The dorms were cold but dry and Eric stood in the entryway for a minute building up his courage. He peeked down the hall; it was empty. There was music coming from somewhere, heavy bass thumping the walls. Slowly, he started his way down.
Each sound was like an alarm going off and he’d stop and listen whenever he heard something. There was an argument coming from a room up ahead, a girl on the phone yelling over some indiscretion that happened the previous weekend. Two doors down was his room.
His stomach was fluttering from adrenaline as he walked down and stopped at his door. He put his ear to it and listened, plugging up the other one with his finger. It was silent. He put in his key and unlocked it.
The room was a little messier than he’d left it but other than that it looked the same. There were no dirty shoe prints on the carpet or anything else indicating a lot of people had come through. He ran to the closet and began throwing around clothes and old books and papers. In a shoebox with letters of academic awards he found his passport and social security card. He put them in his gym bag and changed his clothes and shoes, putting on his jacket and a gray beanie with the University of New Hampshire logo on the front before walking out.
As he shut the door, relieved, he heard voices down the hall. He looked to see two men walking toward him. One was balding and older, Hispanic, wearing a cheap tan overcoat and the other was young and wearing a business suit that was wet at the shoulders.
Eric jumped away from his door. He walked down and knocked on the girl’s door that was having an argument. The men were now only a couple dozen feet away, eyeing him. The girl opened the door wearing sweats, a cell phone to her ear.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Hi,” Eric said, “I’m David Russell with the UNH Student Committee and I’m just going around today talking to people about the upcoming elections and reminding them to vote.”
She gave him a quizzical look and then said, “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote. When are the elections?”
The two men walked behind Eric and he felt his heart drop. They’d walked past him and were going down to his door. He glanced at them quickly. The older one smiled and was about to turn back when he looked down and noticed the dripping wet gym bag Eric was holding. He looked up and they caught each other’s eyes. For a moment, neither did anything.
Eric sprinted toward the entrance of the building at the same time the man yelled out “Police!” Eric heard the girl scream behind him as he rammed the doors open and turned toward the parking lot, the water on the ground splashing up around him as he ran through puddles formed in the small potholes, the shouts of the detectives muffled by the rain.
He ran into the library and a guy was walking toward him with books held under his arm. Eric knocked them out of his hand and they landed on the floor behind him as the guy started yelling. The officers weaved around him and kept shouting “Police!” startling everyone nearby. Eric got through the door and looked back to see them not thirty feet behind him. He darted into the rain again, the gym bag hitting his knees as he sprinted past the Field House and into the main parking lot before hitting the street. He looked back and saw the older officer far behind him but the younger one was keeping up.
There was a residential neighborhood across the street and Eric dashed for it, a black SUV having to slam on its brakes and blare the horn as Eric crossed its path. He ran down the sidewalk and saw the detective still behind him. He turned into a driveway and through the backyard, climbed a wooden fence and sprinted through another yard and past a trampoline.
Eric jumped another fence and into another yard. He heard a scream and saw a woman on her back porch, bringing inside cushioned chairs that were getting doused in rain. He ran at her as she held up her hands and screamed again. He jumped through the open sliding glass door and shut and locked it behind him before shooting through the house and out the front door.
He ran to an intersection and turned right, ran behind a McDonald’s and around the back into another residential neighborhood; cookie-cutter houses, all square two stories with small front lawns. He could hear sirens in the distance, coming from all directions. His adrenaline kept him going but he could feel the dull ache of lactic acid build up in his legs and his pace began to slow. The Lortab dulled his sensed and winded him. Soon, he wouldn’t be able to run anymore. He went to a white house with immense bushes on the front lawn by the doorway and shoved his money and wallet into the gym bag. Then he shoved the gym bag into the bushes before taking off again.
Eric zigzagged through more streets, but he’d slowed down considerably by now, having sprinted more than a mile. As he turned a corner, a patrol car skidded to a halt in front of him and two officers jumped out with their guns drawn.
“Down on the ground motherfucker!”
Eric put his hands up and lay down on his belly, the wet pavement cold against his chest. He felt the pull of hands grabbing his wrists, and the steel handcuffs against his flesh.
CHAPTER
16
Dr. Namdi Said had lived in Andhra Pradesh briefly as a child though he was originally from Somalia. He remembered only the droves of merchants lined up on the streets of Kavali, yelling and haggling with any tourist that wandered by. A sight that, still in existence, had died down with modern conveniences like the internet. He had not seen the plains-named by the locals “Gold Mines of India” because of the color of the landscape given by the tall yellow grass-until he was in his late twenties and out of medical school.
The jeep he drove in was well past its prime, rust adorning the underside and a constant clicking sound accompanying every rotation of the front wheels. The road to Saint Anthony’s Medical Outpost was bumpy and littered with old bones from animals that had happened in front of moving vehicles. It was rough terrain. More than one tourist died every month in the plains. From animal attacks, from getting lost, from disease… there were thousands of deaths awaiting them here.
The medical outpost had been established by a United Nations relief effort to help the outlying villages attain medical care. It was little more than a couple of operating rooms and a limited pharmacy, but it was better than nothing. In years past the various bureaucrats sapped the villages of whatever value they possessed. Sometimes it was just taking livestock and precious metals. It was rumored by the locals that other times it was pushing the villagers into forced labor. If the government here couldn’t use them they would be rented to other nations. These were people in the lowest caste of society and even their own government saw them as little more than animals. Though the thought of the Indian government selling slaves to other nations was too much even for Namdi to believe.
But Namdi had seen such brutality in the diamond mines of the Congo in his work with Doctors Without Borders. An entire village in the Congo was ransacked. The girls and women were forced into prostitution, chained up on a military base. The boys and men were taken to the jungles, a mine called N’su havu.
He remembered the stink of the mines more than anything else. Since work was never allowed to stop the laborers would have to urinate and defecate on themselves. They slept in a nearby cave and were given the barest minimum sustenance to survive. Usually some type of gruel made from animal entrails and whatever else happened to be in the vicinity of the mines. They were given a few cups of water. In the soaring heat and humidity three cups led to severe dehydration. Most of the laborers died because of the lack of water. They would fall in the mines and their bodies would remain there the rest of the day.