by Peter Tonkin
Once they were vermin-free, warm and dry, they began to realize how hungry and thirsty they had become. The station in the township seemed a long, long way ago now; indeed, it was more than thirty-six hours since either of them had had anything to eat. But there was nothing to be done about it now. It was too dark to go hunting and although the jungle seemed dead, there was no guarantee that it was as empty of predators as it seemed. Stumbling about blindly with the gun would be a suicidal waste of time, even if either of them had been any kind of a hunter at all. Neither of them was. They banked up the fire, did their best to ensure that the circle of logs round it would stop it spreading across the jungle floor, made themselves beds of dry leaves with pillows of outer clothing and went to sleep hungry in their underwear. And, wisely, in their boots.
The last thing Robert did before sleep claimed him was to take the gun and some bullets from the camera bag which was supplementing Ann’s shorts as her pillow. The cold metal added nothing to the comfort of his own bunched-up shirt, but it added a great deal to his peace of mind, even though he took the considerable risk of setting it to automatic after he had loaded up. He was so exhausted that even the gnawing in his belly could not keep him awake for long - nor could the sight of Ann curled seductively so close at hand. He was idly pondering the paradox of the way in which her brief plain cotton underwear enhanced the attractiveness of a body he had just seen utterly exposed with no conscious reaction at all when he fell into a deep, dark slumber.
~ * ~
The smell of the fire was enough to keep the herd of elephants well away from them and the tall pachyderms finished their wallow and returned through the dead strip of jungle to the red plains beyond to spend a restless night searching for something to assuage the hunger which had replaced the urgency of thirst in their massive bodies. They were not the only animals moving among the dead trees, but even the most desperate of the predators was wary of the fire and so the two defenceless humans slept on in relative safety for the first few hours at least.
The leopard was old. Wounded in a cull and crippled with disease, it had been reduced to chasing injured or sickly birds in the days when Julius Karanga was president. In the years since, it had scavenged around the outskirts of N’Kuru villages, taking die odd goat, the occasional unwary dog, every now and then a child. It had been lucky to survive this long but now its luck was running out. The smell of the fire held no fears for its wise old nostrils, for this was not the stench of fire uncontrolled. Rather, it was a smell it knew well, which told of village camp fires, of offal to be scavenged, of soft, weak, unwary prey. Had it been capable of surprise, it might have wondered that there was no odour of roasting meat or boiling maize; but it was not. It was too hungry and intent upon feeding its hunger.
It came through the forest silently in the blackest moment of the night just before moonrise, and paused to look across the makeshift campsite from the edge of the forest. It noted the two still forms beyond the brightness of the fire and heard the restless rustle of their breathing. Saliva washed down the long channel of its mouth and all its claws slid out. Drooling with excitement, it filled the night with the hunting roar it had hardly used in the last decade and charged.
Robert jerked awake to see a bright yellow streak rushing towards him at unbelievable speed. He was sitting up almost before his eyes had opened and he was at such a point of tension that he fired the gun before he was properly awake. There was no thought of taking aim, no supple flick of switch, no red dot. He pointed at the middle of the thing and pulled the trigger.
‘ANN!’ he screamed as he fired, tearing his throat with the power of the sound he was making.
The leopard, recognising the muzzle flashes, turned, but too late. The bullets spat into its wounded shoulder and flipped it over into the fire. With its oily fur beginning to smoulder, the wounded animal writhed in the heart of the pile of glowing branches, scattering them hither and yon. From side to side it rolled, wildly trying to regain its feet. Its mangy, shaggy coat was on fire before it pulled itself to its feet and, blinded by die flames as its beard and whiskers ignited, its nostrils blocked by the stench of its own pelt burning, its ears all but deafened by its own wild screams, it charged again.
