Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) (30 page)

Then war broke out. Pierre’s village avoided most of the violence, but hunger, poverty and disease took its toll. Now that life was slowly returning to normal, the village school had re-opened, the villagers had started to rebuild their livelihoods, but they were still heavily dependent on outside help and would be for many months to come.

* * *

Mr. Wyndham-Smythe of Kensington had broken his vow never to suffer going on the tube again, and was sitting, handkerchief held firmly over his nose and mouth, among the coughing commuters and excited tourists, when he noticed the Giftaid poster directly opposite him. He had already read all the other posters—twice—but somehow this one had eluded his gaze, perhaps—as is often the case in life—by merit of being directly in front of him.

“That’s the family and its conscience taken care of,” it proclaimed. “Buy a goat or some chickens from Farm Africa for £10.” The poster went on to explain that an enterprising blacksmith could convert a decommissioned tank into 3,000 farm implements for a poor African village.

Mr. Wyndham-Smythe didn’t like animals, particularly smelly farmyard animals tended to by dirty farmers. He found weapons and militaria much more appealing. Ever since his father had sent him to military academy and he had met Dick, the young Wyndham-Smythe was fascinated by all things military. Dick had humiliated him, played practical jokes on him, beaten him and urinated on him, and Wyndham-Smythe had loved every miserable minute. As old memories came flooding back, Mr. Wyndham-Smythe reflected on his life, and his thoughts turned to his children, William and Henrietta. Henrietta had been pestering him all year for a Sony widescreen laptop with 32X Re-write DVD drive, and all William could talk about was an X-box. Well—not this year. This year William and Henrietta would learn about the true spirit of Christmas.

* * *

“Pierre? — Pierre!” The blacksmith had been daydreaming: imagining himself driving through the village in his perfectly polished, shining silver tank, the other villagers eyeing him with admiration and cheering as he passed. The village elder’s voice brought Pierre out of his reveries.

“Huh?” Pierre took his hand off the tank and looked around, slightly dazed. The village elder had called all the villagers together for an impromptu ceremony in honor of the aid workers who had transported in the village’s allocation of western aid and the donors who had funded the gifts.

“I said that you,” the village elder told Pierre, “as the village blacksmith, will be honored to make tools out of the old tank, so that we will be able to till our land again and grow our own crops.”

“Huh?” The village elder frowned at Pierre and turned back to the villagers, the aid workers and the two truck drivers who had convoyed in the tank, rice and farm animals.

“On behalf of everyone in the village of Santa Maria Illuminosa Madre di Jesu Crucifixio, I would like to thank the Giftaid Foundation and all of you for bringing us help in our hour of need. We also extend our thanks to the people of Great Britain, in particular to Mrs. Jameson of Shepherd’s Bush for the goat, Mr. Thompson of Aberdeen for the chickens, and to Mr. Wyndham-Smythe of Kensington and his family for the tank.”

“Mr. Wyndham-Smythe of Kensington,” mouthed Pierre.

* * *

The village elder’s speech went on for some time and Alicia was starting to feel nauseous again. She hadn’t been right since the incident in Utar Pradesh. It had been dark and the aid truck she was traveling in hit what she and the driver initially thought was a large black dog. Alicia got out of the truck to see if it was still alive, and that was when it went for her. It all happened so fast. Alicia saw the creature’s yellow eyes and large fangs as it sprang at her throat. She managed to raise a hand to defend herself, but if it hadn’t been for the driver leaping out of the truck and hitting the animal with the cricket bat he kept next to his seat, it would have ripped her throat out for sure. Instead it reeled under the blow from the bat, then glowered at the two humans and disappeared into the bushes.

“Are you alright?” cried the driver, rushing over to Alicia and helping her to her feet.

“I think so.” Alicia inspected her bitten hand. The shock had not set in yet and she was surprised at how clear her head was at that moment. “But the dog might have had rabies,” she told the driver calmly. “I need to get to a hospital as soon as possible.”

“Yes, of course.” The driver helped her back into the truck, adding quietly, “But that was no dog.”

