The Bone Yard and Other Stories Page 4

  Open Wounds

  All along the border dead bodies steamed in the desert heat, their final death throes frozen for the pale UN troops to see and be sickened by. Babies, children, teenagers, parents and grandparents drew a bloody line in the sand, a red line on the map. I could see where they had been cut down by AK47 fire or chopped by machetes or burned by flame throwers. Naively, when I saw a little girl move her arm I thought she had survived - I put down my rifle and rushed over to the mound of corpses. But once I’d stepped over the slick human parts and pulled her out of the mother’s lifeless arms I realised how I’d been fooled. The maggots swimming in her open chest wound had given her illusion of life, eating away at her insides until her arm had fallen off.

  Of course, I should have known not to expect miracles. Sanguro’s soldiers had been too thorough and enthusiastic to leave anyone alive. He’d herded them out of the UN camps and straight to border, where his devoted men had gone to work, slaughtering innocent villagers, killing anyone who could oppose his junta. From his point of view the operation had been a complete success. Bodies were heaped upon bodies, limbs tangled into knots. A sprawl of butchered human meat a hundred miles long. I could not even imagine the number of people that would total. The excrement stench was something I’d never forget, a stain on my soul.

  Sergeant Kelly swore and called me across.

  “We just got word that all the refugee camps from here to Jagadisa have been razed to the ground.” He spat into the sand. “Maybe half a million victims. Maybe more. Nobody’s counted them.”

  “Hell,” I said.

  “Close as,” he said. He took a moment to compose himself. “Our orders are to check out Camp 5 - sixty klicks west of here. The Red Cross station there hasn’t called in for twelve hours. We’re worried.” He raised an eyebrow, telling me he suspected the worst. “Anyway, you and me will scout ahead using the Land Rover. There shouldn’t be trouble from Sanguro’s men if we go along the riverbed marked here on the map. It’s dry this time of year and it’s unlikely he’s mined it yet. Still, it’s a dangerous mission, so if you don’t want to go I’ll get someone -”

  “I volunteer,” I said. Anything was better than staying here. And if I could save even one person from suffering at the hands of Sanguro I was up for it. I was a nineteen year old with delusions of heroism. I’d grown up watching action movies where the good guys won, and I wanted the real world to be the same. With adrenaline pumping through my bloodstream I followed Kelly to the Land Rover.

  “You drive,” he said, “you need the practice.”

  The Land Rover powered down the muddy riverbed, sloshing up the red mud so common to the region that we had nicknamed it Sanguro’s blood. With the main roads mined and half the country rocky and impassable, the riverbed was the fastest way to reach our destination short of risking a helicopter against Sanguro’s SAM sites. As I drove 60 mph - Sergeant Kelly studying the map in the passenger seat - I prayed the Red Cross had not fallen, that the lack of communications was explainable - a radio breakdown, a flat battery, anything. The Red Cross were doing an excellent job, but they had no defences against a man like Sanguro.

  Once every generation a man is born so evil he hurts the whole world. Sanguro was that man, a man driven by an uncontrollable power lust. In the fifteen years of his reign over Kansassa, he’d invaded his two neighbouring countries, imprisoned or killed all who opposed him in his own, and defied the UN countless times. He existed on his own terms, an invisible presence I could feel in the dusty air. He had not appeared in public for several years, rumours claimed he’d been assassinated and his minions now ruled, but while driving through Kansassa’s bloody landscape I knew he was alive. Killing the innocent was his trademark. If only his country had oil then something might have been done before this latest tragedy, but Kansassa was the country the world had forgotten, a Central African nowhere, brushed under the carpet of political affairs. Something had to be done about Sanguro, I knew. But in order to deal with Sanguro, you had stoop to his level. Unfortunately, Sanguro wallowed in the ninth circle of hell, smiling up at you. Waiting.

  The riverbed forked ahead.

  “Left,” Kelly said.

  “Sir, may I ask you something?”

  “Of course. What?”

  “If you had Sanguro in a locked room with you, what would you do?”

