Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  They sky reddens and darkens. It doesn't take long. At these equatorial latitudes night falls as suddenly as a stage curtain. Soon the strip of velvet darkness above is stuffed full of stars. Veronica can clearly see the gossamer ribbon of the Milky Way stretched across the night sky.

  "All right," Jacob says. He threads the hacksaw blade into the hasp of the padlock at his neck, and smiles thinly. "You know, if this actually works, it'll be the greatest customer testimonial of all time, eh? My Leatherman got me out of the clutches of homicidal terrorists! Don't you dare leave home without it!"

  No one else smiles. Jacob begins to work, holding the padlock with one hand, sawing rhythmically with the other. It doesn't take long before he begins to tire and slow. Veronica can't help but resent him a little for it. She feels like Derek, if he were still alive, would have cut through all their locks in a matter of minutes.

  The rasping noise of metal biting metal seems very loud, she is frightened that someone will hear it, but nobody intrudes. Veronica waits tensely as the minutes drag by. She is very tired, she cannot remember a more draining day, but she is too nervous to sleep. Instead she lies on her back and stares up at the stars. She never realized how beautiful they could be. She promises herself, God, the Tao, whoever is listening, that if she gets out of this somehow, she will pay more attention to the beauty of the world, she will appreciate every golden moment of the rest of her life.

  She falls into a dazed and trancelike state until a brief clatter of metal brings her back. "Got it," Jacob mutters triumphantly, breathing hard as he detaches his chain, then hands the Leatherman over to Tom. The portly British man seems stronger and works faster than Jacob, but Judy takes so long that Veronica actually falls asleep.

  "Come on," Jacob says, prodding her awake. "Your turn."

  Veronica looks around wildly before coming to her senses. It is almost pitch dark. The others are all free. She takes the Leatherman in her fumbling fingers, remembering how she freed it from Derek's belt. The memory is somehow comforting, steadying. She inserts the blade into the lock at her neck and begins sawing back and forth. At first it doesn't seem to bite at all, and she begins to fear the hacksaw has worn smooth, but then it catches on the brass, rasps loudly as it begins to abrade and then to cut. Her forearms and biceps are already cramping. She switches arms, then switches back. Soon she has to rest between arms. A small eternity seems to pass, but when she pauses to inspect her work, only a shallow notch has been carved into the brass.

  "What time is it?" she asks the darkness.

  "No idea, love," Judy says. "They took our watches."

  Veronica swallows. "If it starts getting light, go without me."

  "Don't say that. Get back to it."

  She obeys. Her muscles fall into a rut of sawing. She is getting clumsy now, keeps stabbing herself with the end of the hacksaw blade, and though it is dull she draws blood from her neck at least once, can feel it dripping slowly down her skin. Her mind seems to retreat from herself, take a few paces back to observe, and she almost bursts out in giddy laughter. Here she is in a slave-labour mine, sawing at her chain, about to attempt a desperate escape: a situation so wrong, so ridiculous, so not the kind of thing that happens to people like her, that she has to bite her tongue not to laugh.

  The moment passes. Veronica has to close her eyes and grit her teeth against the pain in her arms. She tries to belly breathe, as if this is some kind of demented Lamaze class. But there seems to be no more strength left in her. She is about to ask someone for help when suddenly the hacksaw blade breaks free and the lock swings open.

  Veronica's arms feel about to fall off, she can barely pull the chain from her neck, she is panting as if she just ran a marathon. But it feels so good to be free.

  * * *

  The starlight is not enough to navigate across the gorge. They have to crawl like animals, feeling their way through the mud. The river water feels very cold, and when they climb out the other side Veronica starts to shiver. As if she didn't have enough problems already, now she has to worry about hypothermia.

  It takes ages to locate the trail that leads up to the airstrip. It seems unguarded. Veronica supposes the last thing escaped slaves would do is climb to the interahamwe settlement above. Somehow they manage to ascend the treacherous switchbacks out of the gorge without tumbling to their deaths. It helps that they crawl. Veronica has to; her legs are too weak to climb. At least the exertion keeps her warm.

