Apex Book Company

The midday heat heavy on the Kisumu docks sweated the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. Hot humid air, thick with lakeflies, stunk of stale food and swamp gas. A ramp lowered from an ancient steamer freed a flood of a thousand black faces that pushed through the dense crowds. Hope in their eyes begged for an official pass off the dilapidated ferry and on through immigration.

As Sandra Young stumbled with the crowd that jostled her, she tightened the black veil wrapped across her face, the concealing garb worn by Islamic women the world over. She possessed no Muslim face nor did she follow their religion, but in this country a disguise was required nonetheless. With every step she hoped the wearied officials would not mistake her as a westerner. The mutilated bodies of Americans littering the road to Kampala seven days earlier were warning enough. Africa had gone mad.

‘Kipande?’

She hoped her stance was casual as a Sergeant demanded identification. A tense neck and fingernails that dug deep into her palms did not project the calm she hoped to display. As she handed over the passport, ‘acquired’ from a corpse in Rwanda eighteen days earlier, Sandra dreaded the soldier might not have randomly selected her from the crowd after all. In that moment an unseen hand snatched Sandra’s veil and all her fears were confirmed. White skin and blonde hair had just been exposed.

‘A western spy,’ grinned the mildly surprised Sergeant, smug with twisted mouth. Dressed in NewKevlar plate over jungle-camouflaged army fatigues with a holstered sidearm, there was no point fighting her way past. She would lose, and she would be dead.

Instead she opened her mouth to speak, and could not.

He snatched her passport, laughed at it. ‘You know it is highly illegal to travel under false identification?’

Her stomach sank further when she realised he wore no insignia proclaiming nationality, but who did these days? The white streaks of paint harsh across his face said more. Suggestive of a zebra, they held a deeper meaning: membership of a secret cult or a new tribal clan. Secretive societies were Africa’s real rulers in this mid Twenty-First Century world of chaos.

‘Well?’

‘I…’ she did not know what to say.

The jostling crowd laughed at Sandra. Mostly women in Islamic garb, they must have known of her deception for some time. Sandra wondered if their chatter and fluttering sea of arms were claims of reward for their betrayal. If so, the soldier refused to acknowledge any of them.

‘Lost your tongue?’

‘I’m a teacher with an NGO,’ Sandra finally managed a lie, ‘Non-Government Organisation.’ If the Sergeant learnt the truth—that she was a soldier with an Australian contingent of the UN—she would be as good as dead, just like those Americans littering the road back in Rwanda. She handed over her real passport, because it revealed no such details. Any documents or items that did she had destroyed long ago … mostly.

Smirking because he had beaten her, the Sergeant nodded, ‘Is that right?’ Then to his men, ‘Restrain her.’

Several uniformed underlings with similar white striped faces were rough as they handled her. A couple were careless—or deliberate—when they fondled her breasts.

When she was cuffed, the Sergeant gripped her face with his strong hands, examined her fine bone structure and rubbed her soft blonde hair, then sighed as if aroused. ‘I think the Chief is going to develop a special interest in you.’

She felt sick in her stomach. ‘I have money,’ she offered.

He laughed, ‘I know.’

Hope vanished from Sandra for he seemed not to care. She struggled to recall some other commodity to bargain with. He pulled his gun, a neural stunner which he forced into her temple, and she froze with fear.

‘We’ll get that, too.’

Sandra’s last memory was a blinding headache, before unconsciousness took hold and she collapsed into oblivion.

#

Darkness unravelled, transformed into hot smells and the buzz of mosquitoes close to her ears. She sat quickly which served only to worsen a pounding migraine. The only light shone from a circle, a sharp-edged opening to the sky. When Sandra realised she was naked and plastered with fetid mud, she moaned from the shock and clambered into a dark corner.

She was not alone. Three naked women caked in mud huddled together in an opposite corner. Africans with scarring representative of tribal upbringing, their dark skin like chocolate stretched over thin frames. In their hands they clutched what appeared to be white straw, as if their very lives depended upon maintaining its ownership.

Controlling her fear, Sandra clambered against the wall, discovered there were no corners in the curved concrete container, wet with dirty water and slime. She suspected the bottom of a dry well, and then she remembered the prison pits in Bukavu. Those holes had been filled with the dead.

‘Who are you?’ Sandra demanded. ‘Where are we?’

In the half light she searched for her possessions, cloth, anything to cover her exposed flesh. As her hands ran themselves across her body to hide herself away, she discovered tender spots; welts, bruises and abrasions. She did not wish to begin considering what they might have already done to her. Thankfully nothing seemed to be broken, but when she touched her head she discovered fresh blood and patches where hair was missing. That was not straw in the other women’s hands.

‘Hey, give that back,’ was called as she scrambled towards the women. Sandra did not understand why she was terrified, but the idea that they had a piece of her chilled deeper than any fear she’d already experienced upon waking. Thoughts of voodoo magic and occult powers would not vanish no matter how hard she tried to dismiss them from her mind. ‘I said…’

They shied from her, huddled closer together, so Sandra made herself big and angry.

‘I said, give it back!’

With her hand raised ready to strike, she almost did. What stopped her was empathy, a sombre understanding of her own fear and how that fear had clouded her thoughts and actions. She reminded herself that she was a professional soldier, and that irrational responses would not improve her situation. These were not adult women; these were three young girls who would be lucky to possess twenty years between them. They were no threat.

Falling backwards, shocked at how quickly her own fear had manifested into aggression, she sighed with frustration. ‘Who did this to you?’ she asked with a softer tone. ‘Who did this to us?’ she asked more harshly.

‘The Punda Militia,’ whispered the middle girl.

‘Who?’

‘The Zebra Company.’

Overhead a shadow passed. Instinctively they all gazed upwards. Mud was flung from above, splashed across Sandra’s face, forcing a shudder. She heard the perpetrators’ laughter, and through the burning light of a midday sun, identified three silhouettes cast by soldiers.

‘You four,’ yelled a familiar voice, the Sergeant who stunned her at the docks. ‘The Chief is going to see you now.’

A ladder of bamboo and twine was thrown down. Sandra barely managed to flatten herself against the concrete to avoid serious injury. Thankfully the three girls were not in the way.

‘Right you lot, climb out now!’

Sandra and her companions instinctively retreated into the shadows. Her head burned, as a pain like hot pin pricks arced between her temples, ready to fry her skull. It ceased just as suddenly, and she recognised the effects of the neural handgun. On this occasion its discharge was low, not to render her unconscious, but more than enough to teach a lesson of pain.

