Imagine a shadow, but vague, only slightly darker than the surface onto which it is cast. The light is obscured. The shadow suffers. It is a cataract.
You can’t see me. I am less than a shadow.
I am nothing.
But I am coming.
The cariocas paid him no attention.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. October 18th 2064.
Desperation had brought him here, and the final strand of what could be called animal instinct. These streets, as crowded as a child’s imagination, once filled with colour and vibrancy, but now made grey by clouds of fear; thunderhead of disease. The locals—the cariocas—pressed to get out of the rain, heads down, bodies wet. They did not look at him. They did not question his obvious weakness or the mask he wore. The storm blistered along Delfim Moreira. The palm trees twisted, fronds swaying. He was pushed aside and knocked to the floor. Again and again. The rain rattled off his mask. The cariocas paid him no attention. He picked himself up and followed the meager thread of instinct.
How long had he been running?
“Where are you, Avô Vinícius?”
Every minute was fear. Every second.
Fernando gazed along Ipanema Beach, a deserted belt of cocoa sand, bullied by the relentless angst of the Atlantic. To the west, Morro Dois Irmãos loomed through bellies of cloud. Its split peaks made it resemble a giant, infected tooth. He felt a pull in that direction. The unguarded aspect of his soul registered hope. It was like oxygen. His pulse quickened and he staggered on.
He was close.
His mask was butterfly-shaped.
It was stained glass, as fragile as his life. The wings covered his eyes and cheeks. He viewed the world through tinted shards. The left eye was green. The colour of everything he had known and still hoped for. The colour of beginnings. The right eye was smoky-brown. The colour of destruction.
The mask covered his stigma. The word INFECÇÃO (infection) tattooed the left side of his face. His number, 339099, branded the right. A signature of ignominy. All of the infected were marked in this way, and would be until they faded from existence. They were no longer strong. They had been gathered like cattle and quarantined . . . broken down and weakened over several generations . . . reduced to little more than substance. His kind was crushed and dying. Flies in the cold.
If the mask were to slip, or break, if his sickness were to be unveiled, he would be captured within moments. The mask was his saviour, as important to him as the blood running through his body. Its colours represented the events of his species, from inception to decay. Its shape represented metamorphosis; flight; beautiful hope.
Cure.
Avô Vinícius.
“Close,” he whispered.
A scathing gust slammed him as he crossed Rua João Lira. A dramatic pirouette, jacket billowing. He was thrown against the side of a parked truck and fell to his knees, one hand instinctively protecting the mask. The locals hurried past him—almost stepping over him in their haste. He longed for wings to lift him above the storm.
Fernando got to his feet. Warm rain dripped from his hair. He continued across the street, buffeted by the storm. Sustained thunder damaged the sky. The creature kept his head down. His pale eyes flashed behind the mask.
They even chased him in dreams.
The only vivid things were his tattoos. He was diluted . . . watery. His body was a wan rack of bone and sinew. His hair was dead ragweed.
Heart like cirrus cloud, scattered across the sky of his body.
All he could feel was the weak beat of his instinct.
Lightning saturated the afternoon gloom, turning all things to ghosts. The sidewalk shimmered and he saw, in one brilliant frame of time, his reflection: a hunkered thing, as dark as any bad dream. He forced himself to stand straight, and in so doing saw the men walking toward him. His failing instinct, which had brought him this far, warned him that they were not cariocas. They were impervious to the storm. Bound by purpose.
They were a Polícia do Vírus (the Virus Police), enlisted by the Brazilian government to eradicate infection beyond the quarantines’ barricades. Officially, they were supposed to subdue carriers and return them to the nearest quarantine city, but they were more inclined to blood and torture. They were known throughout South America as Psycho Cowboys.
Fernando wanted to surrender—fall at their feet and let them tie him up and bleed him dry (infamous cruelty; they laughed while they tortured; they donned multicoloured garments and smeared their faces with wild paints). He was too weak to run, but salvation was within reach. He would not give up. He would not surrender.
He cut across the empty parking lot of what had once been a glimmering beachfront hotel, but was now a concrete ghost. Moving as swiftly as he was able, he climbed through one of the shattered windows and into a dark lobby. The walls were smeared with neglect. The front desk had been stripped for firewood. Vagrants huddled amongst the cockroaches and trash.
He turned, his butterfly mask sparkling, and saw that the Psycho Cowboys were following. They came fast, flowing through the rain. He staggered across the lobby, into a seemingly endless corridor. Doors hung in tatters and mosaics rippled on the walls, depicting the dead colour of the city: the Rio of yesteryear. His heart made rain and thunder and he pressed forward. He took a stairway, swollen steps that he struggled to ascend, both hands clinging to the rail.
He could hear them in the lobby: commotion, raised voices, cries of pain as they checked the vagrants for tattoos. They knew they were close; they could feel him, too.
Fernando burst into the first floor corridor and reeled toward the elevators. His mind was a battlefield. Everything was green or brown. His single thought was to keep moving.
The Psycho Cowboys were relentless. They even chased him in dreams, where his imagination gave them clown faces and legs like rainbows. In reality they were grave, almost normal, until they caught you . . . then the grey suits came off and their true colours were revealed.
He stumbled . . . picked himself up. The elevators, directly ahead, yawned open. He heard voices on the stairway and scrambled toward one of the empty shafts, throwing himself inside.
Falling . . . spinning. He reached out and grasped the thick cable, the skin ripping from his palm as he broke his fall and halted his descent. The cable whipped and bounced. The counterweight struck a single dull chord and then everything was silent.
He curled his legs around the cable, placed one hand on the mask to keep it from slipping, and hung upside down. He held his breath and waited, his heart cannonading, his wet jacket falling around his shoulders like wings.
He imagined them with rainbow legs.
Voices in the corridor above. Footsteps. Fernando closed his eyes and willed his frail body to become absorbed by the darkness. He heard them approach, bullish steps and coarse breathing. They carried guns and batons, but in his mind they wielded blunt torture implements and walked on rainbow legs. He was sure they would hear his heartbeat. The cable creaked and his jacket dripped water to the floor below.
Long moments passed. He did not move. He barely breathed. The Cowboys thumped and grunted. Six or seven of them, kicking open doors, cursing. He could feel their impatience vibrate through the walls of the shaft.
