Copyright © 2017 Matthew Lloyd
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One Setting the Trap
Chapter Two A Favor
Chapter Three The Bruisers
Chapter Four ANI
Chapter Five When the Student is Ready…
Chapter Six Interconnectedness
Chapter Seven A Sunday Stroll
Chapter Eight First Contact
Chapter Nine Journey of Faith
Chapter Ten On a Mission
Chapter Eleven World of Hope
Chapter Twelve A Chance Encounter
Chapter Thirteen New Life
Chapter Fourteen Those that Sleep
Chapter Fifteen The Tourist
Chapter Sixteen A Glimpse into the Past
Chapter Seventeen A Morning’s Run
Chapter Eighteen Where to Start?
Chapter Nineteen Wrong Questions
Chapter Twenty Further Back
Chapter Twenty-One In Wrong Places
Chapter Twenty-Two A Past Revealed
Epilogue
Prologue
With a squeal of tires, the car shot out from the parking lot and into the evening traffic. It accelerated fast, the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor. The car swayed across both lanes, the inexperienced driver unable to keep a straight line at these speeds. The few other vehicles on the road on a Sunday evening flashed their lights or sounded their horns, but he noticed none of it. The drive would normally take about thirty minutes, but after the phone call from the police, thirty seconds was too long.
The lights were on red as he skidded around the next corner, he didn’t even attempt to slow down. He had to get back to his family as quickly as possible. The lights had barely gone to amber when he crossed the line, missing the back end of a bus by inches. He didn’t even notice.
With a white-knuckled grip on the wheel, he blasted along the main road, went through two more red lights and caused at least one accident as other cars swerved and braked in a frantic effort to avoid him. The road seemed to go on forever, a never-ending series of roads and junctions, screeching brakes and curses and crumpled metal, as though he was trapped in a perpetual video-game nightmare.
After what seemed like hours, he turned into his street, barely making the turn and leaving his tires smoking. The first thing he saw were the blue lights and so many of them. They flashed and reflected on the houses and trees, the other cars, the faces of the neighbors who’d come out to see the show.
He slammed to a halt some distance from his house, unable to get any closer. His seatbelt tangled as he tried to get out, tripping him so that he fell onto the sidewalk. Ignoring his scraped palms and bruised knees, he stood and ran towards his house. There were police officers everywhere, many with rifles in their hands. One of them spotted him, saw the pain in his face, and approached, arms spread wide to stop him.
“Doctor Riva?”
Riva tried to dodge around, but the police officer and two others stepped forward to restrain him.
“Are you Doctor Riva?”
“Let me through, where are my family?” He tried to pull away, but the officers held him fast, despite his frantic struggles.
“Please sir, if you just calm down and identify yourself we can help you.”
“Yes, yes! I’m Doctor Riva, Piero Riva, now where are my family?”
The officers didn’t speak, but led him over to an ambulance, inside was an adult covered in a blanket.
“I’m sorry doctor, but we need you to take a look.”
Before he even entered the ambulance, before they lifted the blanket off her pale face, before he saw the blood soaking through, he knew she was dead. His wife, his soulmate, ripped from him after only a decade. Still, they made him look, pulling back the blanket to end his world. She looked peaceful, as she did when she slept. In the early hours, when his mind was racing with ideas and he couldn’t sleep, he watched her. He watched her eyes move in REM sleep, heard almost formless words on her lips.
Piero’s knees gave way and he collapsed to the ground, crying and screaming, raging against the events which had led him here. He shouted and asked why? Why had he gone to work on a Sunday? Why didn’t he work from home? Why is she dead, why? He grabbed her still warm body and hugged her, thoughts building up a pressure inside his head. She’s not really dead, this is all a dream, he, they, will wake up soon and it will all be back to normal.
Like a bolt of lightning, a realization struck him. He stood and looked around in an almost mindless panic. His wife was alone in the ambulance. He leapt from the door, looked for other ambulances, and found none.
