Free Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill

bound to stem the flow of blood. They came on ox carts, on ponies, on litters dragged by their relatives. The hospital staff gave them generous doses of opium to repress any sensations, good or bad, and did their best to clean the wounds. Many had lost too much blood or were too shredded to keep alive. Those who survived did so mainly of their own volition. Every few days, Dr. Santiago would come by to amputate whatever was unsavable and perform whatever miracles it took to give people another chance at life.
    There were no shifts at Kilometer 8. Staff slept during the rare moments of quiet, day or night. They cooked for those patients whose relatives weren't camped in the wards. They kept them full of a painkiller they knew would leave them addicted, and they stretchered the deceased up the slope to the cave of the dead, a crematorium on the skirt of the mountain. At the end of her incredibly long first day, Dtui estimated she'd lost four kilograms. Singsai, the senior medic, told her if she stayed a month she'd be so skinny they'd be able to store her in the closet with the mops. She enjoyed that image.
    It had been a comparatively good day. Only one lady had made the journey to the cave of the dead. Dtui had personally been able to save the life, perhaps temporarily, of a ten-year-old child, and at two in the morning the residents at Kilometer 8 were all stoned into a restful sleep. Dtui and Singsai sat in front of the long rectangular room that formed the main ward. They were too fatigued to sleep, so they gazed up at the stars that showed themselves so rarely in the northeastern sky that the medic saw their appearance now as an omen.
    "Days like this make you realize how stupid you are," Dtui said.
    "You aren't stupid at all, Nurse," Singsai assured her. He was such a brown-skinned little man his words seemed to come out of the darkness from a floating set of teeth. He reminded Dtui of the mummy in the president's house.
    "Okay, perhaps not stupid exactly, but ... lacking."
    "You've done a lot of good today."
    "But there's so much more I didn't know how to do. It's so frustrating. It makes me appreciate your Dr. Santiago and my own boss that much more. They do this stuff day in, day out, year after year, saving lives as if it were as natural as breathing."
    "I hope to be a surgeon someday," Singsai told her, looking at the sky as if that were the place such a hope might hang. He was in his fifties and unconnected so Dtui knew he had little chance.
    She scrambled for a change of subject. "Do you ever have any cases here that aren't emergencies?"
    "One or two malarials," he said. "We've a little boy with chronic diarrhea. They say that's the biggest killer of kids in the whole of Southeast Asia. Most of them don't make it, but we're fighting for this chap. He's been lucky. Oh, and then there's Mrs. Duaning."
    "What's wrong with her?"
    "Nobody knows. She's been in a coma for two weeks. We found her out on the road."
    "Nobody's come to claim her?"
    "No."
    "Then how do you know her name?"
    "We don't, but we can tell she's Hmong. One of our Hmong interns christened her 'Duaning.' It means 'nuts.'"
    They went to visit Mrs. Nuts, who lay in a small block away from the others, where the non-life-threatening cases were billeted. She was on her back with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling and muttering.
    "What's she saying?" Dtui asked.
    "She only started speaking the day before yesterday. She says the same thing, over and over."
    Dtui leaned over her and listened. The old lady's voice seemed less gravelly than one would have expected from such a battered old crone. The words came from her mouth on a breath that smelt musty. "Have to feed Panoy," she said. "Have to feed Panoy."
    "You don't suppose Panoy's her name?"
    "This woman's? No. It isn't a very Hmong-sounding name." He pulled up the single blanket to cover her and her feet were momentarily exposed. Both Dtui and Singsai looked at them in amazement. "What the