His hand covered the mask. He could feel the cable biting into the tender flesh at the backs of his knees.
“Coming for you.” The voice was keen and cold and too close. He imagined a white face and a deformed, painted smile. “We’ll find you.”
Less than a shadow.
The light bleeding through the elevator doors flickered.
“Coming . . .”
He sensed the Psycho Cowboy peering into the shaft, eyes gleaming, his clown-grin impossibly long.
You can’t see me.
His heart sent small vibrations through the cable. He could hear the Cowboy sucking in greedy breaths. The seconds passed too slowly, and he became convinced that he had been seen—would be caught, tortured and killed—and a part of him welcomed the end of it all. No more running. Nothing, indeed. A single tear dripped from his eye and ran across the inside of the mask, changing colour, from green to brown, like a leaf. A strident bell of regret sounded in his mind, and for a moment she was there, suspended in the darkness ahead of him, shimmering. They’ll find you, Fernando. They’ll kill you. He came close to reaching out for her, revealing his pale hand, or his mask. Stay with me. I know how to love you.
He opened his mouth to respond. Even his words were shadows: But we’re dying. More tears splashed against the inside of the mask.
She disappeared. His heart found hectic life and pounded furious fists against his chest. The cable creaked. He revolved, slowly, like a voiceless chime.
The light flickered again and he heard the Cowboy retreat, bouncing on his rainbow legs. Relief swarmed Fernando’s ailing body, but he did not move. The Psycho Cowboys continued their search—tearing through all floors, all rooms—for a loud, interminable passage of time. Fernando clutched the cable and waited. His body ached. His shadow/soul withered. When he was sure that the Psycho Cowboys were gone, he adjusted his position. The cable rippled and the counterweight played several sad notes. He waited a little longer before emerging from the shaft. He crawled, and then collapsed. Painful breaths sagged from his lungs. He lay in the corridor, unnoticed by the world, like a charred piece of paper; broken furniture; a curled, damp strip of carpet.
Rain fell through the shattered windows.
The reason you look away.
It was a cold pain, as if a January wind were blowing through all the joints and tendons of his body. He staggered into the lobby and looked at the shapes of the vagrants huddled against the walls. They were rags. Breathing, bleeding rags. Specimens of a ruined city. The reason you look away. Fernando moved toward a lowly shape, embraced by shadow: a man, swaddled in mouldering newspaper, whose beard made the top half of his face appear too thin. Veins ticked beneath the membranous skin of his eyelids. His temples could have been hollowed out with spoons.
Fernando crouched next to the man. He removed his mask. The butterfly appeared, for a moment, to be suspended in the dimness, captured in flight. The vagrant opened his eyes: preternatural instinct; the core of survival. He saw the tattoo—INFECÇÃO—and the minutia of his face responded: the dry skin of his upper lip stretching and cracking; his pupils contracting; the creases around his eyes thinning; the hairs in his nostrils quivering. He managed only a fraction of his final breath before Fernando’s hand was pressed to his mouth, forcing his head back, exposing the vulnerable meat of his throat. A discerning eye may have detected a hint of resignation in the half-second before Fernando went for his jugular. A softening in the pupil, perhaps, or the fine crease appearing at the bridge of his nose. Then he was dying. Blood sprayed into Fernando’s mouth. The vagrant’s body was rigid for slow seconds, and then slumped all at once, as if some central support cable had snapped. His left leg twitched. His shoe came off and was buried in a drift of trash.
A pall of nausea draped over Fernando. He pressed his fist to his mouth to keep from vomiting. The lobby wavered and he fell across the dead vagrant like a lover. His kind had developed an intolerance for human blood. It was a thick, sickening taste, but he needed the nourishment. His body was failing. He would die if he didn’t find Avô Vinícius soon.
The mask fluttered to his face. The world became brown and green, but his mouth was splashed with red.
O Cristo Redentor.
He emerged from the hotel to find that the rain had stopped, but that the wind persisted. Thick droplets were blown from palm fronds and window ledges, pattering off his shoulders with heavy sounds. Sacks of cloud dragged across the sky.
He sensed the sunset and looked west, toward Morro Dois Irmãos. Lights glinted in the surrounding hillsides, glimpsed through stained cloud. His sick heart dared to hope . . . to believe. He was, after all, so close.
No sign of the Psycho Cowboys. He looked in all directions. Fernando lowered his head and moved on, ignoring the car horns, the jostling cariocas, and the occasional bursts of samba music heard in crowded apartments. His mind echoed with prayers.
Genuflection: he dropped to one knee at the intersection of Rua Mário Ribeiro and felt all the energy in his body gather between his shoulder blades and then erupt, breaking through his skin, hovering in the air above him like wings. He was lifted. Nothing mattered. There was no pain. His invisible wings rippled.
Seen through a diamond-shaped rift in the clouds, Christ the Redeemer looked down on him. The magnificent statue shimmered. Nothing of the mountain could be seen—only the pale, cruciform image, hanging in the heavens. Fernando threw out his arms in imitation, supplication, and exaltation. His imaginary wings made a sound like music.
“Save me,” he whispered. His mask glittered.
The statue hovered in the sky.
The cariocas paid him no attention.
To feel the final beats of your heart . . . and then to have hope, that wonderful, sweeping arc of hope, lifting everything inside you. The world becomes infinitesimal. You move with the stars. An endless, shining entity.
But I am still a shadow. That is the irony. I am still nothing.
You can’t see me.
Yet.
Translation taken from the Journal of Vinícius Araújo Valentim.
(Date unknown.)
I don’t know how long I have been here. There is a great void in my mind that no thought can fill, although I remember the crash clearly. One moment the world was bright. The sky was an undying shade of blue with the beautiful greens of Amazonia stretched below us. I remember looking down on a flickering formation of sun parakeets, and how they seemed to map our shadow on the trees. And then I heard an ominous clunking sound from the engine and all at once the cockpit was filled with smoke. This was terrifying enough, yet I could not accept that we were going down. It seemed too surreal. The idea that I was going to die within the next few moments refused to compute. That was when my pilot started to scream. It was an awful sound.