‘I said climb out!’

Although fearful of their intentions, Sandra managed to obey the order. The Sergeant would not ask a second time.

As she climbed Sandra hoped the skinny girls behind her were sisters, or from the same village, because then at least they had each other. What waited beyond the prison pits could not be pleasant, and they would need support to survive through the pain and horror that awaited them.

On the surface the three soldiers ogled, the same individuals from Kisumu. The Sergeant’s face was streaked with the same white paint that designated him a zebra man, the Punda Militia as Sandra had just discovered.

‘Didn’t think we’d let you sleep all day?’ he laughed. ‘Come on, move it.’

The sight of the bellowing zebra men terrified the children. The youngest clambered into Sandra’s arms, demanded to be carried by tightening her arms around Sandra’s neck. The older two together gripped her spare hand, a feeble attempt to seek safety in this unholy place.

As her military training kicked into action Sandra took a moment to assess her situation. Apart from the neural handgun casual in the commander’s hand, all three were armed with gauss shotguns. These were weapons Sandra knew well, because they were favoured by most fighting forces in Africa. With few moving parts, even under the harshest conditions they rarely malfunctioned. More importantly, they could utilise any ferrous metal object as a projectile, such as nails, coins, ball bearings, wire and caltrops. No longer did the armies of Africa worry about the conservation of ammunition when ammunition was the junk discarded everywhere.

One of these shotguns was pressed into her back, indicating that she should march between the prison pits stretching out before her in their hundreds. Sandra dared to gaze only into a few. Some held captives naked and dirty like herself, deliberately divided between men, boys and mixes of women and girls. Many were empty. Too many, as she had long expected, were rotten with the dead.

Beyond the pits the surrounding savannah grassland was dry and lifeless. In between a sea of tents, many of which had once belonged to the UN High Commission for Refugees. Soldiers dallied everywhere, but only a few wore proper uniforms and shouldered state-of-the-art military arsenal, and these individuals were all men. Those without the signature white-on-black face paint numbered amongst the sick and starved and were an equal mix of men, women and children. Mostly they were children.

It seemed all of Africa’s worst crimes had come together here, and this thought enhanced the dread that accompanied each step Sandra took towards the indicated tents. What waited inside had to be worse than rape, assault, torture and death, because she had already convinced herself that whatever fate was hers had to be worse than anything she could imagine.

‘Keep moving.’

Again she was prodded, towards the largest tent. Still carrying one girl and holding the hands of the others they stepped inside. Their nostrils were whacked by stale heat, the smell of human sweat and the haze of marijuana. At least two dozen soldiers shared these confines, African mostly, all with the face paint and all men. Sandra was surprised to see several whites.

But her attention did not linger on these underlings. She was drawn to the one man who had to be their tribal chief, military commander and cult leader all rolled into one. Seated at the tent’s far end on what could only be considered a bronze-plated throne, was a large muscular man, bare-chested and ritually scarred. Without face paint he instead wore the regal skins of a zebra. A rare ivory-handled dagger graced a scabbard on his belt, while gold voodoo charms clinked from restless chains tight around his neck.

‘Your majesty,’ bowed the sergeant, ‘Three kikuyu girls, and the white women I told you about.’

The Chief stood tall, raised his hand slowly and held it high as if he were some kind of god. ‘Thank you, Sergeant Uskili. Let’s see, bring the young ones to me first.’

Torn from Sandra’s grip, the whimpering children were pushed forward. Sandra’s stomach churned as the Chief manhandled them, felt their bones, checked their teeth, stared into their eyes, and touched them where he should not. It took every effort to do nothing but watch, not even to beg for compassion. If she did so, Sandra sensed that she would only encourage him to do worse.

‘These two,’ he pointed to the two eldest. ‘Take them to my harem. This one,’ he pointed to the smallest child. ‘She is sick. Slit her throat.’

‘What!’ Sandra screamed. She could no longer hold her tongue, so she ran forward regardless of the consequences.

The Chief made a motion with his eyes, an angry stare from one not accustomed to being questioned. Not a second later the Chief was obeyed. Uskili punched her hard in the gut with the stock of his shotgun. She crumpled gasping for breath, tried to beg for compassion, but ended up doing little more than choke for air.

From the earthen floor she heard a scream. The little child, her cries were cut short, too sudden to be natural.

‘You bastard,’ she whispered with what little breath she could muster.

Ignoring Sandra, the harsh tongue of the Zebra Chief was directed at the two survivors, ‘This is what will happen to you two if you try to escape. Do you understand me?’

Down low in the dirt, Sandra could neither see nor hear the surviving girls as they answered. Pressed between the legs of the intruding zebra soldiers she did at least glimpse them as they were led outside again. Of the dead girl, she saw nothing except splatters of fresh blood seeping into the earth. She swore to extract revenge, if the opportunity ever presented itself.

‘Bring forth the mzungu.’

A dozen hands pulled and pushed Sandra forward until she stood naked in every sense of the word, caged inside a wall of soldiers. All wore white face paint, except the white men who instead wore the reverse: streaks of black paint to create the same effect on their white skin. She wondered what kind of fear or charisma turned such people toward the dedicated worship of madmen. Personally she’d rather die than become part of this farce. Maybe that choice would soon be hers to make.

‘A blonde hey?’ boomed the Zebra Chief. ‘I should put you in my harem, too. What do you say to that?’

Trembling, Sandra wrapped her arms about her chest and hoped to wake from the nightmare. ‘I have other skills,’ she spoke forcefully.

‘A teacher? You wazungu, you all want to be that here in Africa. I have no need for teachers. I teach my Zebra People all that they will ever need to know. No teachers here.’

‘Teacher?’ she asked, remembering too late the lie she told in Kisumu. Her foe’s eyes widened when he too detected her self-questioning.

‘You are not a teacher?’

Sandra’s eyes darted, sought a safe place to flee and found none. She’d bluffed this far on her escape from a wild continent tearing itself apart, and although her situation had suddenly changed for the worst, she was still alive and in one piece. This must mean she still had a chance of escape, if not now perhaps later, even if that was only a slim chance.

‘Yes, you are right. I did lie.’

‘Then what are your skills?’

‘I …’ Sandra hesitated. These last months, terrified by the wave of violence that had infected the continent like a plague, she’d seen more than her fair share of slaughtered people, westerners and Africans alike but mostly westerners. And yet in this moment Sandra’s gut instincts told her that the truth now was her best chance of survival. ‘I’m a soldier,’ she blurted before she changed her mind. ‘A Major with the UN forces. Until a month ago, we were maintaining the peace in the Sudan-Congo conflicts. Not very well, but we had our successes.’ She knew she was rambling, so told herself to be silent.

