Sweaty, grim-faced soldiers took the four prisoners out of their cage and escorted them, unshackled, across the shadeless military base to the helipad. A huge white helicopter waited there, surrounded by men in flight overalls. The ramp at the rear of the helicopter was down.
“This the meat?” asked one of the crew.
The soldiers walked the prisoners to the ramp. The pilot briefly inspected Adaku and laughed.
“Look how skinny you are, woman! You’re no use to them at all. Get in, little weasel.”
The soldiers motioned with their gun muzzles and the prisoners entered the helicopter, sitting on the canvas web benches. Two more armed soldiers sat inside on a wooden crate, watching over them.
The helicopter lifted off with a roar and the prisoners, in their scraps of clothing, were quickly chilled by the increasing altitude.
It was a short flight. They soon descended, and Eja glanced out the round windows. There were no buildings in sight.
“I heard about this,” Adaku shouted over the engine. “It’s a dead drop.”
“Where are they taking us?” asked Kambili.
“Into the wilds,” said Adaku.
“Why?”
“To die, you idiot.”
The soldiers did not seem to mind their talking, which Eja took as a bad sign.
“And to kill,” he said.
The helicopter landed, the ramp lowered, and the soldiers motioned them out into the cloud of red dust the blades kicked up.
The vehicle lifted off again, deafening the four of them and blasting them with stinging sand. The ramp was still down, and the two soldiers now tossed the crate they’d been sitting on off the ramp. It landed on its side near the four.
As the roaring faded with the helicopter’s departure, Kambili righted the crate. It was locked, but an improvised device that appeared to be a washing machine timer ticked away on the lid. The others gathered around.
The timer pinged a cheery note and the lid popped open slightly. Kambili lifted it and extracted a rusty bolt-action rifle.
“Here’s some ammo. And magazines,” he said, drawing out the canvas bags still stenciled with “FOOD RATIONS - UNITED NATIONS.”
There was also a beaten-up semiautomatic pistol, an old Russian assault rifle, and four rusted machetes.
“Just who are we supposed to shoot?” asked Mazi.
“The ghouls,” said Eja. “They figure we can kill a few before we die. Last service to the nation.”
Adaku pulled eight battered military canteens, all heavy with water, from the crate.
“They don’t want us to die too fast,” she said.
“They certainly know how to squeeze every drop out of us,” said Mazi.
They ought to, thought Eja. The world doesn’t have many drops left in it.
The situation in which Eja, Adaku, Kambili, and Mazi now found themselves was an improvement over their last twelve weeks.
Climate change had been cruel to the nation. The coast suddenly had too much water, none of it potable; a few miles inland, so little rain fell that plants and animals were dying, and the people were following. The earth turned to dust, dotted with sun-bleached dead trees and animal bones. The humans looked barely less skeletal.
The consequences were predictable. The government lost credibility and society devolved into armed groups following charismatic saviors. Civilized living degenerated into a wild melee between eight rebel groups, the national military and police, numerous criminal gangs, troops from the African Union and French Foreign Legion, and a Russian private military company. The government was particularly intent on retaining control of the gold mines, the last of its GNP. Less-productive regions were abandoned. The capital, of course, had to be protected. The politicians lived there.
When the situation stabilized after some years, the government controlled an area encompassing the capital, the port, and the mines, maintaining order with a vicious authority. The autocracy was generally tolerated because what lay beyond the wall was much worse.
The wall wasn’t just metaphorical. The capital was encircled by a barrier of various materials, ranging from concrete slabs in some places to wrecked cars or piles of broken concrete and bristling rebar in others. The garrison watched over the walls from towers and improvised battlements. The single road from the city ran through the walls at the gatehouse, the strongest point in the defenses. It was a high concrete blockhouse with steel-faced double doors on both sides. The top of the gatehouse was fortified with sandbag positions for the troops, as well as an improvised mounted flamethrower, ad-hoc Greek fire atop the walls of a dystopian Constantinople.