My life did not flash before my eyes. I thought, absurdly, about my camera—such an expensive and delicate piece of equipment that would be destroyed in the crash. I thought about the pictures on the film that would never be seen: a sunset blistering through the branches of a kapok tree; a Mirity-tapuya child poised with a fishing spear; a multicoloured waterfall arcing into the Rio Negro. I thought about my studio in São Paulo, and what would happen to my work. My final moments felt terribly lonely.
We broke through the canopy and I heard the aircraft coming apart. Searing heat pushed me from behind and I felt a moment of euphoria (I think, now, that it was acceptance). There was nothing else. No thought or feeling. Not even blackness.
I awoke here, in this cave . . . days, months, perhaps even years later. My eyes opened to unnerving darkness. I could not move; my muscles were like wet straw. I could only lie in that void listening to the sounds of the deep earth. But I soon came to realize that there was something else in there with me . . . that I was not alone.
Scratching and shuffling. The sound was all around me.
I didn’t have the strength to scream.
I wish I could explain the fear, but there are no words. I am a professional photographer; I would have more success pointing my camera at a cancer cell or a dying child—some terrible thing that would turn your heart into a miserable weight and drag you to your knees. I became certain in those first dreadful hours that I had died in the crash and been thrown into hell. The scratching sounds grew louder. I could hear inhuman chattering and flapping. At one point something moist and fleshy dragged across my prone body. My throat contracted. I imagined my eyes bulging in the darkness.
I cannot explain the fear.
My pounding heart assured me that I was not dead. Feeling returned to my body, albeit gradually. A pain in my ribs. My spine sending blunt signals to my limbs. I could feel the rock beneath me. I was naked. I tried to shut out the scratching and flapping sounds and throw all my energy into moving my body. I had no concept of time. It was eternity, measured only in beats of pain. I am sure I passed out several times, but eventually the fingers on my right hand were twitching, and then flexing. I could feel a shift in the air pattern as something large moved beside me. Its breath was warm and bitter, but I closed my eyes and ignored it—swam through waves of consciousness and agony—and then I moved my legs. I could bend my knees and wriggle my toes. I arched my back and tried to roll onto my side, but it was too much, too soon. The pain was immense and I cried out—the first sound I had made. This disturbed the creatures with which I shared the darkness. There was a flurry of movement and agitated whooping sounds. I could hear something to my right. My eyes, slowly adjusting, sensed a pale shape clambering along the cave wall.
Gasping breaths. The air tasted of alkaline and salt. I cried and prayed. I tried to move my left arm but couldn’t. More darkness, more time passing. I touched my face, hoping to judge from the length of my beard how long I had been there.
My left arm was missing, severed at the shoulder.
I thought about my camera, burned and twisted out of shape, with the film (so many wonderful pictures) melted to the spool. I was my camera: a ruined thing in a lost place. I blinked dreams that would never be fulfilled.
Time drifted. My panic subdued, allowing clearer thought. The creatures had no intention of harming me, or they would have already. Were they waiting for me to die? Did they only feed on dead flesh? Were they keeping me alive?
I was about to find out. I lifted my body to a sitting position. My head rolled in loose circles. Blood thumped in my temples and I had to clutch the rock to keep from falling backward. The creatures clicked and whooped, scratching across the roof of the cave. My head attained some semblance of balance and I pushed myself to my feet. Again, it was too much; I crumpled to the floor. In the next seconds I became aware of movement beside me. My terrified eyes glimpsed something huge and monstrous. Stale air rippled across my naked body.
“What are you?” I asked. A helpless, desperate question. I felt a spiny hand slide between my shoulder blades and lift me, cradle me. Warm fluid splashed onto my mouth and my weak body responded; I drank greedily. The taste was hell: flesh and fat and acid. It was gritty and sour. I drank, and when it was all gone, I opened my mouth for more.
It cradled me. It mothered me.
Before long I was able to gauge time based on the creatures’ habits, and how often I was fed. In the course of one day they would sleep (incredible stillness; the only sound was the earth groaning), then they would wake, and as one would leave the cave, presumably to hunt the wilds of the Amazon. They powered their wings and left in a fury of sound and motion. It was like standing at the rim of a cyclone. They returned with equal enthusiasm, taking their perches, chattering and clicking. I was fed soon after, like a baby bird. I opened my mouth, eyes bulging.
I got stronger. I could stand; walk; climb. I touched the creatures that swooped to feed me. My one hand determined moist skin and tight muscle; ridges of bone; spines and horns. I caressed claws and wings.
My eyes adjusted to the dark, not completely, but enough to see them—their hairless bodies, vaguely human, suspended from the roof of the cave with wings curled around their bodies like petals. Shivering, pink things.
I drank . . . and drank.
Stronger.
I explored the cave and found my clothes—torn and burned—and my pack. Vestiges of a previous life. My notes were inside: Expedition into Amazonia: Words and Pictures by Vinícius Araújo Valentim. I ripped out the pages, tore them to pieces.
It would seem I have a better story to tell.
I am writing this in a chink of daylight. The creatures are sleeping. I have no idea how long I have been here, but my beard is long and my body is growing stronger. I am almost ready to leave this dark place.
I can see the brilliant green of the jungle canopy and many jewels of blue sky.
The world is waiting.
339099377822.
There were isolated cases all over the world, but South America was decimated. The military controlled the borders, and they weren’t trained to ask questions. Industry failed. Tourism was non-existent. Chaos curled its hand around the continent and squeezed hard. Millions died. The cities—explosions of life, at one time—stumbled to their knees like tired fighters.
Love and prayer . . . all that remained.
Psychoglobunaria (PGB). The first recorded case was in the municipality of Pauini in 2013. A young farmer named João Moraes claimed to have been attacked by a man who “. . . veio das árvores” (came from the trees). Whilst recovering in the clinic from numerous bite marks, Moraes attacked two nurses, and from there the disease spread. Tests concluded that the PGB virus was a rogue segment of genetic code that caused hitherto unseen levels of adaptive parasitic existence. Transmitted through bodily fluids (most often from being bitten by a carrier), the virus cloned central nervous system signalling molecules, affording it similar intelligence to the host and an awareness of its environment.
Further tests showed that, once adapted, the intelligent PGB virus produced a protein that altered haemoglobin and induced a violent appetite in the host for blood. The infected were relentless. The disease advanced mercilessly. Those who were not killed became carriers, and so it continued: tens of thousands dead or infected within the first months. The governments of South America responded, first with the culling and execution of the infected, and then—after global outcry—with the introduction of quarantine cities. The infected were branded and kept from the outside world. In Brazil, a Polícia do Vírus were established to seek out rogue carriers.