The Zebra Chief raised an eyebrow, ‘A soldier hey, and a woman soldier at that?’

‘Not so uncommon where I come from.’

‘No,’ the eyebrow became a frown. ‘No, perhaps not. What’s your speciality?’

‘Infantry. Urban warfare. I’ve seen action, in Indonesia, Texas, Ethiopia and now here.’

‘Good for you,’ he mocked. ‘If this was a civilised world and I was in the market to buy, I’d hire you.’

She waited for him to say ‘but’ and then add something about the desperateness of the current situation and how she could be of use to him, but he said nothing. Instead he sidled up to her, close enough so she could feel his hot breath on her exposed skin. He manhandled her arms, face and a breast. He forced open her mouth, took his time when he examined her teeth, for the mouth was a telling assessment of health. All she could focus upon during her ordeal was that the same intrusion had been forced upon the three girls, and that one of them had been murdered at the conclusion of that examination.

‘Which one is it?’ he asked as he released her.

‘What do you mean?’

The slap across Sandra’s face stung bitterly. ‘You’ll learn not to lie to me woman, if you live that long. You and I both know that every UN soldier conceals an identification chip inside a hollowed tooth.’

Again he forced her mouth open with callused fingers that tasted of pungent meat. They pushed and prodded, until a tooth opened and the capsule sprung forth. In his hand now he squeezed it, releasing a holographic identity card; Sandra D Young / DOB 12 June 2036 / Major, Australian Armed Forces / Secondment to United Nations Peace Keeping Force / Stationed Bukavu, New Congo Republic, 2067AD.

She had no more secrets to hide.

‘It seems you finally tell the truth?’

Sandra nodded solemnly. Now was the moment for truth for the Zebra King, too, when he would either murder her, or enlist her into his Zebra ranks hoping that she would adopt his barbaric cult philosophies and become loyal.

‘I always need good soldiers, even if they be an mzungu woman. Give her the implant.’

‘What?’

He turned to her, his laugh so obnoxious it carried enough pressure to lay spit across her face. ‘What did you expect, for me to take you on your word that you will be loyal?’

‘I…’ Lost for words again, that was exactly what she had expected, and so again she did not know how to respond.

Before she could say more, several soldiers led by the gleeful Uskili grappled her, restrained her arms and pressed their weight so she could not flee or struggle. While she was held rigid a white face with black paint entered her field of vision. He seemed to be sad, verging on morbid depression, as he withdrew a lethal-appearing syringe pointed at her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered as the thick needle slipped between her eye and eye-socket, and planted what excruciatingly felt like a tiny insect-sized robot that crawled deeper, searing her head with burning pain.

‘That hurts,’ she cried.

‘The pain will pass in moments’, the white man mouthed a whispered apology, ‘The physical pain, I mean.’

When convulsions possessed her body the zebra soldiers released her. As if in a dream, she fell into a spasmodic fit, like epilepsy she had witnessed suffered by poor Africans. Dumped unceremoniously onto the earth, she kicked, contorted and foamed at the mouth. Her nervous system was not her own, sluggish and ineffective as it fought against whatever had hold of her.

As quickly as it began, it was over, and self-control was restored. She clambered onto her feet, shocked and scared because this was exactly the type of unknown horror she had dreaded most. ‘What the hell did you do to me?’ she screamed.

‘Enforced your loyalty,’ explained the Zebra Chief casually, as if he were an academic lecturing on nothing more than developing market trends to a class full of bored accounting students. ‘Now, bark like a dog.’

Sandra shuddered with her whole body. Compelled by his words, she yapped and yapped, imitating every canine she had ever known, until he ordered her to stop. When he did she ceased immediately.

‘Kiss my hand.’

He held out his thick paw and she kissed it willingly, hoping not to gag from revulsion as she did. The feared unknown she had expected and then found to be real had grown into something so much worse. What had they done to her, screamed her mind. And all the while her body responded as ordered, kissing and kissing.

‘Kiss my feet.’

She bent down on her hands and knees and did exactly that. God knows what diseases or parasitic worms she was feeding into her mouth, and yet even this fear was not enough to stop her.

As she willfully degraded herself, the men behind her laughed, enjoying her discomfort. For the first time in her life Sandra understood why death was sometimes seen by the desperate and depressed as the more desirable option to suffering prolonged horror. Right now, she really did hope for death above anything else.

‘That’s enough, now stand and look at me.’

Trembling, again she did what she was told. This torment could continue for hours and days, and it seemed there was nothing she could do to make it stop.

‘There are several rules, which I am about to make very clear, so listen carefully.’

She found herself concentrating intently on his every word. Yes, this would never stop. He owned her now. He owned all of them.

‘I live by several rules, and they are to ensure I come to no harm, you understand me? The first is that you will protect me from all harm, physical, anguish, mental trauma, anything that you think will upset me. You will bend over backwards to ensure that it does not occur, even at the expense of your own life. Do you understand?’

He kept asking her if she understood, and unfortunately she did. From this moment on she would follow his every instruction to the letter—the machine injected into her brain would see to that.

‘Secondly, you will do whatever I request of you. But I see that you are doing that exceedingly well already. So lastly, under no circumstances will you remove the neural controller from you head. You are mine now, my slave, and you will be that until the day you serve me so well you die doing so. Now, is that all clear?’

She fought back the tears. He hadn’t told her that crying was not permitted, but she did not want to give the impression that he had broken her will. Clearly she wasn’t the only one in this room implanted with a neural controller device. ‘Yes, it’s all clear,’ she said.

‘Good. Welcome to the Punda Militia, Major Young.’

#

Once dressed in clothes previously worn by a corpse, Sandra found she was quickly accepted by the ranks. Most Zebra Company recruits were mismatched mercenaries. Many were young boys and girls barely into their teens. A few sported horrific scars suffered from burns, shrapnel and disease, and with a sickness in her stomach Sandra understood none were debilitating. Serious injuries would not be tolerated here, and she did not have to guess the fate of those who had acquired them.

At sunrise the next morning, approximately two hundred recruits marched from their makeshift prison to trudge east along a dusty road. The lingering smell told they had left behind a similar number of corpses and the silence in the ranks spoke for their atrocities. Only when the horizon claimed their camp did the soldiers allow tensions in their muscles to lessen, but nothing could improve their mood.

