The Legend City, Emir Bozkurthanoglu [best book club books for discussion .txt] 📗

THE LEGEND CITY


If you lived there, you would say that it’s beautiful. If you did not, you would say
that it’s a mystery. If you heard of it for the first time, you would want to know more about it. The truth is, it cannot be explained, it cannot be written, and it cannot be sketched. Now I know what you are thinking. What on Earth is “it”?

“It” is Cidade de Costa Janeiro. A metropolis that is the capital of an unnamed
island. It is really unnamed, because no one ever bothered to name it. Cidade de Costa Janeiro, Portuguese for “the city of January coast”, was a major city found 229 years earlier by a Brazilian explorer who decided to visit a volcanic island 1,200 miles off the South American coast. A river passed through the unnamed island, which was named “New January River” by the visitor who dedicated most of the names in the island to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro. Rio was almost completely annihilated by a coup six to seven years ago.
The explorer fled Brazil and spent most of his life on the mighty oceans of Atlantic
and Pacific. After coming to the unnamed island, and exploring the shores of the New January River. He decided to build a settlement where The Pacific and The New January met. The city was named Cidade de Costa Janeiro, and 39,000 people moved to the city. After 229 years of continuous development, there were 1.6 million people who resided in the city.

One late-Spring evening, an earthquake, measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale, struck
the city like thousands of atomic bombs were dropped simultaneously. For between 100 seconds and 2 minutes, the city shook like it was put on a rocking chair. Fifteen minutes later, the local TV-station reported 65,000 casualties. Only four months ago, they had found out that the city lied on an extremely dangerous subduction-type fault zone. Thirty minutes after the earthquake, a 58-foot tsunami flooded the central business district of Cidade de Costa Janeiro.
The casualty numbers were doubled. Over 150,000 lied dead or maimed. The people who had a raft paddled through the downtown district left in silence. Without breaking the tranquility, they searched for people in need of help. Infants were the only ones crying, or even making a sound. With broken pipes and gas lines, hundreds of structures caught on fire, but it was impossible for the fire department to reach these buildings.
The fragile buildings burnt until they partially or entirely collapsed. Over the night,
thousands more died, because they didn’t receive the medical treatment they needed to survive. Prof. Francine Worcester from the University of New Orleans, and Prof. Jack Tucker from the University of Southern California came to Cidade de Costa Janeiro to assess the damage. The day after the earthquake, the tsunami receded from the city back to the ocean, taking most of the debris with it.
Professors walked through downtown that day, looking at the destruction and
the calamity from the quake. As they walk, they notice that some of the buildings sunk into the ground. They understand that the ground started to liquefy and turned to mud, causing the buildings to actually sink. The professors also know that liquefaction occurs in landfill, meaning that most of the structures were built on man-made fill.
The professors interviewed four people the next day. The survivors told their stories about the earthquake and the tsunami waves. After the interviews, the professors talked to each other about the interviews. Worcester asked, “Did you notice something about their eyes?” Tucker replied, “I did. All of the people we interviewed had a dark golden eye with a tiny red spot in it.” Worcester said, “We need to get blood sample from these survivors.”
Tucker and Worcester received blood samples from fifty-three survivors in two
days. They sent the samples to the Santa Anna Medical Center in the central business district for analysis. The doctors analyzed the samples and sent the shocking results to the professors. The results said that this was a more violent case of St. Louis Encephalitis caused by infected mosquitoes from the destroyed farms and fields nearby.
To confirm the analysis, the professors sent more blood samples to another hospital outside Laredo, Texas. The second analysis had even worse results. This infection targeted the ears from where it targeted the brain. Because of two heavy shields of bone, the infection could not travel. However, the virus sent peculiar vibrations into the brain, ordering the “control room of the body” to do things, also affecting vital bones like the sternum and the patella, causing infected people to most likely become paraplegic and broken bones in the chest area in one year. Femur bones would be equally affected and weak. Worcester said, “The virus is controlling their body!!” Tucker replied, “Yes, like zombies!”
Worcester and Tucker sent mails to the universities they work in Los Angeles and
New Orleans about the discovery, but they soon realized they had made a big mistake. After seeing the mails, the two universities sent mails to other colleges and the mails eventually ended up in the District of Columbia. In two weeks, the United States, Canada, and Mexico all cut their connections with Cidade de Costa Janeiro, and the city was isolated. The universities of Southern California and New Orleans sent plane tickets to the professors to come back to the U.S. Worcester and Tucker reluctantly agreed to leave the city.
The next day, the professors came to the airport for the very last flight out of Cidade de Costa Janeiro until there was a cure for the infection. Worcester and Tucker quickly showed their tickets, but they were rejected and they were told that the flights were already canceled. The police soon came to the airport and asked both of the professors to come with them. They agreed and they got in the police car. The cops brought them to an abandoned warehouse in a suburb of the city. As the police were walking with the professors, Worcester’s heart was beating two times faster than normal and her brain was writing hundreds of thousands of questions as she slowly walked in the silent hallway, not realizing that she was firmly holding Tucker’s hand who was equally confused.
Lieutenant Samuel Bow led the two afraid professors into a room with a light bulb that had little power left. Bow, who never spoke during the trip to the warehouse, released 3 dreaded words that would immediately bring fear and confusion to an average person: “Please, sit down.” Tucker and Worcester, who started to sweat in the tiny room two levels underground, looked at Lt. Bow and sat on the two rusty chairs. Without any interruption, Bow, and other police officers, brought the two chairs together and tied Worcester and Tucker with a heavy duty tape. Before leaving, Bow said that he would be back in less than ten minutes. After the large door shut, Worcester screamed as hard as she could: “Let us out of this stinking room!!!” The room was so small that Worcester’s screams made no echo. Tucker calmly said, “Francine, we need to get out of this room as soon as possible. I think these cops are infected with the encephalitis!”
Worcester agreed to the theory. The professors were very scared as they were waiting for
the dreadful moment the door would slowly open. Worcester said, “Jack, they can do anything! They might interrogate us, torture us, or even kill us!!” Tucker nodded with a fearful expression on his face and perspiration running around his eyes, nose, and mouth. Five minutes later, the thick, metal door started to move. The attention of both of the professors were on the door.
The door partially opened. From the darkness of the door’s shadow, a tall, skinny person
entered the room. The person quickly rushed towards the chairs and he removed the tape off the professors. He soon announced his name, “Allow me to introduce myself, my name is William Hamilton and I am from the University of Kentucky.” Millions of questions were popping up on the professor’s heads who were too distracted to see the person before them. Hamilton continued, “Don’t worry. I’m going to free you guys and we’ll get out of this horrible city.”
Tucker and Worcester did not want to believe him, but Hamilton might have been their last chance. Hamilton began telling them what he knew, “The police walked with me in the hallway, and I heard your screams. I sneaked towards the door, but I saw that they had two syringes. I think that they were going to inject the infection into you.” Worcester replied, “You mean they were going to infect us?” Hamilton replied by slowly nodding. Worcester loudly gasped and she closed her mouth by tightly grabbing it with her right hand.

