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by Robert Muchamore

  ‘How?’ ‘Nero’s going out with a convoy tomorrow,’ I said. ‘He’ll be furious if all the tyres are flat, not just

  yours.’ The drunk’s expression changed into a smile. ‘Nero will go crazy,’ I said. The drunk set me free and gave me a friendly thump on the shoulder. ‘I like your style, boy,’ he giggled. ‘I’ll give you a hand. But first you have to take this.’ The soldier reached inside his truck and pulled out two banana beers. ‘Be merry my friend,’ he boomed. ‘Beautiful,’ I said, grabbing one of the beers. The drunk laughed, ‘They’re both for you. Put one in your pocket for later.’ I grinned, ‘Cheers.’ I was thirsty from the walk. I twisted the top off a beer and drank half straight down. I walked back to the tyre and carried on letting out the air. My new friend staggered off and started letting down a tyre on another truck. He was so pissed, he took twice as long as me to do each tyre. When I crept off to meet Jesus, he carried on doing my job.

  The three of us met up by the fence. Jesus had killed the storekeeper and hidden his body so that everyone thought he was skiving. He’d stolen loads of grenades and walked around camp rolling them under the raised buildings. If we got a single grenade to explode in any of the buildings during the assault, it would set off all the ones underneath, creating a massive explosion. Desi had packed dirt and stones inside heavy machine guns and grenade launchers, so they’d jam up or explode if anyone tried to use them.

  Our final task was to neutralise the roadblock a kilometre from camp. The three of us crawled through the jungle. It was the kind where there are no tall trees, with really dense undergrowth. There wasn’t any moon, so it was pitch black and thousands of insects and stuff kept buzzed past right next to my ears.

  As we walked, I felt a sharp pain in my wrist. I was scared it might be a snake, but I ran my finger over the painful spot and only felt a little round lump, which I realised must be an insect sting. The pain was quite bad, but I carried on. Then I felt the same stabbing pain, only this time it was up around my elbow. Something was crawling inside my uniform. Jesus realised I had a problem and stopped walking, but it was so dark he couldn’t do anything to help.

  I frantically unbuttoned my jacket and threw it off. The insect managed to get a couple more stings in before I flicked it off. ‘You OK?’ Jesus whispered, trying not to giggle at my frenzied state. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it was a wasp.’ ‘That’ll hurt,’ Desi said. The wasps in Africa were black, evil looking, things, about the size of a small car. My arm burned with

  the most staggering pain. I slipped my jacket back on. Jesus started walking again. We got up close to the guard hut at the roadblock. The fingers in my right arm were locked up and my

  wrist was all tingly and swollen. I could hardly hold my rifle. Desi crawled around the side of the hut and peered in the window. He raised four fingers, to indicate the number of soldiers inside. There were two others outside. One in the road by the line of spikes and one standing behind a big machine gun. We had to do a neat job. Too much noise would put headquarters on alert and the mission to take it over would be hopeless.

  I couldn’t shoot straight, so Jesus pointed me towards the guy manning the machine gun. It was the closest target and the only one I stood a chance of hitting with arm in agony.

  ‘I’ll do the one in the road,’ Jesus said. ‘Desi, you point your gun in the window of the hut and start blasting. We roll on three.’ Me and Desi nodded. ‘One… Two… Three.’ I fired two quick shots into machine gun man. Jesus ran in the road and shot the guard, before spinning and blasting the only soldier who managed to run out of the hut before Desi got him through the window. We killed all six men in about five seconds.

  Jesus dragged the chain of metal spikes out of the road. Then he dumped some of the sandbags packed around the machine gun a few hundred metres down the road. These were an arranged signal, to tell our people that the roadblock had been dealt with.

  . . .

  We hid near the guard hut and waited for the others. My wrist was swollen to about twice it’s normal size. Jesus and Desi said it was nothing to worry about, just a mild allergic reaction that most people get the first time they’re stung by a wasp. They both giggled about my performance throwing off the jacket and said I was soft when I moaned about the pain.

