Denver International Airport hummed with the usual bustle of major departures. Nicolas Bar, twenty-eight years old, stood before the flight information display, his satchel of medical documents clutched against his chest. The screen read: FLIGHT AF247 – DESTINATION ABUJA – BOARDING IMMEDIATE.
He had come alone, just as he had lived his twenty-eight years: with quiet determination and a solitude he had never truly questioned. His Denver apartment would remain empty for six months. The rent was paid. The plants given to his neighbor. There was nothing to regret.
The attendant at the counter checked his passport, the Nigerian visa, then the accreditation letter from Médecins Sans Frontières. She stamped the boarding pass with a sharp, definitive sound.
"Have a good trip, Doctor Bar."
Nicolas nodded without answering and walked down the jet bridge.
The flight lasted eleven hours. Nicolas alternated between fitful sleep and rereading the reports MSF had sent him. The situation in northeastern Nigeria had deteriorated considerably. Boko Haram incursions had intensified, striking entire villages, displacing populations, leaving behind wounded that local medical facilities could no longer handle. Columns of data that represented, behind their administrative coldness, lives hanging by a thread.
At Abuja airport, an MSF team was waiting for him: Moreau, a French logistics coordinator; Marianne, a Belgian nurse in her forties; and Samuel, a Nigerian driver with a weathered face. Introductions were brief. Moreau explained that a convoy was leaving in two hours for Maiduguri, where a temporary medical camp had been established for displaced populations and the wounded from recent clashes.
"You'll have time to rest in the vehicle," he said, handing Nicolas a bulletproof vest. "Here, we wear it all the time. No exceptions."
Nicolas put it on, adjusted the straps, and immediately felt the heat building against his chest.
The convoy of three white all-terrain vehicles left Abuja. The journey took nearly fourteen hours, punctuated by technical stops and military checkpoints. Nicolas dozed intermittently, his head jostled by the bumps of the ruined road.
Dawn was breaking over Maiduguri when the convoy reached its destination. The medical camp consisted of half a dozen white tents arranged in a semicircle, surrounded by sandbags. Two Nigerian military vehicles were parked at a distance.
Nicolas got out, his legs numb. The air smelled of dust, smoke, and that organic odor he recognized immediately from his experience as a doctor: human suffering on a large scale. Wounds. Infections. Blood.
Doctor Hélène Vasseur emerged from the nearest tent. Pale complexion, deep dark circles under her eyes. She introduced herself as the camp's medical director.
"You're Doctor Bar. Good. We need every available pair of hands. The arrivals of wounded have tripled in the last forty-eight hours. The fighting has moved closer. Follow me."
She turned on her heel before he could even respond.
What he saw in the tent took his breath away. Dozens of bodies lying on mats, some on makeshift stretchers. Men, women, children. Gunshot wounds. Fractured limbs. Burns. Faces drained of all expression. The smell was even stronger: antiseptic, sweat, pus, dried blood, necrotic tissue.
Nicolas put down his bag, pulled on gloves, and got to work.
The following hours blurred into an indistinct mass of medical gestures. He cleaned wounds, placed sutures, administered antibiotics and painkillers. He immobilized an open tibia fracture on a man in his fifties who did not moan once, his teeth clenched on a piece of wood. He tried to comfort a little girl of six or seven whose left arm was nothing more than a bandaged stump, her immense eyes fixed on him with silent terror.
The sun turned the inside of the tents into a furnace. No one complained. No one spoke more than necessary.
At midday, a lull allowed the team to have a quick meal. Nicolas sat on an overturned crate and ate mechanically.
"Is this your first mission?"
Hélène Vasseur had approached without him hearing her.
"Yes. First field mission."
She nodded slowly. "You'll get used to it very quickly."
She stood up and went back toward the tents. Nicolas followed her.
The afternoon brought a new flood of wounded. A convoy of villagers had been intercepted by an armed group. Nicolas saw an old man arrive whose chest was pierced by a bullet wound, each breath producing a sucking sound indicative of a pneumothorax. He worked for over an hour to stabilize him, inserting a chest tube with the camp's limited resources.
Then another emergency. A child of about eight, carried by his mother, had received metal shrapnel in his abdomen during an explosion. Nicolas and Hélène worked side by side. They managed to extract the most accessible fragments, but the internal hemorrhage was too advanced. The child died on the makeshift table at 6:47 PM, without having regained consciousness. The mother let out a long, heart-wrenching cry that seemed to suspend time for a second, before the ordinary noise of the camp covered it again.
Nicolas removed his soiled gloves. Threw them away. Washed his hands. He thought of nothing. He could not afford to think.
Night had fallen two hours earlier when he was finally able to step away and catch his breath. Moreau, the logistics coordinator, approached and handed him a cup of coffee.
"Here. It's the real stuff."
Nicolas accepted. The coffee was scalding, bitter, and probably the best thing he had ever drunk.
"How are you feeling?" asked Moreau.
"Tired."
"That's normal. Tomorrow will be worse. And the day after, even worse. Then you'll get used to it. Not to the suffering—no one ever really gets used to that. But to staying functional."
Nicolas took another sip.
"The child, this afternoon..."
"I know. I saw." Moreau was silent for a moment. "We do what we can with what we have. That's all."
A distant sound reached them, carried by the wind. Muffled detonations, one after another.
"Fighting," said Moreau. "About twenty kilometers away, maybe less. They're getting closer every day."
Nicolas looked in the direction of the sound. Only the darkness of the savanna and, very far away, a faint orange glow.