The wasteland beyond the wall was a lawless no-man’s land of crippling poverty and starvation. Only hardscrabble groups survived, eking out a living by hunting small desert animals and challenging the army for UN supply drops.
It wasn’t long before these groups raided the capital for food. The wall was built to end that option, so the survivors turned to their last reliable food source: each other. Rumors within the walls spoke of savage raids and orgies of blood. City denizens called them ghouls, and they were a great blessing to the politicians. Only the government can protect you and your children from the bloodthirsty cannibals, said the propaganda broadcasts; anyone who opposes the government is endangering your family’s safety. If we don’t work together, your children will be eaten alive. A better unifying force could hardly be imagined.
The same sense of desperate unity was shared by the three men and one woman who had just touched down in the desert. They had each waited between three and four months in prison without trial; each had nearly died of heat, exhaustion, and dehydration as about one-third of prisoners did. Each was driven to the military base and put in the same chain-link pen, reminiscent of a kennel.
“I was reporting on police abuse,” said Adaku, her voice tired but retaining a note of dignity.
“I was caught poaching,” said Kambili.
“That’s it?” said Adaku.
“Well. . . it was a parliamentarian’s dog.”
“Did it at least taste good?”
“You’d have to ask my kids.”
Mazi was extremely thin, his clothes hanging limply.
“I taught a lecture on democracy,” he said slowly. “They arrested me the next day.”
The trio then looked at Eja.
“I stopped one of the men in my platoon from raping a girl. Then I was accused of treason.”
“At least it was for a good reason,” said Adaku.
“I heard they killed her the next day.”
They sat in silence in the sun for a few hours before the soldiers gave them a little food and water, then walked them to the helipad.
Now, in the dusty wilds, Kambili flipped the crate back on its side and stood atop it. In every direction he saw a badland of parched red soil, scraggly trees, mostly dead, and twisted scrub brush.
“Can’t see anyone,” he said.
“They’d have seen the helicopter,” said Eja, “if there’s anyone around.”
“Where do we go with our day’s worth of water?” asked Adaku. “Two, if we’re lucky.”
“Away from here,” said Kambili.
“That narrows it down,” said Adaku.
“Maybe we should just shoot ourselves right now, to save ourselves the suffering,” said Mazi.
“Help yourself,” said Kambili.
“Where are we?” asked Adaku.
“No idea,” said Eja.
“Let’s just start walking west,” said Kambili, looking at the sun. And so they did.
They hiked until the sun went down and they were nauseous with hunger.
“This is far enough,” said Mazi, flopping down against a dead tree. The rest settled in.
“No way to make a fire,” said Kambili.
“We shouldn’t anyway,” said Eja. “Someone will see it.”
“It’s gonna get cold,” said Kambili.
They sat silently for a while as the sun sank lower over the empty horizon.
“We need a plan,” said Adaku. “If we want to live, anyway.”
“We can’t go back to the wall,” said Eja. “They’ll shoot us on sight.”
“So will the ghouls,” said Kambili.
“How far is it to Cameroon?” asked Adaku.
“Given our water,” said Mazi, “too far. Anyway, the border is guarded.”
“Let’s attack the ghouls, and do our nation proud,” said Kambili grandly.
“Let’s join the ghouls, and eat people,” said Eja.
“That sounds oddly attractive,” said Mazi.
“What day is it?” asked Eja.
“Who knows?” said Adaku. “Why, you got a big social event? Cocktail party at the Hilton?”
“Every other day, the UN drops a few pallets of food and water to the ghouls.”
“Where?” asked Kambili.
“Usually between where different groups are camped out.”
“So . . . the most dangerous place to be,” said Mazi.
“Then the army comes and steals it, if they can,” said Adaku.
“If they reach it before the ghouls do,” said Eja. “Sometimes they both show up, and they fight over it.”
“What’s your point?”
“If we can reach a drop before either side, we might survive.”
“If we’re near a drop in the next forty-eight hours,” said Kambili. “What are the odds?”
Eja said nothing to that.
