38

Voinjama Johnson was on her knees, the top half of her chest slumped over something hard and wooden. The smell of rust, mildew and new plastic mingled with that of fresh dirt. Her senses were, in a rudimentary way, attuned to her unfamiliar and uncomfortable surroundings, although her mind was not. She was conscious, but operating on a much-altered cerebral plane. Her breath condensed into vapour as she exhaled; her eyes were wide open, rolled back to the whites. On the monitor in her mind’s eye, a sequence of events played out. It was a memory dulled by time, one nearly two decades old, that had squirrelled itself away in a recess she couldn’t storm, hoping to destroy it. It surfaced when it chose.

The little girl shivered, legs crossed in front of her as she sat on the ground. The cold was coming from inside her bones. Fear danced in her bloodstream. There were people on the ground next to her. Some of them were dead. She couldn’t see how many. She didn’t want to see. But she could hear the buzz of flies and feel the foggy stench that came off their bodies, building like a raincloud over her head.

The ones who were still alive had a frightening heat coming off their skin, and they groaned and coughed and vomited on themselves. Every now and again they would twist like snakes or lift their arms up, as if reaching for an invisible force to help them. Some whispered, but the child couldn’t hear what they were saying. But she knew they were talking to God.

So was she. She wasn’t very big, and neither was her voice, but her Sunday school teacher said God could hear everybody, fish of the sea and ants on the ground alike. She wanted her mother and brother back, wanted to find them or for them to find her. But for now she couldn’t hope for that. She would pray for one thing at a time, because God’s hands were full with everybody’s problems coming in one big rush. Now all she wanted was to get out of this place alive. The room was dark and stank with the smell of dead and dying human beings. Worst of all, it stank of fear.

All of them had walked as a group for miles across the city to cross into the ‘safe zone’, the side where the rebels didn’t threaten and shoot civilians. She didn’t know a single person in the group, but being with others made her feel safe. They walked and walked, and more people running from the shooting joined them. Some were carrying loads on their heads and sick children on their backs. Others had bundled their injured onto cloth or wooden stretchers. The crowd got bigger and easier to see.

By afternoon they came upon armed men, more like boys, who stopped them and told them to line up. They were asked their names, their tribes, what language they spoke and which part of upcountry their village was in. Some answered and others were too scared to talk. Some tried to run and were shot. The boys with weapons larger than their bodies got bored with harassing them, gathered them into their truck and drove back to a camp.

The camp looked like it had been a nice neighbourhood not long ago. Now it was just a spread of deserted houses. The people who used to live there were gone, and the walls were full of holes made by bullets and mortars. The rebels had kept the big houses for themselves and parked their trucks in a clearing in the middle of the compound. They separated the males from everyone else and said the men would join their forces. They said nothing about the women and girls and sick people. All the people they didn’t need they pushed into one room with a small window high up on the wall and no air.

No one brought food or water. People wailed and prayed loudly. Hours passed, and soon they gave up and kept quiet. More time passed. The girl watched through the window as daylight faded and disappeared. There were sounds of vomiting and people going to the toilet on themselves. A woman screamed over and over, forever, that her baby was sick and dying. After a while she also kept still, and so did the baby. The young girl was too tired to keep her ears covered, but she kept her eyes away from it all, doing what her mother had told her. She sat with her knees drawn up and her head resting between them.

Through the window, daylight reappeared and faded once more.

The girl had gotten used to her hunger and walking for long periods. It had been so long, months and months, since she felt like a child with a life full of normal things. Aside from the guns, her worst fear was the sickness. Cholera. She knew you could catch it very fast, and it spread through the watery pupu and vomit shooting out of the sick ones, sucking them dry until their skin went grey. She had to stay away from it. As long as she wasn’t sick she could walk. And as long as she could walk, she could find her mother and brother.

Someone opened the door at the end of the third day. No light entered because it was night-time again. Instead, cool fresh harmattan air rushed in. It woke her from sleep. When she looked up, one of the rebel boys was standing over her with a cutlass.

