“No. Most of our possessions were destroyed when our plane crashed. I salvaged some jewelry.” Shawna paused, her lips pursed. “We traded it for food and water in the camp.”
“Which camp was this?” Mrs. Krohn asked. Her voice was neutral.
“Camp Eight,” Shawna Littleton answered carefully.
The Swiss woman chewed at her damp, slightly protuberant lower lip. “Our doctors will examine you. For your own safety, of course.”
Of course. Shawna straightened in her chair. “Is there a problem of some kind?”
“Mrs. Littleton, there is an enormous difference between camps Seven and Eight. Camp Eight is the compound for political prisoners, where you were kept?” There was an implied question at the end of the sentence. “We are attempting to free as many prisoners as possible. General Zanga’s new government, in a humanitarian spirit of cooperation”—she lifted and cleared her voice, almost as if speaking for hidden microphones—“is helping us. However, the process is a slow one.”
“And the other encampment?” Shawna allowed only the barest trace of emotion into her question.
“A quarantine area. As you know, there have been…”—Mrs. Krohn searched for the appropriate words—“considerable problems with communicable diseases in the Republic. We face rampant parasitism, typhus, polio, syphilis—” Again, that odd inflection. Something left unsaid.
Mrs. Krohn cleared her throat. “We have also detected nine variants of HIV in the area. The refugee camps are what the scientists call a ‘forcing ground.’ ” The two women locked eyes. Shawna’s gaze was hard, almost lifeless, like an image stamped onto a copper coin. The Swiss woman’s face grew redder. She lost the contest of wills and looked away.
At a fly buzzing against the windowpane.
Shawna followed her gaze.
A fly.
It rubbed its forelegs, took flight in a loop, landed again. It buzzed. Shawna rubbed her fingers against her temples. She shifted her eyes back to Mrs. Krohn’s, locked them there. Only then, at that moment, did Mrs. Krohn see what she had expected: nervousness. A touch of something near panic, held down very tightly.
Triggered by the sight and sound of a fly.
* * *
Even after nightfall, Camp Seven’s stench was a syrup of dead flies and rotting human flesh, a wafting wall of acid. Gas-masked soldiers roved the perimeter, wetting the dirt with disinfectant and deodorant.
Camp Seven was nearly a square kilometer of clustered ramshackle cabins, tents, and makeshift huts. The spaces between them were dotted with cook fires and outhouses, roving knots of starving refugees, and armed guard patrols.
Concentric rings of concertina and razor wire walled the entire camp. Between the rings was a prowl space for the guard dogs, mongrel mixtures of shepherd and rottweiler bred for strength and aggression. Spotlights slid sinuously along the prowl space, crisscrossing every few seconds.
Four central checkpoints breached the fence, each guarded by armed soldiers. At the northeast gate the soldiers laughed raucously and strutted, saluting each other cockily as if still part of a glorious foreign empire. They turned serious as a Klaxon’s shriek split the night, and their flagged gates lifted. A tarp-covered, stake-bed Chevrolet truck rumbled in.
The black wraiths roaming the camp craned toward the gate, eyes hopeful. They looked like refugees anywhere on this blighted continent, with one exception: Each wore a blue plastic collar. Within each collar was a radio device keyed to transceivers around the camp perimeter.
The Chevy’s engine shook and belched smoke for a full minute after the wheels stopped turning. Soldiers unlatched the back of the truck, barking orders in their native tongue.
Men and women tumbled from the back. They were as dark as the night itself, cloaked only in rags and despair, both garments grown shiny with wear.
When the inmates realized that the truck carried not food but more miserable refugees, their malnourished attention broke and they resumed their numb and endless perambulation.
Jabbing with rifle butts, the soldiers prodded the newcomers into a line. As one guardsman peered into the back of the truck, a grin creased his broad face. He forced a tall, bespectacled, very dark man from the back. “All right, we’re coming. Please,” the tall man protested in English, and was pushed roughly aside. From within the truck came a woman’s voice. “Please,” she said in English. “Just give us a minute. You’re scaring the child.”