  The first truckload of rebels was from a unit I’d never seen. Within fifteen minutes, there were twelve vehicles stuffed with rebels lined up in the road. The reports were good. Every command post in the area had been taken without much difficulty. Sami and Captain jumped out of a freshly stolen Nissan. Captain went off to organise the final assault on the base. Sami spotted me, lit up by the headlamps of a truck and came over. ‘Oh my god,’ Sami giggled, looking at my arm. ‘I’m married to a freak.’ A couple of people standing nearby started laughing. She kissed my cheek and grinned at me. ‘It’s not funny,’ I moped. ‘It really hurts.’ ‘Hurts even more when you do this.’ Sami grabbed my swollen wrist and squeezed it. I screamed out loud. ‘You’re such a baby, Killer. It’s only a wasp sting.’ ‘I love you too,’ I said. I was getting fed up with everyone taking the mickey. ‘OK,’ Captain was shouting. ‘I want an advance party of ten to go in through the fence and start

  attacking the front gate from inside. The rest can ram it in trucks as soon as the fighting starts.’ Sami gave me a quick kiss and got back in the Nissan. We had plenty of troops and I could barely pull a trigger with my swollen arm, so I waited by the guard hut, telling any late arrivals that the party had started without them. I heard some explosions and a few brief bursts of gunfire. A big fireball shot into the air when a fuel tank got hit. The whole sky flashed orange.

  When everything quietened down, I began walking up the road. I passed through the main gates and looked around. Things had gone well for us. The grenades under the huts had gone off and most of the government troops didn’t even get out of bed.

  Loads of rebels were celebrating by climbing up the watch tower and screaming off the sides. As a rebel, quiet became second nature. Even in our own camps we never spoke loud in case there was an army patrol nearby. Now we had 250 square kilometres of our own and there were no soldiers left, except a few manning obscure roadblocks, who’d be in for a nasty surprise when they finally got fed up waiting to be relieved and wandered back to base.

  . . .

  Sami and me crashed together in the back of a truck for the last few hours before sunrise. I woke first and gently rolled her head off my chest, without waking her up. I stepped over a couple of sleeping rebels and jumped off the back of the truck, into the white glare of the day’s first light. Nobody else was awake, except a few poor souls who’d been ordered to stay sober, guarding the main gate.

  The ground was littered with bodies. The rebels crashed out on the ground sleeping off drunken victory celebrations were dressed identically to the dead government soldiers. The only way to tell them apart was to inspect for bullet holes and blood stains.

  I wandered to the mangled wreckage of the accommodation huts, where most of our enemies had died. The smell of burning was still strong. The corrugated metal sides had collapsed and were all melted out of shape. One bit looked like something out of a horror film: a charred arm, attached to a set of finger bones pointing at the sky.

  I’d had a few drinks and celebrated with everyone else the night before, but I didn’t feel that great about what we’d done. Whatever the politics behind it, up until now I didn’t feel like I was fighting for a cause. I was fighting to get supplies, protect our camp and help a bunch of people who’d saved my life. The raid on headquarters felt different. We weren’t plucky underdogs anymore. We’d ruthlessly killed everything in our way, even when that meant burning fifty people burning to death.

  Maybe it was marrying Sami and having responsibility for Adam that changed my perspective. Whatever it was, I had a bit of a moment as I stood there. I looked at my filthy, sweat soaked, uniform. I had a pistol in my belt. Grenades, knives and ammunition in my pockets. My whole body dripped wit
h stuff whose only purpose was to kill and maim other humans.

  I was ashamed of what I’d become, but I still didn’t have much sympathy for the dead soldiers. They would have done the same to me.

  21. BUNGS

  The unit leaders went into conference. We wouldn’t hold our ground for long unless we cut off the roads with some heavy duty blockades. There was also a supply problem. We usually ambushed the fuel, food and weapons we needed, but the government had already sent everything it could forward. Unless new convoys started dropping supplies into our lap, things were going to get tight.

  Captain estimated we had weapons and ammunition for months. There was food for a few weeks, after which they’d have to pull men off military operations and send them hunting. Our big problem was fuel. All but a couple of vehicles had survived the raid, but the store of diesel had exploded. We had whatever was already in the trucks, plus a few odd cans at our camps and in the army command posts. Within a week, we’d be reduced to defending our land on foot.