The room was dark but she knew who he was. The door had opened three times on the second day. Three of the boys had come in, twice to drag out bodies that had stopped moving and once to put down a big dish of rice with palm oil. She had only managed to get one handful, and as she had wolfed it down she had noticed one of the boys looking at her with strange eyes. She had known what it meant. Her mother had told her what everything meant, just before the fighting got terrible. When the boys had left, she had told herself to be brave. She had crawled to the nearest body and rubbed herself with the stinking mix of fluids all over the person’s clothes, closing her mind against the smell.

‘Finegeh, whah your name?’ The boy put down the cutlass and dragged her to her feet.

He was old, but not old old – maybe five years older than she was, like her brother. Boys that age thought they were men. They loved to tell you what to do, and give you punishment when you didn’t. Quincy smiled when he pushed her around. This boy wasn’t smiling.

She didn’t answer. Her body felt light, like there was no ground under her. It needed food, but she didn’t care any more if she never ate again.

‘You nah get sick, ehn,’ he said. He flinched at the dried filth all over her. It wouldn’t stop him. Everybody had seen everything. With unsure fingers he reached out and rubbed her chest, groping over her T-shirt with heavy fingers. Big women had breasts, but she had nothing.

‘Don’t touch me.’ Tears on her cheeks, she shrank from him. Her foot tripped over something; her body was too light to stop its fall and she tumbled backwards.

The boy knelt beside her. Her fingers scrabbled on the ground until they closed around the cutlass. She drove it up and hit something solid. The boy’s face changed. Warm liquid spurted onto her skin. The door was open, inviting her …

Something alive tickled Vee’s neck. She jerked awake and scurried away until she hit a wall, choking on a yelp as her head knocked against a wooden surface. The world, or what she could see of it, swam and sharpened back into focus. Pain struck up a marching band inside her cranium.

‘It’s me,’ came a whisper a few feet ahead of her. ‘It’s Chlöe.’

‘Chlöe?’ Vee saw two disembodied arms flailing around as they moved closer, until they wrapped around her in relief. Wonderful. She was stuck in a dark hole, phoneless and clueless as to where she was, and the only hope of getting out was trapped in here with her.

‘What happened to you?’

Vee rubbed her aching neck. ‘I was coming out of the hospital and got knocked out. Corniest trick in the book but it worked. Can people find somewhere else to hit me, ’cause my fucking head is paper-thin from all this abuse. Long story short, I woke up in here.’

Chlöe shook her head. ‘Not before; just now. You went vacant, your eyes disappeared right in front of me. It really freaked me out. Where did you go?’

Vee tottered to her feet. Accomplishing anything with a limb that was effectively dead weight was going to be impossible, even with an extra pair of arms. Gingerly, she lifted the sling, passed her head through it and tossed it off her shoulder. She flexed her hand. The muscles felt sore through the vice of the splint-glove, but it would have to do.

‘I must’ve passed out for a li’l bit.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Chlöe quivered. ‘It was like a trance, and you were muttering shit I couldn’t understand … like that juju stuff you told me about! What happened?’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Vee took Chlöe’s face between both hands and gave her head a little shake. She didn’t think it was possible for Chlöe to get any paler, but her skin was positively glowing in the dark. Vee’s fingers resembled streaks of muddy face-paint against her cheeks. ‘Chlöe Jasmine Bishop. This is not the time for crazy talk about juju and mystical trances, all right? It’s not going to help us.’

Vee felt Chlöe’s tears trickle down her palms. Chlöe swiped them off with the back of a hand. ‘Then what’s going to help us? I’m sorry I’m freaking out, but–’ her voice cracked. ‘How come she did all this? What’s she planning to do to us?’ Her eyes darted, bouncing around the cramped surroundings. ‘She was the same one, right, that …’

‘Yes, it was Rosie,’ Vee said. ‘Rosie did all this shit.’ Hunted and knocked each of them down in turn, put them in the back of a car with her hoodie over their eyes, drove them to wherever this dungeon was and locked them in. Biggest cliché of the century.

Feeling like an utter fool wasn’t going to help them either, but Vee figured that a minute to wallow was appropriate.