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Sarah
Anyone in the world? But who? Who did she know who could do anything? Did she even know any phone numbers? At home, in Cleveland, she had a cell phone full of contacts but none of the numbers were in her memory. Wait! Yes, she did know a number. She’d known it since she was a little kid. A yellow phone attached to a land line sat on the counter in the kitchen. Even as a three-year-old, reading well beyond her age-range, she’d committed the numbers to memory. The phone was still there. It rarely rang but it was there. She could phone home.
“Matthew,” she said, “I know what —”
“Shh,” Matthew put his finger to his lips. “Tell me in a minute.”
The girls from the convent were filtering in through the trees. They were highly visible in the bright cloths that had supplanted their school uniform. A couple of the other captured girls came with them and the pregnant one followed behind along with Angelique.
“We are going to hold a service,” Cecelia said to Sarah.
“What?” Sarah’s mind was not in Uganda, it was in the sunny kitchen of her home in Cleveland. Would anyone be at home What was the time difference? Suppose all she got was the answering machine?
“They are burying our sister,” Cecelia said.
“I know.”
“We are going to pray,” Cecelia said.
“We’ll come,” Matthew said.
Sarah was still wrestling with the question of time difference and she tried to free herself from Matthew’s hands. “Leave me alone.”.
“You have to help me walk,” Matthew said. “I don’t think I can get over there by myself.”.
Oh great! She didn’t have time to be his human crutch. She needed to make a plan. “Can’t you use a stick or something?” she asked.
“I will look for one,” Matthew said, “if you will help me. I cannot escape if I cannot walk.”
For a moment, pity took the place of impatience. All he wanted to do was to walk. Was it so very much to ask of her? She stooped to allow him to drape his arm over her shoulders.
He gestured toward the forest. “Over there.”
“That’s the funeral,” Sarah said. “We shouldn’t go there.”
“That’s where they keep the firewood,” Matthew said. “It’s the best place to find a good stick. We can just walk behind the funeral procession. They will think we’re curious.”
The dead girl was to be buried in a small clearing just behind Matapa’s tent. Sarah reasoned that Matapa had no intention of making this gorge his permanent home or he would choose a different site for the graveyard. She was pretty sure that bodies accumulated at quite a rate around Matapa and his followers.
Her sincere hope was that Matapa would soon be adding his body to the accumulation. She wondered if his death would make any difference. Apparently, the title of General Matapa could be passed from one evil jerk to another, ad infinitum.
The girls assembled around the gravediggers and Sarah watched out of the corner of her eye as the older man lowered the girl’s small body into the grave. Then Angelique stepped forward and handed over another small bundle wrapped in rag - the baby.
The convent girls started to sing. One took the lead and the others followed, their voices weaving intricate rhythms and harmonies. Much to Sarah’s surprise the boys put down their shovels and joined in, building another layer of harmony. Their song rose into the steaming equatorial air carrying with it all the richness of their culture, all the dreams and hopes that had once been part of the captured girl, and all the future that might have existed for her tiny baby.
Sarah imagined that the convent girls were offering their prayers to the mother they all trusted - the Virgin Mary of their Convent. She could not imagine what dark gods were being worshipped by the ragged, thuggish boys of Matapa’s army. They sang with the voices of angels and lived the life of Satan’s demons.
The girls continued to sing as the boys filled in the grave. Matthew hopped over to the wood pile and began sorting through the dead wood. Sarah remembered the home-made crutch he used in his father’s compound. No doubt Matthew was an expert at finding just the right crutch to fit his growing body.
One of the older boys stopped his work on filling in the grave and shouted at Matthew. Cecelia stopped singing and shouted back to the boy. The gravediggers continued their labor and Cecelia came to speak to Sarah.
“I told him the boy was looking for a crutch so he could walk alone,” she said.
“You’re right,” said Sarah. “He can’t rely on me all the time.”
“Take me with you,” Cecelia said.
“What?”
“When you escape, take me with you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know how to escape.”
“You will think of something,” Cecelia said. “You are a mazungu, you will not die here.”
“I’m a mazungu, not a magician,” Sarah said, I don’t have any special powers.”
