Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days (5 page)

By the time I returned, I’d grown from a
homesick child to a man, from student to full shaman. I had
hardened to life. I was separate from human life, detached. Having
delved into the deep reaches of the spirit world, I no longer felt
a close connection to my family or community.

I wasn’t homesick when I came to the Pen. I
didn’t miss them. I received a photo of my son, born six months
after I entered this cell. I put up his picture but felt no
connection to him. My family was my spirit guides and my home the
spirit world.

Now that I know that everyone is gone, I
wish I had cherished them. I wish I had done what most prisoners do
-- written letters, begged for visits, taken conjugal visits,
stayed connected to my family, my people.

I didn’t. And now it’s too late.

It’s been almost ten years since I’ve heard
a coherent sentence. It’s been more than five years since my ears
heard the sound of drums and music. George and I live in a silence
broken only by the sound of our labor.

I will never hear Tiwa, Tewa, Dine, Hopi,
Apache, or any Ind’n language again. The wasps completed what
invaders were never able to do. The wasps have broken the backs of
the Indian Nations.

I see my mother in my dreams. Her black hair
falls almost to her knees. She is holding me in her arms. Her long
nose brushes my face. The firelight reflects in her dark eyes,
which hold only love for me. She is singing to me in Tewa. I see
her smile. I feel her kiss on my cheek, and fingertips tickle my
belly. I am safe in her arms. I am safe. The world is filled with
sound. The television blares the announcer’s annoying voice and
roar of the professional football-game crowd. My brothers listen to
punk rock in the room they share on the other side of the wall. My
sister is giggling and gossiping on the telephone in the hallway.
But my ears hear only my beautiful mother’s song. I am perfectly
content and happy.

I miss everything now -- the noise, the
bother, the eternal neediness of people, even the guards and
prisoners. George is sitting right next to me while I type this. I
miss him, too.

As a shaman, I’m trained to be open to the
flow of life. I am transition. I create transitions. I know how to
put the slightest pressure on any given part of a change to get it
moving again. More than anything, I believe in my very soul that
life is change.

And still, I miss them all so very much.

I was the one who never wanted to be the
shaman. I only wanted to be left alone with my mountains, streams,
and big, open places. I didn’t want to save the day. I didn’t want
any part of the prophecy.

But here I am. Alone. The last one
standing.

11/05/2056

I should tell you more about the wasps. For
all we’ve experienced, we don’t know a lot.

The infection destroys a person’s mind and
releases their soul. Their body continues to function. The body
eats, eliminates, heals injury, mates, and sleeps. I have some
question as to whether a wasp can love. They may not love, per se,
but they form attachments to each other over time. Wasps group
together in something like colonies or hives.

Unlike in the movies, wasps don’t wander
around with filth all over them. Their skin doesn’t rot from the
bones. They also don’t stumble around with their arms waving in the
air. Wasps walk upright, like men.

They are unable to verbalize but, over time,
seem to learn a kind of communication. I’ve wondered if this
represents an evolutionary to Neanderthal man, as they walk erect,
no speech pattern, hunt to kill, etc.

The greatest difference between a wasp and a
man is wasps eat only living flesh. I believe they only eat
mammalian flesh, but George and I aren’t around fish, reptiles,
spiders, or birds. We’ve never seen them eat anything but living
mammalian tissue.

After they first turn, their hunger seems
insatiable. It’s possible that they are so hungry because they need
nutrition to transform their bodies. Over time, either they seem to
adjust to the hunger or the hunger lessens. By the end of a year,
the wasps we kept for observation ate about twice a day.

The transformation doesn’t appear to be
painful. Outside of the obvious discomfort of losing all of your
bodily fluids, the wasps don’t seem in pain when it happens.
Transformation is simply something that happens while they
sleep.

We know that wasps:

* live for a long, long time;

* are impervious to heat or cold;

* eat only living tissue;

* mate, but, to our knowledge, cannot
procreate;

* seem to have no memory of life before
becoming a wasp and limited recall of their life as a wasp;

* are unable to learn. We tested this at the
Pen. No matter how many times they completed a maze, they never
remembered how to do it two hours later or the next day.

* have lost all reason, decision-making
ability, forward thinking, or planning capacity.

To a certain extent, wasps live in a perfect
Zen moment. They live in the present and respond to what’s right in
front of them.

Early on, George and I captured a number of
wasps. It wasn’t very hard. With the entire Pen at our disposal,
and a lot of wasps around, we were able to create an entire
cellblock of wasps.

Over the course of the next few years, we
experimented on wasp subjects. We tested what they would eat, how
they functioned, if we could train them, would they return to a
more human-like state, and a variety of other ideas we got from
watching all of those zombie movies.

A few of them became almost like pets. Well,
pets that would prefer to eat you. Pets that couldn’t be touched.
We developed a fondness for them anyway.

In the end, we experimented on what was the
most humane way to euthanize them. Their souls beg for peace. Their
souls wanted to move on, to complete their journey to the
afterlife. But the souls were unable to leave as long as their
bodies were in the semi-living state of wasp.