  Casino had an engineer in his unit who’d drawn up plans for eight roadblocks, sealing the four roads through our area in both directions. The idea was to stop all government supplies getting through to the front. Our unit was one of the smallest, so we were assigned to build and defend a single blockade about three kilometres from our camp.

  A lot of thought had gone into the design. An approaching convoy first encountered a double line of spikes. The spikes were booby trapped, so that anyone who tried to move them would be blown up. We set up heavy machine guns behind a wall of sandbags at the side of the road. If anything got past the spikes and guns a tank or an APC most likely – they came face to face with a giant stack of logs. We parked a couple of trucks at the side of the road, because we’d seen how effective they’d been ramming APCs when we took the money.

  The final obstacle, past the logs, was designed to stop tanks, which we reckoned were the only things likely to make it this far. It was supposed to be a trench, nearly two metres deep. We got the logs, spikes and guns sorted out the day after we captured headquarters, but the trench was one of those things that looks good on paper but never really works out.

  We only had three shovels and the ground was baked so hard that digging was a nightmare. The sides of the hole crumbled when it was dry. When it rained, it filled with water and the bottom turned into sludge. Mosquitoes love a bit of stagnant water to lay their eggs in. By the third day, you couldn’t go within five metres of the hole without your hands and face disappearing under millions of black dots, all stabbing your skin for a morsel of blood.

  . . .

  Life soon got boring waiting at the roadblock, but it was less tiring than ambushes, when you’d often walk thirty kilometres a night and only get a few hours sleep. We were on duty 24/7 so we made ourselves comfortable. We put tents by the road to sleep in, which was fine as long as a couple of us stayed awake keeping lookout. Captain let us take it in turns to go up to camp for a couple of hours break. Me and Sami usually went to the pool, washed off and had a bit of a romp. I took Becky swimming if I had the time, which she absolutely loved.

  Adam spent most of his time with us, messing around with David and Beck, and driving everyone crazy asking them to tell stories about battles they’d been in. There wasn’t any camouflage small enough to fit him, but he carried his rifle everywhere and even managed to get hold of his own supply of grenades, despite me telling everyone not to let him have them.

  He seemed really happy. He hadn’t seen anything horrible happen yet, there were plenty of bored people around to pay him attention and as far as Adam was concerned, the weapons were the coolest toys ever. One afternoon, I took Adam out to the abandoned mine. I let him get a feel for shooting his gun, by letting him fire a couple of ammunition clips into a metal shed.

  In the first four days, we only stopped two single trucks. Another sign that the government had already sent everything it could to the front, was that both trucks only had a driver, instead of two or three men like usual. Both times, the driver stopped at the line of spikes and got out of his cab with raised hands. We had to kill them. We didn’t have the resources to look after prisoners and we couldn’t let anyone who knew where the blockade was get away.

  . . .

  The fifth day of the blockade, a six truck convoy arrived in the hottest part of the afternoon. Adam refused to leave when I told him to hide in the trees. One of the trucks was a tanker. Unfortunately, the tanker driver had brains. Usually, you shoot at the tanker first because the explosion knocks out half the rest of the convoy, but we were desperate for fuel.

  The tanker driver sussed we weren’t firing at him and stayed in his cab. He picked a moment when it looked like we were all occupied shooting up the other trucks and made a run for it. Captain reckoned he got shot in the arm, but before we could finish him, the tanker erupted. The driver must have left an armed grenade on his seat. The cab exploded first, followed a couple of seconds later by a massive fireball as the fuel exploded. The fire surged upwards, setting light to the branches above our heads. Adam and Amin both started screaming. The wave of heat knocked me backwards. I grabbed my pack and ran towards Adam.

  The skin on Amin’s bald head and back of his neck had peeled up into little rolls, with the raw flesh exposed underneath. He’d dived forward to cover Adam when he saw the first explosion. I pulled him off Adam. It sound’s awful, but I didn’t care about Amin’s sacrifice, I just needed to know if Adam was OK. First impressions weren’t good, Adam’s forehead was all bloody with strips of skin dangling in front of his eyes. He had another nasty patch on his elbow, where Amin hadn’t quite covered him up.

