by E. J. Swift
She looks for something to use as a splint, and sees a couple of pieces of wood on the floor, presumably of no use for the cross-braces over the shutters. She asks the man who was holding her to grind the ends smooth. While he works on the splint, she gently lifts the girl’s wrist. The sobs increase.
Ramona hesitates. In a flat box at the bottom of the med kit is a box of anaesthetic syringes. She wants to ease the girl’s pain, but the severity of the injury is not as bad as many she has encountered and many more she might. Certainly it is not as bad as the boy she took to the emergency centre at Titicaca.
She gives the girl’s mother a strip of rubber.
‘Get her to bite on this.’
The rubber is marked with the indents of Ramona’s own teeth and those of other people.
‘I’m so sorry, Ana, this will hurt. Be brave for me, little one.’
She takes the tender, swollen wrist in both her hands and wrenches. Ana screams. The other woman screams straight after, and Ana’s mother glares at her.
‘That’s good, the bone is back in place,’ says Ramona quickly.
She works fast now, increasingly aware of the tension in the room, the smell of sweat on frightened bodies and the masking storm outside. She swabs the graze, hardening her heart against Ana’s sobs. She bandages the wrist lightly, allowing for further swelling, and straps the splint in place. Ana’s tears have soaked into her tee, but she is quiet now, limp and shuddering.
‘Well done, sweetheart, well done.’
Ramona gives the girl’s mother a ration of pills.
‘I can spare enough for tonight and tomorrow. She’ll be in a lot of pain.’
The woman tries to put one of the pills between Ana’s lips. The child shakes her head. The woman grips the girl’s jaw and forces the pill into her mouth.
‘Swallow,’ she instructs.
The girl pulls a face and swallows.
Ramona glances once more around the stripped-bare room. The teenager has his ear pressed to the wall, and the stocky man is at the door, alert and attentive.
‘How many rooms here? How many windows?’
‘A bedroom through there, the kids are up a level. The other windows are all boarded.’
‘Where is everyone else?’
‘In their own houses, locked down,’ says the white-haired man. ‘What do you expect?’
What does she expect? The best thing the villagers could do to protect themselves would be to converge in one place and barricade themselves in, but to do that is to leave their hard-earned, scant possessions exposed. It is the same reasoning that meant Ramona’s mother would never leave her shack to take shelter down in the sliding city, the same reason Inés was beaten by raiders on more occasions than Ramona likes to remember.
She looks at the bolted door, the two windows. There is no defence here. And now she is worried about the plane, which presents a far bigger prize than anything the villagers might own.
‘You need to get me onto the roof.’
‘In this storm?’ the old man looks incredulous.
‘It’ll give me the best vantage point.’
‘For what?’
‘I’ve got a gun.’
She notices the shift in their expressions, the wariness that creeps into the old man’s eyes and the way the mother’s arms tighten around her girl.
The teenager with the axe says he will go with her. The others protest, trying to stop him, but not for long.
‘It’s what I was going to do anyway,’ he says. ‘And we’ve got better odds if she’s armed. She can shoot the bastards dead.’
His face is tense as he slides back the bolts from the door.
The blast of wind and rain from outside almost knocks Ramona to the floor. Water is streaming off the roof and walls. I must be insane, she thinks, as the teenager cups his hands to give her a leg up. She levers herself onto the frame of the door and perches precariously on her toes for a moment. The roof slopes to an apex. She gauges the distance and leaps, landing sprawled on her front. She skids downwards before scrambling to a halt.
Rain sluices her face. The teenager is shouting up at her and it takes her a moment to realize they have closed the door, leaving him outside. He reaches up a hand. She braces her feet and helps him up. They slither up to the ridge of the roof.
‘All right?’ she mouths. He nods. He has the axe in his belt. She hopes he has good aim, because unless he drops directly on top of an attacker, the weapon is not much use to either of them. She feels the solid weight of the handgun in her pocket. Anger, that is what the gun means, and she lets herself feel it, remembering all the times Inés suffered at the hands of those animal gangs.
It might not feel like it, but she can tell the storm is less intense than it was. Gradually the cumulus banks will roll away, moving around the highlands, slowly shrinking. Which means now is a good time for raiders to strike.
The villagers have blocked their windows, sealing in the light. Ramona waits for lightning. In the brief flare she counts another ten houses and spots the face of the mountain rising on one side, the land dropping away on the other. Then the light is gone and everything is black again.
She lets her other senses take over.
Another flash of lightning. This time she sees the teenager’s face, wet and scared. ‘When lightning comes, I’ll look this way, you look that way. If you see anything moving, tell me,’ she shouts.
But nothing comes.
After a while, their waterproofs are no longer waterproof, and the sheer weight of the water is turning her body numb. She flexes her fingers in their gloves.
She loses count of how long they have been on the roof.
A tug of wind tries to pry her from her moorings. Lightning flares. At the corner of her eye she catches movement. A hunched figure, running.
She squeezes her accomplice’s shoulder and speaks into his ear.
‘I’ll go after that one.’
She is sliding down the roof when, thirty metres away, a house bursts into flames.
