by Niko Perren
“Don’t ever, ever take a taxi,” he warned over his shoulder. “Most of the drivers are honest. But the ones who aren’t will sell you straight to the syndicates. You don’t want to know what they’d do to you while they’re waiting for ransom.”
His beatup white jeep was easy to find. He’d left it illegally parked in the passenger pick up lane, creating a minor traffic jam. An airport guard in military clothing stood next to it, brandishing his automatic rifle and arguing with the honking taxis. Steve gave the guard an elaborate handshake and slipped him a bill.
“Ladies first.” He held open the door for Tania. The cargo area was a jumble of supply boxes, hidden from curious eyes by the tinted glass of the cracked windows.
He started the car in a cloud of black smoke. Gasoline? That explains the stench. They inched into the traffic. The transportation grid hadn’t made it here, so everyone was driving their own vehicles – not very competently, judging from the number of dents and scratches. Steve slow-motion-slalomed around giant potholes in the crumbling asphalt.
“So where are we going?” asked Tania.
“The refugee camp tonight,” said Steve, turning down the sun visor, which came off in his hand. “I’ll run you into the preserve tomorrow morning. I should warn you though,” he smiled as if the thought appealed to him, “it could be dangerous.”
Dangerous? Coming from the same man who’d just said gun battles were nothing to worry about. “What is it you do at the camp?” Tania asked. Please. Don’t be a missionary. Be something tough. Steve swerved, cutting off a taxi. The driver yelled something in Arabic, and Steve pulled a gun out of his vest, waving it out the window.
He turned back to Tania. “I’m head of security,” he said. “I used to work for a private military corporation. Soldiers are one of the biggest exports from this area.” He swerved around a broken down car, stripped down to a rusting frame but still blocking one of the lanes. “If there’s a festering conflict, you can bet there are Sudanese mercenaries on both sides of it.”
Shiny new buildings, protected by electric fences, rose at random out of a sea of tin shacks. Starving figures crouched on the sidewalks, hands outstretched, while men and women in business suits strolled past, chatting on their omnis under the watchful umbrella of their machine-gun-toting bodyguards. Wealth existed here, but it was unevenly spread, like cold butter.
“A military background doesn’t sound like a promising path into aid work,” observed Tania.
“I made the mistake of getting to know some of the soldiers I was supposed to recruit,” said Steve. “Just desperate people, trying to help their families, and I was sending them to their deaths for a few dollars.” He slammed on his brakes to avoid a skeletal dog. “You know how my PMC cut medical costs?” He made a pistol with his fingers.
***
Civilization faded, as if they were travelling back in time: buildings transitioned to clumps of mud huts, exhaust fumes became a heat haze. A child played on the road, chasing a scrawny chicken with a stick. The asphalt all but vanished, the potholes so continuous that only the occasional hint of gray showed that there had once been pavement. “An Islamic warlord seized South Sudan ten years ago,” explained Steve. “He built roads and schools, but he was assassinated. The US Government. Radical Islamists. Depends who you talk to. That was the last time this country saw a paving crew.”
They jounced past a mother and father, shadow thin, with three spindly children trailing in a line. A strap around the father’s forehead supported the canvas bag holding his family’s life possessions. The mother, her breasts shriveled and empty, carried a bawling, potbellied baby. They stepped off the track and stood watching, eyes white in their dark faces, as the jeep passed. Steve didn't slow. Tania averted her gaze.
Steve spat out of the window. “The Western world helped cause these problems. We wanted to help, so we brought in just enough aid to let the population explode. But we had no appetite for real change. What’s the point of saving a girl’s life, if she’s going to be beaten, and have her clitoris hacked off, and then raped to produce the next generation of misery? Are we reducing suffering?” He pointed at the dead grasses baking in the hot sun, cropped short by goats. “Even before the drought this was a desert, able to support only a few nomadic tribes. People shouldn’t be living out here.”
“My goal is to change that,” said Tania. “The UNBio preserve money is supposed to educate people. Provide them places to live. You can’t care for the land if you’re starving.”