The strain weakened over succeeding generations. Many symptoms diminished, but one remained strong: the virus altered signalling molecules in the brain, producing a heightened awareness of blood; not only were the infected able to perceive the blood type of others, they were also able to recognize the unique signature of that blood, allowing them to identify another individual at a cellular level. This ability—stronger in women and children—shared similarities with extrasensory perception.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Yes. Your instinct has always been strong.”
“Stay with me.”
His heart ached. He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to look into her eyes. But he knew that she could look into his mind—using the coil of power that had remained so vibrant. She could look into his mind and see his purpose. And his fear.
Her name was Giovanna Almeida, and she was everything in his heart. You could rip it from his chest and cut it in half, and she would be there. She poured through his veins and brought every nerve ending to life. She was him.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. She was crying. Every tear was like a star—some burning, brilliant memory he could never grasp.
“Don’t do this.”
He wiped away her tears; he didn’t want to look at them.
The quarantine was known as a Cidade do Inferno (the City of Hell). Formerly the Brasilia satellite city of Taguatinga, it was evacuated at the height of the pandemic, barricaded, and the infected were moved in. They lived in apartments and houses, and were given basic liberties, including running water and electricity. They had jobs and money. They had a small hospital, a library, even a school. Freedom was not a liberty, however. Much like Brazil’s borders, the quarantine was policed by the military. The government ordered the infected to stay within the walls, and warned that anybody caught trying to escape would be executed on sight.
Scientists worked to find a cure, while many believed that the best way to eradicate the disease was to eliminate the problem. There were multiple attempts to destroy the quarantine by various terrorist factions. It had been bombed eleven times. Low-flying aircraft had emptied vats of sulfuric acid onto the city. It had been set ablaze. The water supply had been contaminated. Several hundred barrels of synthetic blood had been poisoned. Thousands had been killed over the years. The quarantine protected the outside world from the infected, but it couldn’t protect the infected from the outside world.
Fernando moved into her open body and she closed around him like a shell. They made love with terrific passion, their minds conjoined, flaring with each other’s desire. Fernando often said that her love was life within life; the point where connection became duplicate. She threw her arms around his mind and her legs around his soul. They were singular and beautiful. Their tattoo was one long number.
“Don’t leave me.”
Sunset stretched pink arms through the open windows. Children’s laughter lifted the failing light. Fernando rolled Giovanna into his embrace and they stood looking out at the blackened city. Corroded buildings. No grass or trees. The broken walls of what had once been their church, bombed long ago, with the pale beam of a crucifix jutting from the rubble. They prayed, now, in their homes, to statuettes of the saviour, his body tattooed with numbers. Diseased Jesus. It was all they had. Fernando kissed Giovanna’s temple and felt the quick flutter of life on his lips. The children played and laughed outside. New numbers. They—like Fernando and Giovanna—had been born into this. They wouldn’t live to be twenty years old.
“I have to go,” Fernando said. “I have to find Avô Vinícius.”
They had been strong once. At the beginning, when Fernando’s grandfather had been a young man, their numbers were vast. They were the Great Flood; the Plague of Locusts. But oppression and incarceration had diminished them, and now, only four generations old, they were on the threshold of extinction. No strength to fight. No substance to evolve. A Cidade do Inferno used to be a teeming, vibrant metropolis: several families to a single apartment; the streets swollen with people lining up to get their ration of synthetic blood; bars and clubs packed with dancers, strippers, and musicians; a carnival every year—just like the world beyond the quarantine—with colourful floats and celebrations. There had been life. But now Fernando could see the deserted streets and the ghostly apartment buildings. So many empty rooms. They were always considered third-class citizens—no more important than the bands of stray dogs nosing through the streets of every South American town. They were reviled, and had been left to die.
Avô Vinícius represented hope, and perhaps their last chance at survival. He was the first of their kind, the purest strain, and grandfather to them all. His blood was the elixir of life.
“He could be anywhere,” Giovanna said. “Anywhere in the world. He might even be dead.”
“He’s not dead,” Fernando said. “I can feel him. You can, too.”
Tears moved down her face. Her number—377822—glimmered on her skin in the pink light. The children laughed. In the distance, the barricade was a silhouette of angry angles. Concrete and steel and tangles of razor wire. A mechanical forest.
“The Psycho Cowboys are out there,” Giovanna said. “You can’t run from them.”
“It’s our only hope.”
“They’ll find you, Fernando. They’ll kill you.” She pushed away from him, turning, clasping his firm upper arms. A tassel of black hair fell across her brow. “Stay with me. I know how to love you.”
He traced her tattoo with his fingertips, making, as always, slight adjustments to the letters, spelling different words: QUE LINDA, meaning “so beautiful.” She closed her eyes. Her eyelids shimmered.
“But we’re dying,” he said.
They made love again, deep into the darkness. She went inside him—became him. Life within life. She knew there was to be no dissuading him. All she could offer were love and prayer—all that remained.
“Be a shadow, Fernando,” she said as he poured into her.
“I’ll be less than a shadow.” Droplets of sweat fell onto her brow. Her soul felt as warm as the air. “They won’t see me.”
She kissed him. “Be nothing.”
Fernando masked his face and escaped a Cidade do Inferno in the early hours. Giovanna stood by the window, her hands clasped, waiting to hear the gunshots. But, true to his word, he was less than a shadow, and he slipped through the barricade unnoticed. He moved southeast, following a trail of instinct as thin as Giovanna’s tears, toward Rio de Janeiro and salvation.
Translation taken from the Journal of Vinícius Araújo Valentim.
(Date unknown.)
In my dreams I am with them—one of them. I hang from the roof of the cave, my feet hooked into some fissure. I have one wing. It is folded around my body, the cartilage stretched so that the wing covers me completely. I understand their animal language. I scratch and cry to be fed.
I escaped while they were sleeping: a thousand long shapes hanging in the darkness. I crept beneath them and made my way toward the cave entrance—that alluring chink of light. They did not stir. They did not follow.
