the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller Page B

for the dead, on any given day you could still have hundreds of people walking these grounds.  Some of them are outright violent, others indifferent, but all of them without exception are volatile and unpredictable.
    The hotel staff saw what was coming; they got the hell out of the Lavelha early on.  Rina included.  The instant it became clear that this was a mass epidemic and not a handful of scattered cases, the staff loaded themselves into their three cheapjack buses and hauled off back down the murram, southwest to the town of Cãlo, no looking back. 
    At the time, the entire staff was made up of Torluna locals, members of the ethnic Mirasai— all of them dark-skinned, all of them a hundred percent pure on account of their isolation—and Cãlo was home.  The Mirasai would commute up the dirt road every morning before sunrise in those buses to work at the hotel or to work in the Trap, and then they’d go back home again at nightfall.  Seven days a week.  Only a few dozen staff remained on the grounds of the hotel around the clock, but now they’re gone also: everybody is either dead or back in the enclave. 
    In theory you could make your own way across the islet to Cãlo.  Go West, young man, down the murram.  Try to hide yourself among the town ’s shanty houses and colonial-era stucco buildings.  Cãlo is a safe haven, disease-free as far as anyone can tell, but you can forget about going because they’ll never let a foreigner in past the border.  Unless you’re one of the Mirasai people, the town is off limits.  They might let in a tourist or two who can show a passport from an African nation, maybe, but even that’s not for certain.  It’s all just rumors, the things you hear. 
    What Park knows for certain is that the Mirasai have set up vehicle barricades—metal sawhorses and bales of barbwire and rusted-out sedans set on their bare rims—all along the dirt road leading into Cãlo, expressly to keep people like him and Lee out.  It doesn ’t matter that his skin is brown and hers browner.  The Mirasai won’t stand and watch as an influx of Americans and Canadians and Australians and Europeans carry their foreign plague in from the resort.  From what he’s heard, there are armed Mirasai militiamen stationed at the roadblocks on the murram around the clock, watching for border crossers.
    The situation in Cãlo doesn ’t much matter either way.  Even if the town kept its gates wide open to the world, Park would still have to cross La Sielve to get there, which he simply can’t do, at least not on foot.  The route cuts through more than fifty miles of treacherous, untouched jungle landscape.  The only civilizing influence on La Sielve over the last hundred years has been the single dirt road, the murram, carved haphazardly down the middle.  Otherwise it’s nothing but an expanse of wild terrain, impassable to anyone but the most seasoned Mirasai women and men.  That’s also just rumor, something he’s heard during his time here, but he believes all of it.
     
     
    Park clambers out of the ravine, and then there ’s only a short stretch of woodland standing between him and Lavelha.  He takes the walk carefully.  He keeps his head turning, eyes wide. 
    W hen he looks out at the main resort beachfront through the treeline, it’s like witnessing a killing field.  The assemblage of corpses, strewn in their ghastly configurations, the final postures.  Above it all, a dark brume hangs on the air—a swarthy pall, like soot smoke—created by the cloud of insects come to feed, wheeling and chirring. 
    All of this purposeless death.  He tears another strip of fabric from the hem of his undershirt and ties it, bandit-like, over his lower face.  He steps out of the brake of trees.
     
     
    As he walks, he tries not to look around at the wasted shoreline.  Eyes kept forward, he crosses the sand, stepping gingerly over body after body, using one arm to bat away the swarm of