Thad struggled to move but couldn’t even lift his arms.
The men lowered the gurney.
“On three,” the colonel said.
No, please, no—
They positioned themselves around him.
“One. Two. Three.”
The men eased Thad onto the gurney. As a precaution, they firmly secured his wrists and ankles with the wide leather straps riveted to the sides of the gurney, and then raised it again so they could wheel him out of the room.
He tugged desperately at the restraints, but it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere. “I swear,” he mumbled, “I’ll…”
Byrne put a hand reassuringly on his arm. “Just relax, Thad. My people know what they’re doing. I’ll see you after your surgery.”
Then he walked to the table and, using only his thoughts, made the robotic arm set down the cup, pick up the spoon, dip out some of the gray powder, mix it into the drink, and then hand it to him.
From where he lay, Thad saw it all.
The colonel was sipping the coffee when the orderlies wheeled Thad past the bodies of the two men he’d brought to protect him, and rolled him down the hallway toward the operating room.
Thad tried to scream out curses, threats, even a final cry for mercy, but it was too late for any of that. He could only make soft, unintelligible gurgling sounds that no one paid any attention to.
They stationed the gurney beneath a wide, bright light in the operating theater where they had done the implant procedures on the monkeys.
As the men prepared for surgery, Thad heard a woman’s voice: “Lemme see him.”
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he recognized that—
Leaning over him, she came into view.
Yes, he did know her: a stunning blonde in her mid-twenties, nubile, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, a woman with a quiet, simple laugh and a svelte, well-toned body.
She was the escort he’d hired last night, the woman he and his men had shared. She called herself Calista, but he had no idea if that was her real name.
“Can you keep him awake while you do it?” she asked Dr. Malhotra.
“We should be able to get by with a local anesthetic. Sure.”
She trailed her finger along Thad’s cheek. “That’d be cool. He was totally rude to me last night. I wanna see the look in his eyes when it happens.”
One more time Thad tried and failed to beg them to stop.
He felt a sting in the back of his neck as they injected the anesthetic. Then Dr. Malhotra began the surgery of severing his spinal column while Calista watched curiously and, admittedly, somewhat grossed out, holding Thad’s hand in hers while it all went down.
Part II
Venom
The sun dips wearily into the evening mist hovering above the mountains as I watch my friend Emilio Benigno get buried alive.
One man cuffs his hands behind his back, two others lay him in the wooden coffin, and a fourth drops four Sri Lankan cobras in with him. They nail the lid securely shut, then lower him into the shallow grave and start shoveling dirt onto the coffin’s lid.
We’re in a cemetery, surrounded by ancient grave markers being slowly reclaimed by the jungle. Filipinos typically place their dead in cement tombs above the ground, but in remote areas like this, that isn’t always feasible, so they’re forced to plant their dead. Somehow this strip of cleared land beside the jungle seems glad to have the opportunity of swallowing this village’s corpses.
Despite a recent downpour, the air is still thick and heavy with humidity. Puddles lie around us and dense clouds obscure the peaks of the nearby mountains. The rainforest that surrounds the village of thirty huts hums with unseen insects calling anxiously for night to come.
The evening is cool for this time of year, and a faint breeze fingers its way past the drenched rice fields and through the cemetery. The air is smudged with the sharp tinge of smoke from the wood fires of people cooking dinner in their bamboo huts. Everything smells damp and earthy and weary of the day.
One of the men who’s standing beside the grave lights a kerosene lantern. Even though darkness hasn’t devoured the jungle yet, the day is dim enough for the lantern to cast a blur of uneven light across the ground.
I picture Emilio lying motionless in the coffin, trying to calm his breathing. It would be pitch-black in there, the dirt sealing out any light that might be trying to sneak through the cracks between the lid and the sides of the coffin.
I imagine what it’s like for him, hearing the sound of the soil landing on the wood just inches above his face, the noise getting more and more muffled with each shovelful of earth.
I’ve been in tightly enclosed spaces myself, struggled with claustrophobia for almost a year and a half now, and I know what it feels like when the walls seem to be closing in and there’s nowhere to go and nothing you can do to stop them.
The whole event is being filmed, is being streamed live on the Internet. I have no idea how many people around the world might be watching, but based on the buzz leading up to today and the insatiable nature of human curiosity, the number might well be in the millions.
My friend is in the coffin, shrouded in the dark.
With his hands restrained behind him, Emilio is helpless to stop the four cobras from slithering across his body.
Though I’m no expert on snakes, my friend Xavier Wray knows his reptiles, and before we arrived here tonight, when all of this was still a possibility and not yet a reality, he told me about Sri Lankan cobras.
They’re curious snakes and right now they would be exploring the confines of the coffin, passing over Emilio’s legs, his chest, his neck and face. He’s almost certainly being careful not to move too much, not to let the sense of their thick, rope-like bodies startle him, or he might thrash around and agitate the snakes.
Sri Lankan cobras have one of the most toxic venoms of any subspecies of cobras. It’s a neurotoxin that can cause respiratory failure.
But tonight their venom won’t kill Emilio; this time if they bite him he will survive.
I tell myself this, try to comfort myself with this fact.
I’m guessing that now, as the men continue to toss the soil onto the coffin, Emilio is already out of the handcuffs, that he has slipped on the gloves he had hidden beneath his shirt to protect him if the snakes — which have had their venom glands removed but still have their fangs — were to bite him.
I glance at my watch.
He’s been in the coffin for three minutes.
At any moment he’ll be starting to dig.
His clothes are thicker than they appear, but with the amount of force the snakes are able to generate at the tip of their fangs, they would still be able to easily pierce the fabric. Any bites would still be painful. Venomous snakes can strike up to three times per second and if he responded impulsively or jerked from the bite of one of the snakes, it could make the rest of them aggressive — not at all what he would want, being sealed in a coffin with them.
We rehearsed for that, but you can never cover every contingency and you have to be able to respond when things don’t go as planned.
Besides, his neck and face were still vulnerable.
Emilio even let himself get bitten by a cobra with its venom glands removed to see if he could remain calm and controlled. I know only a handful of escape artists who would be willing to go that far.