  The trail seems endless, she feels like Sisyphus, doomed to climb until the end of time - and then suddenly she crests the cliff edge and sees the airstrip spread out before her, and above it a half-moon hanging in a canopy of stars, shedding enough light to make out even distant shapes. Veronica remembers the equatorial full moon from a couple of weeks ago, fat and radiant; remembers standing on a hilltop in Kampala with her housemate Brenda, reading a newspaper by moonlight just to prove that it was possible. It feels like remembering a past life.

  She forces herself back to the present. Red embers are visible on the other side of the airstrip, in the interahamwe settlement, where something is flapping in the warm night wind. Veronica is glad of the wind, it swallows other sounds. Along the cliff edge to their left they see the wooden building, and beside it, looming in silhouette, the pale arc of the satellite dish.

  "We have plenty of time," Jacob mutters. "It's just past midnight."

  "How can you tell?"

  "Astronomy. The stars rotate around Polaris during the night, they're like a clock. Come on."

  The satellite dish is mounted on a metal pole set in the earth. Three metal arms project from the lip of its pale bowl, holding a small box at their apex a few feet above the dish. Three cables run from this box into the wooden building. The dish is mounted near the edge of the gorge, on the edge of an overhanging cliff. Jacob looks around as if something is missing.

  "What's wrong?" Veronica whispers.

  Jacob says, low-voiced, "We need power. There must be a generator, or batteries." He touches one of the cables that leads to the wooden building, so old and weatherbeaten that its planks sag towards the ground. "Inside."

  They look at one another.

  "It's not like we have a choice," Susan says.

  She pulls open the single misshapen door as gently as possible. The one-room space beyond is obviously used mostly for storage; the walls are lined by piled bags, boxes, jerrycans, tools, and random debris, looming shadowed and mysterious in the moonlight. There is a desk in the middle of the room, and on it a laptop computer. Jacob walks in and begins to feel around. After a moment Susan joins him.

  "Wish we had a light," Jacob mutters under his breath. "Maybe turn on that laptop –"

  "Here," Susan says. "Look. There's a phone."

  Green monochrome light blooms inside the hut, emanating from the clamshell cell phone Susan holds. Jacob kneels beside a tangle of wires, plastic and metal at the edge of the room.

  "Here we go," he says triumphantly. "Car batteries. Must be seriously jury-rigged. But it will do if there's any juice left."

  He takes up two wires. A spark flickers between his hands, then another, and another; then three more, with longer pauses between; then three more, in quick succession.

  "What are you doing?" Tom asks.

  "Turning it off and on again."

  "That's all? That's our signal?" Veronica feels betrayed.

  "Morse code," Jacob clarifies. "I'm doing some SOSes. Then I'll tell them what's happening, our names, everything."

  "Them who?"

  He hesitates. "Hard to say. The NSA is supposed to pick up every satellite signal on Earth, and they should be looking for us. Also the satellite company might pick up on it, lots of guys who work there are ham-radio types, they'll know Morse code when they see it, and they probably have the lat-long coordinates of this dish. I never said this was guaranteed. But it's a chance."

  Veronica doesn't complain. Some hope is infinitely better than none. She goes back around the bui
lding, just to be sure, and when she sees a little green LED winking on and off above the dish, her heart soars. It seems incredible that they can communicate across the world with nothing but that box full of electronics, the ceramic dish below, and the few stacked car batteries inside the building.

  Susan joins her, still holding the terrorists' phone, now folded and dark. They wait in silence. A long time seems to pass before Jacob emerges from the building.

  "OK," he says shakily. "Might as well stop, I'm getting too sloppy."

  "What do we do now?" Tom asks.

  "Run. And pray."