“How does the army recover the food?” asked Mazi.
“They send two trucks,” said Eja. “One for the soldiers, and the other to bring back the food.”
They watched the sun go down in silence. It got cool. Then cold. They huddled together.
After some hours, Mazi finally announced:
“I have an idea.”
No one said anything, so he told them.
In the morning, Eja checked the battered AKM from the crate. He had sixty rounds for it. Although he’d drunk one of his two canteens the night before, he didn’t need to urinate this morning, and he’d noticed that he’d stopped sweating during the hike the day before. He had one canteen left. This was the last day he was confident that he would survive -- that is, if the professor’s idea didn’t shorten his life even further. The only reason they’d accepted the plan was that no one could think of anything better.
They sat in a circle, facing outward, watching the sky like devotees of a sun god. Sat like that for hours in silence.
“Strange way to spend your last day,” Eja finally mumbled.
“It’s not the end,” grumbled Mazi in a voice Eja had not expected.
After another hour, Adaku pointed and said, “there.”
They turned. A moment later came the drone of an engine.
The aircraft, a four-engine cargo model, flew north of them; they watched the pallets ejected from the rear of the plane that descended by parachute.
“Four miles,” said Kambili.
“I make it five,” said Eja. “Drink the rest of your water and move as fast as you can.”
“We don’t have a compass,” said Kambili.
“Or a choice,” said Adaku.
The walked fast through the sun-scorched terrain, the dead trees serving as constant harbingers of their potential fate. At least we can still shoot ourselves, though Eja. Death by dehydration, he’d heard, was particularly unpleasant, though hardly uncommon.
Mazi, older than the rest, grabbed a walking stick from the ground and worked hard to keep up with the others. He soon lagged. The others wordlessly slowed their pace to match his. He smiled for the first time in months and pushed himself harder.
After an hour, they saw high-tension towers rising before them; they approached and passed under the lines. Adaku climbed one of the steel-girder towers.
“I see a dust cloud over there,” she shouted, pointing.
“The Army trucks,” said Eja.
“But where are they going?” asked Kambili. They couldn’t see the pallets.
“Wait until the cloud disappears,” said Mazi. “Then move to the last point she saw it.”
“How does the Army know where the food lands?” asked Kambili.
“They get a report from the airport,” said Eja. “They track the planes on radar.”
“I see people,” Adaku called down. She pointed eastward of the cloud.
“Ghouls,” said Kambili.
“We need them now,” said Eja.
“This is going to be interesting,” mused Mazi.
When the red dust cloud vanished, the four moved off quickly; within an hour, they heard voices more or less in front of them. Eja and Kambili stalked ahead and found the Army trucks. Nine soldiers were tearing the canvas webbing from the pallets and loading the crates and barrels into one of the trucks. One soldier stood atop a truck with binoculars, scanning the horizon; the pair took pains to avoid his gaze. They returned to the others.
“You know the plan,” Eja told them.
Adaku already had a long stick, tied to which was Mazi’s shirt. The trucks were a hundred meters away.
Adaku raised her impromptu banner in the air above the stunted treetops and waved it while Mazi, after Eja’s quick lesson, fired his pistol into the air.
Eja heard the soldiers shouting. He hoped they thought the flag and shots were ghoul scouts summoning their comrades.
Eja and Kambili crouched side by side in the brush, waiting.
“How many would you send?” whispered Kambili.
“Two or three.” Within seconds, they heard running footsteps approaching. Three soldiers came into view as if coalescing out of the dry scrub.
Eja and Kambili were both dubious of the weapons and ammunition bequeathed them, but they worked well enough when Eja shot the two leftmost soldiers and Kambili shot the man on the right.
“I got two,” said Eja.
“Only because you have an automatic!” snapped Kambili. “I have a bolt-action.”
“I'm surprised you hit anything at all,” said Eja. “Have you ever shot a man?”
“I have nothing to say to that, Your Honor. And what about you, soldier?”
Eja said nothing.