That night, he slept in twenty-minute stretches. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the face of the dead child. Every time he opened them, he heard the detonations, like a storm drawing inexorably closer.
The third day began like the two previous ones. Wake-up before dawn. Bitter coffee. Stock check. First patients. Nicolas had learned to recognize certain faces: the little girl with the amputated arm who had stopped trembling when he approached her; the old man with the chest wound whose breathing had stabilized; a young woman seven months pregnant whose baby seemed, by some miracle, to be healthy.
At two in the afternoon, he was changing the old man's bandage when he heard a high-pitched, prolonged whistling sound approaching at terrifying speed.
The old man looked up at him. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second. In the patient's eyes, Nicolas saw what he now recognized: the resignation of those who have already lost everything.
The explosion occurred at the entrance to the camp.
The blast threw him against a pile of crates. His skull hit something hard. A moment of absolute white, then the world returned in fragments. The tent had partially collapsed. Dust floated in thick clouds. Shouts rose from everywhere, in English, in Hausa, in other languages. And above it all: automatic weapons fire, continuous and steady.
Nicolas got up. His head was spinning. His hand at his temple came away red, but the wound seemed superficial. Around him, bodies littered the floor of the tent. The old man with the chest wound lay on his side, eyes open and fixed, a new gaping wound in his neck.
Nicolas crawled to the entrance and risked a look. Armed figures were moving between the tents, shooting at anything that moved. The Nigerian military vehicles were burning. The MSF flag hung in tatters.
He spotted Hélène Vasseur about thirty meters away. She was running toward the storage tent, bent double. A burst of gunfire caught her mid-stride. Her body collapsed to the ground and did not move again.
Nicolas had no time to react. Two armed men were approaching his position. He threw himself backward, frantically scanning the space. Nothing. Only bodies, overturned crates, broken vials.
Another explosion shook the ground. Shrapnel tore through the canvas inches from his face. Shouts nearby, then footsteps moving away.
Nicolas remained motionless, holding his breath, blood from his temple dripping slowly onto his shirt. The minutes stretched into an eternity of pure terror. Intermittent gunfire. Orders shouted in a guttural language. Sounds of vehicles. New explosions, farther away. Then a lull in the shooting.
He dared to move. Crawled toward a tear in the canvas and looked outside.
What he saw was the last thing his eyes recorded.
Less than twenty meters away, a man in camouflage fatigues held an RPG-7 rocket launcher on his shoulder. He was aiming it precisely in the direction of the tent where Nicolas was.
Their eyes met. The man wore an expression of intense concentration, nothing more. Simply a craftsman aiming true.
Nicolas saw the man squeeze the trigger. Saw the flame burst forth. Saw the projectile launch.
He had no time to close his eyes. No time to scream. No time to think.
The shell struck him full in the face.
A white light, blinding, total, erasing everything. The camp. His twenty-eight years of life. His medical studies. His Denver apartment. The orphanage. Everything vanished in a fraction of a second.
The body of Nicolas Bar, a young volunteer doctor with MSF, ceased to exist.
Around his remains, the fight continued. More shells were fired. More lives cut down. The MSF medical camp near Maiduguri became, in a few minutes, a smoking charnel house.
Silence lasted. How long, it was impossible to say. Perhaps a second. Perhaps a thousand years. Time had no meaning anymore.
Then something changed. A perception of being. Simply of being. Without form. Without limit. Without anchor.
Nicolas Bar regained consciousness.
He tried to understand his situation. He tried to move. The very concept of movement was strange, for he had no body to move. Yet he had the perception that he could direct his attention, orient this floating consciousness toward what surrounded him.
He found himself in an immense space. Infinitely vast. Around him, in every direction, stars. Countless twinkling stars.
He was in the form of a floating soul.
Worry rose within him, diffuse, disturbing.
He was dead.
The thought imposed itself with perfect clarity. The shell. The explosion full in the face. Truly dead. And now he found himself... where? In some form of afterlife? In a parallel dimension?
He stayed there, floating in that starry immensity. He realized he could see the stars more closely by focusing his attention on them. One of them grew in his perception: a dwarf planet, dusty. He averted his attention. Another star pulsed with a bluish, cold light. A third shone with a warm, golden glow. There were millions of them, stretching out in all directions.
The question looped endlessly: do I still exist? The answer seemed to be yes, since he could formulate it. But this fragile certainty did not lessen his torment.
Time passed again.
He contented himself with simply being there, a silent witness to the starry immensity.
That is when it happened.
From one of the stars, a light burst forth. Blinding. Absolute.
His consciousness reacted as a physical body would have. Instinctively, he brought his hands to his face.
There was only light.
Then, without transition, the light disappeared.
Or rather: Nicolas disappeared from the light.
Nicolas woke up with a start, his head sweaty, his eyes wide open.
He had already experienced death—struck by the shell, an almost gentle transition in his memory. But this second experience had confronted him with something far more terrifying: nonexistence. The fear of the void. For even in that space between the stars, he felt he existed. Beyond, in the light, he was no longer certain. He did not know what there had been. He could not know. He only knew that he was terrified.
His chest rose and fell with the jerky rhythm of his breathing. He was lying on a solid surface. His heart was beating. His lungs were breathing.
He was alive.
At least he supposed so. He had a body. Physical sensations. By all the criteria he knew as a doctor, he was alive.
But how? Was it a dream? Had he not been killed on the battlefield? Had he been saved?
The questions swirled without answer. He waited, let his breathing return to a regular rhythm, then raised his eyes to observe his surroundings.
A single question gnawed at his brain: where was he?