Had Ann not been sleeping with the strap of her camera bag wrapped round her arm, she would have lost it. Like Robert she sprang from deep sleep into total wakefulness and, like him, she found herself facing a charge by a leopard. But this leopard was fiercely ablaze. The sight of it and the sounds it was making were utterly, overwhelmingly terrifying. She was on her feet at once and running wildly along die riverbank far beyond rational thought or the faintest hope of self-control. Because she was screaming at the top of her lungs, the leopard was able to follow her movements, and because it was mad with agony and rage, it continued its vain attempts to destroy her.
Robert abruptly found himself alone in the wreckage of their makeshift camp. Because of the noise, he too was able to follow Ann and the leopard. He was up without further thought and off after them at a dead run. Sometime during the first five steps he switched on the red dot, and he followed this along the top of the river bank, sweeping it from right to left. After five minutes of feverish activity he paused to draw breath and compose his thoughts. There was now neither sight nor sound of them. How could they have vanished so quickly and so utterly? he asked himself in an agony of worry. The low, bright stars gave him light enough to see a possible answer. He found himself looking forward and to his right down the slight slope into the massive featureless field of dry reeds which lay between the high bank and the mud slope down into the dry lake bed. The wind stirred the tops of the dead reeds as he watched and he suddenly realised that if Ann had vanished into this then he would never be able to find her again. ‘Ann,’ he bellowed as loudly as he could. ‘Ann, can you hear me?’
He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, and even to slow his tumultuous heartbeat so that the could listen for her reply, but there was nothing. Nothing save the wind and the weird whispering of the reeds.
He pointed the gun up into the air above his head and pulled the trigger. A brief burst of bullets ripped up into the air. It was a short signal but a clear one, he thought. Surely she would hear. He listened, straining his ears.
The faintest mumble of sound above the seductive sibilance of the reed sea.
He raised the gun again and pulled the trigger. Nothing. He swore and yelled at the top of his voice again but there was no reply. Except that when he stood absolutely still, and listened with every nerve of his body, he could hear a quiet babble and the odd crackling of footsteps.
Just behind him!
Spooked, he swung round, expecting to see the smouldering leopard creeping up with Ann’s arm drooping palely from its smoking jaws. But what he saw was much worse. He saw yellow brightness gleaming through the tall columns of the dead, dry trees, and he realised that the whispering and crackling were die sound a bushfire makes when it is spreading swiftly through undergrowth.
He stood for just a moment, calling to mind all the foulest swear words he had ever known. What the hell was he going to do now? ‘Ann!’ He swung round again, to look over the reeds. The wind gusted warmly from behind him, carrying smoke already; smoke and sparks. ‘ANN! For Christ’s sake! AAANNN!’ All too close, the first tree exploded into flame and he was running. As though observing a complete stranger, he noted that he was running wildly along the bank above the dead sea of reeds. If there was any kind of a plan in his head it was this: to cut round behind the reeds away from the blazing forest and down across the wide expanse of mud to seek refuge in the sluggish water. Even the leeches seemed a fair exchange if he could escape die all-consuming fire which was exploding terribly into life behind him as he ran. And if he remained on the high mud crest he could keep an eye out for Ann, for he was still convinced that she was somewhere down there.
As he ran he kept swinging his head to right and left, for the starlight was not strong enough to
reveal the details of the bankside path ahead and he was forced to rely on his more acute peripheral vision. Furthermore, he was half fearful that the path the leopard took between die dry stems of the reeds would burst into flames at any moment, ignited by the burning creature’s fur; and in any case he wanted to keep an eye on the wildfire spreading through the woods behind him. When it got firm hold it would, he knew, be able to move at more than sixty kilometres an hour. Downwind. His way. Of all the things he feared most, fire ranked highest on the list and he had no intention of being outrun by this one if he could possibly avoid it.
When the next tree exploded into flame and sent a wave of red light rolling down the bank after him, he thrust Ann into the back of his mind, tucked his chin down and started to run in earnest. He was going at full sprint, the better part of ten kilometres per hour, when the ground gave way under him and swallowed him with one silent gulp.