An officer approached, reached out to him. He shook off the grip and ran into the house, followed by several uniformed figures.
“Doctor Riva, please, your house is a crime scene…”
He dashed through the door, colliding with a white-suited woman and knocking her aside. Taking them three at a time, he dashed up the stairs and into the bedroom at the back of the house. The door almost broke off its hinges as he raced inside.
A paramedic was sitting on his daughter’s bed, checking her pulse and talking softly. She was crying silently, tears running down her pale face. Her eyes flicked across the room as he entered.
“Daddy?”
Her voice was weak, from the illness and the day’s trauma. He dashed across the room and around the first bed to the one that held her. He carefully sat down, the paramedic smiling in sympathy. Carefully, he put one arm around her, holding her as tight as he dared. “It’s ok, it’s going to be ok, we’ll be fine, you and me.”
Chapter One
Setting the Trap
On the edge of the Sohalo squatter camp, next to a river choked into stillness by rubbish, Jonas prepared to set his trap. From his prone position on his stomach in the long grass, he went over his plan one last time. It was a good plan. It was also the most dangerous of all the schemes he had hatched in his fifteen years as an orphan of Sohalo. The game of life was becoming more complicated, there were more players, each one more devious and power-hungry than the next. Times were changing, Jonas was simply changing with them.
Where once he might have risked a beating or public humiliation, he now risked everything, including his very life. But he was bigger and stronger these days, strengthened by a life of running and fighting, surviving. A life spent being a small fish in a small pond had thickened his skin and sharpened his wits. Today was a good day to take risks, for the boy to give his teachers a lesson in loss.
Jonas had always worked alone. It was safer, both for him and everyone else. It was a sad fact of life in Sohalo. With the Fathers in control, a mysterious group of criminals who kept their identities hidden, it wasn’t possible for someone like him to get too close to anyone. The Fathers were everywhere and nowhere, watching and waiting as they commanded their army of thugs to do their bidding. No one knew who they were, except maybe their puppets, those they used to recruit their armies of men, women, and children. Children were their favored targets because they were easily seduced by the promise of regular meals. But Jonas refused to work for them, instead, he’d made it his life’s purpose to a be considerably sharp thorn in their side, wherever, and however, he could. He was just fifteen years old, yet it seemed
the Fathers were afraid of him.
He remembered the days before the Fathers had taken over. The community, while destitute and not without problems, was safe and its people worked together to better the lives of their children, and the generations that would follow. Those days were now as distant as the Great Escarpment that surrounded Jonas’ home on all sides, visible but untouchable. The Fathers had sprung up from the trash-covered ground like fast growing weeds, to strangle the life out of Sohalo and its people. The scrap yard he was now looking at from his hiding place in the grass was part of their empire. The man who lived beyond its walls could have been one of them. Even if he wasn’t, he was still an infectious blight on an already ruined people. He was a single cog turning in a monstrous machine that swallowed people up, and spat them out again, as fear-crippled and despair-ridden shadows.
Today, Jonas would return the favor. It was a small act though still dangerous, and potent enough that Hans and the Fathers might learn about loss the way his people had. It was interesting that for him to reach this level of evolution, it had first been necessary for him to suffer. He was certain that had he been born in the east, in a more affluent area of Johannesburg, the ease of life would have polished his character, rather than carved it with a blunt blade. He pondered it sometimes, exploring the possibilities that might have been. Would he have been a star pupil in a good school, destined for a life filled with success? Given his gifts, he was sure that might have been a probable path, but Jonas wasn’t one for regrets. He was all about the moment, and how that moment could be best used to survive, perhaps to create a better moment in the future. If he could improve his own lot in life, then the lives of others in a similar position might also benefit. Not that Jonas thought of himself as some kind of savior for the masses, far from it. It was difficult to trust anyone in the decrepit slums of Sohalo, especially so when you were an orphan with no roof over your head. While the government ignored the plight of its forgotten citizens who struggled to eke out a life in this strip of soulless land, the Fathers fed off its decaying corpse like vermin. The Fathers orchestrated the feast. They used the suffering of the Sohalo people as a means of raising their own standard of living. If food was scarce, they monopolized what little there was, and sold it at a premium. If water was hard to come by, they offered more; under the guise of a service provider with the welfare of the people in mind.