The road ahead was dried dirt, the fields yellowed grasslands, and the landmarks dead thorny bush. Once elephants and impala had grazed these lands, but not any more. The escalating war in Africa had changed all that.

Sandra was weary under her load. Her superiors had supplied her with a gauss shotgun and a backpack heavy with supplies, food mostly. Because she was a woman, Sandra was not permitted to paint stripes on her face. This was the only outcome since her capture for which she was grateful.

The Zebra Chief ordered his outfit to march hard, and so they did. Sandra’s muscles argued against the overwhelming surges fired from her neural controller, and unfortunately it was her muscles that were losing this battle. As the day grew long she realised only a small number of the ‘soldiers’ pushed themselves as hard as she did, mostly adults and most of them males with face paint. She guessed the Zebra Chief’s supply of implants was limited. Only individuals who could assert physical power to control others were fitted with the devices. They were also the only members allowed to shoulder the outfit’s more advanced weaponry. Sandra was likely included in this category because of her military training.

Occasionally one of the ‘free-minds’—often a child—would collapse from exhaustion, dehydration, or because they just doggedly refused to march on. Those that slowed the column were given a choice: keep up or have their throats slit. Most found the strength to go on, but not always.

In the mid-afternoon heat, with the sun behind her back and her meagre water rations already depleted, Sandra was ready to collapse herself. Thankfully, the Zebra Chief had sense enough to order rest breaks, even if they lasted no longer than minutes. On their twelfth break for the day, under shade cast by the wreckage of an incinerated sub-orbital jet, Sandra wished for nothing more than to camp here for the night.

In the brief moment allotted she rubbed her blistered feet before the two surviving Kikuyu girls found her. They wasted no time snuggling into Sandra’s arms, seeking comfort. When Sandra asked them their names they were too timid to answer.

‘Right you lazy arseholes, back on your feet.’

The detestable Sergeant Uskili made his presence known. He passed Sandra with her new friends, stopped in his tracks when he noticed them together. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Resting,’ Sandra managed, until she realised that it was not her he had addressed.

The terrified young girls were the subject of his attention. Sandra spotted welts on the girl’s wrists where they had been bound and bruises on their faces where they had been struck, and severely doubted this was the complete extent of their abuse. Uskili examined them, and then licked his lips, remembering a taste.

‘Bastard’, she whispered harshly when he finally turned his back ready to march on.

Barely an hour passed before the outfit encountered a tree-lined river where they could re-fill water bottles. Sandra feared bilharzia and other diseases until she reconciled herself to the fact that dehydration would kill her first. When she clambered from the mud she realised that her two still-as-yet-unnamed girls had vanished. In their place urgent disquiet grew amongst the soldiers.

‘You two—find them and kill them.’

She recognised the voice of the Zebra Chief, or more precisely, her neural controller did the recognising and so forced her into action.

Desperate to find fault in the logic, Sandra hesitated, looked to see who the Chief had addressed in the possibility that it was not her. Uskili was by the Chief’s side, and her heart sank when she saw the Chief was staring not at him, but at her.

‘Kill who, sir?’ she asked, dreading the answer.

‘Your two young girl friends.’

The Chief’s orders were all too clear, which brought a grin to Uskili’s face. Both were pleased that it was Sandra who was to perform this bloody task.

Cursing under her breath, swearing revenge, Sandra loaded her gauss shotgun with nails and soft drink bottle caps. She sprinted into the bush along the river edge where she tracked the obvious footprints in the mud. For the first time in her life, she found she hated herself. Of all atrocities imaginable, this one she could not bear. Yet here she was about to do it, murder innocent children who trusted her. Not content with his own atrocities, the Zebra Chief wished to blacken her soul as well.

A crack of snapped branches startled her. Turning quickly, she raised her shotgun centimetres from the face of a white man, ugly with black stripes. She immediately recognised him from tent, the man who shared his sorrow while he filled her head with the implant.

‘Steady on Miss,’ he held his arms high and wide to show that he was not dangerous. ‘He said the two of us.’

Two? Yes it made sense now. The Chief had ordered two people to kill the girls.

Unwillingly determined, they set off together, knee deep in mud now that the thick thorny undergrowth forced them to push on just off the river bank. Tree roots cut at her shins, flies plagued her eyes and mosquitoes bit at her skin, but it was her exhausted muscles that physically hurt the most.

‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

‘Don’t think about it. If you do, you’ll drive yourself crazy.’

His accent was English. The manner in which he carried his weight and slung his gun suggested an absence of military training, which she instinctive understood to be to her advantage if she needed to neutralise him. Then she wondered why she thought such things, and realised it was the neural controller automatically scanning for potential enemies acting against the Zebra King, and then providing her with details on how to eradicate the identified threat.

She looked back at his face in hope of gauging what kind of man he was beyond just being a threat. All she could tell was that he was British, mid-fifties, eighty-kilos, right-handed and obviously suffering from malnutrition. Nothing about who he was as a person.

‘The name’s Colby by the way,’ he smiled while she studied him, ‘Marcus Colby.’

‘Sandra Young.’

‘You mind if I go first?’

‘You’re not a soldier.’

‘Yes, but we’re only chasing two little girls.’

Without thought she slapped him hard. Hot with anger, she was so enraged that her blood surged with nothing else. How could he say such things? Again she found her answer; he too was with a neural controller.

‘Perhaps I deserve that.’ He didn’t wait for a response when he pushed past her.

It took only another minute to find the children. The younger stood petrified on the bank, her attention drawn to her profusely bleeding sister tangled in a partially submerged coil of barbed wire. Shock in the second girl’s white-rimmed eyes told she was losing blood fast. Regardless Sandra found herself raising her gun, aiming at the mobile target first, the younger girl, as if she were the greater threat. If she pulled the trigger—and it was inevitable that she would—Sandra knew she’d never forgive herself. Controller or no controller, she was about to become party to the barbarity of this continent.

And yet before she could shoot, Colby stepped in front of her.

‘Hey,’ she called, ‘You want to die, too?’

Two quick shots created two corpses. Clean and quick, he had aimed for their heads so their pain would be minimised. Exactly how she would have executed them.

The bloody work done, when Colby turned to her he avoided her eyes. He was as angry as her, suppressing equal amounts of rage.

‘Why did you do that?’

He snorted, mad at her perhaps or mad at something bigger, but answered her anyway. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve had to kill children, Miss Young.’

‘You’re proud of that?’

‘No, I already have to live with what I’ve done, but…’

‘But what?’

