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fectiveness very quickly. As I have also already said, one of the benefits of my position was that both my family and I had access to regular supplies, which is why were safe when compared to civilians, doctors and even lower-level government officials, all of whom wore utterly ineffective surgical masks in the misguided belief that they would protect them.
And so, wearing this special equipment, I went to Huoshenshan with Corporal Meng.
Whatever you want to call that place, it is not a hospital. Sure, the entrance looks like a hospital and in the ward at the front of the complex, there are what appear to be normal medical beds. There, thousands of infected patients lie, all of them in the early stages of the disease. I walked along those long, white corridors next to Corporal Meng, his angular face dispassionate in his military fatigues, and saw hundreds upon hundreds of identical hospital beds on which squirmed the terrified and diseased inhabitants of Wuhan. Their cries and pleas haunt me in the long nights in which I now am unable to sleep.
But this was merely the beginning. Eventually the Corporal took me to the rear of this front section. There, locked metal gates led to what he called the "middle section". The patients in the front are unaware of its existence. It is there that the more advanced cases are kept, in what most closely resembles a mental asylum.
Immediately upon entering this part of Huoshenshan I was struck by the dim lighting and stench of vomit and human waste. Here the unfortunates roamed freely, their minds gradually disintegrating in endless panic attacks and psychotic episodes. Here too there were no more doctors, merely gorilla-faced men in black uniforms who belonged to some secret branch of the military police I had never heard of.
They appeared to have been selected for their cruelty, for they beat and degraded the patients in the most sadistic manner. Many of the inmates had regressed to childlike states and lay on the floor weeping like infants and begging for compassion that they did not receive. There was cruel pleasure in the eyes of these thugs as they brutalised the unfortunates. They beat them with batons, sprayed pepper spray into their eyes and kicked them with their steel-capped boots. As I was from military intelligence, the guards did not even attempt to hide their activities. They even invited me to join; in every way, they treated me as one of them.
Yes, one of them. I stood in the grey staff bathroom of Huoshenshan and looked into a cheap mirror and asked myself — is this really what you are? Are you really like them?
But the violence was not merely an expression of sadism, for the poor inmates were not there to be cared for.
They were there to work.
There was one more set of doors, and beyond them lay what the Corporal called the "Core". And it was there that I saw it — piles and piles of dead bodies, stacked on top of one another all the way to the ceiling. There were men, women and children, elderlies and toddlers, rich and poor, beautiful and misshapen, proud and humble.
They were all of them dead. Our Agent made no distinction between any of them.
I gasped when the Corporal led me to the Core. I cannot count how many there were, but it was many, many thousands. And in the midst of the piles of corpses was a kind of path, and I heard a roaring sound in the distance. The miserable patients from the middle section picked up the dead and carried and dragged them away into the dark, even as the guards beat them with truncheons.
It took me a little while before I grasped what was happening. I simply could not believe what lay at the end of that path in the Core.
It was an enormous furnace, with great fires roaring within.
One by one, their minds destroyed and their bodies twisted, the dying men and women carried the corpses to the furnace and cast them inside in a doomed attempt to hide the dreadful truth. I saw several of them collapse from exhaustion only for their lifeless bodies to be added to the mountains of corpses on both sides. In a seemingly endless li