World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

Oliveira, the emaciated, drug-addicted white man “from the edge of the world,”
is their guest, mascot, or prisoner.]
I was still a doctor, that’s what I told myself. Yes, I was rich, and getting richer all the time, but at
least my success came from performing necessary medical procedures. I wasn’t just slicing and
dicing little teenage noses or sewing Sudanese “pintos” onto sheboy pop divas. 1 I was still a
doctor, I was still helping people, and if it was so “immoral” to the self-righteous, hypocritical
North, why did their citizens keep coming?
The package arrived from the airport an hour before the patient, packed in ice in a plastic picnic
cooler. Hearts are extremely rare. Not like livers or skin tissue, and certainly not like kidneys,
which, after the “presumed consent” law was passed, you could get from almost any hospital or
morgue in the country.
Was it tested?
For what? In order to test for something, you have to know what you’re looking for. We didn’t know
about Walking Plague then. We were concerned with conventional ailments—hepatitis or
HIV/AIDS—and we didn’t even have time to test for those.
Why is that?
Because the flight had already taken so long. Organs can’t be kept on ice forever. We were already
pushing our luck with this one.
Where had it come from?
China, most likely. My broker operated out of Macau. We trusted him. His record was solid. When
he assured us that the package was “clean,” I took him at his word; I had to. He knew the risks
involved, so did I, so did the patient. Herr Muller, in addition to his conventional heart ailments,
was cursed with the extremely rare genetic defect of dextrocardia with situs in-versus. His organs
lay in their exact opposite position; the liver was on the left side, the heart entryways on the right,
and so on. You see the unique situation we were facing. We couldn’t have just transplanted a
conventional heart and turned it backward. It just doesn’t work that way. We needed another fresh,
healthy heart from a “donor” with exactly the same condition. Where else but China could we find
that kind of luck?
It was luck?
[Smiles.] And “political expediency.” I told my broker what I needed, gave him the specifics, and
sure enough, three weeks later I received an e-mail simply titled “We have a match.”
So you performed the operation.