Despite what had happened in India, Alicia jumped at the chance to travel to Africa. Since her husband had left her for a woman half her age, Alicia had thrown herself completely into her charity work. She had been to India and to Thailand, but Africa had always been the one country that she really wanted to visit. That was where the starving children truly needed her, and the charity had finally given in to her nagging and allowed her to join one of the aid convoys, on the condition that she cover the cost of her own travel. Luckily she had enough of her parents’ money left even after the divorce. But now that they were finally here, she was not feeling herself.

A skinny little boy caught Alicia’s eye and she smiled at the child, happy that she was making a difference to his impoverished life. The boy’s eyes opened wide and to Alicia’s dismay he burst into tears and pulled his hand out of his mother’s grip, running for the shelter of one of the ramshackle huts surrounding the dusty village square.

Alicia swooned slightly in the heat and wiped her brow. As the village elder’s voice swam in and out of her consciousness, she started to notice other sounds around her: the agitated clucking of the chickens, the distant sound of a rat scurrying though the bushes, the heartbeat of the goat they had brought and which was now tethered with a piece of string held by one of the villagers. As she listened, fascinated, to the goat’s beating heart, the animal turned to look at Alicia and bleated in alarm. Perhaps at that very moment the wind drifted in Alicia’s direction from where the animal stood, but Alicia was surprised to find that she could smell the goat even at a distance of eight or so metres. The smell told her that the animal was afraid. Alicia found herself salivating and wiped the corner of her mouth. She could hear the goat’s heart beating faster and faster, and suddenly the animal was bucking in fear. The goat tore itself out of the grasp of the astonished peasant who was handling it and in its confusion darted here and there among the villagers and their foreign visitors. As if noticing the wasteland that stretched beyond the villagers’ huts, the goat bolted towards it, seemingly oblivious to the small man and the tank that stood in its way. The village elder spotted the goat’s intentions and yelled at the blacksmith.

“Pierre! Grab it, don’t let it get away!”

Pierre took his eyes off the tank and saw the goat heading straight for him. He waved his arms around and shouted at the terrified animal, causing it to swerve around him, straight into a couple of youths who had been forced by their parents to attend the village festivities. One of the boys threw himself nimbly on the goat and wrapped his arms around its neck, bringing it to the ground, where the villager who’d been made responsible for looking after it retrieved it and stroked its head gently, whispering in its ear until it calmed down.

The village elder concluded that it was time to wrap up the speeches for the time being, and invited the villagers and the visitors to join him for dinner later that evening. Slowly the villagers drifted chattering back to their huts, and the aid workers followed their allocated hosts back to their accommodation. Only Pierre and one of the aid truck drivers remained. Jim had noticed Pierre’s fascination with the old tank, and he wandered over to the blacksmith.

“Centurion Mark 3,” Jim smiled at Pierre and patted the rusty tank. “Never thought I’d see one of these outside a museum. Figured they’d all been converted to Olifants or Semels in these parts.”

Pierre nodded enthusiastically, happy that the driver spoke English—one of the few languages in which Pierre could do more than just quote lines from ‘The Exorcist’.

“I bet she’s seen some action,” continued Jim. “Korea, ‘Nam— there’s no telling where she’s been.”

Pierre was finding it a little hard to follow the lesson in world tank history, but he certainly recognised a fellow enthusiast when he saw one. “You like tanks?” he asked the driver.

“I used to be in the army,” Jim explained. “I spent some time in tanks...”

Pierre’s eyes opened wide and an excited flush spread over his face. “You know drive tank?” he asked, his childlike enthusiasm making the driver smile.

“Yes, I can drive one of these.”

“You teach me?”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea—”

“Why?” The disappointment in the little man’s face affected the driver in a way he hadn’t expected. There was a naivety and innocence about the blacksmith, which made Jim feel like he had given a sweet to a child, only to take it away again.

“Well, for a start we would need some diesel.”

“Diesel?”

“Fuel— for the tank to run on.”

“Oh— yes,” Pierre looked crestfallen for a while, but quickly perked up. “You have?”