  Amin yelled out in my ear. Adam was in shock, eyes open wide, hands jiggling. There was still a bit of gunfire going on between our people and the last truck driver. Amo was next on the scene, she gave Adam’s burns a quick once over. ‘Looks like it’s only the top layers of skin,’ Amo said. ‘Take him to the pool and run lots of cold water

  on the burns.’ I poured some of the water out of my canteen onto Adam and slung him over my shoulder. When I

  turned around, Sami was right in front of me. ‘I’m faster,’ She said. Sami grabbed Adam and ran off with him. The tanker still burned fiercely, only a few metres away.

  Captain had arrived on the scene. I made to run after Sami. ‘Where you going?’ Captain asked. ‘After Adam,’ I said. ‘That’s a waste,’ Captain said. ‘Help with Amin.’ Me an Amo slung Amin in the back of a truck and drove as far as it would go. That still left us to carry Amin up the final narrow stretch to camp. He could just about walk, with an arm around each of us. He groaned in pain the whole time. Blood dribbled down his arms and torso until we were all sticky with it. It took half an hour to drag him the whole way.

  We lowered him onto the ground outside Amo’s hut. All three of us were breathless and covered in insects with the taste of blood. I doubled up in a heap. Amo didn’t even pause for breath. She shoed Becky away and shouted for Ghina to fetch a bucket of water. ‘Will he survive?’ I asked. ‘He would in a hospital,’ Amo said. ‘Out here it’s no certainty.’ Grandma came over to help. Amo gave her a cloth and she started dipping it in the bucket and

  squeezing out water over the burns to soothe them. ‘Can I help?’ I asked. ‘I’ll cope,’ Amo said. ‘Take these down to your brother. Sami will know what to do.’ Amo gave me a sterile cloth, a bottle of disinfectant and some clean bandages. I grabbed a fresh uniform for myself and ran down to the pool. Adam was lying flat in the shallow part of the pool with water rushing over him. Sami laid beside him, dribbling water onto his forehead form her cupped hands. Adam was a bit shocked when he saw all Amin’s blood on my uniform. ‘You OK?’ I asked. ‘My head really hurts,’ Adam said. ‘Is Amin dead?’ ‘He looks bad,’ I said. ‘You’re not going down to the blockade anymore. It’s too dangerous.’ Adam sat up, ‘It’s boring up here with Grandma and the little kids.’ ‘Tough shit,’ I said. ‘You do what I say from now on.’ Now Adam was
sitting up, Sami started dabbing his elbow with a cloth soaked in disinfectant. He

  winced in pain every time she touched him. I stripped off and started washing the blood out of my camouflage. ‘You’re not Mum or Dad,’ Adam said. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’ I wasn’t in the mood for his lip. ‘You’re eight years old and you’re not going down there,’ I shouted. ‘I told you to hide in the trees

  when we heard the trucks coming.’ ‘I’ll do what I like,’ he said defiantly. Adam’s expression changed to horror when I charged through the water towards him. I grabbed his

  hand and crushed his knuckles inside my fist. He let out a high whine and started to sob. ‘Dad’s dead,’ I shouted. ‘Mum’s not here. I’m all there is. From now on, you’ll do everything I tell you,

  or I’ll make you bloody sorry.’ Adam stared me out, he could be stubborn as hell sometimes. I squeezed his hand harder and bunched

  my fist in his face. ‘Got that?’ I said. Adam nodded reluctantly, between sobs. I let his hand go. ‘No more knives and grenades,’ I shouted. ‘You can have your gun if Captain wants you to do guard duty. The rest of the time it stays in our hut. You’re going to stay at camp and help Grandma and Ghina to cook and look after the little kids.’ Adam didn’t have the guts to answer me back. He looked at Sami. ‘Can I get out of here?’ He asked sourly. Sami shrugged, ‘If you want. I’ll put a bandage on your elbow later. Don’t let the burns get dirty.’ Adam got up, scowling at me. He slid his shorts and t-shirt back on and started clambering up the