He didn’t say. Turning awkwardly in the thick river mud he wasted no time on the hard slog back to the break point, or perhaps to escape the killings he had just perpetrated.

It was while she trudged in his wake that Sandra at last understood what he had lost the courage to say, and found respect for the Englishman. Colby couldn’t stop himself from murdering the two girls any more easily than she could, but at least he could save Sandra from additional torment, by performing the execution himself.

#

Camp was established in an old abandoned safari lodge. Once this luxury destination had catered to wealthy European and American tourists, but the tell-tale signs of high explosive rounds and thermal grenades had changed all that. Bloated corpses of the former staff had to be taken outside and burnt, but the grime and dried blood on the walls were ignored. A crocodile scavenging for food was shot before it could flee into the murky waters of the nearby river. Fresh meat, it quickly became their dinner.

Resting at last, Sandra rubbed her legs to fight off cramps and hid her face to fight off anger and torment. She wished for revenge but knew not how to achieve it. She wanted solitude but understood the folly of isolation. Where she sat was not chosen at random. Women and young girls encircled her, congregated in numbers as protection from the men. Together they could intimidate the younger weaker males, but not the militant white-on-black-faced leaders. One by one the zebra men would select a companion before disappearing with them into the darkness. Sobs and the occasional plea for mercy echoed from the black night, but no one dared offer assistance.

It was Colby who selected Sandra. With a plate of half eaten crocodile meat mixed with rice in one hand he took hold of her arm in the other. ‘I’m not going to do anything to you,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘But if you don’t come with me now, Uskili or one of his chums will claim you.’

She took his hand willingly, allowed the envelope of the night to vanish them both.

‘You afraid of predators?’ he asked.

‘Out there?’ she pointed to the barely discernible scrub and shook her head. ‘Not out there.’

A nod was his only response.

‘I assume you’re controlled, too?’

‘U-ha,’ he nodded again. The black stripes remade him as a ghost. His eyes did not find her. They darted constantly, seeking potential eaves-droppers. As a soldier, that should have been her job. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, his voice soft and caring.

‘No!’

‘Didn’t think so’

‘What the hell is going on?’

Finally he caught her eye and held it. ‘I thought you said you were with the UN? I thought you knew?’

‘Knew what?’

Visions of the two unnamed kikuyu girls filled her head, memories she cared not to remember. Less than five hours ago the children had been alive and as happy as they could be considering their circumstances, resting as they did in her arms, feeling safe, even if fleetingly. Colby and she had changed all that, now that they were part of the horror. As the range of her vision grew wider, she imagined neural controllers inside more heads that just of those of the Zebra Company, and found this to be a far more terrifying thought.

‘This isn’t just isolated to Uganda and Kenya, is it?’

He shook his head, ‘I’m afraid not.’

‘What are you, to know such things, a government spy?’

‘No, thank god.’ His chuckle mocked his own sense of humour. ‘I’m a journalist. Although we do what we do for different purposes, our process of information gathering is essentially the same.’

Sandra nodded slowly. She became aware that Colby was holding her tight, not sexually, not with aggression, but as if he was afraid he might lose her. She found that she was glad that he did.

‘I’ve only heard rumours, snippets of conversations really, such as dispatches, misplaced mail, whispers at embassy balls and that kind of thing.’

‘And?’

‘And adding it all together, one starts to get an idea of what happened. You sure you want to hear all this?’

She nodded vigorously.

‘I’m fairly certain it all started in Washington DC, or Maryland, Virginia, somewhere like that. As you would know, the US government has always desired to control Africa, especially now that the Middle East is effectively devoid of oil, and so they are forced by their incessant quest to burn black gold to focus on this continent. This time, however, the Americans did learn from their own legacies, but not well. The west has long been responsibly for supporting African dictators who would grow too unpredictable, too violent and too paranoid. The American government decided to develop a failsafe means by which to control them, or so they thought.’

‘The implants?’

‘Precisely, only it all went wrong, didn’t it? Someone here in Africa found one, cut it out of the skull of an ousted leader and then decided to replicate it. It’s just a common neural interface chip whose speciality is in its programming. Easy to copy, you see, and to reprogram to create slaves of one’s own. That’s what our Zebra King did.’

‘He’s a computer programmer? He doesn’t strike me as one.’

‘He’s not. Believe me they’re easy to set, designed that way for CIA field agents no doubt, who presumably had to hastily insert them into their puppets.’

She remembered Colby injecting the robot into her eye. ‘You’re talking about escalation—one gets out and then suddenly everyone is manufacturing and using them?’

Colby spun around suddenly to stare into the darkness behind him. Perhaps he had heard a noise. Perhaps he was just scared. He did not indicate which.

‘Yes, everyone is out to control everyone else now. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. But instead of making things better in Africa, the US made things worse. As well as Africans in their thousands, westerners like you and me are being enslaved by the very same technology they thought would save this continent.’

Sandra laughed hysterically. Colby’s words explained so much; the disintegration of her UN outfit, garbled commands from headquarters more often than not contradictory and often suicidal if obeyed, and then there was her own people turning on their own rank and file. It was ironic that she had survived this long in the aftermath of these atrocities without really understanding what had gone wrong in Africa, a gigantic international war where there were no sides and a millions sides.

‘No one’s coming for us, are they?’

Colby gave another snort, followed by another paranoid glance into the blackness. ‘I’m sorry to break this to you Miss Young, but if you think about it, like a virulent disease, can these implants really be contained to just Africa?’

#

‘What is this place?’

‘An old army base,’ Sandra answered obediently as she lowered the digital viewfinder from her face to allow clear enunciated words just to please the Zebra Chief. ‘British or French I would say, judging on the layout and equipment.’ The viewfinder’s mil-analysis software agreed with her. Already it had recorded the layout of the abandoned military compound in case they were planning an assault or further recon.

The Zebra Chief nodded in agreement, as if she had just confirmed what he had thought all along. Sandra was sure he had absolutely no idea at all about anything, except how to gratify his own self-seeking needs and take credit for ideas that were not his own. He wasn’t a solider, he wasn’t clever, and he certainly wasn’t a creature of empathy. Worse than all of that, she was certain his pathetic orders would eventually get them all killed.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked and realised it was her controller that made her speak, concluding that if she was not given orders she must seek them out.

‘I’m undecided, Major. What do you recommend?’

She knew this question would be asked sooner or later and she did not wish to answer. Why give him the breaks when he gave them none in return, when he saw her as an expendable tool, a piece of meat to use and abuse? ‘I suggest we move on, leave it alone.’