Bright daylight greeted me: an infusion of breathtaking colour that felt like falling into deep water. I dropped to my knees, unable to move. Incredible pain splintered through my head and my eyes screamed in the intense light. The stump of my left arm twitched. I covered my face and buried myself in long grass.
I got to my feet, slowly, allowing sips of daylight through the cracks of my fingers, until I was able to remove my hand completely. The vastness of the rainforest stretched around me and I suffered a long moment of disorientation. Everything was green. I staggered in circles, struggling for focus. Eventually I was able to move in a straight line and with huge relief I started away from the caves, away from the creatures. Every step eased my soul. I was sobbing. I felt reborn.
The sun leaked through the thick canopy. I could see its flare, at first directly above me, and then sinking to my right, to the west. I decided to head east, trusting to the logic that we had taken off from Manaus and were headed west, for Carauari. We were not long into our journey when our plane went down. I surmised—incorrectly, as it turned out—that I was submerged in the Amazon to the west of Manaus. I was simply going back the way I had come, one step at a time, using distinctive landmarks (fallen trees, colourful bromeliads, odd-shaped leaves) as waypoints. I waded through rivers and crashed through snarls of foliage, determined to maintain an even line. When the sun touched the horizon and the jungle was fat with purple light, I thought of resting for the night. But that was when I heard their crying, tormented whoops. The sound didn’t carry across the miles; it was in my head. I was a part of them. I shared their blood, and understood them.
They were coming for me.
I peeled through the darkness, snapping through ferns and vines with no regard for direction. Their advance was like a pendulum in my mind, swinging from one side of my skull to the other, until I could hear them on the outside—their wings slapping the air, their frustrated shrieks. I never looked back. I never stopped. Everything was hurting and my heart brimmed with dread. I crossed a wide river, kicking my legs and working my one arm, finally reaching the other side, where a female caiman snapped her huge jaws and whipped away from me. I broke into the jungle, startling sprays of sleeping macaws. The creatures were behind me, closer now. Their powerful cries filled the sky like stars.
Trying to outrun them was futile; I was weak, and they were too quick. My only hope was to hide, and I found a place in the dense understorey, low to the ground, where I knew they would have difficulty moving their wings. I wriggled amongst the vines clinging to the trunk of a strangler fig, shivering as they came closer. At one point I heard their cries directly overhead and dared a glance. I could see fragments of the night sky through the skeletal fingers of the canopy and shuddered, watching their shapes pass over the stars . . . long, hooked wings and thin, almost-human bodies. They circled above my hiding place, occasionally swooping lower so that their talons scraped the treetops, but they never broke through the canopy. I waited, my heart blistering in my chest, and eventually they swept away from me. Wounded shrieks ripped from their bodies, fading into the night.
I could still hear them, though—in my mind. Their cries trailed into my sleep and underlined my dreams. I awoke at dawn. Bursts of green seeped through my wounded eyes and a line of orange light bled through the understorey in the east. The air was clean, fat with oxygen, and I sucked in long, grateful breaths as my nightmares dispersed. I started to snake my body through the vines but stopped when I saw the jaguar poised on a fallen tree trunk, less than seven feet away. It glared at me, yellow eyes glimmering, and I watched the muscles in its flank ripple as it readied itself to pounce. Instinct swept away all fear—hateful, animal instinct—and I roared at the beast, baring my teeth, stamping my one fist into the ground. The jaguar hissed, backed along the trunk, then turned and fled. It rustled amongst the understorey and disappeared.
Sweat glistened on my brow. I wiped it away with a trembling hand, got to my feet, and walked toward the light.
My body cried at me, buckled with thirst. I knew what it wanted—what it thirsted for—but tried to deny it. I splashed chilled water down my throat, gagging, hating it, and couldn’t keep it down.
What have I become?
By chance I stumbled upon an injured tapir. Its front leg was lame and it struggled to walk, snuffling at the grass, trembling when it saw me. I caught it easily, wrapped my arm around its neck, and twisted. There was no fight in the creature; its body flexed once against my side, and then it was still. I opened its throat with a sharp stone. Hot blood poured out and my stomach made convulsive clenches. I didn’t deny it a moment longer. I lowered my mouth to the steaming wound and drank. The taste was immediately satisfying and I felt my strength returning. I drank until there was no blood left—just a slaughtered husk lying in the grass. I licked my lips, half-weeping with some unknown emotion, and stumbled on.
I wondered if I was more animal than human—more like the creatures that inhabited the cave than the professional photographer who owned an expensive studio apartment in São Paulo. I still don’t know the answer. My thoughts are certainly human, yet I know there is something different inside me. Something huge and living. And terrifying.
My appetite for blood is unquenchable.
What have I become?
I staggered through the jungle for days—weeks, even, killing whatever I was quick enough to catch. I feared nothing. I encountered the worst the Amazon had to offer, and bested it all. I always had blood on my hands.
And at last . . . civilization: lights flickering in the distance.
I washed the blood from my body and staggered, naked as the day I was born, into the municipality of Pauini.
Close to you.
City lights blaze around me, but I hold to the shadows and move like vapour. I reach out—mental arms yearning to touch you—and feel the vague flicker of your presence. It touches me like sunlight.
Here I come.
Favela Rocinha.
The buildings were like the random thoughts that occur on the cusp of sleep, haphazardly piled on top of one another. Concrete and clapboard. Brick and tin. No order. Barely a semblance of structure. They challenged physics, leaning at angles, creaking and shifting in the wind. Electric lights hummed behind shuttered windows.
It was easy for Fernando to move unnoticed. He was just another stray; trash blown by the wind. He whispered through the shanty, past the stalls selling bottled water and old fruit and clay statuettes of Christ the Redeemer. Fires flickered on street corners, fuelled by children with dirty faces and scuffed knees. He could smell churrasco and sewerage. The streets were wet with rain. He could hear it dripping from one tin roof to another.
Closer.
A thin man sat on a concrete step playing a guitar with three strings, finding a melody even though his fingers, out of habit, touched empty places on the fretboard. He didn’t notice Fernando, who flitted by, as light as an insect’s wing. A woman danced barefoot in the gutter, holding her skirt above her knees, like a little girl paddling. She didn’t lose a step as Fernando swept around her. He followed a pack of stray dogs to the end of the street, where a faulty traffic signal buzzed indecisively between stop and go. Mosquitoes flicked between colours, like living glitter.