Our experiments with the wasps have taught
us quite a bit about the junction of soul and body. The human soul
is only as important as the physical body it lives within. The
physical body can easily survive without the soul, but the soul
cannot find peace until the physical body is at rest.

I could go on and on. Souls are fascinating
to shamans. In the last four years, I’ve learned more about souls
than I did in the twenty-plus years studying the shaman path. I’ll
put souls on my list of things to talk about.

This entry was supposed to be about wasps --
what they are like, what they eat, how they are dangerous, and how
to kill them. Back to the task at hand.

After the initial transformation, wasps tend
to be more aggressive and hostile. It’s almost as if they are angry
for their transformation and they want you to do something to fix
it. Or want me to do something to fix it. They bite, kick, punch,
and scream.

George is impervious to their bite. We have
seen people turn to wasps after being bitten, but, at least here,
it’s fairly rare. According to everything I read before the
Internet went down, direct blood-to-blood interaction turns on The
146 in those who aren’t making The 146-protein. In those who are
already making the protein, the replication goes into overdrive, as
if it’s competing with The 146 in the saliva of the biter. People
convert quickly.

I believe that we had such a massive
conversion here because the Pen housed so many hard cases -- people
who’d spent most of their lives in prison eating The 146-modified
food and getting 146 vaccines. For the first couple of years or so,
George and I spent all day, every day, killing wasps. It’s hard to
believe, but it’s been more than a year since we’ve even seen a
wasp.

While movies play up the fact that wasps can
infect you, the true danger of the wasp is their violence. Granted,
we’ve just studied ex-prisoners at New Mexico’s most violent
prison. Still, wasps seem to love to kill. Because they eat only
living tissue, death comes to their food late. They kill a lot more
people than they eat. They kill for the sport of it or even kill
because they are bored. The amount that they kill is one of the
least human things about them.

We haven’t seen a wasp use an implement --
knife, gun, shovel, etc. We tried to train them to use tools, but
most of our training was ineffective. We were able to get them to
take up the asphalt and cement in the exercise yard. The wasps
mostly did that with their bare hands as a way to vent their
violence and boredom.

Probably the most important thing we’ve
learned is how to kill a wasp. In movies, the standard line is:
“Remove the head or destroy the brain.”

That only sort of works. The 146-protein has
already destroyed the wasp’s brain. When we had a lot wasps around,
we did a few autopsies. Their frontal lobes are like gelatin with
the consistency of oatmeal. The only portion of the brain that’s
functioning is the back of the head and the deep recesses of the
brain. Wasps can see and have reptilian drives.

Bashing it in the forehead doesn’t affect
the wasp at all. You can’t kill a wasp by destroying his or her
brain. It’s already destroyed.

Removing the head works. BUT, you must
separate the head from the body and keep it separated. You should
have seen George’s face the time we chopped off the head and then
tried to bury them together. To our horror, the body reanimated
when its head came close. George picked up the head like a
basketball and hurled it toward the rusted basketball hoops. He
laughed when the head went through the rim.

As an aside -- one of the joys of my life
now is making George laugh. He still has that hearty belly laugh.
His laugh reminds me of a time when things were normal, when we
didn’t live in hell. George is a good friend to have.

We’ve found that the most human way to
dispatch a wasp is to:

1. Remove the head;
   

2. Light the body on fire;
   

3. Bury the brain.
   

We’ve tried burning the brain, but the wasp
screams as if it is in terrible pain.

The ancient cleansing agents -- fire, soap
and salt -- work the very best. Wasps will walk right into a fire
and burn to death. The first two years, we kept the fires going day
and night for protection. Of course, we had a lot of corpses and
refuse to burn.

Salt works in two ways. When we were able to
get the wasps to eat something really salty -- pickles or even
salted flesh -- the salt worked from the inside out. The wasp comes
apart from the inside out. Salt injections work better than salt
baths, but that’s mostly because it’s hard to force a wasp to stay
still long enough to absorb the salt.

Wasps that have been around a while fear
salt. A two-inch line of salt in a doorway is enough to keep a
colony of wasps out. We’ve been able to keep the Pen free of roving
bands of wasps by salting the doorways.

11/07/2056

I’ve skipped a day. I hate to admit it, but
I don’t know if I am up to the task of documenting everything that
has happened. I guess that’s why it’s taken me so long to get
started.

I’ve never felt this kind of insecurity.
Ever. I’ve always been a person who moved forward -- either at a
rapid pace or one step at a time. I never understood why people
were afraid to change, or for that matter, afraid to do anything.
Insecurity was as bizarre a concept as human beings dying.

My great-great grandmother tasked me with
this challenge. She manipulated my entire life, including going to
the United World College, so that I would be prepared for this
moment in time. I should be ready to do this thing, ready to
document the downfall of humankind.

It’s only been a few days,
and I am struggling. I hate this Remington. I hate the way the keys
punch at the pages. I hate that the letters don’t match up evenly.
I hate the loose paper roller that makes the pages slip. And the
dirt and dust and broken keys and
…