Eja and Kambili relieved the new corpses of their guns, ammunition, and water, quickly guzzling the last without a thought of Mazi or Adaku. They returned to the others as the sound of an intense battle exploded in the direction of the crates.
“Place bets?” asked Adaku.
“I left my wallet at home,” said Eja.
Eja could see the battle in his mind just from the sound. Twenty or twenty-five half-starved ghouls, clad in scraps and armed with bows, javelins, slings, and the occasional gun with a handful of rounds, tested their nerve against six soldiers blazing away with automatics who knew that surrender was not a practical option.
Within a minute, the shooting died down, with only a few scattered shots lingering in the air.
“The soldiers won,” said Eja. “They usually do.”
Eja and Kambili crept forward from behind the trucks. One soldier stood atop a truck, taking pot shots at the retreating cannibals to quicken their steps; two others were giving clumsy first aid to three wounded comrades. When the one atop the truck stopped shooting for want of targets, Eja shot him in the back of the head with an assault rifle liberated from his last targets. Kambili shot the two amateur medics. They approached the collection of bodies.
“This is a nice gun,” said Kambili, caressing his new assault rifle lovingly. “And I got two of –ˮ
Eja nonchalantly shot the three wounded men in their heads. Kambili looked at him wordlessly.
Eja whistled loudly for his comrades. By the time Mazi and Adaku reached them, Eja and Kambili had already cut the canvas straps from an airdrop pallet. Together the four of them tore open the cardboard boxes containing meals-ready-to-eat for hundreds of people, plastic packages of pre-cooked noodles and boiled vegetables, tins of crackers, peanut butter, and aluminum bottles of water. They cut open the bags and ate the meals without bothering to heat them with the accompanying chemical heating pads. They mixed the water with powdered sport drink and drank liters of it from Styrofoam cups. None of them bothered to keep watch for more ghouls.
When their stomachs were finally full, Eja gave a thought to their situation. He checked the nearest truck for fuel and found the tank half-full. Both trucks also had precious gasoline in jerrycans strapped to the frames. And in the first truck he found what he prayed he would: a GPS mounted on the dashboard.
“Found the ghoul camp,” he told the others. “It’s marked on the GPS.”
“Where is it?” asked Kambili.
“Five point four miles, east by northeast.”
“Now what?” asked Adaku. “We’re not leaving this food…”
“It can come with us,” said Eja.
“And how much gas have we got?” she asked.
“Can we make it to Cameroon?” asked Kambili.
“The border is guarded. On both sides,” said Eja.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“We could make it to the border.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Stick to the plan,” said Mazi.
“Your plan is going to get us killed!” snapped Adaku. “We’ve pushed our luck far enough.”
“But what about our families?” said Mazi. “What happens to them?”
“We can still help them, if we follow the plan,” said Eja.
The other two pondered it somberly.
“So how do get the ghouls to follow us?” asked Kambili.
Eja turned to slowly, lovingly, lift a rifle from the bed of the truck. It was a Dragunov marksman rifle with a telescopic sight. The previous owner had obviously cared for it meticulously, as the wooden stock and handguard were polished and oiled, and he’d kept it in a leather rifle case lined with sheep’s wool.
Kambili smiled like a boy as Eja handed it to him.
They loaded the food and water into one of the trucks, leaving just enough room for two people to ride in the back with it all, and consolidated the gas in the jerrycans and lashed them to the truck. They took the dead soldiers’ uniforms and weapons. Then they slowly drove to the encampment, watching for the ghouls, as the sun went down.
“Wait for dark,” Eja told Kambili. “The camp is in a depression about half a mile from here.”
“Do we have any night vision?” asked Kambili.
“No. Just a flashlight.”
“What if there’s no light at the camp? I won’t be able to shoot.”
“Then you’ll have to wait for morning. But that would be…dangerous.”
When it was dark, Kambili walked east through the scrub brush with the rifle over his shoulder, shining the flashlight through his fingers to control the light. In the moonlight, he could make out a rise in front of him, and a dim light beyond it. He crept up to the lip of the ridge and peered over.
