There were also acts of resistance. In fact, they abounded, needless to say if one could overcome first impressions and take note of the rickety fragility of those poorly-assembled bags of bones scantily covered by the remains of entrails and putrid jellies. The passivity of terror had its limits. A town of farmers and truck drivers hardened by their daily encounters with Nature and man being wolf to man couldn’t surrender without putting up a fight. Some waged improvised struggles during the desperate fury of contact; others waited and readied themselves with sticks, irons, chains, and furniture to hurl. Half a dozen sons in the prime of their youthful vigor defending their old parents against one moldy arthritic corpse didn’t necessarily have to be battles lost before they began. Yet, they were.
Large defense groups were organized in certain nightclubs and restaurants, where they holed up in basements and on balconies, or in rooms whose doors were barricaded with piles of chairs and tables. The number of the living offered hope for salvation, but the number of the dead was always greater. “They will pay dearly for our endorphins,” they said, but ended up giving them away. And those who escaped could do nothing but run. Run blindly through dark streets, seek out open spaces, gain an extra minute, then another one, maybe it could be repeated, recover the instincts of deer, let the legs and lungs respond. But the streets, the street corners, the vacant lots were also responding; and the only response they gave was a proliferation of assailants swathed in old death and new terror.
As for the plan of the Clinic doctors, it had the advantage of initiative, but that was about all. From the get-go it was doomed by both intrinsic and extrinsic flaws. Moreover, they didn’t even manage to put it into practice due to an unexpected event that ended up providing the attackers with extra nourishment. It just so happened that while everybody was trying to get out of town, there arrived quite inopportunely a nourishing caravan of cars and SUVs packed full of dressed-up people: men in suits and tuxedos, women wearing long furs over low necklines and jewels. They had driven from an estate on the road to Pensamiento, and they were guests at a highly publicized wedding. The estate belonged to a rich and prolific French family; the bride was one of the eleven daughters of the owner, and the guests had come in from their other large estates in the south (the ones near Pringles were used only in winter), from Buenos Aires, and even from France. Right in the middle of the reception the patriarch suffered a heart attack, and without wasting any time, they piled him into an SUV and started off toward town. Since the others had no desire to continue the celebrations, they followed behind; his condition appeared to be serious; they feared he would die before they arrived, so the caravan sped up as if they were racing. On the way there, they tried to get in touch with the Clinic, and with doctors they knew, but all the numbers were busy, or didn’t answer. Thus they arrived, totally oblivious, in the middle of another “party,” which would end even more badly than the one that had just been ruined for them. They were in such a hurry that they didn’t notice anything strange when they got to town. The vehicles, around forty of them, reached the Clinic without any problem. Seeing family members pour out of the cars, shouting and demanding a stretcher and medical attention for a patient who was seriously ill surprised the doctors and nurses, who were expecting anything but that. The explanations they tried to give managed to only further confuse the already flustered minds of those who’d just arrived; admittedly it was difficult to explain out of the blue. The wedding guests were just starting to understand what it was all about, and to take measure of their colossal inopportuneness, when their skulls were being opened and their brains slurped up. The dead, who appeared in great numbers, worked from the outside in: first the relatives who had remained on the sidewalk out front, then those who had entered the hallways and waiting rooms, offices, rooms, laboratories, the intensive care unit, until they reached the sancta sanctorum of the operating room. Not even the heart-attack victim, with but a thin thread of life remaining, was spared. It was one of the best banquets of the night, that defenseless conglomeration of rich French partygoers — a class of people who make the production of endorphins their life’s work.
They didn’t all fall at once, however, because one car had separated from the retinue before reaching the Clinic (by prior consultation on cell phone with those driving the first vehicle), and it started to drive across town, utterly ignorant of the ongoing coven. It was on its way to the Church to get the priest. The entire family were fervent Catholics, and they had anticipated that they would need the succor of the final sacrament if the worst came to pass (how naïve). The person in charge of this mission was a brother of the dying man, the one with the most easygoing relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy; the bride and groom were riding in his car; they had climbed into it in the same way they could have climbed into any other, rushing as they were. They drove across town at full speed, without stopping at intersections, and, in part because of their speed, in part because they were distracted by their own emergency, they didn’t notice anything strange. If they saw a drooling corpse emerge from a house, they thought there was a costume party; if they saw another one tottering on a rooftop, they took it as an advertising gimmick. A group of young people running down the middle of the street? They were in a hurry. The brightly lit dining room of Hotel Pringles was full of lifeless bodies draped over the tables and sprawled on the floor. They didn’t look.
They stopped in front of the Church. They got out of the car. The uncle went straight to the rectory. He wasn’t concerned about it being too late. The groom accompanied him. They found the door broken down and entered, intrigued. Two tall shredded shadows crossed the Plaza and entered behind them. The bride, in the meantime, had seen that the doors to the church were open, and she entered, thinking that maybe she would find the priest presiding over a nighttime service. That was not the case. The nave was empty; solitary candles were burning on the altar. She walked down the central aisle in her long dress of white tulle: the repetition of the same scene, this time in a different register. She’d gotten married just hours before, in the chapel at the estate, and there she had also proceeded “white and shining” down the central aisle, but then the aisle had been flanked by smiling faces, and the “Wedding March” was playing, and there were lights and flowers, and there, in front of her, her groom had been waiting. Now, on the other hand, the only figure she was approaching was Christ presiding over the altar, and she continued precisely because of how fascinated she was by that statue, which she didn’t remember ever having seen in the church in Pringles. It was a Christ Crucified, suffering, expressionistic, twisted, frankly putrefied — the work, one might say, of an insane imagination that had melded the concept of Calvary with that of Auschwitz and the aftermath of a nuclear or bacteriological apocalypse. In the tremulous half light, more than see him, she imagined him, and it was too late when she realized that she had imagined him wrong, when the Crucified One leaped at her and snorted — with diabolical bellowing — and fell upon her; they rolled over together, the bride unable to shout because at that precise instant the false statue ripped open her skull and was slurping the rich little drops, a substance filled with the expectations of honeymoon, children, and a home.
At the Palacio, in the meantime, pessimism had given way to desperation. Some final phone calls, which were cut off, led them to deduce what had taken place at the Clinic. At the Hospital, in spite of its distance from downtown, things hadn’t gone any better; even the Old People’s Home for the Indigent, adjacent to the Hospital, was the site of a ravenous visit, and they didn’t spare a single head. Didn’t they respect anything? Wouldn’t they turn up their noses at the poor, the old, or the infirm? From the look of things, no. The police medical examiner, who was still at the mayor’s office, shared his reflections on these questions with his comrades in misfortune. In their search for endorphins, he said, the barely resuscitated dead had nothing to lose; the human nature of their living cohorts worked in their favor, it wanted the living to stay alive; that’s why it provided its organisms with an inexhaustible source of the substance of happiness, so that they would never stop believing that it was worthwhile to continue in this world, and to multiply. Given this premise, everybody had some. The beautiful, the rich, the young all secreted endorphins constantly, not only the passive ones, the product of the happiness in which they spent their lives, but also the active ones, since the rich want to be richer, the beautiful more beautiful, the young younger. And these active endorphins, the ones the nocturnal slurpers most valued, were the speciality of the majority of the rest of the population: the old, the poor, the humble, the sick. The last scraps of human detritus, people who hadn’t enjoyed a single moment in their entire life, had to produce tons of endorphins in order to keep that life going.