Once upon a time, in the now distant past, when the political climate of South Africa was stable, things had started to improve. New housing had begun to spring up nearby, provided by the government, electricity had been promised, as well as running water, and sanitation for all. Now, where once those new houses had stood, hundreds of more shanties had sprung up. Not even the foundations of those houses remained. Once it was clear the help had dried up, and no more was coming, the impoverished people of Sohalo had moved in and stripped the houses bare until there was nothing left.
He knew though that the vile snakes, who strangled the life out of his home from within, would not have been able to flourish as they did without support from above. The corruption started at the top and its oily, viscous taint leaked downwards until it pooled at the bottom, in the shit-caked streets of Sohalo. His people were far from forgotten. They were remembered alright, remembered by those who realized there was money to be made from poverty.
He inched forward, moving on his elbows, through the long grass; toward the graffiti-covered walls of the scrap yard. In each hand, he clutched several small stones. If his plan worked the way he expected, those stones were all he would need. Beyond the wall, he could just make out the rooftop of Hans’ house. If the stories were true, it was as big as ten of the Sohalo shacks; with a swimming pool, and balconies on every side. But Hans was a paranoid man, and greedy to boot. The only way a person got through those gates was if they had something to offer, and not just anything would do. Hans had so much money, he could probably build every family in Sohalo a real house, one that was built with bricks, and not strips of corrugated iron, cardboard, and mismatching wooden planks.
Hans didn’t give, however. To him, generosity was an alien concept. If a family had no choice but to move into the barren tin-hut city of Sohalo, then they would need somewhere to stay. Finding a meager slice of ground was easy, but there wasn’t a shred of scrap to be found anywhere. Hans and his fetchers saw to that. The fetchers were the kids who worked for him, scouring the streets, and the surrounding areas for scrap metal, wood, plastic, and just about anything that a person could use to build a home. He paid the fetchers next to nothing, and any scrap they found was to be left outside the gates.
The fetchers, though, were so poorly paid for their efforts they even stole parts of people’s homes in the night. By day they scouted, searching for a shack with a choice piece of iron or a window—a rarity—and returned at night to tear it loose from its precarious position, before disappearing into the darkness. People would awake to find whole sections of their home gone. Then it was back to Hans’ scrap yard to purchase more, sometimes even buying back that which was taken.
Jonas himself could have made a living that way. He could have joined a Bruiser gang too, kids that roamed the streets stealing what they could, and beating whoever fought back with clubs and knives. But he couldn’t. While he was as coarse as the dirt under his feet, something stopped him from giving in to the corruption. While some kids went to school, and then obediently returned home to their parents, some chose to abandon hope and instead chose a life of crime. Maybe it was because they were so used to being unwanted, so used to having nothing, that when the chance to be someone came along, they seized it with both hands.
Jonas had no inkling of who his parents had been, but they’d left him with a gift before disappearing. By the age of six, a time when Sohalo was a third the size it was now, he realized he could learn things, anything, far quicker than anyone else. While the other kids lived like dogs in the street, begging for money, and stealing whatever they could to survive, Jonas had studied. He watched the poor farmers on their meager strips of land nearby, hungrily digesting everything he could about raising livestock and nurturing crops. He had no land of his own, no money, and barely enough food to give him the strength to walk, but his brain seemed to devour whatever knowledge he fed it, and once learned, he never forgot. In those early days, as he realized how valuable his ability was, he had tried to keep it from the other townsfolk, playing dumb whenever challenged. But it was impossible to keep his gift secret for very long, for Sohalo had eyes and ears that eventually saw and heard everything. At first, he had been approached by the heads of each Bruiser gang. They had asked him to join them, to rule the streets with them. He declined. When that failed, the Fathers had sent their men to recruit him.