Before him was a wide bowl in the terrain, a hundred feet deep and a quarter-mile across, with bluffs rising on the far side.
The sandy floor of the bowl was lit by hundreds of man-high torches set in the ground. At the foot of the slope below Kambili was an encampment, the tents made from scraps of canvas or plastic sheets. Beyond the tents, which seemed abandoned, was a line of bonfires. Kambili thought that they were for cooking, and smelled smoke and the scent of meat drifting up to him. Beyond them were several thousand people seated on the ground. They faced a tall man standing on a rock, the bluffs rising behind him like a torchlit backdrop.
The crowd droned a mournful note, and their leader suddenly raised his arms and cried out loudly. The drone surged, the pitch climbed, and individuals began crying out above the din in wails of pain and sorrow. Kambili saw that some of them swayed, waved their arms, beat their heads and chests, or threw themselves sobbing to the ground.
Then the leader quickly lowered his arms, palms down, and the crowd took the drone down to a constant, hovering moan.
The leader seemed to mumble to himself, eyes half-closed, swaying in the torchlight. Then he called in a raspy voice:
“How does it feel, my children?”
“It hurts!” the crowd cried as one. They sounded to Kambili like they meant it.
“What is it that hurts you?”
“We’re hungry!” the crowd responded. Some women cried, pulled their hair, and rolled on the ground, covered in red dust.
“I know you are hungry, my children! Who is it that feeds you?”
“Ekuba!”
“Ekuba feeds his children!” cried the priest.
“Ekuba!”
“Ekuba loves his children!”
“Ekuba!”
“Do you love Ekuba?”
“We love Ekuba!”
“Do you love Ekuba?”
“We love Ekuba!”
“Are you his children?”
“We are his children!”
“Children of Ekuba!” cried the priest.
The crowd fell silent. All eyes were on him.
“Ekuba feeds you!”
The crowd exploded in a cheer which changed to cries of rejoicing and praise. At this, the line of people between the crowd and the bonfires surged forward bearing large clay bowls of a food Kambili could not recognize from this distance. The servers wound through the crowd, which drew handfuls of food from the bowls and devoured it eagerly, feeding the children as well. The drummers at the priest’s feet began a rhythm, and the people danced as they ate, kicking up a haze of red dust with their bare feet.
While they danced, the priest swayed and spun on his rock pedestal, then stopped suddenly and seemed to glare up at Kambili.
Kambili closed his eyes to hide the whites and held his breath.
He can't see you, he thought. It's too dark.
When he squinted his eyes open, the priest was dancing again.
It then occurred to Kambili what the people were eating. He smelled the roasted meat and suddenly felt nauseous and faint. He suppressed his retching and took deep breaths to clear his head.
He didn't know how long he watched this display, but eventually the priest seemed to exit his dance trance.
He raised his hands overhead, and the crowd again went silent.
“Who feeds the children of Ekuba?”
“Ekuba!”
“Who feeds you?”
“Ekuba!”
There was a long, pregnant pause. It was the silence of death.
“My children, who keeps you from eating?”
“They do!”
“Who keeps you from eating?”
“They do!”
“Who are they?”
“The other!”
“Who are they?”
“The other!”
“Who is the enemy of Ekuba?”
“The other!”
“So!”
The crowd again paused.
“Who shall we eat?”
“The other!”
“Who shall we eat?”
“Them!”
“They are not the children of Ekuba!”
“Kill them!”
“They are not the children of Ekuba!”
“Eat them!”
“Ekuba wants you to eat them!”
“Eat them!”
“Ekuba demands you eat them!”
“Eat them!”
“Ekuba commands you to kill them!”
“Kill them!”
Kambili’s shot shattered the trance.
Three things happened at once:
The crowd turned and looked up at Kambili.
The priest collapsed.
And Kambili jumped up and ran.