“That’s why I’m helping you,” said Steve. His voice trailed off as he stared down the road. “Not that I think you’ll succeed. I’ve seen too much horror to be an idealist anymore. But you still believe you can make a difference. I want to remember what that’s like.”
***
They passed more families, bone-thin, plodding in the terrible sun. The flat land stretched in every direction, withered bushes, the occasional patch of tinder-dry grass, cracked soil shimmering as the heat boiled the dead earth. The first body, a child, lay in the middle of the braided track, bloated and covered with flies. Steve drove onto the desert, one wheel in the soft sand, maneuvering the jeep past. Tania nearly gagged at the smell.
“It’s going to be a bad year,” Steve said. “We’re ten months without rain. And last year’s famines used up what little extra food the world had stockpiled.”
Another body. A woman, laying naked next to the road, vacant eyes staring into space. She jerked as they passed, raising her arm, trying to sit up. For a moment she looked straight at Tania, and as their gazes met Tania was exposed to the full depth of the woman's terror. She’s going to die here. A meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.
“Stop!” yelled Tania. “Stop!” Steve swerved in surprise, and his head snapped to look at her. “We've got to help her,” Tania pleaded.
Steve fixed his eyes on the road. “She’s beyond saving.”
“I saw her. She sat up. We’ve got space next to the boxes.”
Steve clenched his jaw, hands locked on the steering wheel. “Ruth told me you could handle this,” he said. He stopped, then accelerated backwards into the dust cloud behind them.
Tania jumped out and ran over to the woman. Flies swarmed, climbing into the woman’s eyes and nose. She moaned. Steve’s eyes flicked over her, the detached assessment of someone who had seen this too many times. “Her family left her because she was too weak,” he said quietly. “See, they even took her clothes. She’ll only take up medical resources that can be used on somebody else.”
“We’re here,” Tania insisted. “We have space.”
“No.”
“What will her treatment cost?” asked Tania. “I’ll give you the money.”
Steve sighed. “No money. You’ll work the infirmary tonight. Deal?”
They shifted some boxes and lifted the woman into the jeep’s back seat. She weighed almost nothing, and her papery wrinkled skin gave no indication of her age.
Tania offered the woman a sip from her water bottle, but it dribbled out of her mouth.
“I’d burn that bottle if I were you,” said Steve.
He rolled open the windows to combat the smell, then slammed the jeep into gear. They bumped down the road in silence, the woman dying in the back. The stream of people grew denser, old men, families with sunken-eyed children, bawling toddlers walking alone. More bodies too, stinking and foul in the hot sun. So many people. They rumbled through the remnants of a fence onto a cracked mudflat. Rows of makeshift plastic and cardboard shelters mingled with tattered UN High Commission for Refugees tents. People rose like black reeds from the scraps of shade under which they had been crowded, waving and cheering, only to sink down again when they saw that it was just Steve’s jeep.
“Over 100,000 people live here,” said Steve, gesturing at the ramshackle tent ghetto. He dropped his arms in defeat. “The whole of sub-Saharan Africa is like this. Entire cultures, wiped out.”
The woman m
oaned and slid onto the jeep’s floor. Tania steadied her, choking back revulsion at the sour scent of decay and the feel of coarsened skin. A cluster of more permanent buildings sat inside a gated compound, protected by double rows of razor wire. Two young men with automatic weapons saluted and swung the gate open. The jeep rolled to a stop outside a green medical tent.
“Wait here,” Steve said.
He emerged moments later, followed by two tall Sudanese men with a stretcher. They carried the woman into the stifling tent. A row of fans kept the flies off packed lines of people lying on dirty blankets. Steve found a spot for the woman, and after a few false starts managed to insert an IV. He stroked her forehead, saying something in Arabic.
Tania nearly hugged him. “Thank you.”
“Steve, what the hell’s this?” A female doctor, a vertical frown line etched deep between her eyebrows, pointed at the woman on the floor. Steve shrugged and they stepped out of Tania’s earshot. The doctor nodded, glared at Tania, and then strode over. “Steve says you’re mine for the evening.” She snapped Tania some latex gloves. “Come.”