  “Kill him.” His mouth was a tight line. “Slowly. Nothing could make him suffer like those people suffered, but I’d give a good try.”

  “Uh-oh, Sarge,” I said. “Something’s ahead.”

  I slowed the Land Rover. Kelly readied his rifle and leant out of the window. The riverbanks were dotted with rotting corpses, skeletons and skull fragments. I felt bones crunch under the tyres, snapping and clicking. These bodies had to have been dumped when the river was full. Red mud caked them. They reminded me of Chinese chicken. I almost laughed at the absurdity. The corpses went on and on. I was appalled to think the people downstream had swallowed the polluted water, believing it to be clean.

  We drove on in silence.

  We were soon used to the graveyard, saturated by the horrors. I was tired and restless and demoralised, eager to leave the riverbank. Kelly, despite being a Falkland’s veteran, was as pale as a raw recruit. I was desperate to have the day end, increasing my speed over the corpse path. The wheels ejected a trail of body parts in our wake. I knew what we’d find in the camp, but I needed to be there now. Not in this pit. Maybe I should have been looking more carefully, I don’t know. I don’t think it would have made much difference. Because just one mile from the camp they ambushed us.

  Damn, they were fast.

  Something struck the tyres. The Land Rover veered out of my control as if the steering wheel was an afterthought. The vehicle struck the bank. The centre of gravity tilted over and over. I slammed into Kelly and saw the hole in his temple Where had that come from? and his brains leaking out Oh, God, he has a family and thought this can’t be happening but it was happening and I was upside down and the roof was skidding along the ground and I’d never heard a single shot ...

  I could smell petrol. Opening my eyes I grunted as raw pain chewed my face where glass had imbedded. Bruises throbbed everywhere. My mind felt sluggish. Where was I? Seeing the dead sergeant brought it back. I was still in the Land Rover. My face was pressed against the shattered but intact windscreen. I could see several holes typical of .22 bullets in the glass. They must have hit Kelly. I tried to move, but couldn’t. The seat belt held me in place. I fumbled it loose and dropped onto the roof. Voices drifted in an alien tongue. Sanguro’s men! My gun -

  A khaki uniform yanked me from the vehicle. The soldier said something. I slurred my name and number. He pushed me into the mud. Hands stripped off my uniform. So they’re going to rape me before they kill me, I thought dully.

  For once in my life I was grateful for being wrong.

  They just took my clothes and left me drinking mud.

  Twisting my neck, I could see a couple of soldier’s dressing a corpse while others inspected the upturned Land Rover. Their officer barked orders, they hurried up. Then he walked over to me and spoke in English.

  “I am so sorry about the other one,” he said. “That was a mistake. General Sanguro likes his meat fresh.” He laughed and kicked my ribs. Two soldiers younger than myself approached. They carried me to a truck parked a hundred metres from the river and tossed me in the back like a sack of rice. They closed the doors. An engine started. A far away explosion told me that I didn’t exist any more.

  *

  So I was going to meet Sanguro, but it was going to be on his terms. Alone in the dark truck, a fear gripped me worse than any I’d known. It was a solid, bowel-loosening fear. I had to escape. I hammered my fists against the steel doors until they were bloody, then crawled up in the darkness, too tired to move.

  Perhaps worse than death was humiliation in the eyes of your enemy. Being naked and vulnerable made it seem more real. I’d heard war
stories about Sanguro, stories I’d dismissed as the impossible exaggerations. Sanguro had once forced a rival warlord to eat the flesh of his own children, while they lived. In a homage to Vlad the Impaler he had spiked the heads of a hundred villagers on the walls of his palace - for no reason at all. What would he do with a British Army soldier, a despised UN enforcer?

  I envied Sergeant Kelly. At least he had not suffered.

  The doors opened and bright painful sunlight hit me.

  The truck was parked on a verdant lawn in front of Sanguro’s palace. The palace was a shadowy nightmare in front of the descending sun. Black towers and minarets spiked the purple sky. Hell’s Palace.