Again, he had declined. No matter what they offered him, he could not accept it. Anything they gave him would be coated in the suffering of his people, and thus it was impossible for him to accept. Finally, they had tried to kill him. They failed, repeatedly, with Jonas’ intellectual superiority besting them every time. They could outgun him, and outfight him, but brains always prevailed over muscle in the end. This had driven him to seek out a new home for himself, out in the grasslands that lay between the growing slum of Sohalo, and the well-off township of Soweto in the east. There, he had built a home for himself, underground. It was little more than a pit, and when the rains came, it flooded, and when the hot summers came along, it baked, but it was safer than the streets of Sohalo, where the stench of feces and death filled the air. It was from that home he fought his silent war against the darkness blanketing Sohalo’s once safe streets.
Jonas wished he could walk into the police station in nearby Soweto; and ask for their help. But it was because of the police that such criminals had made their home here. They would likely arrest him, and probably hand him over to the Fathers’ men. If his body turned up face down in the river of trash on the edge of Sohalo, they could pretend that it was simply an
accident. The police had done their fair share of killing too. They tried to cover it up, but it was obvious what was going on. The Fathers had them buried deeply in their pockets. They had killed before for the Fathers, and they would do so again. But they preferred to let Sohalo do it for them.
Some of the townsfolk had become angry a few years before, and mobbed the gates, demanding their scrap be returned. Hans didn’t even bother to speak to them. Later, terrible things befell those who had dared stand up to him. Jonas was a wide-eyed eight-year-old when some kids found a man in the river with his throat slit. Jonas never forgot how he had looked floating there, naked, his stomach shiny and bloated, his fly-filled mouth frozen in a scream. He remembered thinking the man didn’t look real. He looked like something made from plastic in a factory somewhere and could have been, if not for the stench.
Hans rarely ever left his yard, so it hadn’t been his hands that left a trail of blood through the heart of Sohalo. His partners, the crime overlords of the slums, had likely lent him their muscle to silence the people. As Jonas lay there in the grass staring up at the red shingles of Hans’ roof, he imagined him loafing by the pool, probably surrounded by young, half-naked girls. That was his gift to Sohalo. He turned the boys into scrap thieves and the girls into sex-slaves. Sometimes, as he lay there at night, in his camp out in the wilderness, Jonas thought about killing Hans, and all the other demons that ruled over Sohalo. In his mind, he went over the ways it could be done. But always, in the end, he came to the conclusion that he wasn’t like them.
Jonas couldn’t kill them. However, he could hurt them, a little. In Sohalo, a little was a lot, and it would have to do. He hadn’t stolen from Hans for over a month. Last time, he’d taken Hans’ leather moccasins; today he would steal his phone, along with all his contacts. It was one of those new phones. He’d seen it on his last visit here. Thinking about it, he couldn’t help but recall something else, something that made him almost wish he’d brought a gun instead of a handful of stones. As he had lain in the grass watching some fetchers pick up their meager pay for a pile of scrap, Hans had come out to the gate, making a rare appearance. He hadn’t come for the fetchers. His two Lieutenants dealt with the workforce, a pair of lumbering apes with guns at their hips, bald domes and mirrored shades glinting in the sun as they handed the boys a few Rand for a long day’s work. On that day, however, there was another visitor among the fetchers. A girl, probably not much older than Jonas, had stood at the gate with the boys. It was obvious what she was doing there. In a faded red dress that hung off her skinny body like a sheet on a clothesline, she stood fidgeting, constantly looking back over her shoulder, down the path toward the Sohalo slums. Sometimes, they went of their own accord. Other times, they were sent for, by Hans, or even worse, sent by their fathers to earn money for their family. It sickened Jonas and made him glad he was an orphan.
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