Fernando paused in the doorway of an exhausted building, where the wind whistled in the gaps between bricks and the windows rattled like old toys. He closed his eyes and cast his instinct into the night. He was rewarded with a feeling—as light, yet real, as the beat of his pulse—from the northwest, further up the hill, where Rocinha’s streets were more jaded, but where its lights burned brighter.
“Avô Vinícius . . .” He caught another wave of instinct and his promise trailed away. This was deep and cold, rushing to him from the south, bringing dread, whistling and rattling, like the wind through the tired building. His mind danced with terrible images. Clown faces leered at him. Endless rainbow legs bounded through the cramped streets.
Closer. But now the word was terrifying.
Fernando peeled out of the doorway and dared a glance over one shoulder. He couldn’t see them, but they were coming . . . they were close. He turned back to the lights towering in the streets above him.
The signal stuttered. Only green. Only go.
Translation taken from the Journal of Vinícius Araújo Valentim.
(September 19th 2032.)
This must end.
I have torn through civilization, bringing pain and death and disease. I have burned with devastation, and seen cities—countries—spill countless infected to the streets, and then fall crippled to their knees. I am the cloud over the sun. I am the falling rain. I am the disease.
They cannot catch me. I am too quick, too strong, and always one move ahead. They come for me in São Paulo, yet I am in Florianópolis. They are weeks, months, cities behind. I drink to stay alive. I spread the infection. All I can hear is screaming.
They come for me—an army: one thousand strong. They batter down doors in Brasilia. I am in Teresina.
I drink. I live. I grow stronger.
How long before the world is beaten? How long before the continents are ravaged and buckled and slide screaming into the oceans? Because of me. I am the grandfather of ruin.
It must end.
I could take my own life, but I lack the courage. I could return to the caves in Amazonia, where I was saved—reborn—and be with my kindred, but the thought of being back there, with their cold, leathery bodies so close to mine, fills me with terror. I can do that no more than I could throw myself from the highest building in Brazil.
I want to be normal.
I will find a place where all hope is fragile, and where prayers are always spoken. I will blend in with the desperation—lose myself there. I will surround myself with darkness and live by meager means, until I grow old and weak. Until I die.
And if they find me . . . it will all be over. Leave it to fate. Let God decide.
I am the cause. The most virulent strain. But my part in this horror is done.
Let me find darkness.
Please, God.
The light inside.
Fernando’s body ached and boomed and he pressed on, doubled over, heaving up steep, uneven streets. His jacket caught the wind and flowered behind him, and he shook it off so that it wouldn’t slow him down. It flapped and tumbled down the streets, followed by a stream of excited children with naked, polished skin. He held the butterfly to his face. Tears flashed behind its delicate wings. His instinct shimmered, but he couldn’t tell if it was because he was close to Avô Vinícius, or because the Psycho Cowboys were closing in.
Graffiti bled on the walls. Faded colours. Doors and shutters applauded in the breeze. The buildings leaned above him, time-washed greens and reds and blues, stacked like boxes. He ascended a corkscrew of crumbling steps, gasped the name of his saviour, and fell to his knees. He closed his eyes for a second and saw rainbows. The image terrified him—pushed him to his feet. He pressed onward. Rocinha glittered below him: a puddle on the earth, reflecting stars.
And all at once he was there. The shack was small and dark, with rotted slats of wood and flaps of tarpaulin filling the gaps in the brickwork. Simple light flickered inside. It was weak, decrepit, but for Fernando, it was everything he ever hoped to see.
“I am here,” he said.
The Psycho Cowboys were close now. Fernando staggered to the shack. His heart was the light inside, flickering and bleeding through the gaps in the weakened frame.
We’re not normally so kind.
“What have you become?”
“Less than a shadow.”
“I thought you’d be . . . more.”
“I am nothing.”
The thing on the bed was barely human, and barely alive—a broken creature with pale eyes and sallow skin. Fernando could define the bow of his ribcage and the buckled knots of his spine. Thin lips receded from endless teeth. Purple veins jumped with uncertain rhythm, wrapped around loose muscle.
“Avô Vinícius, I have—”
The thing spat: “I am not your grandfather.”
Fernando shook his head. Hope scattered from his heart. The strength moved from his legs and he collapsed—as frail as the monster on the bed. He had travelled so long, and risked certain death, to be here . . . to find salvation.
The creature pulled this thought from his mind and responded, “I am not your saviour. I am the disease. I am death.”
“We can be strong again.”
“Everything dies.” A syrupy yellow substance leaked from his eyes, into the shallows of his face. “Find your own destiny, and leave me alone.”
“You are my destiny.” Fernando crawled toward Avô Vinícius. He grasped his meager body and pulled him close. So light. A devastated, useless thing. His head lolled pathetically on his stick neck.
Sounds from outside: doors thrown open, raised voices, people crying out.
“They are here,” Fernando said.
“Let them take you,” Avô Vinícius hissed. He shifted in Fernando’s arms, twisting his skeletal frame, the stump of his left arm twitching. “Look at me, and tell me . . . is this really what you want? I am the pestilence that runs through your blood. I have nothing good to give. And neither do you.”
“I have to survive.”
“That’s not a reason to live.”
The sounds outside were louder. Closer.
“I was born into this,” Fernando said. “It’s all I know.”
A grotesque smile touched his lips. Fernando, aghast, threw him back onto the bed. A stuttering tangle of bones.
“A good reason to die, then,” the creature said. The door crashed open. The Psycho Cowboys were there. Six of them. Tall, ungainly men with stretched faces. One of them pulled a handgun and fired three times. Fernando felt the heat of the bullets. They missed him by inches.
The first bullet tore through Avô Vinícius’s chest. The second entered his right eye and exited the rear left portion of his skull, splashing thick pink matter onto the wall. The third bullet ripped through his throat with terrible force, severing what remained of his head and sending it tumbling into the corner.
The Cowboys stepped into the shack. The one with the gun (he was at least seven feet tall) looked at Fernando and grinned.
“Why do you think we let you run?”
Fernando sneered. “You couldn’t catch me.”