“Excuse me?”

“You have diesel?”

“Well, we have some in the trucks.”

“We put in tank?”

“Well—” the driver looked down at the little man and thought for a moment. “We do have considerably more than we need. I guess you could have a bit of it—”

“Oh thank you! Thank you!”

* * *

The rumbling sound split the balmy afternoon like summer thunder, waking the villagers from their siesta and bringing them out of their huts, eyes wide with fear and curiosity. The foreigners came out too, equally fearful, but less curious—the unpleasant sound was nothing new to those of them who had spent time in combat zones.

“Pierre!” The village elder did nothing to disguise his anger, but the blacksmith was in no state to pick up on the emotions of others. He was riding high, head in the clouds, the rest of him sat firmly in the Centurion Mark 3.

“Pierre, what the devil are you doing?” Pierre responded to the elder’s exclamation by waving happily. “It works!” he cried, “It works!” His smile faded as no one apart from a couple of children waved back.

“You get out of that tank right now, blacksmith! Or there will be hell to pay!” The village elder looked ready to explode.

“Okay, I’m going. I’m going.”

Everyone looked on in astonishment as Pierre turned the tank around carefully and disappeared into the scrub beyond the village. That was the last they would see of him until dinner that night.

* * *

“What do you mean, you haven’t started yet? You’ve been gone all day and the least you could have done after your performance earlier today was to start stripping it down. You may think that the planting season is a long way away, but it will be on us faster than a hyena on an abandoned antelope calf, and what will we do if we haven’t got tools to till the earth?”

They were all sitting in the large canvas dining-tent specially erected for important village occasions such as this.

Pierre was taken aback by the village elder’s outburst, but he wasn’t giving up easily.

“We can till the earth with sticks and sharpened stones—like we did last year and the year before that. And the kind people of Europe and America have sent us plenty of grain and dried food, and food in metal tins. We don’t need to destroy the tank—you never know when the village might need it.”

The village elder was speechless for a moment, turning a deep purple color that rather worried both his foreign guests and the other villagers. No one had seen him turn this particular shade since his son had informed him that he was marrying a girl from the neighboring village—a girl that everyone knew was most definitely not a virgin. Finally the elder spoke:

“How dare you speak for this village, and how dare you mention the people of Europe and America?! You have betrayed everybody’s trust, and you insult our guests who have come a very long way to bring us the tank so that we can till our land and feed ourselves, and not so that you can ride around in it making a spectacle of yourself!”

The foreigners had no idea what the village elder was shouting, but knew that the little man he was yelling at, was not going to get off lightly. Jim picked at his plate of rice distractedly, feeling guilty and uncomfortable about his role in the blacksmith’s disgrace.

“Blacksmith,” the elder continued, “you leave this table now, and you go and start converting that useless piece of junk into farm tools for the people to use, or I will personally cast you out of this village and make sure that you never return!”

A gasp went round the table. Pierre hung his head and stood up.

“Yes, elder,” he said quietly, and headed out of dining-tent, avoiding the eyes of the others – some pitying, some indignant, but all of them fixed on him.

“Your mother sucks cocks in hell,” he mumbled under his breath in Italian as he left the tent, passing through the shaft of light from the full moon as he went.

* * *

Alicia was feeling increasingly tense. The heady smells of the food set on the table before her, and of the plants and creatures outside the dining-tent were making her head spin. Some unfamiliar sense was telling her that flesh might alleviate her symptoms, and she reached out, grabbing a chunk of the pungent, fatty, non-descript meat from the large bowl that had been lovingly placed in front of her and the other foreigners. Alicia sniffed at the meat suspiciously, and immediately started to drool. She took a tentative bite, then stuffed the whole chunk into her mouth, reaching out for another.

Alicia’s colleague had been staring at her for a while before she noticed.

“What?” she asked, staring back.

“Nothing, it’s just that I thought you were vegetarian.”

“I was.” Alicia didn’t offer anything by way of an explanation, and her colleague mumbled an apologetic, “right,” and returned his attention to his own plate.