He slammed down the throat of a shallow pit with stunning suddenness and dropped into a mud-walled little cave. A long hard balk of wood broke his fall and he found himself precipitated head first into a claustrophobically narrow corner where the hard earth of the roof pressed terrifyingly against the back of his head. The cave was clearly some kind of fault in the high bank, and was apparently prone to flooding for it stank overpoweringly of the river. He choked in the fetid air and scrabbled backwards until he could at least sit up straight and look around him. But there was nothing to see on either hand except the suffocating blackness. He looked up and high above his head he saw the grass-edged jaws of the hole through which he had fallen. The blackness surrounding it made it impossible for him to judge how high it was above his head, and without thinking he began to scramble to his feet, already reaching up to see if he could get some kind of purchase on the sides of the rim.
But as he moved, so did the balk of wood he was standing on and he lost his balance and sat down suddenly. Chillingly, close by, something stirred. In his mind’s eye he tried to conjure the situation he now found himself in. The cave, low in the bank, open to the river though the water was long gone now. Open at such an angle that tree trunks and branches and balks of timber had been swept in here by floods over the years, like the tree which had brought them this far today. Great lengths of wood piled atop one another and stirring now uneasily under his weight. Great trunks beginning to rot and give off that fearsome fetor which almost smelt like rotting meat.
He was already whimpering with visceral, atavistic realisation when he switched on the red dot and saw it reflected off a cold, golden eye. He shouted with fear as his own eyes cleared just enough to reveal the length of the snout beyond that cold, cold eye and the length of the teeth around it. With trembling concentration he pressed the barrel to the patient eye, until the steel circle was mere millimetres from the bright red dot. Babbling a childhood prayer he believed he had long forgotten, he pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Still praying, refusing to the last to believe that there was no way out of this, he pulled the trigger again only to hear the quiet click of the hammer falling on the empty chamber.
The eye closed, squeezing a fat tear from its corner. The mouth opened.
And he was screaming wildly all through the next few dreadful moments as his finger pressed and pressed the pistol’s trigger - and continued to press it long after the hand controlling it was ripped from the end of his arm and lay nestling for ever in the belly of the largest of the twelve ravenous crocodiles into whose bankside nest he had fallen.
And the nest remained safe even from the apocalyptic inferno which whirled by above and without during the rest of that terrible night.
~ * ~
Ann had in fact fled into the field of reeds, some half formed thought inhabiting her panicked mind that cats feared water and if she could elude the leopard until she had gained the river, she would be safe. In fact die unfortunate creature succumbed to a massive heart attack brought on by the shock of its terrible injuries soon after it had entered the reeds behind her, but she did not know this as she plunged wildly through the tall grasses. Nor had she any idea that the noise of her own terror, of her gasping for breath, of her wild passage was drowning out the gathering rumble of the fire behind her. As she shoved her way by main strength through the sharp reeds, they chopped at the skin of her forearm and scored along the flesh of her triceps into her armpits. Within two hundred metres, the shirt which was all she wore apart from her underpants and boots was hanging in tatters from her and only die camera bag hanging round her neck saved her breasts from more serious damage. But she neither knew nor cared: she was running for her life, not just from the leopard but from everything that had happened to her during the last three days. She was running away, far beyond control, and she had no real intention of ever stopping again.
She burst out into a kind of trackway and paused, disorientated, just as a single scream, crystal clear and utterly terrifying, sang out through the night. So piercing was the scarcely human sound that it would have echoed hauntingly off the cliffs even though they were nearly five kilometres away, but the dull crump of an explosion - exactly like the shell from a T-80 main battle tank - killed the sound utterly. She looked around, half convinced that there must indeed be a tank following her. As she did so, the sound was repeated and suspicion became certainty. Fear of the leopard was replaced in her mind by the conviction that Gogol and Nimrod Chala had found her, that within a matter of mere moments she would be utterly at their mercy, with nothing to look forward to but six carefully-placed bullets.