“Wrong.” The Psycho Cowboy pointed the gun at the broken, bleeding shape on the bed. Tendrils of smoke eased from the barrel. “We wanted you to lead us to him. The Pathogen. The root of all evil. Now he is dead, and the war is over.”
Fernando got to his feet. The Butterfly trembled on his face.
“What happens to me?” he asked.
Their grins were identical: yellow teeth set in grey faces.
“We killed him quickly,” the one with the gun said, holstering his weapon. “We’re not normally so kind.”
We are the revenge.
With the first wave of pain he knew he was not dreaming. No dream could bring such agony, although everything else . . .
Naked, his thin body coloured with bruises. Blood raced from his shattered nose and mouth. It was thick in his throat. His eyelids flickered. He could hear laughter—a chattering, bubbling sound that pulled him to full alertness, and yet made him want to faint away forever.
He could see wild colour.
“No one will cry for you.”
He was chained between two posts, his arms pulled wide, cruciform, so like the famous statue. The tips of his toes scuffed the concrete floor. He blinked tears from his eyes and rattled the chains. There was no give in them. Heavy breaths worked from his lungs. He snapped his head around and could see that he was in a large room—it looked like an abandoned warehouse—with a row of dusty windows along one side and loading doors at the far end. Ultraviolet lights glared like wide eyes, making strange shadows.
The Psycho Cowboys formed a semi-circle around him. They had changed out of their drab suits and into the regalia of cruelty: not quite the rainbows and clown faces he had seen in his dreams, but close. They wore fluorescent costumes—flamboyant colours amplified by the ultraviolet lights. Their faces were alive with luminescent paint. Nightmarish designs. They glowed like a child’s Halloween joke.
They brandished their torture implements. Three of them carried batons. Two wielded picanas that were wired into car batteries. The sixth Cowboy (the tallest of them—the one who had shot Avô Vinícius) had an oily chainsaw hoisted on one shoulder.
“Let me tell you what happened to me,” he said. The chainsaw looked heavy, judging from the way he adjusted his body to support the weight. “My family was killed in front of my eyes. I was seven years old at the time. Two of your kind broke into my house and slaughtered them all. My mother, father, and my two sisters. I hid in the closet and watched. Terrified, but vowing revenge. My associates . . .” he gestured at the Cowboys gathered around him, “. . . have similar stories. So do many hundreds of thousands of people in this country—in this continent. Innocent people torn to pieces by your disease. That’s why we’re here. We are not the cure. We are the revenge.”
Fernando opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He had nothing to say. He knew his fate, and would accept it silently. His heart ached with the failure, but it ached more with the knowledge—even though he had always expected it—that he would never see his beautiful Giovanna again. Her face burgeoned in his mind for a second. A beautiful flower, with petals so bright they threw the Psycho Cowboys’ colour into shade.
I’m so sorry, Giovanna, he thought. He glimpsed his mask, lying on the floor behind the Psycho Cowboys. Its wings were crushed. The pieces shimmered in the ultraviolet light, like rare minerals. He closed his eyes. She faded from his mind.
“You were strong once,” the Cowboy said. His voice creaked like wet leather. The colours of his face were orange and pink. Sunrise colours. They accentuated the blackness of his eyes. “You were virulent. You killed millions. But you’re not strong anymore.”
Another Cowboy stepped forward. His face was obscenely bright—painted with red, tribal whorls that reached to the back of his bald head. His baton was happy-yellow. He raised it . . . brought it forward in a sunshine arc . . . smashed it against Fernando’s ribcage. The pain was alive and furious. It writhed and kicked. Fernando heard his ribs shatter. He felt them break loose inside his body.
“Not strong,” the Cowboy said. He nodded to his soldiers and they stepped forward. The picanas sent tens of thousands of volts through his body. The batons broke his bones. They came in waves, beating, and then retreating. The air was filled with the music of laughter and the percussion of weapons. Fernando swayed from the chains. When he passed out, they revived him with icy water, and then beat him again.
A ghost in his mind: Avô Vinícius, a dreadful, perished creature who could give him nothing except a promise of damnation. Fernando held that ruined face in his mind. I thought you could save us. He recalled how light the crippled body had been in his arms, like a bag of loose sticks. I travelled so far for you. I thought . . . I thought . . .
All for nothing.
They came at him, laughing maniacally. They shattered his legs. They smashed his ribs. The picanas were pressed to the most sensitive areas of his body: his armpits, his genitals, his bleeding, open wounds. The voltage roared through his body in blackening, crackling storms. Ribbons of smoke peeled from his scorched skin.
Fernando floated on the brink of an abyss. Endless and black. It was heaven. He floated in a thousand pieces: the debris of hurt, like a meteor shower. He trailed and blazed and prepared to offer himself to nothingness—that long sea of death. He experienced a moment of euphoria. He thought it was his soul departing.
No more pain.
I am nothing.
One moment. That was all.
And then he heard the roar of the chainsaw.
As bright as his mask.
“Our colour represents new life,” the Cowboy shouted over the chainsaw’s growl. “From our grey suits to this . . . like a new dawn, a new era. Soon the world will be painted with amazing light. A world that you will not be a part of.”
He depressed the chainsaw’s trigger and its hooked, oily teeth blazed around the bar. It drowned the sound of laughter. Dirty smoke puffed from the exhaust, hanging in the air, obscuring their fluorescent stripes and swirls. The Psycho Cowboy lifted the chainsaw and took a step toward Fernando. His grin was a deep red groove. His eyes dazzled, even behind the smoke.
He shouted something else, but Fernando did not hear him. Partly because of the chainsaw’s mean growl, but mostly because his attention was diverted to the windows, where he saw movement. Something large, swooping from one window to the next. He flexed and pulled at the chains. His mind screamed impossible images, as bright as his mask, and in as many pieces.
I am nothing.
The chainsaw purred inches from his shallow stomach.
Less than a shadow.
His instinct blazed. A divine rush that scattered all pain and pulled his mouth into a long, bleeding smile. He gazed beyond the chainsaw . . . beyond the Psycho Cowboys . . . beyond the smoke and colour . . . to where the wooden loading doors suddenly crashed open.
I am coming.
“Giovanna,” he said.
Fallen from time, like rain from a cloud.
She came like a tempest. An infernal, chaotic force, leaving the doors in ruins and killing two of the Cowboys before they knew what happened. Their bodies were shattered against the wall: bags of glass. They bled through their fluorescent skins.
