Max Brooks - Warnings: Overland Smuggling lyrics

LHASA, THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF TIBET [The world's most populous city is still recovering from the results of last week's general election. The Social Democrats have smashed the Llamist Party in a landslide victory and the streets are still roaring with revelers. I meet Nury Televaldi at a crowded sidewalk café. We have to shout over the euphoric din.] Before the outbreak started, overland smuggling was never popular. To arrange for the pa**ports, the fake tour buses, the contacts and protection on the other side all took a lot of money. Back then,the only two lucrative routes were into Thailand or Myanmar. Where I used to live, in Kashi, the only option was into the ex-Soviet republics. No one wanted to go there, and that is why I wasn't initially a shetou.(1) I was an importer: raw opium, uncut diamonds, girls, boys, whatever was valuable from those primitive excuses for countries. The outbreak changed all that. Suddenly we were besieged with offers, and not just from the liudong renkou,(2) but also, as you say, from people on the up-and-up. I had urban professionals, private farmers, even low-level government officials. These were people who had a lot to lose. They didn't care where they were going, they just needed to get out. Did you know what they were fleeing? We'd heard the rumors. We'd even had an outbreak somewhere in Kashi. The government had hushed it up pretty quickly. But we guessed, we knew something was wrong. Didn't the government try to shut you down? Officially they did. Penalties on smuggling were hardened; border checkpoints were strengthened. They even executed a few shetou, publicly, just to make an example. If you didn't know the true story, if you didn't know it from my end, you'd think it was an efficient crackdown. You're saying it wasn't? I'm saying I made a lot of people rich: border guards, bureaucrats, police, even the mayor. These were still good times for China, where the best way to honor Chairman Mao's memory was to see his face on as many hundred yuan notes as possible. You were that successful. Kashi was a boomtown. I think 90 percent, maybe more, of all westbound, overland traffic came through with even a little left over for air travel. Air travel? Just a little. I only dabbled in transporting renshe by air, a few cargo flights now and then to Kazakhstan or Russia. Small-time jobs. It wasn't like the east, where Guangdong or Jiangsu were getting thousands of people out every week. Could you elaborate? Air smuggling became big business in the eastern provinces. These were rich clients, the ones who could afford prebooked travel packages and first-cla** tourist visas. They would step off the plane at London or Rome, or even San Francisco, check into their hotels, go out for a day's sightseeing, and simply vanish into thin air. That was big money. I'd always wanted to break into air transport. But what about infection? Wasn't there a risk of being discovered? That was only later, after Flight 575. Initially there weren't too many infected taking these flights. If they did, they were in the very early stages. Air transport shetou were very careful. If you showed any signs of advanced infection, they wouldn't go near you. They were out to protect their business. The golden rule was, you couldn't fool foreign immigration officials until you fooled your shetou first. You had to look and act completely healthy, and even then, it was always a race against time. Before Flight 575, I heard this one story about a couple, a very well-to-do businessman and his wife. He had been bitten. Not a serious one, you understand, but one of the “slow burns,” where all the major blood vessels are missed. I'm sure they thought there was a cure in the West, a lot of the infected did. Apparently, they reached their hotel room in Paris just as he began to collapse. His wife tried to call the doctor, but he forbade it. He was afraid they would be sent back. Instead, he ordered her to abandon him, to leave now before he lapsed into coma. I hear that she did, and after two days of groans and commotion, the hotel staff finally ignored the "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and broke into the room. I'm not sure if that is how the Paris outbreak started, though it would make sense. You say they didn't call for a doctor, that they were afraid they'd be sent back, but then why try to find a cure in the West? You really don't understand a refugee's heart, do you? These people were desperate. They were trapped between their infections and being rounded up and “treated” by their own government. If you had a loved one, a family member, a child, who was infected, and you thought there was a shred of hope in some other country, wouldn't you do everything in your power to get there? Wouldn't you want to believe there was hope? You said that man's wife, along with the other renshe, vanished into thin air. It has always been this way, even before the outbreaks. Some stay with family, some with friends. Many of the poorer ones had to work off their bao (3) to the local Chinese mafia. The majority of them simply melted into the host country's underbelly. The low-income areas? If that's what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos? It's been said that many shetou propagated the myth of a miracle cure in other countries. Some. Did you? [Pause.] No. [Another pause.] How did Flight 575 change air smuggling? Restrictions were tightened, but only in certain countries. Airline shetou were careful but they were also resourceful. They used to have this saying, “every rich man's house has a servant's entrance.” What does that mean? If western Europe has increased its security, go through eastern Europe. If the U.S. won't let you in, go through Mexico. I'm sure it helped make the rich white countries feel safer, even though they had infestations already bubbling within their borders. This is not my area of expertise, you remember, I was primarily land transport, and my target countries were in central Asia. Were they easier to enter? They practically begged us for the business. Those countries were in such economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they actually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our fee. There were even shetou, or whatever they called them in their barbarian babble, who worked with us to get renshe across the old Soviet republics into countries like India or Russia, even Iran, although I never asked or wanted to know where any of the renshe were going. My job ended at the border. Just get their papers stamped, their vehicles tagged, pay the guards off, and take my cut. Did you see many infected? Not in the beginning. The blight worked too fast. It wasn't like air travel. It might take weeks to reach Kashi, and even the slowest of burns, I've been told, couldn't last longer than a few days. Infected clients usually reanimated somewhere on the road, where they would be recognized an collected by the local police. Later, as the infestations multiplied and the police became overwhelmed, I began to see a lot of infected on my route. Were they dangerous? Rarely. Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You'd see something moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy blankets. You'd hear banging from a car's boot, or, later, from crates with airholes in the backs of vans. Airholes…they really didn't know what was happening to their loved ones. Did you? By then, yes, but I knew trying to explain it to them would be a hopeless cause. I just took their money and sent them on their way. I was lucky. I never had to deal with the problems of sea smuggling. That was more difficult? And dangerous. My a**ociates from the coastal provinces were the ones who had to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds and contaminating the entire hold. What did they do? I've heard of various “solutions.” Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast—it didn't matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast—and “unload” the infected renshe onto the beach. I've heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early cases of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or why you'd hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walking out of the surf. At least I never had to deal with that. I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time to quit. There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi'an. He'd made a lot of money buying up American credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The man's Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every day. The driver's eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn't going to be much good for much longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all I could do. Where was the truck headed? Kyrgyzstan.