Shawna Littleton crawled over the gate on hands and knees. Nearly as dark as the other prisoners, she wore snug Levi’s and a soot-stained cotton blouse. She was tall, thin, and exquisitely sculpted. Her cheekbones were only a breath from the surface, but her flawless skin declared this to be the result of exercise and diet, not starvation.
The true surprise was still to come. A tiny girl lay curled in a dark corner of the truck. She was perhaps nine years old, but small for her age. She wore a soot-smudged white cotton dress. The girl stared out at them, her eyes wide and liquid. Thin arms clutched her knees against her chest.
The soldier grabbed Shawna’s slender arm roughly, yanking her down from the truck. She spilled onto her knees in the dirt and glared at them, her beautiful face twisted with rage. “You bastards!”
The bespectacled man went very rigid. He yelled at the soldier in his own language and pushed him away from Shawna.
The soldier looked at him calmly, as if examining a mosquito that had alighted on his arm. He drew his pistol and, at point-blank range, calmly fired two bullets into the tall man’s stomach.
Shock distorted Shawna’s face. Her mouth worked without producing words. Then she screamed, “Mitch!”
Clasping his belly, the tall man staggered away from the truck. As the echoes washed away, they seemed to draw all other sound away with them. The eerie silence was broken only by scratching sounds as the tall man stumbled like a drunk, toes scuffing up little clouds of dust. He took three steps, four, crumpled to his knees, then staggered up again. He lurched blindly toward the northernmost guard gate.
There, against nearly a kilometer of concertina wire, stood a makeshift wall six feet high and almost two hundred meters long, composed of shells and rocks, rags and pieces of board, splashes of paint and twists of clay.
The faces of Africa stared out from the wall. Kwanta faces carved of wood and Adansi images of bone. A hundred different animals lived there, including Chi Wara antelopes and Gato lion spirits. A thousand symbols, a dozen tribal patterns on display: broad lips and high cheekbones, strong hands and kinky hair. Pende house mothers, Masai giraffes wrought from truck bumpers, firewood gorillas and wire-frame crocodiles. Oil-painted antelope and a scrap-iron vulture with a missing lower mandible. Exquisite Zulu beadwork.
Here were artistic styles and animals from every corner of Sub-Saharan Africa. The only common element was infection.
The tall man tottered along the wall, fingers tracing the countless faces and figures tightly fitted together by a thousand hands. He almost seemed to be searching for his own face, perhaps wondering if it was concealed somewhere there, within the wall.
Then, as if finally realizing that the time for life had passed, he slid to the ground. Blood smeared a glass mosaic chimp. He stared up at the ape, something very like a sad smile shading his lips. His eyes closed.
Shawna Littleton stared, trembling in the grip of shock so great it threatened her sanity. The girl child crawled out of the truck. Her small, dark face was blistered, her hair singed and then clipped away almost to the scalp. Her dress stank of smoke. “Daddy…?” Her voice was disbelieving.
She started toward the dead man, but the soldiers pushed her away. She made a clucking sound in the back of her throat, then again the question: “Daddy?”
She began to scream. Shawna overcame her own paralysis and ran toward the girl. A soldier backhanded her hard across the mouth. Her head snapped back and she tumbled to the ground, lips split. He hauled her up and shoved her roughly back into line.
The gi
rl never stopped screaming, but flinched back before the soldier could strike her. The guards prodded them both toward a line of stinking shacks.
Shawna Littleton fought to keep her voice steady. “His name is Mitch Littleton,” she said urgently, repeating the same frantic words to everyone she passed. “A very famous man. Artist.” She was shivering. “Many friends. Help him, please. President Chimbey brought us here—”
A mistake. Rifles clinked, the soldiers bristled at the hated name. Even in her excited state, the slender woman realized her error, tried to correct it. “Someone has to help him. Please.” She repeated the words, over and over again. “This is my stepdaughter, Elizabeth. Somebody help us. You don’t understand.” Her voice almost broke. “It not our war. We don’t belong here.”
A hundred small campfires misted the night stars. Men, women, and scrawny children hunched around smoking oil drums. Open latrine trenches boiled with the odors of sour stomachs, diseased kidneys.
