The road was flat and non-descript when I woke up. Brown, brown, flash of green. Brown, off-white building. Brown, brown, brown again. I rubbed my eyes. Wakefulness returned fitfully, like a thief not sure he’s finished casing a joint.

Amritsar was driving. She looked beautiful in the morning light, concentrated and serious. I stretched surreptitiously and looked behind me. Hamed and Suzanna were still asleep back there. I wanted to stay asleep. I wanted to not have to wake up, to not face the day.

The mountains were behind us. Back there, too, the small village I couldn’t even remember. The drive had been silent from the start. The end of a mission, but not good.

Humanity had the chance to completely eradicate the disease. No more children would ever suffer the crippling, the pain. Lives healed and limbs strong. And it was so easy. A few drops. A few drops each, and the kids would only be at risk of getting shot in some blood feud, blown up by a bomb, burned in one of the innumerable fires that live behind the smoky burning lamps that extract a small hacking cough as payment. Not to mention malnutrition, violence of all kinds, corruption so staggering one wondered how any human could survive with their sanity intact, and a lack of economic possibility so profound that smuggling was considered the gold standard of careers. Risk of dying in a shootout with officials and/or rivals notwithstanding.

The car droned on. Two weeks of this. Of practically living in this non-descript box on wheels. A white Toyota Corolla of indeterminate age. A few kanji characters on the rear trunk lid. Faded now from the high, dry, Eurasian sun.

Amritsar. I still couldn’t remember her real name.

I drowsed a bit. Sleep beckoned again, but stayed without reach. Amritsar, she of the golden smile and sullen stare. Last minute addition to the team, documents closely held tight in her plastic bag inside the jacket-robe. Did her job conscientiously.

Her presence ate away at Hamed, who didn’t know much about women from what I could tell. He kept making the same lame jokes and trying to jolly her in small ways. I didn’t know her background. Didn’t know her family. Didn’t know her romantic history. Didn’t know her religion. But I could tell, in fact knew, from the very first second that we’d met and she’d introduced herself to us, paper vouchsafing held forward like a cross to hold off vampires… this was not a woman who would ever enjoy being jollied.

The last village had been so bad we’d called it off completely. We still had almost two hundred doses to distribute, but the gathering of the men around the small, angry one had signaled time on the enterprise. I wasn’t going to risk the team for these people. Satellite phone of not, by the time any help arrived it would have been far too late. Many quick salaams, much rushed bowing, and back in the car and rolling out without even the clipboards.

Would we go back to get them? No. No, we would not.

Amritsar had hopped behind the wheel the second the situation started going South. I was smiling and saying in pidgin how regrettable it was that the day was late and we had to leave. Hamed and Suzanne collecting the small fold-up table, the doses. Throwing them in the trunk. Me still talking. Keep talking. The men turning towards us in a group; a bad, bad, sign. The elder listening politely to me with a vacant, gap-toothed smile. And then a flurry of checking that the others were in the car, me jumping in as the men, twenty or thirty strong, with a slow fire of hatred behind their eyes, walking up the short stretch of rock-strewn dust towards us. In the car and Amritsar driving out quickly and without too much drama. Me surprised. I hadn’t even known that she could drive at all.

I waited ten minutes. Ten minutes of silence, of each of us throwing thoughts against the wall and having them bounce back, over and over. Why bother? Why were we here anyway?

“We’re going back, we’re done” I finally said. The silence continued all through the long path down the hills, the night flashed with truck lights and hairpins.

Amritsar drove the whole way, through the night. Suzanne was quiet. Hamed tried to chat with Amritsar, who didn’t listen. I spent the night in the front seat thinking about whether or not the time was right to pop the cassette back in. Goo Goo Dolls, a tape that had washed up from 1990s America into this beige corduroy world that rocked on shot shocks. “Name”, a song that Suzanne and I had sung along to at high volume, Hamed and Amritsar grinning despite themselves two weeks or eons ago. I fell asleep in that rocking passenger chair still not having made up my mind if group morale would be helped or hurt by hearing some decades-old top 40 hitmaking. The people… The anger was oppressive. Feeling the hate directed at you simply by being who you were – an outsider, a not-from-here. It was not frightening so much as exhausting.

And now it was morning and we were in the flats. Brown, then green, then brown again. Dusty fields and cheap cinderblock houses.

I must have dozed off again.

I play this part in my mind. A couple times a day, an hour, a minute.

I must have dozed off, because I don’t recall how we got there. Only that Amritsar was looking at the policeman steadily. He rapped on her window with the butt of his assault rifle, said something I couldn’t hear. I wiped my eyes blearily and the rear door had opened and Hamed was standing in front of the cop, pushing into him somehow, although I couldn’t see his face from the angle of where I was sitting I could see the way the policeman pulled back before pushing forward and swinging the rifle it a short, sharp arc, but Hamed put his hand on it, and I remember distinctly, at that very moment, the very second I saw that… His hand going onto the rifle stock and grabbing it, I remember thinking, “No.”

That’s all, just, “No.” I didn’t think of calling out, and I didn’t think of leaping out of the car and yelling, distracting, changing the dynamic. I didn’t, in short, think of the things a team leader, a real team leader, should think of. I just thought, “No.”

And the sharp crack of the gun punctuated the thought.

And I could see Hamed crumple down.

And then I was outside, of a sudden. And I was staring at the kid in the policeman’s uniform. The kid, scared and defiant. Angry and sad. And I was saying “Salaam, salaam,” over and over. Like we were going to have a cup of tea together. Us, the weary travelers and him, the friendly officer of the law. And there would be smiles and nods at the small misunderstandings, and we would go on our way, playing our part in one of the unsung heroics of our time, the eradication of disease, and the sun would shine on a green and verdant world.