  Soldiers wearing black kerchiefs covering everything but their eyes yelled at me to get out. When I didn’t respond they dragged me out kicking and punching. Suddenly handcuffed, I was led towards the vast entrance archway. It was like a viper’s mouth, a red tongue of carpet leading up the steps to a profound darkness. I knew Sanguro waited for me.

  I decided then that if Sanguro wanted me to beg for my life I would not. I would not give him the satisfaction. Never.

  Never is a long time, a little boy’s voice said. It was the voice that was scared of the dark and the thing under the bed and the bogeyman.

  Sanguro was the real bogeyman.

  As the darkness swallowed me whole, I screamed.

  Naked and handcuffed, I was thrown into a vast chamber decorated entirely in red silks. A king sized bed was in an alcove, over which six lion heads glared. A gold world globe rested at the bed’s edge, spinning on its axis. More stuffed animals were in niches - tigers, pumas and even an entire rhinoceros. Evidently, Sanguro’s bloodlust did not discriminate between species. I wondered where he was, since he had to have spun the globe.

  Several layers of silk curtain billowed in front of the windows. I thought I glimpsed a figure on the balcony beyond - an awesome silhouette that could only be one man - but he was gone in an instant, leaving me to concentrate on my immediate predicament.

  A soldier attached a heavy steel chain to the handcuffs, and left me alone. The chain was fastened to the onyx floor with just enough length to allow me to stand. I did so. I pulled at the chain. It would not break loose. The floor had been designed for this purpose.

  Looking around, I noticed I was in the centre of a circle below the level of the normal floor by about six inches. There were small holes under my feet, like a pepper shaker. I could think of no purpose unless ... unless the holes were there to drain away blood and the ridge was to stop it spreading.

  The curtains parted like a ghostly veil, hidden strings pulling them back into the walls. He was standing in the crimson light of dusk, facing the mountains. His black uniform filled my vision. He turned around and looked at me. Though his hair was greying, the streaks only served to darken his features. His brown eyes sparkled with intelligence, the skin around them wrinkling as he grinned.

  “You are mine,” he said. His teeth shone behind his dark beard.

  “Go kill yourself,” I said.

  “You are a spirited man, English. I like that. You may last longer than the last one to be in your position.”

  Sanguro walked towards me, but stopped tantalisingly out of my reach. He could see the fury in my eyes. I would have given my life right then to squeeze the life from Sanguro, to hear his neck snap as my thumbs dug into the soft skin above his breast bone. It wasn’t meant to be. Sucking in a deep breath, I saw a whip at his side. He toyed with the whip, cracking the air between us. He was Thor, God of Thunder, and I was a mere mortal.

  “I will take the spirit out of you,” he promised.

  When he swung the whip at my chest the movement exposed the vermilion shirt beneath his jacket, showing as a gash at his throat. Like a cut throat, I thought. Then the whip struck, opening a line from breast to sternum. A warm wetness dribbled down my stomach. His second strike wrapped around my legs and pulled, landing me on my back. Laughing, he cracked the whip between my legs. Pain flared supernova bright. And he continued. A God never tired.

  *

  Every morning a guard sluiced my blood down the holes using an icy hose. Some would leave me curled up, shivering, but others turned the hose on me. The cold water was like acid against the red raw wounds. I was sure they put salt in to add to the agony. They kept me alive with raw meat. When I stopped eating it, hoping to die, they would just force the meat down my throat, so I had to eat it. I had little doubt the meat was human. They would not waste food on a non-human like me. Vaguely, I held on to some hope of rescue, but after six weeks of whipping and mental torture I knew this would not happen. Nobody knew I was alive. Unless they did an autopsy on the bodies found in the Land Rover - and it was unlikely given the larger atrocities - they’d never find out. And if they did - what could they do? Nothing. No, the only way the suffering could end was if I died or I escaped.

