Monster Island(101)

“Sarah, if you can hear me come here!”

In English, even. Nobody here speaks English any more, Daddy.

Everybody moved so fast, all the soldiers converging on our location like they’d been trained and they shoved me to the back even if the voice was speaking to me. Ayaan knows English, too, so she can’t pretend she didn’t understand. The soldiers crowded in so I couldn’t see but Ayaan told me it was just a dead man. Dead men don’t talk, of course, but she had told me stories about Gary and the mummy that talked to you, Daddy. One of the soldiers said she held down the dead man’s body with her boot, that he was pretty well cut up with bullets already and couldn’t move much (I didn’t see this but they told me later). All I could hear was his voice.

“I’ve been searching for you for years, Sarah. Tell them to step back. I have a message for you. My name is Jack and-”

There was a gunshot and then Fathia grabbed my wrist and pulled me away so I couldn’t see. It was silly, she said, some kind of trick. She knew Jack, she said. She had met him and worked beside him and he had been a white man, even though the talking corpse was an Ethiopian. A refugee. It was all some kind of trap.

I was confused and a little angry. I wanted to hear more and I also wanted not to think about it. I knew what Ayaan would recommend.

We decamped after breakfast, refilling our canteens with water from the local well, boiled and purified. It tasted like pills, like the dust at the bottom of a pill bottle. We moved fast and kept together, headed for the main encampment on the border. All day I kept by Ayaan’s side, holding her rifle and her binoculars. She’s teaching me to shoot, Daddy. She says I’m going to be good at it.

We passed a tiny little house, the kind of place a goatherd would live. It could be taken apart and carried. We passed a dried-up river bed where we had to walk carefully because sometimes the mud isn’t as solid as it looks. We came out on a ridge, a line of hills between us and the encampment and some of the girls just couldn’t go any further. I guess I was one of them. Ayaan called for a halt and we set up tents and cut down trees to make logs for a palisade, like a fringe of sharpened stakes all around the camp. There wasn’t enough wood for a complete wall so we strung wire between the stakes and hung empty cans from it. That way at least we would hear the dead coming.

In the night I woke up next to Ayaan in our tent. She was snoring pretty loud. She never has trouble sleeping, unlike the rest of the soldiers. I had to pee so I pulled on my poncho and crept out to the edge of the camp, waving at the girls who stood watch. They turned around and gave me some privacy. It had been a quiet night, not so much as an animal out in the dark. So when the darkness started talking to me I jumped.

“Sarah!” I dropped to the ground in case something was about to grab me and tried to scan the shadows outside the perimeter with my eyes. I could just make out a silhouette out there-a human-shaped silhouette. One of the dead. “Don’t make any loud noises. We need to talk.”

I stayed silent. The first thing the soldiers did was train me not to scream.

“They won’t let me near you. I’ve been close a couple of times now but they destroy my body before I get a chance.”

I checked the position of the nearest guard. She was maybe five meters away-too far to hear a whisper, close enough to see any movement.

“You're dead,” I hissed. “What can you possibly want with me?”

“I want to rest, Sarah. That’s all. I can’t seem to die. I don’t have a body anymore, I guess you’d call me a ghost. I can animate any corpse I want but something just won’t let me go. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. I’ve lost pretty much everything as a result. I think I have one last thing to be rid of and maybe then I can be free. You have to help me. You have to accept my gift. If you’ll do it-when you’re ready-come out into the desert and meet me. Come alone or they’ll just gun me down.”

He was gone before I could say anything else. Come alone-out into thedhaaqsin, alone, without even knowing how to shoot a gun. I would be dead in a matter of hours. Dead with nobody to sanitize me, which is worse.

I’m writing this now in Ayaan’s tent. She’s still snoring away. She won’t notice if I go out again. She’ll never know what happened if I just curl up and go to sleep.

What do I do, Daddy? I know you would have an answer. Ayaan and Fathia told me all about Jack and the horrible things he did. They also told me he was the bravest warrior they ever met. That means a lot to Ayaan, to be a brave warrior.