How do they communicate? Which type of Worm is the most efficient at infection? How do they produce different types of Worms and when? Do they work the same in all populations? Women, children, Asians, Africans? So many questions.” The Doctor suddenly reaches down into the red hole he has cut in the poor woman and makes another cut. With horror, I watch as he pulls out a handful of small, wriggling, maggot-like Worms from her stomach. He walks toward me, a fistful in his hand, dripping them behind him. “These are questions that we need to answer. We will answer them, but it will take sacrifice. Heroes.” He leans in closer to me. “Heroes like you.” He looks at me. “I need diverse specimens to study. We don’t see many like you. Young female with African ancestry. We need you.”

My eyes are wide with horror. The smell coming from the woman now is noxious. He wants to infect me I realize. I’m shaking as the Doctor returns to the table. My heart throbs as he picks up a strange, plastic tube with a plunger on one end, like a gigantic needle, and begins to put live Worms in it. I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.

“No, no,” I say, trembling.

“I need specimens,” he repeats. “I can watch what it does to you. You can save countless people. You can be the hero.”

“Please,” I say, my lip trembling with fear.

“I know I’m not the hero,” he says without feeling. “That is my sacrifice.”

“Don’t do this to me,” I plead, but my voice is hardly a whisper.

He straightens up and examines the wriggling worms inside the tube. “This is when the screaming starts,” he says.

I open my mouth to scream, when I see that Doctor Bragg is looking down at the corpse of the woman. He prods her once. I clamp my mouth shut, watching. “When did she die?” he asks, annoyed. He looks at me. “Was she dead before or after I acquired the Worms?”

I look at him speechless.

Doctor Bragg puts down the maggot-filled tube and examines the dead woman. His shoulders slump. He sighs and then looks up at me, almost apologetically. “I had to acquire the Worms from a live host.” He seems embarrassed by the mistake, or like I should feel pity for him. Relief hits me so hard that I begin to weep. Doctor Bragg leans over the corpse. “If I hadn’t been talking to the girl,” he mutters. “If I was more professional and not so…” he trails off into inaudible muttering.

I’m still weeping with relief when Doctor Bragg shouts for Squint.

I am so relieved, I can’t concentrate. I hardly notice when the Doctor is standing in front of me again, giving orders to Squint. “Get her back to her room and feed her, please. I’ll be using the other one to acquire the specimens tomorrow.”

Although he’s planning to do to Eric what he did with that woman, I’m too relieved to think about it. I’m shaking and weeping when Squint shoves me back in my cage. For a long time, I can’t think of anything. I lay there for a long time, shuddering, trying to forget the sound of the woman groaning as the Doctor reached inside her body. I keep hearing it again and again until, somehow, I fall asleep.