Tucker whispered, “Hush! What’re you trying to do, get us captured again?!” Hamilton
replied, “No, but you will if you don’t stop talking!!!” Worcester, Tucker, and Hamilton silently walked across the hallway and found the exit. As soon as the three opened the door, Worcester screamed as Lt. Bow and one of his infected colleagues were looking at them. Hamilton quickly removed a gun from the holster he had been hiding and shot the two surprised police officers.
Worcester and Tucker were both horrified as they looked at the blood stains on the
infected men and Hamilton, who was still holding the gun with a long silencer at the tip of it. Tucker screamed at Hamilton, “William, are you out of your mind?! That was a first-degree murder!” As he was putting the gun back in the holster, Hamilton responded, “If I hadn’t, those corpses would have probably been the three of us!” He stopped for a minute and then continued, “We have to get to the plane in eight hours or we will get caught. If you want to get out of here, you need to come with me!” Worcester nor Tucker did not say anything but they walked with Hamilton.
Hamilton said, “We can take this car to get to the airport. It’s completely bulletproof and
it has enough amount of fuel in it.” Hamilton drove the car and they were three kilometers outside downtown in just five minutes. All of the sudden, Worcester heard popping sounds which became louder and louder by the second. Finally, the professors heard four explosion sounds as Worcester ducked. Hamilton shouted, “They’ve got machine guns!”
Tucker responded, “Look at the trouble you got us all in! Now we’re all going to die!”
Worcester began slowly weeping and Hamilton handed Tucker a gun and said, “Use this!” Tucker replied, “What the heck is this?” Hamilton said, “This is a submachine gun. Open the sunroof and shoot!” Tucker shouted, “I’m not going to use a gun! Besides, what if the car is bulletproof?!” Hamilton also began to shout, “Just shut up and open the stinking sunroof already!”
Tucker did as he was instructed