The Ministry for the Future

5

We drove in with a fuel truck, water truck, all that. It was like going out into nothing. With the electricity out, pumps weren’t working, nothing was working. We set to work on the power plants before we did anything about all the dead. In any case there was nothing we could do about them, the bodies were sleeping where they fell. This wasn’t just the people, but all the cattle too. Seeing all the bodies, cows, people, dogs, someone said something about the way Tibetans bury their dead, called sky burial—let the vultures eat the bodies. And there were some vultures doing that, yes. Clouds of vultures and crows. They must have flown in afterward. Sometimes the stink was horrible, but then we would move on or the wind would shift, and it went away. It seemed like it was too hot for smells, the air was cooked. The main smell was of burning. And things were burning, yes. Once the power came back on, there were some downed lines east of Lucknow, and brush fires started from them. Next day a wind came and the fire spread and got into the towns and we had to fight the fire before anything else. We got particulate readings of 1500 ppm.

There was a lake we could pump from, next to one town near Lucknow. The lake was filled with dead bodies, it was awful, but we threw the pump intake out into the lake anyway, because we needed the water. We were downwind of a brush fire, it was coming at us fast. So when the pump started filling our water trucks we were relieved.

Then I heard a noise, at first I thought it was something in the pump line, a kind of squeak it was. But then it seemed to be coming from the lakeshore, where there was a sidewalk running around the edge of the water. So I went over to look. I don’t know. I guess it sounded alive.

He was lying against a building across the sidewalk from the lake. He had a shirt draped over his head. I saw him move and shouted to the others and went to him. He was a firangi, with brown hair and skin that was all peeling off. He looked like he had been burned, or boiled, I don’t know—he looked dead but he was moving. His eyes were almost swollen shut, but I could see he was looking at me. Once we started helping him he never said a thing, never made another sound. His lips were cracked bloody. I thought maybe his voice was gone, that he was too cooked to talk. We gave him water by the spoonful. We were afraid to give him too much at once. Once we got the word to team command, the medicos were with us pretty quickly. They took over and gave him infusions. He watched them do it. He looked around at us, and back at the lake, but he never said a thing. His eyes were just slits, and so red. He looked completely mad. Like a different kind of being entirely.