Matthew interrupted Sarah’s protest by hissing at her from his place in the wood pile.
“What?” she asked.
He hissed again, and then put his finger to his lips, and opened his eyes really wide, more or less beckoning her with his eyebrows.
“He wants to talk to you,” Cecelia said.
“I can see that.”
“Perhaps he has found something.”
“In the woodpile?”
Cecelia shrugged her shoulders. The choir took up another song, even more heartbreaking than the last one, and the boys shoveled to the rhythm.
Sarah sidled over toward the woodpile and Cecelia followed her. As they stepped into the undergrowth Matthew hobbled toward them with a newly discovered forked stick tucked in his armpit.
“Come this way,” he said, “and do not scream.”
“Why should I scream?”
“You will want to scream, but do not make a sound and do not run away.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. She turned to Cecelia intending to send her away but the convent girl shook her head and followed her to the wood pile.
“Now stand still,” Matthew said, “and look down.”
Obediently Sarah looked down and practically jumped out of her skin.
“Do not scream,” Matthew whispered.
Sarah swallowed the scream that was rising in her throat as she took in the fact that a huge snake was sliding through the undergrowth within inches of her feet. Its tail was hidden in the long grass on one side, and its head had already moved across the clearing and was lost from sight. The snake was an iridescent blue-black ribbon moving like a flowing water.
“Ah,” said Cecelia, “I see.”
“What?” Sarah asked. “What’s to see? It’s a snake.”
Matthew shook his head. “Not a snake,” he said. “Safari ants.”
“Ants?”
Sarah bent over for a closer inspection.
“Do not move,” Matthew said.
Sarah stayed where she was and stared at the flowing stream in front of her. Now she could see that it was not a snake but a column of ants. Millions, maybe billions, of shiny black ants were moving with a single purpose.
“If you disturb them, they will bite,” Cecelia said. “They are looking for food. They will eat anything they find.”
Sarah had been thinking about poking them with a stick. She rethought the idea.
“They can devour an elephant,” Matthew said. “They can kill a sleeping man. They can kill a man who is in his bed.”
“Well, that’s all very interesting,” Sarah said, “but I don’t see...” And then she did see! She saw exactly what Matthew had seen. The column of ants was moving in a straight line. If there was no change in their direction, that line would lead them to the rear of the green tent where Matapa lay immobile in his bed.
“Will they go in there?” Sarah asked.
“I think so,” Matthew said. “When the colony is hungry, they send out scouts to find food. If the scouts have found food in Matapa’s tent, they will lead the colony to the tent.”
“Chicken bones,” Sarah whispered. “He had chicken bones and there were ants on the bones.”
“God is good,” said Matthew.
“All the time,” Cecelia said.
Matthew nodded.
Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not God, it’s nature.”
“All nature is in God’s control,” Matthew said. “I have prayed for a miracle.”
“Eh,” Cecelia said admiringly.
“Okay, okay,” Sarah said, “let’s not argue. You can say it’s a miracle if you like.
Her mind was racing. She had no idea how long it would take for the ants to reach the tent, if that was indeed where they were heading. Even in the short time she had been standing in the clearing, millions of ants had marched past her feet and the end of the column was nowhere in sight. She tried to gauge their speed - slow and steady, and the tent was not far away. If they were not already making their way under the tent flaps, they wouldn’t be long. There was no time to waste.
“If one of Matapa’s people sees them, will they be able to stop them?” she asked.
Cecelia shook her head. “They will need poison. When these ants find food, nothing stops them, and if anyone is in their way...”
Sarah looked at the ants. She really had to find out for herself. Everything logical in her cried out against the wisdom of making a plan based purely on the possibility that a miraculously summoned column of ants could eat an elephant, or a man in his bed. She extended her sneaker clad foot and touched the outer edge of the column. For a brief moment the column hesitated and then it flowed on while a couple of ants detached themselves from the column and crawled across her shoe, and then a couple more, and then a few more.
“Get back,” Matthew hissed.
The ants moved from her sneaker to her socks and then started up her legs. They started to bite, pinpricks at first, and then sharp stabbing pain advancing up her legs. She sprang backwards, beating at her legs. Cecelia pulled her away.
