Monster Island(5)

My whole body twitched at the thought. “We-I locked her in the bathroom. We left, then. The servants had already gone, the block was half-deserted. The police-even the army couldn’t hold out much longer.”

“They didn’t.Nairobi was overrun two days after you left, according to my intelligence.” The woman sighed, a horribly human sound. I could understand this woman as a deadly bureaucrat. I could understand her as a soldier. I couldn’t handle it if she expressed any sympathy. I begged her silently not to pity me.

Lucky me.

“We can’t feed you and this installation isn’t defensible so we can’t let you stay here, either,” she said. “And I don’t have time to argue about your list of demands. The unit is decamping tonight as part of a tactical retreat. If you want to come with us you have five minutes to justify your keep. You’re with the UN. A relief worker? We need food, more than anything.”

“No. I was a weapons inspector. What about Sarah?”

“Your daughter? We’ll take her. Mama Halima loves all the orphan girls ofAfrica.” It sounded like a political slogan. The fact that Sarah wasn’t an orphan didn’t need to be clarified-if I failed now she would be.

It was at that moment I realized what being one of the living meant. It meant doing whatever it took not to be one of the dead.

“There’s a cache of weapons-small arms, mostly, some light anti-tank weapons-just over the border-I can take you there, show you where to dig.” We’d put the guns there in hopes of destroying them one day. Stupid us.

“Weapons,” she said. She glanced at the pile of rifles on the floor by my feet. “Weapons we have. We are in no danger of running short on ammunition.”

I clutched Sarah hard enough to wake her, then. She wiped her nose on my shirt and looked up at me but she kept quiet. Good kid.

“She’ll be protected. Fed, educated.”

“In a madrassa?” She nodded. As far as I knew that was the limit of the Somali educational system. Daily recitation of the Koran and endless prayers. At least she would learn to read. There was something impacted in my heart just then, something so tight I couldn’t relax it ever. The knowledge that this was the best Sarah could hope for, that any protests I made, any suggestion that maybe this wasn’t enough was unrealistic and counter-productive.

In five years when she was old enough to hold a gun my daughter was going to become a child soldier and that was the best I could give her.

“The prisoners,” I said, done with that train of thought. I had to be hard now. “You have to leave us some weapons when you go. Give us a fighting chance.”

“For them, yes. But I’m not done with you.” She glanced at her sheet of paper again. “You have lived inAmerica.” Here it comes, I thought. The Somalis had no reason to help out an American, not after Operation Restore Hope turned to shit back in ’94. I was aGaal, a foreigner-a foreign devil. This is where they take me out in the yard and put a bullet in the back of my head. “I need a volunteer. An American volunteer for something quite dangerous. In exchange you could have full citizenship.” She kept talking then but for a while I couldn’t hear anything, I was too busy imagining my own death. When I realized she wasn’t going to kill me I snapped back to attention. “It’s Mama Halima, you see.” She put down her paper and looked at me, really looked at me. Not like I was an unpleasant task she had to deal with but like I was a human being. “She has succumbed to a condition all too prevalent inAfrica. She has become dependent on certain chemicals. Chemicals we are dangerously short of.”

Drugs. The Warlady had a habit and she needed a mule to go pick up her supply of dope. Somebody desperate enough to go toAmerica and get her fix for her. I would do it, of course. No question.

“What kind of ‘chemicals’ are we talking about? Heroin? Cocaine?”

She pursed her lips like she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake in picking me for this mission. “No. More like AZT.”

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Five


Now

Garysat on the floor of his kitchenette, surrounded by wrappers and boxes-all of them empty. He licked the inside of a wrapper that used to hold a granola bar, dug out the tiny crumbs with his tongue. All gone.

He was hungrier than ever.

He could feel his stomach distend. He knew he was full, fuller than he’d ever been in life. It didn’t seem to matter. Being among the dead meant always being hungry, obviously. It meant this gnawing inside of you that you could never quench. It explained so much. He had wondered-in his old life-why they had attacked people, even people they knew, people they loved. Maybe they had tried to stop themselves. The hunger was just too great. The need to eat, to consume, was awesome and frightening. Was this what he had consigned himself to?