He cocked a suspicious eyebrow. ‘Move on? This place is ideal: fortifications, supplies, weaponry, vehicles.’

‘So why abandon it?’ Sandra interrupted, ‘That’s my point. There has to be something wrong. Look around you. Nothing is out of place. Nothing.’

‘So?’

‘Well…’ She struggled to hesitate because she didn’t want to say what was on her mind. She wanted him to die from his own stupidity, which, unfortunately, seemed the only way she would ever escape her enslavement. But once again the persistent neural controller forced abandonment of her instincts. ‘It’s obviously a trap, or an ambush. I don’t know any military outfit in the world that would just abandon equipment like that. If they’d all been killed we’d see bodies, signs of small arms fire, something.’

‘Perhaps they were enslaved to neural controllers as you are?’ His words chilled.

‘That doesn’t explain why those spider trucks and those 75mm shell guns haven’t been stripped.’

‘Perhaps we just got lucky, got here first.’

‘Luck only lasts so long,’ Sandra replied morosely, remembered when her luck ran out in the Kisumu docks.

The Zebra Chief interrupted her thoughts. ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t concede your point, Major. There could be traps. That is why you’re going to volunteer in leading a squad of soldiers—expendable soldiers—to make sure you are wrong.’

#

Unable to protest, Sandra accepted ten soldiers, all teenagers armed with low-calibre rifles, relics of the Twentieth Century that were as likely to explode in their own faces as they were to incapacitate an enemy combatant. Paired up, they cautiously entered the camp.

Thankfully the base turned out to be a ghost town, but that didn’t leave Sandra feeling any better. There were no bodies, no signs of small arms fire or any fighting, no blood, no scuffed dirt and no doors left to swing in the breeze. She was reminded of her own flat back in Sydney, as if she’d just stepped out for a few minutes to pop down the street and buy a coffee. Who then would pop back here in a few minutes and surprise them? ‘I don’t like it,’ she said into her comlink so everyone could hear.

‘What you mean?’ asked the fifteen-year-old boy with white stripes on his face who had been paired with her. Sandra knew him as Daniel Mazuri, knew that he was a Maasai, and that he once worked as a cook in a small diner in Magadi. Now he was the last person left alive from his clan; the sum total of everyone he had known for most of his life were all dead. ‘Boss?’ he asked again to gain her attention.

‘No trip-wires, Daniel, no landmines, no lasers slicing off our legs—and these things—’ she tapped a spider truck with the tip of her gauss shotgun, ‘are worth a fortune, so why abandon them?’

‘What are they?’

‘Spider trucks,’ she answered, surprised that he did not know, since this design had effectively replaced every brand of all terrain vehicle sold across the globe. With wheels fitted onto robotic arms, they could go anywhere, even up the side of a narrow ravine if the edges were close enough so the wheels could push laterally. ‘Back home they are atomic powered. They last forever.’

‘Why not here?’

She grinned, ‘Give a dissatisfied man atomics and he turns it into a bomb. Then we call him a terrorist.’

‘No atomics, hey? They could still be booby-trapped with another type of bomb?’

‘Not much of a bang with these: conventional petroleum power.’ What she did not say was that this was a later model whose specifications were unfamiliar to her. They could be atomic powered for all she knew, since in the last few years atomic fuel had become cheaper than fossil fuels. It seemed unlikely that they were, otherwise these spider trucks would not be so readily abandoned when they could be turned into radioactive bombs.

A piece of the puzzle was still missing, and what plagued her mind more than anything was that she couldn’t see it. So she peered into a spider truck window and to her surprise, discovered an interior filled with a dull grey pockmarked substance. She was staring at hardened concrete, used to cripple the vehicle so it could not be used in enemy hands.

‘Do another recon,’ she barked over their comlinks.

‘Another recon?’ questioned a young girl. ‘That’ll be the third time.’

‘Do it anyway?’

‘No. The area is secure,’ interrupted the crackling voice of the Zebra Chief. ‘Major, you’ve checked enough already. We make camp here.’

#

Nights were the worst. Nights were when the men came. Sandra needed sleep, but unseen fears kept her awake, of zebra men and their desire for young girls to fulfil their vulgar sexual appetites.

Whenever despair took hold of her she tried to focus again on what was good. Unfortunately the only positive aspect of her incarceration was that she was making friends, two in particular. Colby had claimed her every night to keep other competitive males from her. They would spend their time wrapped in each other’s arms talking about past lives that seemed never to have belonged to either of them. She enjoyed those moments. They reminded her this world was not the only reality they could hope for.

Her other trusted companion was Daniel Mazuri, who stole food for her and occasional delicacies such as bananas and coconuts, which Sandra shared with the other women. Mazuri was much younger than Colby. His age showed when he talked and so she found it harder to relate to him, but she enjoyed his kindness and optimism. He was the only one who could make her laugh, with his impressions of native animals, and of foreign tourists whose tips had once provided him with a livelihood.

‘They control you too, Daniel?’ she asked that night, seated on the edge of the women’s campfire. Colby had not yet shown and she was wondering why.

With his intimidating face paint, Mazuri sat just far enough outside the circle not to scare the women, but close enough so that he and Sandra could converse in whisperers. He tapped his head, ‘You mean with one of these?’

She nodded.

‘Yes I do, but they don’t give me no big gun, because I got bad eyes and I can’t shoot straight, implant or not. You go and mistake me for one of them free-minds, did you?’ And he laughed hard, as if she had just told him the funniest joke.

‘No … Actually, I wasn’t sure.’

His tone became serious, ‘I saw what they did to you, when you were first brought to us. I’m sorry that happened.’

She nodded slowly, re-experiencing her pain. ‘Can I ask how they got you?’

He shrugged, appeared sad. ‘They get everyone eventually, so what’s the point in remembering what life was like before? We won’t get those lives back again.’

She wanted to say the point was to hold onto their humanity, because if they did not they would loose themselves in this place and become just one more cog turning the wheel that was perpetual horror and violence. Instead she felt physically ill, nauseous as if their food was bad. She had struggled to keep down food for four nights now, ever since their settlement of the abandoned military camp, and she was not alone with this infection. What antibiotics were available and able to combat their stomach bugs, as usual, had been commandeered by the Zebra King.

Sandra tried to speak, only to vomit.

Mazuri was silent and still until she had ceased coughing up bloody bile. He masked well any disgust he might have felt about her condition. Finished, she recalled an earlier conversation where he had complained about gut aches.