Even worse than the toilet stench was the impossibly fetid and omnipresent bleach-and-buttermilk miasma of stale semen. In the darkness to the left, someone squealed. Shawna squinted, eyes struggling to pierce the shadows. In the hollow between two shacks, three men huddled tightly around a fourth. The fourth crouched on hands and knees, grunting in a thick, furry voice.
She covered Elizabeth’s eyes.
They were led between the rows of lean-tos and tents, blankets strung over lines of cord, cardboard shanties and tattered bungalows. Dark, gaunt figures studied them. The impact of their raw and urgent need seared Shawna like air vented from a kiln.
She heard herself murmuring, “Oh God, Oh God…”
The agony of Mitchell’s death was nothing, less than nothing, completely supplanted by the unknown horrors of her future. There would be time for grief later.
If there was a later.
Their guide pushed a heavy blanket from the doorway of a corrugated tin shack and shoved them in. The shack held four beds, one unoccupied. Three hollow-eyed women crouched within like ferrets huddled in a cage. One was tall and skeletally thin. The third and eldest was of medium height. The eldest’s bunk was concealed in deep shadows, in the darkest corner of the shack. Once, she had been short and fat. Now, folds of flesh hung around her like a dark shroud. From the curdled yellow deposits in her eyes and the pronounced tremor of her hands, Shawna thought her gravely ill.
The soldier spoke to Shawna in a language she didn’t understand.
“I… am… American,” she stuttered again, sounding stupid even to herself. He said something else, jabbering. For a dreadful moment, his gaze raped her. He grinned at the swelling of her breasts and hips. He made a crude gesture with a stiffened thumb and cupped palm, then laughed and left.
Shawna Littleton stood in the doorway for a long moment, an arm around Elizabeth the entire time. “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
Her new roommates studied her as if she were festooned with prime rib. Not for the first time she realized how utterly alien she had to appear, with her American clothes, her polished fingernails, and her American flesh upon her American bones. Some percentage of her was the same basic genetic stock as these women, perhaps, but they weren’t the same. Not at all.
She was American, and they were… well, they were unfortunate.
“Littleton,” she said, pointing at herself. They rattled unintelligible words at her.
Perhaps there were names in there somewhere. Perhaps not. Without realizing she had done so consciously, she ordered them short, tall, and fat, and named them after the three Gorgon sisters: Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa. It was either that or Larry, Moe, and Curly, and at the moment, Shawna Littleton didn’t have the strength to smile.
“Tu parles français?” she asked hesitantly. Medusa, the eldest, looked at her shrewdly. In her former plumpness, Medusa might have been pretty. Even beautiful. Now, she was a hag.
“You are the American?” Medusa asked in halting French.
Frightened, Shawna nodded her head. They circled her. The three women smelled like rancid fat.
Shawna held her stepdaughter close against her.
Medusa spoke again, in French. “Soldiers burn my farm. Kill my man. I end here, like you.” She smiled, exposing swollen, diseased gums. “Like you. Not so much difference between us now, American.”
Shawna understood, but couldn’t find words to reply.
“You want food, you earn it.” Medusa laughed, mouth wide. “They like you! They like you fine!” Something cruel burned in her eyes. “Your man, he died to help you. This is his child?”
Shawna nodded.
“He died to protect you. What you do to feed his child, eh?” And she laughed uproariously. Medusa said something to Stheno and Euryale, and they laughed as well.
Shawna gripped Lizzie and backed away from them, holding the sobbing girl as tightly as she could. Shawna whispered comfort to her, stroking and kissing gently. After a long time, Lizzie stopped crying and slept. Shawna rocked her, numb, not daring to let herself feel the shock of Mitchell’s death. Not now. Later, perhaps. She had to be strong, if they were going to have any chance at all.
She smoothed Lizzie’s hair with her fingers, hoping to God that strokes and whispers and kisses would be enough.
