Monster Island(4)

“Dekalb! You ask them about my connection! Damn you if you don’t!”

I nodded, a sort of farewell, a sort of assent. I followed the girl soldier out of the cell and into the sun-colored courtyard beyond. The smell of burning bodies was thick but better than the smell of the shit-bucket in the cell. Sarah pushed her face against my chest and I held her close. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. It could be our turn to get some food, the first we’d had in two days. The girl soldier might be leading me to a torture chamber or a refugee center with hot showers and clean bedding and some kind of promise for the future. This could be a summons to an execution.

IfGeneva was gone, so was the Geneva Convention.

“Come!” the soldier said.

I went.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Four


Six months earlier, continued

A Chinese-built helicopter stirred up the dust in the courtyard with its lazily turning rotor. Whoever had just arrived must be important-I hadn’t seen an aircraft of any kind in weeks. In the shade of the barracks building a group of huddled women in hijab dresses held their hands over the mortars where they’d been grinding grain.

The girl soldier lead me past a pair of “technicals”-commercial pickup trucks with heavy machine guns mounted in their beds. A particularly Somali brand of nastiness. Normally technicals were crewed by mercenaries but these had been hastily emblazoned with Mama Halima’s colors: light blue and yellow like an Easter egg. The vehicles belonged to the Women’s Republic now. Girl soldiers loitered around the trucks, their rifles slung loosely in their arms, chewing distractedly on qat and waiting for the order to shoot somebody.

Past the technicals we walked around a corpsefire. It was a lot bigger than it had been when Sarah and I were first brought to the compound. The soldiers had wrapped the bodies in white sheets and then packed them with camel dung as an accelerant. Gasoline was too valuable to waste. The smell was terrible and I could feel Sarah clench against my chest but our guide didn’t even flinch.

I tried to summon up my identity, tried to draw some strength from my professional outrage. Jesus. Child soldiers. Kids as young as ten-babies-dragged out of school and given guns, given drugs to keep them happy and made to fight in wars they couldn’t begin to understand. I’d worked so hard to outlaw that obscenity and now I depended on them for my daughter’s safety. The worst horrors of the twenty-first century had turned into humanity’s only hope.

We entered a low brick building that had taken a bad artillery hit and never been repaired. The dust billowed in the sunlight streaming through the collapsed roof. At the far end of a dark hallway we came to a kind of command post. Weapons lay in carefully sorted piles on the floor while a heap of cell phones and transistor radios littered a wooden table where a woman in military fatigues sat staring listlessly at a piece of paper. She was perhaps twenty-five, a little younger than me and she wore no covering on her head at all-a sign of real feminine power in the Islamic world. She didn’t look up as she spoke to me. “You’re Dekalb. With the United Nations,” she said, reading off a list. “And daughter.” She gestured and our guide went and sat down beside her.

I didn’t bother assenting. “You have foreign nationals in that cell who are being treated in an inhumane fashion. I have a list of demands.”

“I’m not interested,” she began. I cut her off.

“We need food, first of all. Clean food. Better sanitation. There’s more.”

She fixed me with a glance at my midsection that I felt like a stabbing knife. This was not a woman to be trifled with.

“If it’s still possible we need to be afforded communication with our various consulates. We need-”

“Your daughter is black.” She hadn’t been looking at me at all. She’d been looking at Sarah. My mouth filled with a bitter taste. “But you’re white. Her mother?”

I breathed hard through my nose for a minute. “Kenyan. Dead.” She looked me in the eyes then and it just came out. “We found her, I mean, I found her rooting in our garbage one night, she’d had a fever but we thought she would make it, I brought her inside but I didn’t let her out of my sight, I couldn’t-”

“You knew she was one of the dead.”

“Yes.”

“Did you dispose of her properly?”