‘You were lucky, you know?’ He continued their conversation as Sandra cleaned her mouth with water from a dirty bowl. ‘He treated you well, when you were converted.’

‘Well?’ she managed. She’d never been so humiliated in her life.

‘Some people, he makes them beg to be pissed on or to be fucked up the arse, and then he does it.’

‘He what? My god, that’s horrible.’

Mazuri nodded slowly, lowered his eyes. ‘Yes, it is horrible.’ In that moment his words chilled if the very air had suddenly dropped ten degrees in temperature.

‘He did that to you, didn’t he?’

Mazuri said nothing. She could tell that the very life of him had seeped from his skin and fled like a ghost into the night. No wonder he didn’t want to remember his past, when the barrier between who he was now and whom he had once been was divided by such atrocities.

Sandra moved to comfort Mazuri. He flinched at her touch, as if the memory of what had been was far stronger than any compensatory comfort she could offer in the present.

Startled, his wide urgent eyes stared at approaching shapes. Dark and ominous shapes which materialised into five soldiers who ran at them. They grappled Sandra, carried her kicking and screaming into the night. She managed to witness one opponent kick Mazuri in the face as warning not to interfere. Immediately he fell and vanished from Sandra’s field of vision.

‘You bastards, let go of me!’ She struggled hard, but found their grips too strong to fight them all off at once. Not surprisingly, Uskili was counted amongst their number.

They threw her hard onto the dirt just outside the Zebra Chief’s new abode, the officer quarters previously occupied by the camp’s long vanished commanding officer. Crumpled in the dust was an adult man, moaning and bruised. It took a few moments to recognise Colby. He had been severely beaten, and was now covered in either mud or blood, or both. From fear or sickness, she vomited again.

‘White men think they can keep the white women all for themselves. I don’t think so.’ Uskili hand tightened around Sandra’s hair and pulled her to her feet. ‘Now strip.’

‘No,’ she spat had him, punched his face.

His closed fist was harder, and almost broke her jaw.

‘Strip or we cut it all off and send you back naked.’

Sandra struggled with her rage until the futility of circumstances beat her. Snot in her nose and wetness in her eyes threatened to betray deeper emotions, and yet she still managed to stand defiant on legs she could no longer feel. Trembling as she stepped out of her decaying clothes so that the welts and sores across her body came onto display, welts and sores that would not heal no matter how hard she tried to keep them clean and bandaged. How could the Zebra Chief want her, seeing how sick and thin and unattractive she had become? How could he want any of them, when he must see they all loathed and detested him in return?

‘Get inside.’

This wasn’t about sex, it never was. Always it was about power. Would the Chief be the only man tonight who would invade her? As seconds would these soldiers wait outside ready to abuse her, too? Every day her circumstances became worse and worse, the unimaginable just kept becoming more and more real and there was nothing she could do to stop any of this.

That was the worst of it, knowing that if she ever escaped, she’d have to live with the knowledge that she could not, or would not, do anything to stop the daily atrocities.

So she closed her eyes and stepped inside as her neural controller commanded. She called upon all her inner strength so that she would not be present in her own body while it suffered through whatever ordeal awaited.

As the Zebra King found her, she swore a secret oath. She would murder this man when an opportunity presented itself, when she could finally beat her neural controller, even if the price was her own life.

The morning brought sunlight, but no warmth shone on Sandra. Wrapped in nothing more than a dirty towel, she hid in a cupboard. Nearby rumblings were of crackling static, which she tried to block from her ears by covering them with her hands. That noise came from outside. Anything belonging to the outside world, she didn’t want to know about.

Another fit of pained coughing took control of her body. Nothing left to expel from her stomach, when she stopped retching her hands were still covered in blood and sputum.

She flinched when Muzari found her, touched her shoulder. She had cringed just as he had that night she hoped to comfort him.

He had a mug of black tea for her to drink. She took it slowly, grateful, held it so she could smell its faint aromas.

The crackling, stronger now that her cupboard door was open, still annoyed her. It still told her there was an outside world she wished to disown.

She wanted to taste the tea, but she feared if she moved her arm to bring the cup to her lips she would spill it.

‘I brought you your clothes.’

She couldn’t bring herself to answer him. She couldn’t even bring herself to remember anything about where they were, why they were here, or what had banished them into this hell in the first place. There were far nicer places in the world, like her flat in Sydney, and it was in those places that she belonged. Not here.

‘Do you want me to dress you?’

He took back her tea and helped her out of the cupboard. She let him take her, everyone else had. She let him pull on her knickers, pants, t-shirt. She even let him lace up her boots. A part of her mind understood what was happening, that catatonia was taking hold, and denial was winning. Another part of her fevered mind understood that if she didn’t pull herself out of this despair, this would become her life.

‘There you go. You look much better now.’

‘I don’t…’ Neural controller or not, she found she could not complete what she hoped to say.

‘Don’t what, Boss?’

‘Don’t ever want to look good ever again.’

He shrugged, ‘Well, drink that tea. You’ll feel better.’

It was his only response, so she did what was requested. Its warmth returned some energy. Its taste returned some sense of being alive. ‘What happened to Colby?’ she finally asked.

Mazuri’s smile was grim. ‘He’ll be okay, I think.’

‘But he’s alive.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘he’s still alive.’

‘But not in a good way?’

The young boy was not given the opportunity to answer. A bold and boastful Uskili fronted, accompanied by his favoured henchmen. Automatically repulsed, Sandra recoiled from him.

‘The Chief needs you now.’

She had to obey. The neural controller ensured that. She wanted him to apologise to her, and to each and every victim in this sad sorry excuse for an outfit, but understood he never would. He just didn’t care.

Accompanied by Mazuri, she reluctantly followed Sergeant Uskili and his underlings to the only structurally sound observation tower. Up high the Zebra Chief waited patiently, his zebra hide cape flapped like the frantic wings of hungry vultures. His gaze was intent upon the horizon.

‘You called for me, sir?’ she asked.

‘Take a look at this.’ He handed her the digital viewfinder. In a heavy fit of retching he too began to expel his lungs, and, macabrely, Sandra felt grateful that disease in this country never played favourites. When he was done he continued, ‘It’s already set to the required coordinates.’

Sandra did what she was told, adjusted the filters to cut out the glare of sunrise. Holding the device to her eyes, blurs sharpened into a column of trucks, the old-fashioned wheeled and tracked varieties. She almost cried when she identified UN markings on every vehicle. The convoy was heavily armed. Professional soldiers with UN insignia were alert behind 120mm cannons and rapid-fire gauss guns. In comparison the Zebra Company was comically outgunned and undisciplined. It was a fantasy to believe they might be here to rescue her.