* * *
Perhaps two hours passed. The camp was dark, and silent save for distant mechanical rumblings, and a wet, gargling, persistent cough from someplace closer. Shawna guessed that both Lizzie and the Gorgon sisters were asleep. She was about to slip her arm from beneath the child’s head when her stepdaughter’s eyes opened. Lizzie sat up, almost completely awake, and folded her small hands in her lap. Her eyes were very cold. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“I’ll try to find some food in the morning. I’m sure there must be food.”
“I’m hungry now.”
“I don’t have any food now.” Shawna was dismayed to hear the petulance creeping into her own voice. “I said I’d find some food. I will.”
From the other side of the tent came a sour laugh. Medusa’s laugh. “Food,” Medusa said mockingly in French.
“You said you would?” Lizzie screamed it. “You said the plane would be safe. That we’d be all right. You said we could stay out of the war. And now my daddy is dead.”
A sudden headache sprang to life, so violent and painful that it seemed to have hatched in Shawna’s skull full-grown. Mitchell’s gone. Mitchell’s gone.…
Lizzie’s words had torn the fragile scar tissue away, and the grief was almost unbearable. “I loved him too, dammit,” she whispered harshly.
Lizzie stiffened, and tried to tear herself out of Shawna’s grasp. She sobbed and scratched, hissing, “Hate you, hate you. Killed my daddy…” over and over again, so choked by pain she was unable even to scream the words.
“I’m sorry,” Shawna whispered. “I’m so damned sorry. What can I do?”
For a moment the child fought with her, and then stopped, tiny brown eyes bright with hate. “You can ask Jesus to kill you and bring back my daddy.”
Shawna stared numbly. Before she could even begin to reply, someone laughed boisterously in the doorway behind her.
“Nice little girl.” A man’s voice, speaking English clumsily. She turned and faced a giant.
He was well over six feet tall, perhaps two hundred and forty pounds, dressed in rumpled military fatigues. He was mocha-colored with disturbingly pale eyes. His shaven pate was scarred and lumped enough to obscure whatever masculine beauty he might once have possessed. He wore a pistol on the right side of his belt, a foot-long knife on the left. He drew the knife and began to clean his flat thick fingernails. “Nice little girl. Nice big girl,” he observed.
His pale gaze lingered on Lizzie. “Like big and little girls,” he said. “Like very much.” Lizzie had stopped struggling the moment the big man appeared, and pressed tightly against Shawna.
Shawna quashed her flash of revulsion. “I’
m Shawna Littleton. My husband and I were in the capital, painting a mural for President Chimbey.”
“He gone now,” the big man said. “They blew him up. On Tee Vee. Saw it. He wasn’t dead. He wet himself before he died. Now we have real man. General Zanga. He crush rebels.” The big man smiled broadly.
“That has nothing to do with me or the girl. Can you get a message out for us?”
“I am Sergeant Juta. You American?” His English was heavily accented but clear. “Identification papers?”
“Lost when our plane went down.”
“Husband… died?”
“Not ‘died,’ ” she snapped. “Murdered.”
“He struck a guard.”
“But—”
“No excuse.” His eyes were flat cool holes, deep as the night sea.
She squeezed her eyes tight, fighting a resurgence of pain. “Please. Help us get in touch with the American Consulate.”
“We not… have talk with Americans. Americans arm rebels.” He smiled thickly. “Rebels shoot your plane. You should hate Americans. I do.”
“Then, please… the Swiss Consulate.”
“We are busy. You will be taken care of. Fed and sheltered.” Great white teeth spread grinning in the brown face. “We are very civilized.” He leaned close to Lizzie. “Would you like to have better food?”
Lizzie tried to curl herself into a ball, to make herself as tiny as possible.
Shawna bit her lip, fought her urge to claw his eyes down to the bloody root. “I need to see someone in charge.”
“Commandant very busy.” Juta grinned. “His English not good, like mine.”
“Perhaps you could translate for us,” she said.
His odd, pale eyes flamed at her. “Yes,” he said. “Me could. But why?”
Shawna’s hands shook as she shook a tiny gold stud earring out of her pocket and handed it to him. Thank God for sufficient presence of mind to take them off before the soldiers picked her up.
“Help me,” she said. “Just let me talk to him.”
Dark Matter Page 29