The black frame had returned to the edges of Malachi’s vision, the one that had formed when he was on the other side of the world, the one that only left him occasionally, when he was working with the others at the Middle of Nowhere, when he was …
What?
Engaging with the world? Was that all it took? Get out there and make nice with folks, go to a few parties maybe, ask a girl to dinner … in other words, get on with life. Did you just have to decide that’s what you were going to do and the black frame would go poof in a puff of smoke, wouldn’t continue to close in on your vision until you could only see the world through a small hole formed in it? And when it closed up altogether, you couldn’t see the world at all.
No, that wasn’t right. You saw the world. It just wasn’t the real one out there beyond your fingertips. It was the one that only existed in your head, the world of horror and blood and death.
Malachi grabbed his thoughts, understood that he was perilously close to the point that he’d be shoved out of the driver’s seat of his own life and his own reality, and taken on an all-expenses-paid vacation into hell.
Focus.
“Malachi.”
The word seemed to come from a long way off, like at the bottom of some very deep well. But it was just Roscoe, driving his truck toward Harry’s house, desperate to find out what had happened to his twin brother.
Malachi knew Harry was gone, though. Roscoe probably did, too, but you had to try, had to look. You couldn’t just accept that uh oh, here’s another one. Somebody who was walking around in the sunshine yesterday — gone, poof, vanished. You couldn’t just take that and move on.
But what could you do? In the face of something like that, what could …?
Something. Anything. Everything was preferable to nothing at all.
Harry’s little house was at the bottom of a rise, with Dragon Root Creek running past it not fifty yards from the house. Malachi wondered if the house had ever flooded because the creek was such a close neighbor. He doubted it. Flooding in the mountains wasn’t a common problem because flooding was caused by a creek backing up and creeks here ran straight down the hillsides, carried their water out into the flatland. Once there, if something got in the way, a creek would back up then, spread out of its banks and into the yards, basements, even the second floors of some houses.
Mountain folks had a saying for when the creek was full and running fast: “Creek’s a’rushin’ out there to defile the flatlands.” Or they’d say, “pee runs downhill, too.”
As soon as Roscoe passed the stand of trees that blocked the view of Harry’s house, Roscoe cried out.
“No … noooooo!”
Malachi had only been to Harry Tungate’s house once, and that was when he was a little boy, come to ask did Harry mind if he and his brothers went hunting in Harry’s woods. There’d been rumors that somebody’d spotted elk in the northern part of the county and the Tackett boys wanted to bag one if they could. Asking was just a courtesy. Harry didn’t own the woods around his house. He owned the little plot of land where he raised a small amount of tobacco and Malachi suspected an equal amount of weed, had a garden and apple trees and the standard menagerie of farm animals, chickens for eggs, a milk cow, sheep, pigs and guinea hens. It was just a thing you did so a man wouldn’t suddenly hear the sound of gunfire nearby and rush out into the woods packing.
Just that one visit hadn’t printed a vivid image of the house in Malachi’s mind but it didn’t matter what it’d looked like then. Now it was a collapsed shack that barely resembled a house at all.
Roscoe roared down the hillside to the bottom, popped the clutch to kill the truck, leapt out and went running toward the pile of rotted timber, calling out, “Harry, Harry, where you at? You answer me, now, you hear. Harry!”
Then he started digging through the pile of rubble, calling out his brother’s name in a ragged voice that hardly seemed human. The way you’d do after an avalanche, frantic to find your loved ones buried in the snow. Malachi got out and joined Roscoe, but didn’t dig, just stood there beside the thing that was not a house anymore. Feeling the cold pulse off it like heat pulsed off a potbellied stove in the dead of winter.
“Malachi, come on. Help me dig. Help me find him.”
“He’s not here,” Malachi said as kindly as he could. As soon as he had begun to feel the cold from the house, that felt like the draft of icy air that had belched out of Abner Riley’s house, the black frame around his vision began to expand. Getting thicker and thicker. Pulling him inward away from reality. Sucking him down into the black depths of his own soul.
When Roscoe spoke, his voice was anguished, each word a separate pain. “If’n you ain’t gonna help, go on — get back in the truck.”
The black frame slammed shut with a bang in front of Malachi’s nose.
“Get back in the truck, soldier,” Sergeant Moretti says. “We’re pulling out.”
Malachi can’t believe even Sergeant Moretti could be that heartless.
“Sarge, we can’t leave now. They won’t do anything as long as we’re here, but as soon as we leave …”
Malachi’s squad is on a dirt road beside a cluster of houses, just outside Kigali, where the small contingent of American soldiers are stationed, tasked with guarding the airport, keeping it open so that evacuations of nationals from France, Belgium and other European countries can continue.