A ghastly yellow light showed her a wall of reeds ahead and a tunnel of shadow leading away on either hand. She turned right and hurled forward with almost Olympic speed, so far out of control that had there been space enough and time, she would probably have run herself to death. As she sped wildly along the reed-walled tunnel down towards the water, she brushed against the dead vegetation and, invisibly but thickly, long-legged ticks began to rain down upon her from their hiding places high on the grey stalks.
The air between the thick reeds was absolutely still, no wind could move it though a tempest raged above, and as Ann ran down towards the lake, a tempest was indeed beginning to rage above. Had she been thinking with even a tithe of her usual acuity, she would have realised that the gathering light which was blessedly guiding her down the pathway could be nothing to do with either sun or moon. And had she been at all interested in extraneous sounds, she would have thought beyond the explosions of a phantom military barrage at her back and realised that these were not the shells from Gogol’s tanks pursuing her at all, but the sounds of something much more immediately deadly. Had she even paused to look up, she would have seen that the stars had come low and turned red - and that they were rushing westwards like the river itself.
The rain of blazing sparks set the reeds alight as soon as they began to settle. A hundred little fires sprang up all around Ann, but the magic stillness of the tunnel of air down which she was running kept even the faintest trace of smoke out of her lungs for a few moments more. But this was a situation which could not persist for long. The wind did not die down after the first wild wave of sparks sped west. On the contrary, it gathered strength and the sparks thickened as the blaze intensified so that the fires in the reeds, too, became more and more numerous. The first that Ann knew of her terrible danger was a sudden flash of yellow brightness which she half glimpsed through the stalks as through a bamboo screen. Disorientatingly, she supposed for an instant that she had somehow run full circle and returned to the camp and the fire she had been so proud of lighting. She paused in her panic flight and would have drawn breath to call to Robert but something drove her on - something blessed, for had she stopped for long enough to come to realise what she was doing to her body, to register even the tiniest part of the pain and exhaustion she was inflicting on herself, she would have collapsed and died where she was.
The pause was only die hesitation of the running deer; it lasted less than an instant and she was off again, with every
part of her brain closed down except that part where the irresistible urge towards self-preservation lies. The pathway led straight down towards the river which in fact came closer to the parched outthrust of the tall, stately skeletons than it did to the rest of the jungle which had died for lack of it. Beyond the outer edge of the reeds there was scarcely a hundred metres of steep, animal-roughened mud before a sluggish wash of shallow water filled the outer edge of what had been the lake-still bow of a meander. But once the fires caught hold in that band along the outer edge of the wind’s capacity to bear substantial sparks, the restless, intensifying breeze spread them sideways as it drove them down towards the water.
Had Ann been able to take an aerial view, as the passengers in the last train to Mawanga that night halfway up the opposite cliff could and as the observer in the police helicopter summoned by the first reports of the conflagration did, she would have seen a whole range of black fans all across the terrain in front of her, each fan topped with a thick arch of flame. Had she been able to see what she was running into, she would have paused for thought and realised the full hopelessness of her situation. And collapsed. And died.
Instead, she hurled herself like a stampeding animal along the final section of the track. Unsuspected, the flames closed in on either hand. Now all she could see between the thin reeds beside her was mocking, dancing brightness and the sky in front of her was filled with bright-bellied billows of smoke. Distantly, she thought of trick or treat and a terrifying night of childhood when she had been pushed irresistibly towards the biggest bonfire she had ever seen. And still she ran on, like a lemming towards a cliff top. The roaring all around her cocooned her, pushed her further into her adrenaline-drugged dream world, hid the added thunder of the helicopter passing just above her. She never knew that it was the down-draught of the machine which upset the almost magic stasis which had kept her safe so far. The whirl of air beneath the machine’s great rotors sucked the nearest pincer of fire inwards and as the chopper lifted to turn and speed away downstream, the walls of the passage Ann had been following exploded into flame on either side of her.