The Psycho Cowboy with the chainsaw turned, dragged to one side by the machine’s power. He peered through rags of oily smoke and saw what could not be, but what Fernando knew to be true. She was pure: something part-human but altogether monstrous, a ranging, naked creature sweeping in and out of the shadows. Fernando could not have recognized her without the tattoo: 377822. It was her—his only love: Giovanna. Long black hair flanked her face and splashed across muscular shoulders. Her eyes were keen gold discs. Only their shape was familiar. She breathed—harsh, grunting expulsions. Her wide nostrils flared. Her teeth were haphazard, ivory spikes, projecting from her gums like splayed fingers.
Another Cowboy dropped his (happy-yellow) baton and screamed. Giovanna bore upon him with a furious shriek. One sweep of her arm ripped him in two. His upper body thudded off one of the posts that Fernando was chained to. His legs were sent kicking into the shadows. A fourth Cowboy—his black eyes suddenly very large in the glowing map of his face—tried to run. He didn’t get far; Giovanna pounced. Her thick legs propelled her through the air like a grasshopper. She came down on his shoulders and he crumpled beneath her weight, spine broken. His painted face was glow-in-the-dark terror. Fernando watched as she pulled him apart, scattering him in a hundred fluorescent pieces.
She looked at him. Their eyes came together and Fernando saw what used to be: her softness and beauty. He remembered the way the left side of her mouth would lift higher when she smiled. He remembered the way she had touched him, time and time again, throwing his world into easy clouds of calm. His beaten body trembled from the chains. His heart boomed with emotion.
I know how to love you, she had said. But could she love him still? This new creature . . . every bone reshaped, bent at the waist so that her shoulder blades pressed through her skin like wings. Giovanna Almeida, to whom he had sworn eternity. How much of her soul remained? How much love?
He closed his eyes as she killed the fifth Psycho Cowboy. One moment he was there, living and thinking and afraid. The next he was gone, fallen from time, like rain from a cloud.
Yes, she had always been able to read him. Her gift—her instinct—was incredibly bright. It was the reason she was here, as devastating as a volcano. And this ability, along with everything else about her, must have advanced, because she was able to press her thoughts into his mind. Not words, but images, arranged like a wheel, revolving, drawing long arcs of expression.
So much soul /// I still know how to love you /// I always will.
He opened his eyes. Her mouth was a terrible shape, but the left side was lifted higher.
He threw his own wheel at her: Save me.
Revolve: I already have.
The chainsaw snarled, the teeth whickering, flickering in the ultraviolet light. The Cowboy lifted it to waist-height and gunned the trigger. The machine vibrated in his arms, belching smoke.
“Come for me,” he screamed, pointing the bar toward Giovanna. She circled him, thudding her knuckles on the floor, the bloody swags of her breasts swinging as she moved. She roared: an insane tangle of sound—words and yawps on a stream of hot air. Vapour poured from her long mouth. Her shoulder blades were pressed together, as if she were about to take flight.
The Cowboy raised the chainsaw and took a step forward. Giovanna moved between the shadows. Her claws flashed. She howled. The chainsaw snarled and Fernando heard the change in modulation as it carved the air. She was too quick for him. He was thrown aside, still holding the chainsaw. It purred along the floor, kicking up sparks and spits of concrete. He got to one knee and the weight of the machine dragged him down. It kicked and wheeled back on him. He let go and rolled away, but Giovanna was there. He seemed too small in her huge claws. His fluorescent facepaint dripped as she breathed on him.
“Infecção,” she growled, and crushed him. His body twisted and fractured in her hands. Fernando watched it become loose as she snapped every bone and ground his spine to dust. He screamed louder than the chainsaw. Blood leaked from his eyes. His arms and legs dangled uselessly. She threw him away. He twitched and died.
Fernando faded again, to the edge of the abyss, where the hurt couldn’t reach him. The last thing he saw was Giovanna picking up the chainsaw and lifting it to the chains. He heard the squeal of metal on metal. He felt the hot/cold flicker of sparks. Then he was falling. Then he was held.
O Cristo Redentor.
She cradled him and crossed the city, through twisting alleyways and across rooftops, pressed to the shadows.
You can’t see me.
The lights of ruined lives shimmered below them.
“My mask . . .” Fernando said, lifting to consciousness.
“You don’t need it anymore.”
She ascended Corcovado Mountain with effortless, unfaltering leaps. He trembled against her breast. She reached the magnificent statue and continued to climb. Her claws scratched into the smooth stone and she made her way to the shoulders, and then clambered deftly onto the right arm. The statue’s solemn face regarded the city. Giovanna held her lover, stroking his face, breathing hard. Sweat dripped from her coarse skin. She kissed him. Her hair pooled on his chest.
Fernando opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He pulled an image into his mind, shaped it, and then cast it at her. It wasn’t perfect, but she understood.
Wh/t happ//ed to y/u?
She kissed him again and stroked his face. You have spent the last two years looking for a man /// whom we thought could save us /// but were wrong. Her angular face soothed him. It seemed to be made of stone, like the great, pale face behind her. I escaped and moved in the other direction /// into Amazonia. She closed her eyes. The shape that blossomed in his mind was smooth on one side, hooked on the other, like a bat’s wing. They knew I was coming /// They found me.
He wanted to touch her tattoo—trace the lines, make subtle changes. QUE LINDA. His broken arms throbbed. His mouth opened. He managed to speak one hurt syllable:
“They?”
She looked at him, and then gave him a glimpse. Not all of it. Not even close. But it was enough: a horde of thorny creatures hanging in the darkness. Fernando could almost taste their blood, and feel their brutal penetration—over and over—turning her soft body to stone.
“They made me pure,” she said.
Imagine a shadow, but vague, only slightly darker than the surface onto which it is cast. The light is obscured. The shadow suffers. It is a cataract.
You can’t see us. We are less than shadows.
We are nothing.
But we are coming.
Close.
Ho/d me, Gi/van/a.
And she did, pulling him close as a cool night wind moaned across the statue’s arm. Her lips whispered against his bruised skin. His heart moved against his ribcage. Tears glittered in his eyes and the city spangled like a butterfly’s wing.
He thought, for one moment, that he was still wearing his mask.