  So I ate what was given, and took Sanguro’s whipping without complaint, pretending to feel more pain than I did. Over time Sanguro grew bored with his human pet, the whipping’s becoming less frequent. He was like a child with an old toy. He ignored me, talked with his men as if I wasn’t in the room. He was often called away to the war zone - leaving me to recover for weeks at a time. I grew stronger. The steel chain was excellent for weight lifting, building my muscles, turning the raw protein from the meat into muscle. I sharpened my teeth on the bones. I turned pain into pleasure, revelling in the burning agony of my wounds. Whipping merely fired the adrenaline in my body, made me stronger. Sanguro was so blind to my presence that he did not notice the scrawny prisoner changing into a raging beast. Only I could feel and see the difference. He had stripped away my humanity, and revealed the creature under the skin. Below the purple and black scars was a killing machine, waiting for its moment.

  Sanguro was Thor.

  But I was Odin.

  One night Sanguro left the balcony, sighing as he unhooked his whip for the night’s entertainment. The whip opened a cut on my cheek, a blood splatter arcing away with the whip. A delicious pain squirmed inside me. He flicked it again. The tip of a whip could hit at several hundred miles an hour, but my eyes followed the movement as if it was in slow motion. The tip flayed my wrist. Gripping it hard, I yanked it from his hands. He was so surprised he gaped. I did not give him time to move - switching the whip handle to my handcuffed hands and copying his technique in order to bind his legs. On one knee, I pulled him off his feet and dragged him across the slick floor. He kicked at my face but his kicks were nothing. I had him, and he knew it. His eyes widened in terror. Discarding the whip, I pressed my hands over his throat, pinning him to the ground. He thought I was going to strangle him.

  I was glad to disappoint.

  My razor teeth burrowed into his uniform and shirt, plunging into his chest, renting a mouthful of bloody flesh and muscle, tearing it as my head whipped backwards. He screamed. I knew there would be no answer - the guards were too used to hearing screams. I swallowed the meat while Sanguro bucked under me, burying my face in the gore. His blood pulsed wonderfully. Surfacing, I stared at his rictus face, pink saliva dripping from my mouth. Sanguro could not believe what was happening to him. Leaving his chest wound for the moment, I chewed at his face - the cartilage in his nose crunched between by incisors. Moving on, I took off an ear, spitting it in his mouth. That really made him panic. He almost choked on it. A low, pitiful moan came from him.

  “Kill me,” he said.

  “Not yet,” I replied, taking my teeth to his right eye.

  At dawn he was dead.

  I felt nothing. No pleasure. No disgust. Nothing.

  I found the key to my handcuffs in his ragged clothing. Freeing myself, I strode out to the balcony, leaving a trail of wet footprints. Sanguro’s blood glistened in the cold sunlight, like war paint. In this part of Africa some believed the eating of your enemy’s flesh makes you stronger. I could feel it. The red plains and the mountains were mine now. I was triumphant. There was no turni
ng back to a normal life, not for me. I wasn’t human; I was something else, the darkness evil men feared. I knew those who chose oppression would fear me, for I was the beast within them, forever hunting them as they hunted the innocent. When Sanguro was consigned to a historical footnote, I would be a legend. Parents would tell their children about me, as a warning to treat others as they would like to be treated. Not even death could kill me. I was already dead.

  I jumped over the balcony and landed cat-like on the lawn, running to my homeland. Free.

  Doctors will tell you the dead have no expression. It’s not true. I am grinning.

  Can’t you see my teeth?

  The Challenge

  Lauren did not remember how she had entered the tower, but she knew there had been a life before, if only she could reach those tantalisingly enigmatic memories of yesterday. She found herself climbing smooth stone steps behind a man wearing similar grey, shapeless sackcloth pyjamas, like a prison uniform. He was one of many walking above her. Lauren was wearing nothing on her feet, just like him. He would not talk to her. Neither would the man on the step just behind her, or the people behind him. He pushed her if she so much as slowed down for a second. There was a person on every step, and only enough room for one person on a step at a time, no way to squeeze past the person above or below without crushing both. They were all walking at the same brisk, tireless pace, like zombies. She wanted to stop walking up the spiral stairway, but some instinct told her that was the worst thing she could do. The stairway spiralled up and up, with stone walls on either side. Dark green moss and lichen grew between the cracks. There seemed to be no end in sight.