Chapter 7: Los Baños

They moved south in the first week of May, a year almost to the day since Corregidor’s surrender, and the convoy that carried them—trucks, then a rail car packed tighter than any of them had ridden in since Bataan—delivered them by evening to a camp built on the grounds of a former agricultural college, low buildings scattered across open ground with none of Santo Tomas’s stone permanence and all of its wire.

“Less cover,” Dorothy said, taking in the layout within the first hour, the same flat assessment she’d have given a ward inventory. “Fewer buildings between us and whoever’s watching the fence. I don’t like what that means if anyone ever tries to get us out of here in a hurry.”

Connie said nothing for a long moment, scanning the tree line beyond the wire the way she’d once scanned Manila’s newspapers for what the censors had left uncut. “Further from Manila. Further from anyone my uncle knows here. I told you I didn’t know if the channel would survive the distance. I don’t think it has. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.”

“What does that mean for medicine?”

“It means Helen rations what she has and prays for a miracle instead of a shipment, same as everyone did before we ever had a channel at all.” Connie’s voice carried none of the composure she’d once managed so carefully; whatever she’d built at Santo Tomas across a year of careful risk, Los Baños had cut it loose in a single truck ride, and she felt the loss of it, Ruth understood, the way a person feels an amputation—phantom and constant and impossible to explain to anyone who hadn’t had the limb to begin with.

~ ☆ ~

The camp filled through that summer with a hunger sharper than anything Santo Tomas had produced, rations cut by a Japanese administration increasingly starved itself as the larger war turned against it, news of which reached the camp only in fragments—a captured newspaper, a guard’s careless remark, the internee committee’s practiced art of reading atmosphere for what words wouldn’t confirm. Whatever was happening beyond the wire, it was going badly for the men who held the wire, and camps like Los Baños paid the price of that failure in reduced rice, reduced medicine, reduced everything, long before anyone inside the fence understood why.

Helen’s ledger, carried south from Santo Tomas in a satchel she’d refused to let out of her sight on the journey, filled with numbers that no longer balanced by any measure, not even the brutal triage she’d perfected across two years of practice. Quinine ran out entirely in June. Sulfa followed in July. By August she was treating malaria and dysentery with rest, with what clean water the camp’s failing systems could provide, and with a kind of grim, watchful nursing that amounted, in the worst cases, to sitting with the dying so they wouldn’t do it alone.

“I used to think I was good at this,” she told Ruth, one exhausted evening, “because I could make hard choices without flinching. I understand now that was never the hard part. The hard part is watching a choice stop being available at all, and realizing all my discipline bought me was the ability to notice exactly when that happened.”