‘Attacking them would be suicidal,’ she warned.

‘I know,’ the African’s voice was thick with conceited arrogance. ‘I’ve been watching them for twenty minutes now, and it seems taking this base is not their intention.’

No mention whatsoever of the fact that he had forced himself upon her last night.

‘Then what are they doing?’

He grinned, showed his teeth, not realising that he revealed a mouth of bleeding gums and festering sores. The previous night that tongue had been upon her skin. Whatever diseases his filthy excuse of a body incubated, she was likely to have caught them all. Only her empty stomach contained her growing sickness.

Muzari at her side caught her attention. Similarly he was covered with sores, bleeding infections of every kind, as were the two accompanying soldiers. Did the Zebra Chief fuck them all? Would the sickness he created ever know any bounds? Again her desire to murder him, to make him pay, grew strong and all consuming, if only the neural controller would not bend her will against her.

‘Sir,’ she said, her defeated voice not her own, ‘I have to warn you. If they attack we are defenceless.’

‘That’s not a problem. They’ve been circling, moving around us.’

Sandra’s mind raced, forced itself to consider all possibilities, and again her old fears returned. The camp had to be a trap. The column of UN trucks must surely think as she did because they stayed away. What did they know? What could they see that she could not. Was the threat invisible to the naked eye?

‘Hand me that weapon?’

She vaguely heard the Zebra King’s command, for her mind was on more pressing problems. Perhaps the UN didn’t need to guess. Perhaps they possessed the instrumentation which told them what they needed to know. Why not to approach.

‘This weapon?’ obeyed Muzari, lifting a sniper rifle.

Her neural controller forced her again to focus on the current situation, as a series of dramatic and volatile events unfolded rapidly around her. She saw everything in slow motion, as if in a car crash, although her heart knew that every action now occurred at breakneck speed. The neural controller warned that the Zebra King was about to get himself killed.

‘Yes, now.’

The first event was enacted by the Zebra King himself as he lifted the sniper rifle, no doubt to utilise the telescopic site as a viewfinder. This was the catastrophic action her controller had warned about.

Why wouldn’t the UN be keeping an eye on the Zebra King as they passed through? If she was in command down there, that is exactly what she would have done. It was no surprise then that the UN retaliated with suppressed small arms fire, volley after volley of tracer rounds to guide heavier arsenal if they were required.

The Zebra King was saved by Uskili, who shielded his master with his own flesh and bone, his face full of regret as life escaped him.

‘You fuck!’ the Zebra King screamed at Mazuri before Uskili had even finished falling dead before him. ‘You’re supposed to stop me doing stupid things like that.’

‘What did I do?’ countered Mazuri.

Bursting with hatred, the Zebra King wasted no time in disintegrating Mazuri’s face with five bullets discharged from a sidearm. When he was spent, barely anything resembling a human head remained. The corpse, without a brain to tell it what to do, tumbled off the tower, cart-wheeling once before it crumpled onto dust.

Shock was all that saved Sandra. Shock was what allowed her to stand back and witness the carnage as if none of it was real. Even the blood splattered across her skin was as abstract as flicked paint thrown from an artist’s brush onto canvas.

At last she’d figured out what was wrong. Worked out how she was going to escape. Worked out how to extract her revenge and defeat her enemy once and for all.

Don’t let him get hurt, that was the first rule. Even if he wasn’t aware of his impending doom, the Zebra King must be hurting right now. With bleeding gums and bloody coughs, it would only get much worse, for him as much as anyone.

What could she not see that the UN Convey could? What had the crackling hiss from a discarded Geiger counter been trying to tell her this morning? What warnings was she refusing to acknowledge because of the anguish it would bring? What invisible enemy had the previous occupants hoped to control, filling a spider truck with concrete to bury leaking isotopes? A massive radiation spill was the answer, and every second that passed since their arrival was killing them all.

Before the neural controller could process any logical reason to spare the Zebra King, she grabbed Uskili’s fallen shotgun, and shot the Zebra King four times in the chest. When he fell, face down, she used one more shot to smear what was left of his brains into the already thick mess of wet red.

‘You bastard!’ she screamed, ‘You arsehole!’

The only means left to protect the Zebra King from further harm was to end his misery here and now, and that action finally freed her. Venting her anger she kicked his corpse, again and again. ‘You were pathetic. You were no king. No one respected you.’ She smashed his back with the butt of her shotgun. Freedom was blissful, revenge numb. ‘You probably didn’t even respect yourself,’ she finally whispered to the corpse, words she had long desired to scream at his face while he was living.

‘You’re free,’ she told the two surviving soldiers sharing the platform with her, who could only stare wide-eyed with shock. ‘Tell everyone they are free.’

They paid her no heed as she ran down the metal steps towards her own escape from hell. Controlled for so long, they had probably forgotten even how to act for their own interests.

#

Colby could walk, just. She supported most of his weight, proud as she carried him from their nightmare. In their hundreds the former men, woman and children slaves fled into the bush. To where they ran she could not know. To their homes, hopefully, into arms of loved ones who would heal their pain. As for Colby and herself, all she could think about was that anywhere away from the compound and its invisible enemy had to be better than being trapped inside.

They half-ran to catch the column of UN trucks. Perhaps their drivers were now slowing, waiting to receive them with anti-RAD drugs. She could only hope, for Sandra was betting their very lives that these people really were the UN, and that they would be friends who would treat them with dignity.

‘Where are we going?’ Colby stuttered through his blinding pain, barely aware that they were on the move.

‘Home,’ she quietly answered, and asked herself was the nightmare really at an end? She wasn’t sure, but she had to hope that the worst must be behind them. ‘I have a great flat back in Sydney. You want to join me?’

‘That sounds good,’ he managed through bloody lips that could barely move.

She smiled for him, for both of them as they staggered towards the convoy and home.

END

“Aftermath” first published in Agog! Ripping Reads edited by Cat Sparks (Agog! Press, 2006)

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David Conyers is an Australian author of science fiction and dark fiction, residing in Adelaide. His publications are found in the numerous anthologies including Agog! Ripping Reads, The Black Book of Horror, Horrors Beyond, Macabre, Hardboiled Cthulhu, and Arkham Tales. He has also appeared in several speculative fiction magazines and journals. Between 2004 and 2006 he was the Associate Editor for Book of Dark Wisdom.

Visit David Conyers’ website at http://www.davidconyers.com/