“Stand still,” Matthew said. “Someone will see you.”
The bite of the safari ant was ferocious and Sarah fought the urge to tear at her legs. The column had already resumed its march and she knew that she only had a few outriders chewing on her feet and legs. She needed no more convincing - this column of ants could most definitely eat an elephant.
“Are they poisonous,” Sarah whispered.
“No poison,” Cecelia said, “but you have been very stupid.”
“I had to know.”
“Well now you know,” Cecelia said. “Go over behind that tree and pick them off. It is the only way.”
Pick them off? Cowering behind a tree, Sarah hitched up her skirt and pulled and squeezed at the vicious little creatures that had dug their jaws into her legs. Behind her the singing had stopped, and the burial party broke into a babble of sound. The guards had already seen her and they were heading toward her.
“Just walk,” Matthew hissed.
Yeah, sure, just walk, and pretend that nothing was chewing her foot.
Matthew hobbled along beside her and Cecelia shouted something to the guards.
“What did you say? Sarah asked.
“That you were, you know, in the bushes for what we call a short call.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. She tried to get her mind back around the situation. She fully accepted the fact that there was going to be an enormous disturbance in Matapa’s tent the moment the ants appeared. The question was how to take advantage of it?
“We have to get the phone,” she said to Matthew. “As soon as anything happens, I’m going to grab it.”
Matthew nodded.
“So,” Sarah said, “we’re going to make our way around to the front of the tent and get as close as possible.”
Matthew nodded again.
“I’ll grab the phone,” Sarah said.
“And then what will we do?” Matthew asked.
“Then we’ll run like hell into the woods, and I’ll fire it up and phone home. I will tell them where we are and they will get help.” She looked at Matthew’s crutch. “How fast can you run?”
“I can help him,” Cecelia said.
“I didn’t say you could come.”
“I’m coming,” Cecelia insisted.
“If they find us...”
“I know,” Cecelia replied, “but if we stay here, we will die. I will not let them touch me again - never again.”
Sarah looked at her determined young face. For a few moments she had been so busy concentrating on her own problem that she had forgotten what Cecelia had been through the night before. A fate worse than death - yes, Sarah understood what she meant.
“We have to find a clearing,” Sarah said. “The phone has to be able to see the satellite.”
Matthew and Cecelia looked at her blankly. “You don’t have to understand,” Sarah snapped, “you just have to do it. We’ll go through the trees, not up the road. Do you understand, we will not go up the road?”
“We are not stupid,” Cecelia said quietly.
“I know. It’s just that my mind works very fast.”
“We are not slow,” Cecelia said.
“No, of course not. I’m not suggesting that you are, but...” Sarah interrupted her stumbling explanation with a sudden burst of reason. “Oh, what the hell?” she snapped. “I don’t have time to explain and I don’t have time to take your feelings into account. Both of you just shut up and do what I tell you and we might get out of here. I’ll be politically correct later, when it’s all over.”
“Matthew,” she said, “whether you like it or not, you can’t run as fast as I can. There’s nothing I can do about that right now, so as soon as the trouble starts you head into the woods and stay just to the right of the ants. You know where they’re coming from and no one else does. Just keep going until you find a clearing, and you go with him Cecelia.”
“But—” the girl protested.
“Stay with him,” Sarah said, “and keep him moving.”
Before she could say anything else the shouting started, followed by an enormous eruption of activity from within the green tent. The flaps were flung open and the two girls emerged screaming and followed by the lieutenant barking orders. Behind him came the kid who had called himself the communications officer. They were all slapping at their clothing and hopping from one foot to another.
For a moment Sarah wondered if they were just going to run away and leave Matapa to his fate, but then she heard the boy soldiers’ feet pounding on the ground behind her. They charged past her without stopping, all heading toward the tent.
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Get going.”
Matthew and Cecelia turned and scurried into the undergrowth. No one raised a finger to stop them. All attention was focused on the green tent.
This was it! Whether by good luck, natural coincidence, or the force of Matthew’s prayers, they had their opportunity. Sarah was going in.