“That’s not our problem,” the sergeant said, then spouted the phrase he had used dozens of times, a phrase that said a whole lot more than the words. “Not our circus, not our monkeys.”
A lame attempt at humor to cover up the fact that the man’s a racist. As long as he is charming, his disregard for the lives of the black civilians here isn’t so obvious.
There are probably two dozen people, clustered from all the houses into the one on the end by the road. The men, women and children belong to the Tutsi tribe fleeing in terror from the machete-wielding Hutus, who for weeks have been systematically butchering every Tutsi tribal they can lay hands on. Roads all around the airport are lined with piles of their corpses.
A band of about ten Hutus have found the terrified civilians, and would already have swarmed into the house and butchered every occupant, were it not for the presence of the squad of American soldiers who happened to pass by. They are unwilling to display their savagery before onlookers, so they are waiting for the Americans to leave before they slaughter the families huddled in the house.
The leader of the Hutu tribals is a tall gaunt man with a fat scar slicing across his left cheek and down his neck to his bare chest. His teeth have been blackened by chewing the narcotic weed khat, a shrub with leaves that contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines.
The drug is rampant in Somalia, its addicts termed “skinnies’ by American soldiers because the drug hypes them up and dulls their appetites, making them walking skeletons. Scar-Face and the rest of his crew look like chipmunks with wads of khat stuck in their cheeks. Saliva slowly breaks down the compound and the drug enters the bloodstream, while users spit on the ground a green confetti of discarded leaves.
Their eyes are wild. They carry bloody machetes and butcher knives. One has only a sharpened stick stained brown with blood.
“You go,” Scar Face calls out. “Not your business.”
At that moment a woman bursts out the door of the house and runs toward the American soldiers. She carries a baby and is dragging a little boy of about eight by the hand.
“Take my children,” she cries at the soldiers. “Save them.”
Scar Face gets to her before she reaches the road, raises his machete and buries it in her back and she staggers forward several steps with it stuck there. Sharp-stick man is one step behind and he spears the infant that falls out of her arms when she tumbles to the ground.
But the little boy is quick, and he darts away from the murderers and makes it to the contingent of soldiers on the road, throws himself at them, grabbing hold of Malachi’s leg and hiding behind it.
Scar Face advances, machete raised.
Malachi isn’t even aware of raising his weapon, sighting in on the chest of the advancing Hutu, doesn’t even will himself to speak, as he calls out, “Touch this child and I will blow a hole in your chest big enough to drive a Humvee through.”
Malachi’s sergeant wheels on him.
“I said, get in the truck, Tackett. Leave the boy and load up.”
Malachi doesn’t move.
“That is a direct order, soldier. Get in the truck.”
The Hutu takes a step toward him and Malachi fires, his bullet catching the man in the chest and knocking him backward. He throws the machete at the child as he falls and it catches Malachi in the leg, slicing him open from knee to ankle. Before the man hits the dirt, Malachi has swung the rifle toward the others in the man’s crew, daring them to approach. “One more step and I’ll—”
The world goes black.
When Malachi again opens his eyes, he is lying on his back in the transport truck, bouncing along the road toward the airport. His best friend, Charlie Blinkhorn, is leaning over him.
“I’m sorry, man, but I had to do it. You woulda shot all of them.”
The man sitting next to him nods toward the front of the truck where the sergeant is sitting beside the driver. “But just one … Sarge is gonna say the guy attacked you and you had no choice but to shoot him.”
Malachi’s mind is spinning and he is so dizzy he can barely manage to keep his head up. He hears what the man is saying, but the words aren’t yet connecting to reality in his mind.
The boy. Where is the boy?
He tries to rise.
“I got to get back to the boy,” he says, as hands restrain him and push him back down onto the floor. Malachi fights with all his strength, which is no strength at all. His mind is caught in a loop. He has to get to the boy, find him, save him.
“Let me go. The boy—”
“Is dead, Malachi,” Blinkhorn tells him. He pauses, sees Malachi still isn’t tracking, and leans close to whisper into his ear. “The one with the sharp stick, he gave Sarge the little boy’s head and told him to give it to you.”
Then Malachi falls into another blackness, a different blackness.
Malachi turned from Roscoe Tungate and started toward the woods.
“Harry ain’t in the woods,” Roscoe tells him. “He’s here, under here. I know he is. Help me get him out.”
“The boy,” he said. “I have to find the boy.”
Then Malachi broke into a dead run toward the trees.