  * * *

  Jacob staggers with every step, and in the growing predawn light Veronica can see his face and arms are covered with blood and muck. She supposes she looks much the same. The world has begun to swim dizzily around her. Her throat is as dry as desert rock, she aches for water. She keeps having to reach for branches and tree trunks to steady herself. Luckily there is no shortage of those, and she has been pierced by so many jungle thorns in the last few hours that she has almost stopped feeling their white-hot bites. Behind them, Tom, Judy, and Susan trudge mechanically onwards through the thick and trackless African bush.

  "I don't understand why they keep biting me," Jacob groans. "I can't possibly have any blood left."

  Veronica says, "We all have malaria by now. Guaranteed."

  "Ten-day onset time. If we're still alive in ten days I will treat cerebral malaria as a cause for rampant celebration."

  They reach another thicket so dense it is practically a wall. Veronica wants to go around, but murderous gunmen are surely on their trail already, and they have decided to continue due east no matter what, for fear of going around in circles. She groans, covers her head with her arms, and forces herself into the bush.

  The vegetation around here isn't like Bwindi. This soil is too stony to support huge canopy trees. Instead, low palms and vine-covered leafy trees stand above an amazingly dense underbrush of ferns and grasses, which in turn conceal creeper vines or thorn bushes that seem to reach out with stealthy fingers to grasp at passing ankles. The trees block out most but not all of the sun's dawning light. They have heard a few rustles of animals fleeing their noisy approach, and once something small and slimy, probably a frog, bounced off Veronica's arm, but there have otherwise been no signs of animate life. Unless she counts mosquitoes. Their ceaseless buzzing and biting threatens to drive her mad.

  "Hey," Jacob says wonderingly. He has stopped walking and is staring up into the air. "You guys hear something?"

  "Yes," Tom grunts. "Mozzies."

  "No. Listen. I think I hear a plane."

  Everyone stops and looks into the sky. Veronica realizes he's right, not all the buzzing is insectile, there's an airplane approaching - and suddenly it flashes past, white as a cloud, half-obscured by palm leaves, maybe a thousand feet above the ground. They glimpse it just long enough to register its odd shape. Its wings seem very long and narrow for its body, and two wide struts extend downwards from its tail, like a bipod support.

  "Holy shit," Jacob breathes, his voice full of hope and wonder.

  "What is it?" Judy asks.

  "Predator. Unmanned airplane. US military. They found us. They must have got the signal. They fucking found us."

  Hope erupts like flame in Veronica's heart. Rescue is on the way.

  "We should signal," Tom says, "build a fire or something -"

  Jacob shakes his head. "No. They're not the only ones looking, remember? No point bringing them all the way here just to take pictures of us all getting shot. Just keep running and hope they find us first."

  They push onwards. Just as Veronica begins to think they can't make it through this thicket, they will have to turn back and go around, her foot lands unexpectedly on smooth, bare dirt. It is only a foot wide, but it is unmistakeably a trail, marked with prints of bare human feet.

  "Do we follow it?" Judy asks. "Or do we keep going east?"

  Everyone looks to Jacob. He hesitates, then decides, "There's a camera on that Predator. They won't see us in the bush, but they might on this path. We'll stay on it until it flies over again."

  They proceed north along the path. It is so much easier than fighting their way through the thorns and vines of the jungle, but even so Veronica doesn't think she can stay on her feet much longer. Her legs are starting to feel like they did on the deathmarch from Bwindi, increasingly less responsive to her mind's commands. She wonders if maybe it would be best to split up. Together they must be easy to track. Alone maybe at least one would get away or be rescued. It makes sense, like a kind of preemptive triage, but she doesn't want to be the one to suggest it. She doesn't want to be alone out here.

  The black men with rifles who rise up from either side of the trail appear so suddenly and unexpectedly it is like they just winked into existence, were beamed down from some Star Trek spacecraft. There are six of them, in rubber boots and ragged khaki uniforms. When she sees them Veronica's legs give way with shock, and she half-falls backwards, sits hard onto the ground. She feels frozen inside, like her lungs and spine have turned to ice. It's over. They have lost.