Ramona stares, shocked. She hears the teenager shout.
‘What was that?’
‘I don’t know!’
The fire is not right. It has flecks of blue and green in it. Where the fuck did raiders get northern tech? It blazes against the storm, immune to the rain. She hears screams. The door to the burning house opens and the people inside spill out, backlit against the fire, disorientated. They start to run.
Ramona, don’t stand here, move!
She drops from the roof, landing hard on her feet and tipping forwards onto her hands. The teenager jumps down behind her. The villagers scatter. In the strange firelight she sees two raiders running after them, their movement not erratic, but sure and purposeful. She scrambles to her feet and follows.
Ahead, she sees a figure dart behind one of the houses. She rounds the house and receives a hard blow to the gut and doubles over, winded. Before she can hit back the attacker is zigzagging away. Ramona gives chase. At first the flames of the burning house cast an eerie yellow-green light, but as they move further away the attacker is a dark figure against a darker night. Her limbs are cold and slow. She can’t see the terrain. The rain is blinding.
The gun is in her hand but she is not even sure it will fire.
She sees a spark of blue and something hot whistles past her head.
What the hell.
She can hear screaming somewhere up ahead. Is that gunshots? Are they shooting at people now? This isn’t normal; raiders threaten and steal, they don’t run and sneak about.
The figure looms up from the side without warning. Something aims for her head; she ducks and feels the raider’s arm just clip her scalp. She kicks out and the raider trips. Ramona leaps to pin them and feels another hot bolt narrowly miss her face.
Fuck!
The raider is armed, as is she. They grapple in the mud. She can’t get a grip – slippery limbs, grunts, the lashing rain – she can’t see if it’s a man or a woman she
is fighting, all she wants to do is get that gun arm down, go for the wrist.
Something presses between her shoulder blades. She freezes, caught between the two of them.
‘Drop your gun,’ says the one behind her.
Cursing, trembling with rage, she releases her fingers.
‘Drop yours!’
The teenager’s voice.
‘Drop it now!’
What happens next is a blur in the rain – too quick for thought. She hears a thud as the teenager’s axe embeds in the raider behind her. The arm of the one on the floor rises. There is a blue bolt. A cry.
‘No—’
The dead raider’s body pitches heavily on top of Ramona. The one beneath wriggles out and runs. By the time Ramona has got to her feet it is too late. She stumbles back the way she came and finds the teenager lying on the ground, writhing and clutching his stomach.
She puts both hands on the wound and applies pressure. She can feel the warmth of the spurting blood. She can feel him spasming beneath her palms.
‘Hey, hang on! Don’t die on me, don’t die now.’
He gurgles. She yells.
‘Help! Someone help here!’
No one comes. The teenager’s hand clutches at her wrist. She thinks he is trying to speak. She increases the pressure. He shudders and goes limp.
‘No no no no.’
The next flash of lightning shows his face, the eyes wide and shocked, the hole in his belly. Ramona’s hands coated in blood.
An uncontrollable rage fills her. She goes back to the dead raider. A woman. There are goggles over her eyes and that is when Ramona realizes, with a chill.
They had night vision.
Something is terribly wrong.
She grabs the goggles. Now she can see. The houses, back there, the still body of the teenager, the rising mountains. Nothing moving. She yanks the axe out of the dead woman’s back in a spray of blood. Axe in one hand, gun in the other, she starts to run in the direction the raiders and villagers went, up into the highlands. For a while she can hear distant cries. Cracks that could be gunshots – or something else. The sounds get fainter and fainter, but she keeps going. She finds no one else, alive or dead.
When she returns to the village, exhausted and shivering, the house is still burning with its ravaging greenish fire. The roof has collapsed. The walls will be next. The remaining villagers have come out of their houses. They have found the two bodies. The white-haired man is sat on the ground, hugging the teenager to him and moaning.
The accusation in their eyes is as clear as day and she feels guilt descending, heavy and immovable as stone.
He’s dead because of me.
The next day Ramona and a small party trek into the highlands. They find no trace of the raiders, or of the villagers who ran from the burning house. Ramona hears names muttered: Aimon, Natalia, Mal. Each a code for a life vanished so completely it might never have existed.
Before the villagers burn the dead raider, Ramona examines the corpse. The woman is dressed in traveller’s clothes: practical and plain. She has short, dark hair and light-brown skin. No tattoos. No disease scars. No piercings or jewellery. The gun she pointed at Ramona’s back must have been snatched up by the one who escaped, because they do not find it. There is nothing to distinguish her except the night-vision goggles, themselves devoid of marks.
It is the anonymity that frightens Ramona more than anything. She cannot even say if this woman is South American.
Who are they? What did they want? Where did the rest of the villagers go?
The surviving villagers are clearly anxious to bury the dead teenager in peace. She tells them she will scan the region from the air. They nod, but will not meet her eye. She sees amulets, hears mutterings. This is just their luck. They want her gone.
Ramona will not inflict her unhappy presence upon them any longer. She collects her pack and prepares the plane for departure. The lightning strike has charred the edge of one wing. The exterior of the plane seems otherwise undamaged, but the topographer is playing up.