He heard a terrible sound rise from the bowl behind him. It was a roar of anger, a wail of despair, and a cry of horror, all in one booming, howling voice. He knew everyone saw that the priest was dead. He scrambled, terrified, down the slope.
He flicked on his flashlight and found the path through the scrub. He looked over his shoulder to see waving torches coming over the rim, heard shouts as his pursuers saw the light from the flashlight. He sprinted and did not look back again. It was half a mile to the truck. He heard them gaining. I could turn and shoot a few of them. . .no, you've only got thirty rounds, and there are thousands of them. He hit the straightaway and turned off the flashlight. Maybe they would think he changed direction? But the wall of shouting continued behind him. He saw the moonlight on the windshield of the truck as his lungs and legs burned. He flicked on the light. The truck’s lights came on and the engine roared to life. Eja turned the truck in a half circle, and Kambili could hear the footsteps close behind him. He dropped the flashlight and vaulted into the bed of the truck with Mazi. Eja stomped the gas pedal, spraying the ghouls with sand, and Kambili slowly sat up as the truck built up speed. A bullet whistled past his head, and he grabbed Mazi and pulled him down to the bed of the truck.
They drove with the lights on so the ghouls could follow them. They stopped again after only a mile. Their pursuers, visible by their torches, drew close again; then, when the first sling stone bounced off the tailgate, Eja drove on. They kept this up through the night, driving towards the capital. Kambili ensured their pursuers followed by firing into their ranks, targeting a waving torch. He noticed that the pursuit was slowing; or perhaps the ghouls had smartened up and extinguished all lights, creeping up on them silently?
When the sun rose, they were sixty-five miles from the capital and appeared alone in the wasteland. No one in the truck had slept. Now, Eja sat atop the cab, rifle across his lap, and watched. The others slept in the bed of the truck.
At about eight o’clock, when it was light enough to see clearly, he heard drums in the indeterminate distance. They sounded like the war drums he’d heard in his youth. He quickly woke the others and started the engine. Then he climbed atop the cab with binoculars.
He looked towards the sound of drums but saw nothing. Then the drums stopped and it was silent.
He saw a flock of white birds quickly rise from the scrub brush, a quarter-mile away.
In the distance, the red landscape seemed to darken, as if under clouds, but the sky was clear. Then he saw them running across the desert through the brush and the dead trees. Eja had not seen a crowd like that since his old division had paraded before the president, and they came flooding across the desert like a tsunami.
He jumped into the cab and drove off.
The events of the next forty-eight hours blended into a semi-conscious nightmare which Eja could only recall in fragments. Each night they traded watches from the top of the cab, listening for the approach of the hunters. Eja vaguely remembered his hazy idea of parking one night in a field of dried brambles, so that anyone trying to creep up on them would have to hack a path through and thus reveal themselves. By day they alternated between driving and pretending to sleep. Eja could remember, at one point, Adaku asking, “What happens if the motor breaks down?” and telling her to go back to sleep. He recalled checking the weather on the GPS and noticing the rising winds in the coming nights and considering the consequences. Then there was Mazi suddenly feeling a hundred hands seizing him, tearing his clothes and squeezing his limbs, and he suddenly awoke, screaming, frightening the others. And the ghouls were as relentless as a machine. Eja thought he remembered Kambili firing the occasional shot at them. Or maybe he had dreamed that? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the distance to the capital and the distance to the ghouls and managing them both.
When the sun came up on the fourth day of the chase, Eja stood atop the cab and looked west as the sunlight slid across the plain. In the distance, he could make out the line of breastworks before the capital, with the high point of the gate in the middle. When he heard the drums begin, he started the engine. The four of them, tired and dusty, had a quick conversation during a stop before proceeding. The drove up a rise, maybe eight meters high – the capital sat atop a low bluff overlooking the plains – and the wall suddenly came into view.
They pulled up slowly at the gatehouse and Eja, dressed in a uniform borrowed from a dead soldier, waved through the windshield. Adaku and Mazi, with scarves wrapped around their faces against road dust, sat in the bed with stacks of UN supplies.