Tania stayed in the medical tent until late into the night, cradling malnourished infants as they guzzled bottles of formula. The volunteer staff all had the same looks of despair, the same haunted eyes, as much a part of the uniform as the stained lab coats. “Every hour I sleep is an hour I could be saving lives,” said a male nurse, pausing for a moment amongst the sprawled patients. “How can I rest?”
Just after midnight, two orderlies picked up the ends of a sheet, carrying out a body.
“Oh, no!” said Tania.
“Yours?” asked the nurse.
Tania nodded, feeling as worn as the land.
“She was too far gone,” said a doctor, rolling on fresh gloves. “And what sort of life would she have had anyway? Abandoned by her family.”
The orderlies returned, supporting a ragged teenager with a badly infected foot. They laid him in the dead woman’s spot. He looked up at Tania and smiled with hope.
***
Tania and Steve rattled out of camp as dawn’s first light rose behind the dark outlines of the tents. Did I even sleep two hours? A lone generator droned at the medical center, filling the silence left by roosters that had been eaten long ago. They drove into a featureless desert. The tire tracks forked and rejoined where drivers had tried to bypass rough patches or sandpits. Several times Steve stopped at a junction, as if trying to remember the way, but it never took him long to decide, and they never had to backtrack.
After a few hours of silent driving they reached the edge of a broad valley with a dry riverbed running through it. “The preserve’s over there, in those low hills,” said Steve. “The border with Ethiopia follows the river course.” Steve pulled a pair of digital binoculars from under his seat and played them over the landscape, letting the software search for people, but double-checking himself.
Even without the binoculars, Tania could see the web of tracks where goats had stripped the land after some long ago rain had brought brief life.
“Do you still want to do this?” asked Steve.
A plume of dust stretched kilometers behind them, visible to any watcher. But not even a bird broke the empty stillness. Tania nodded.
Steve stepped on the accelerator and the Jeep dropped down the hill, into the dried riverbed and through the wilted weeds that had overgrown the stream cobbles. He revved the engine, tires spinning, and they wallowed up the other side. The sun blasted down, hostile and cruel, and Tania soaked her bandanna from her water bottle. Every time she thought they could go no further, Steve somehow found another track.
“This is as far as I dare go,” he said finally, pulling to a stop at a flat spot protected from view by a cluster of scraggly bushes. “We’re well inside the preserve now.”
They’d passed no park boundary signs. No fences. Tania got out of the car, gasping at the slap of heat on her face. She brushed against one of the bushes, and a shower of leaves fell to the ground.
“I don’t know what you expect to find here,” said Steve.
Tania touched the gorilla coin in her pocket. She kicked at a rock. “I couldn’t let it go. Not without knowing for sure.”
“Then your crisis is less urgent than mine,” said Steve. “I don’t have the luxury of certainty anymore.”
He pulled out his scoped hunting rifle, checked the ground for scorpions, then sat down in the jeep’s shade. “I’ll keep watch from here.” He pulled his hat down over his eyes. “Don’t go too far.”
Tania put on her pack, then scrambled up the hill, searching out gullies where the goats might have done less damage. Even with good management, this area would not have survived the drought. But surely we could have saved something. Kept the livestock out at least. Put in erosion control grasses. The sun beat down, reflecting off the parched earth. Had it really been sleeting in Boulder?
She reached the crest, her mountain-climbing instinct demanding the view. Lines of rolling brown hills faded into a shimmering haze.
What the…?
Footprints. They looked fresh, the edges still unobscured by sand. The prints had the lugged tread of heavy boots, so it wasn’t a herder; nobody she’d seen in the camp had worn shoes.
A soldier?
She ducked, aware that she was exposed on the hilltop, visible for miles around. At her feet, she noticed a fresh strip of orange flagging tied to a stick. A survey stake? Why would anyone survey this land? And for what? Tania felt a sudden, burning curiosity.
She crouched, and started following the footprints down the hill, darting from bush to bush. Surveyors can’t be as dangerous as soldiers. The prints led to a dry riverbed at the bottom of the next valley, passing four more stakes, which her GPS showed as linear. Tania froze behind the last of the bushes and peered carefully ahead.