Two villagers from the tracking party watch as she makes her checks. She can read the thoughts working through their minds. The plane is valuable. There are two of them, and although she is armed and a fighter, the villagers could overpower her collectively. She is to blame for their loss. She deserves punishment. She deserves to wander the highlands empty-handed. They could send word south that they have a valuable object.
But the plane is too big. It draws too much attention; the raiders might come back. The villagers would be exposed. Stronger clans would overpower them. They would be used.
It is only when Ramona climbs into the pilot seat, her parachute strapped securely in place and her pack stowed in the passenger seat, that she realizes she is horribly afraid. The sliding city is not far from here. The raiders have been working their way across the highlands. What if they already got to her mother? What if they are heading there next? Inés will fight. She is not one to lie down and give up, jinn or no jinn. These are not normal raiders.
They took nothing material. Did they kill the missing villagers? Did they take them? She is filled with misgivings and inescapable guilt. The teenager was trying to save her. She does not even know his name.
‘I was trying to help.’
She says it aloud, but it sounds pathetic.
Flight conditions are good, her hands hold steady and she takes off without incident. The ease of her departure seems a rebuke. She circles the plane up and over the small cluster of houses, climbing higher and higher until they are no more than dots against the plateau. Then she can no longer see them. The highlands unfold below her in wrinkles of brown and grey. The world is wider and emptier than it was a day before. There is a weight in Ramona’s chest, sharp and painful, like a lodged stone that cannot be swallowed.
19 ¦
IN THE MOUNTAINS above the sliding city, they had nothing to keep time by except the sun. Inés never seemed to know what day it was, or what month of the year. The three siblings could wander off for days, playing by the stream when it ran full and crystalline in the winter months, and playing hide and seek in the barren summer scrub. They found lizards and lined them up to race, although the lizards never ran straight as intended, but darted directly beneath the nearest rock. The first time this happened, Paola, the smallest, reached her hand beneath the rock where her lizard’s tail had disappeared and Camilo snatched it away.
‘Don’t you know that’s where snakes live?’
They had only themselves to talk to. They knew that there were other people out in the world, for Inés made occasional trips down the mountain, but it was as though they did not truly believe in them, so rarely were they seen. Other people belonged rightly in the south, where there was a city. Not a dead city, like the ruins on the hillside, but a living, far greater realm. Ramona and Camilo had frequent, detailed discussions about this place, and what it might contain.
‘What will you do when you go to the south?’ Camilo would ask. Ramona would tilt her head and pretend to consider this question as if for the first time.
‘I might … build a house.’
‘They already have houses.’
‘Then I might – grow a field full of peas.’
‘They have peas too.’
‘Peas.’ This would be Paola. The word thoughtful and considerate, as she chewed on her lower lip, which was permanently red and raw, regardless of the salves and balms pressed upon her by a despairing Inés.
‘Yes. Lots of peas. More than you can eat. In the south, there’s a whole house stuffed full of them. There are so many peas, they fall out of the windows and pop out the pods. Then they get squished into goo by all the people walking past the house.’
Camilo clapped his hands together and rubbed them in a squishing motion.
‘What’s the house like?’ Ramona challenged.
‘You know, tall, red.’
‘Red? Why would it be red? That’s stupid!’
‘Why wouldn’t it?’
‘Houses are white,’ said Ramona decisively.
In comparison to the bountiful city of their imaginations, there was not much growing on the mountain. The siblings quickly learned the art of foraging. Inés was fiercely protective of the food she managed to grow, storing her sparse crops in jars that she hid in the underground, where they waited out the storms, or burying them in the dirt outside. Ramona was used to the permanent gnawing feeling in her stomach; it never occurred to her that there were people who did not experience this discomfort. Sometimes she wondered why her mother bothered to save the food, because it was only a matter of time until hard-faced groups of men and women came to the shack, and then Inés would tell the children to run up the mountain and keep quiet.
‘Make yourselves invisible,’ she said. ‘Make yourselves like shadows.’
They were good at it. They could stay still as rocks, their breath barely stirring the long grasses, their faces covered with dust and merging into the thorny scrub. They could keep their throats silent, even when they heard sounds from the shack or voices raised.
When they came back down late at night, the raiders would be gone, and so would the food. Things were broken. The violence was arbitrary: chair legs snapped, jars smashed. One such night, under Ramona’s direction, the three children solemnly collected every splinter of glass and placed the fragments in neat rows along the floor. Ramona began to fit the glass pieces against one another while Camilo chatted about how he would make glue from tree gum.
One hand supporting her chin, Inés watched them with a kind of wearied bemusement. A large purple bruise had swollen her cheek, and Ramona saw her wince every time she moved.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. Her voice was flat.
‘We’re mending the jar,’ said Ramona.
Inés continued to watch for a while. ‘There is no point in mending the jar. When will you understand that there is no point in mending anything.’
‘We can try, Ma.’
Inés did not seem to hear. She said, ‘We are the last and we were abandoned a long time ago.’