The World Without Flags

“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.