Parked across the riverbed, about 100 meters away, was a jeep. It was newer than the one Steve had brought her in, and painted in military colors.
Get the hell out of here!
Both doors stood open. There was no sign of movement. She zoomed in with her omni, using the camera as crude binoculars. Something lay on the front seat. A folder? A few seconds at the jeep, just enough to take some photos, and she might know what was going on. This is my business. UNBio paid for this land. For the restorations that never happened.
Tania sipped from her camelback, considering her strategy. Do it now? Or leave? I can’t sit here. She gathered her courage, then raced across the cracked mud and ducked down at the jeep’s open door. A folder full of papers lay on the front seat. Real papers! Thank goodness for low tech.
She snapped a photo of the first page. CLICK! BEEP. The sound was a thunderclap in the silence. Shit.
“Marhaba?” Through the window she caught a glimpse of a soldier getting up from the tree where he’d been dozing. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. The nearest bushes were a universe away.
Quiet. Don’t move. “Li nadħhab.” A second voice. Boots crunched on dry earth, rounding the jeep.
Run! Tania was fast, but she was a 42-year-old white woman and the soldier was in his early twenties, from a country known for distance running.
A hand seized her waist and hauled her into the gravel, pinning her arms behind her back. She mule-kicked her attacker, aiming at his groin, but she connected with his thigh instead. The hand let go. Then a vicious fist to the head sent a shock of lighting pain through her. Her legs wobbled. Another punch, in the side of the jaw. Tania heard bones and teeth shattering. Somewhere in the blackness she was dragged over rough stones back to the jeep.
***
“Min ayyi daulatiń anta? Amrikiah?” Tania huddled in a fetal position as the taller of the two, the officer, aimed another boot at her. “Ana mehtag motargem.” He kicked one last time, then seemed to tire of the pointless interrogation. Without network access, the omni’s language translators were useless. He leaned against the tree, pointing his rifle at Tania. The other man took over, leering at her through
the jagged scar that split his face. She could smell the sour stench of his sweat through the blood in her mouth. These men had been in the field for a long time.
Scar’s hands probed her clothing, sliding over her skin, searching through her pockets. He laughed at Tania’s revulsion, forcing his hand to her breast, squeezing viciously. She yelped in pain. He stuffed her omni into his pocket, not even bothering to look at it. And then he found her gorilla coin. No! She scratched at him, but he was ready, countering with a knee to the ribs that knocked her, coughing, onto her side.
“Ma beddi!” He hurled the coin into the bushes.
“No!” Tania sobbed. Another kick in the ribs cut off her cry.
Officer said something, and Scar slunk to the tree and took the rifle. Officer smiled as he unbuckled his belt. He glared at Tania, savoring her terror. He’s done this before. Many times. I’m going to be raped. Holy shit. I’m going to be raped.
And then killed.
Officer stepped forward.
Tania took in a shuddering breath. Pretend I’m weak. Lure him close. Make him remember me. But he was too practiced. He kicked her, forcing her into a defensive huddle, then grabbed her folded arms and twisted her onto her stomach. “Get off me! Help!” Through the painhaze Tania could feel his hands, working her pants down. She struggled, but he was powerful, and nearly twice her weight. He used his knees to spread her legs apart.
Head pinned against the ground, face half buried in the sand, Tania could just make out Scar, standing at the tree anticipating his turn. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. Scar laughed.
And then his head vanished.
A half-second later, a crack sounded from the hilltop. Blood fountained from Scar’s neck, and he toppled forward.
“Ma hatha?” Officer leapt off Tania and scrambled for Scar’s rifle, but his pants tangled around his ankles pulling him off balance. The stumble saved his life, drawing the next shot just wide, exploding his arm. “Yaahhh!” The remains of his forearm dangled by a strip of skin from white shards jutting out of his elbow. His eyes rolled like a cornered deer’s, and he dodged for cover behind the jeep, abandoning his quest for the rifle. The windshield shattered into a hail of diamonds.