  But the black soldiers do not seem eager to kill or capture. Instead they stare at the five filth-smeared white people for a moment, then begin to speak excitedly to one another in soft words that sound unlike any African language Veronica has yet encountered. It slowly occurs to her that their uniforms are nothing like the crimson headbands and bullet necklaces of the interahamwe.

  She looks around, confused. The others sway on their feet, looking as dazed as she feels.

  Then one of the gunmen says, in strangely accented but understandable English, "Everything is OK. Everything is a hundred percent. We come to help you."

  "Who are you?" Jacob asks, his voice rasping.

  The man says, as if it explains everything, "From Zimbabwe."

  * * *

  The Zimbabwean soldiers mutter to each other in low voices, tense but not frightened, as they move along the trail. Veronica doesn't understand what they are doing here, but she supposes right now that doesn't matter. It takes all of her concentration just to keep pace with the soldier half-carrying her. The trail has led them into another banana plantation, and the waxy leaves around them rattle in the wind. They stop every so often for one of the soldiers to shout into a massive old radio that looks like something from a Vietnam movie. It distantly occurs to Veronica that it might actually have seen service in Vietnam, and then been donated or sold to Zimbabwe as surplus. Whatever its provenance, it doesn't seem to be working.

  When her legs finally collapse it is like it is happening to somebody else; she watches the ground rise to meet her as if she is riding in an airplane. Rough, strong hands grab and lift her. She wonders if this is what shock feels like, or if maybe she is dying, if all her life's strength has finally been spent.

  She emerges from something between a daze and a blackout just as the trail opens into a hilltop clearing dotted by a few dozen thatched mud huts with sagging walls. Goats and chickens pick their way along the narrow dirt paths that connect the huts, run through the small agricultural patches that surround the hill, and disappear into the bush all around.

  The village itself seems empty of humans; but in the bean field beneath the hill, there is a huge helicopter, painted khaki, covered with bulbous, streamlined projections. This ultramodern vehicle seems wildly out of place here, as if it has travelled in time, is taking part in an invasion of the eleventh century by the twenty-first. There are men milling around the bean field, a few white men in military fatigues and body armour, and many black soldiers in ragged khaki. The helicopter is embossed with an American flag and with the words AIR AMBULANCE.

  The sight of the American flag is like a jolt of electricity, makes Veronica's heart soar with the most intense joy she has ever experienced. She has never been so happy to be American. America has reached across the world to save its daughter. She can barely move, but she feels alive again, alive an
d triumphant.

  Two men in civilian clothes, a wiry black man with dreadlocks and a tall gray-haired man with an acne-scarred face, supervise as she and the other survivors are strapped onto stretchers and lifted into the helicopter. A man with a red cross on his camouflage uniform stoops beside her and begins speaking to her in a Southern accent. She can't make out what he says, partly because the engine roars to life beneath them, partly because her mind has lost its ability to comprehend. It doesn't matter. She is safe now. She has been rescued. She can let herself go. The rotors of the helicopter begin to spin, and Veronica feels like her mind is spinning with them, corkscrewing up into the blue sky and the dark void beyond, losing all awareness of the world and time.

  Chapter 11

  She wakes to bliss. There are sheets over her body, pillows beneath her head, and her body is free of pain for the first time in recent memory. It feels like floating in a warm bath. She rolls onto her side, keeping her eyes closed, trying to draw out this deliriously wonderful daze as long as possible - but there is something against her arm, some kind of thin plastic tube. She tries to push it away but it seems stuck to her wrist. In fact it feels stuck in her wrist.

  Veronica opens her eyes, alarmed. She is in a room decorated with wicker furniture, a big TV, a ceiling fan, and a leopard-print blanket. It looks like a hotel room except for the wheeled cart next to her bed and the IV drip in her arm. She doesn't understand where she is or why. Her memory is a jumbled collage of nightmare images, blood and slaves and feral teenagers with dead eyes, chains and guns and pangas, Derek's severed head, their desperate escape through thickets of thorny bush.