The double doors opened and Eja drove them in. Kambili seemed like a coiled spring next to him. Eja felt like his old self, face-to-face with death as he had been so many times before.
Just one more time, he thought. Just one more and it’s over. One way or another.
The gate closed behind them and it was dark and cool.
Their eyes adjusted to the light. They were in a room resembling a high-ceilinged garage, with a large steel double-door in front of them; those opened onto a broad avenue through the city.
Eja and Kambili stepped out of the cab. There were four soldiers in the room. One of them, sitting at a desk, looked up quizzically.
“Where are the others?” he asked
“Four dead,” said Eja, approaching him with his assault rifle over his shoulder.
“Ghouls?”
“Yes,” said Eja. The guard did not notice Adaku and Mazi hopping out of the bed, or that Kambili had wandered off.
“Wait. . . when did you leave?” asked the duty sergeant.
“Three days ago,” said Eja.
“You’re that missing patrol!”
“That's right.”
Kambili was going up the stairs to the second level where two men manned the famous flamethrower.
“Where the hell have you guys been?” asked the sergeant.
Adaku and Mazi stood near the other soldiers, rifles on their hips. Mazi offered one a cigarette.
“We couldn't find the drop,” said Eja. “Then the ghouls got between us and the city. We had to arc around them. Want some cigarettes?” Pilfering supplies was common.
“The captain figured you were dead!”
“Not yet.”
Upstairs, Kambili found two soldiers leading against a large pump for the flamethrower.
“Who are you?” one of them asked suspiciously.
“Is this the flamethrower?” asked Kambili in awe.
Downstairs, Eja said, “We got the supply drop back, anyway. Think the captain will be mad at us?”
“Not if you brought back the supplies.”
They smoked a cigarette together. Eja wondered what Kambili was doing upstairs.
The soldiers were showing him how to use the flamethrower after he gave them two cigarettes each. Then all three of them suddenly heard shouting beyond the walls.
Something was darkening the horizon. As Kambili squinted at it, he could make out the elements of this dark tide, thousands of individuals who were moving as a single wave across the desert. They crested the rise and charged straight at him.
“Oh, shit!” cried one of the flamethrower operators.
Kambili raised his gun and squeezed the trigger.
Eja had been waiting for that sound. He raised his rifle and fired, the report deafening in the small space.
Adaku and Mazi awkwardly raised their rifles. Adaku hit her target. Mazi hesitated with his finger on the trigger. The shocked man swung his rifle. Mazi still couldn't move.
Adaku triggered and the last man collapsed.
Mazi just stood there, looking at the corpses.
“This was your idea!” snapped Adaku.
Eja checked that his targets no longer breathed. Then he checked that the door to the town was secure; it was, as he figured, to prevent intruders. He went to the front gate, saw the wave of death charging towards him, and quickly closed the double doors and slid the heavy bar across. The sun shone through the loopholes in the wall.
“Everyone get to the front gate!” he yelled. “We have to keep them off the doors!”
“No, let ‘em get close!” Kambili bellowed down the staircase. “I’ve got this!”
The trio on the ground floor watched through the loopholes as the ghouls, only thirty meters from the gate, charged forward. Eja wondered if they had a plan.
He never got to find out. When the ghouls were fifteen meters from the gate, a stream of dragon’s breath shot down from the roof of the gate into their vanguard. The fuel was jellied gasoline which kept burning when it hit both the ground and the people. Those touched by the stream of flame ignited, turned, and ran screaming through their comrades, who dodged these flaming missiles until they tackled them and beat at the flames with their shirts.
The others faced the gatehouse with fear and hate. Some shot at Kambili, but he was behind an improvised gun shield, watching through a narrow viewport, and felt quite safe.
Eja ran to the back of the gatehouse and looked through the loopholes. Several soldiers banged on the heavy doors.
“What’s going on?” a lieutenant shouted.
“A mutiny,” called Eja.
“What?”
“Go get General Bello,” said Eja. “And the ambassador from the UN.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Get moving.”
“We’re gonna kill all of you!”
Eja stuck the barrel of his assault rifle through the loophole and squeezed off a long burst, spraying metal randomly, then retracted the barrel and slammed shut the steel shutter to foil return fire. He heard screams and shouting.
Sometimes, he thought, there’s just nothing more to say.
“Professor,” he called, “it’s your show now.”
In twenty minutes, the scene was set. Ten thousand ghouls were strung out in a dense line below the rise on the approach to the gatehouse, trading a desultory fire with army snipers along the walls. The garrison lobbed a few mortar shells over the wall, which was no more than swatting at a cloud of flies.
“We've never seen this, General,” a major informed the garrison commander, both of whom were sitting inside an armored personnel carrier near the gatehouse. “The ghouls won't leave. We don’t know what they want.”
“They can’t get in,” grumbled General Bello.
The general, his entourage, and five hundred soldiers faced the rear of the gatehouse, with two fearsome-looking armored vehicles which Eja knew would not be able to blow down the rear gate.
Suddenly, a white shirt on a broomstick waved over the battlement.
“Flag of truce?” a voice called out.
The general opened the top hatch of the vehicle and climbed atop. He wore his dress uniform, tall cap and ribbons, and the medals he had awarded himself, and stood with his hands on his hips.
“Agreed,” he said.
“General, is Ambassador Kumar with you?”
At a wave of the general’s hand, the soldiers led a somewhat reluctant Indian man into the square.
“Good,” said Mazi. And he continued in regal tones:
“Gentleman, our party controls the gatehouse, including the flamethrower. There are several thousand ghouls on the other side.”
“Sounds like you have a problem,” snapped the general.
“So do you, General. If you do not comply with our demands, we will open both gates and let the ghouls into the city.”
“The ghouls will kill you, too,” said the general.
“We'll make a deal with them to let us live.”
“You think they’ll honor that?”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. But you are certainly going to kill us. We're just playing the odds.”
“You have miscalculated, my friend. When the ghouls come through the gate, we’ll mow them all down. No matter how many there are. Then we’ll kill you, too.”
The general then heard a silvery voice calling through the loopholes.
“Not at night, General. You don’t have enough night vision.”
“We’ll shine lights on them, you idiot!”
“The winds will blow up tomorrow night,” cooed Eja. “Enough for a sandstorm. The lights would be worse than useless. They’d reflect back at you. You wouldn’t see anyone.”
The general grimaced. Several things flew through his mind at once – the questionable quality of his garrison, the president’s irascible personality, and the fact that Eja was making sense, all set within his incendiary desire to kill everyone in the gatehouse. And they’d been clever enough to involve the UN ambassador, who would no doubt demand that any bargain be respected. The country still needed the UN.
His mind did the cost / benefit analysis. He didn’t like it. But he sighed and said:
“What are your demands?”
Six hours later, Eja, Kambili, Adaku, and Mazi, plus their immediate families with luggage, crossed the tarmac of the international airport behind the capital. The negotiations had been slightly delayed by Adaku suddenly adding a new demand, to everyone’s irritation.
The group, flanked by soldiers, officers, and Ambassador Kumar, approached the same helicopter that had conducted the dead drop. The same flight crew stood at attention before it.
Adaku walked up to the pilot, looked him in the eye, and dropped her suitcase on his foot.
“Carry my luggage, little weasel,” she said.
“Do it!” barked an officer.
The baffled pilot picked up the suitcase and walked behind her into the helicopter.
The rest of the deal was a full pardon for all involved, safe passage to Morocco with their families, refugee status and residency permits for Casablanca, and fifty thousand US dollars in cash for each family.
As the helicopter lifted off, Eja craned his neck to view the ghoul army still assembled beneath the rise and the gatehouse with the doors still closed. As an officer, the safety of the city had been a personal matter to him. Now he forced himself to look away and back to his family. He was off to a new world and a new life, and this was no time for looking back.
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.