The Fallen (12 page)

Tim got up and crept towards the car.  The man inside was watching him and scraping the spade on the inside roof, making a jagged tear in the lining.  Tim moved round to the side where Asefa had been, holding his gun out as if it were a spear to keep anything back.  On the floor he saw Asefa’s gun, much blood and drag marks into the thick jungle.  The man in the car was now bashing at the passenger window, trying to break through and reach him.   He moved away from the car and towards the spot where the drag marks in the track ended and the jungle began.  There was red on the leaves and pieces of what looked like limp sausage skins on a branch six feet in.  He recoiled from the bush and fired four shots into the undergrowth.  A lion?  He shook with fear; it could have been anything.  Whatever it was it was still out there along with who knew what else. 

He edged backwards to the driver’s side of the ranger’s car and clearly saw the horror it caged.  The man with the spade lurched over his dead companion towards Tim, who saw the hand without the spade was unflinchingly gripping the open throat of the man, using it for support.  For a second Tim looked into the wild man’s eyes; they were not dead but held a startled malevolence that sent a chill to his heart.  Even through the fear he felt pity.  Tim raised his rifle against the glass and in the moment before he pulled the trigger the man stopped his thrashing and stared at him with unsettling calm.  The window shattered and then even the jungle fell silent. 

Tim stood holding the gun, unable to move but then remembered the other dangers around him and spun back to face the foliage, the gun trembling in his hands.  In a single motion he turned back, holding his breath, he opened the door, felt through the warm, sticky wetness within and released the handbrake, feeling the car slip back a little.  He jumped out, not stopping to close the door and ran back to the Niva, slamming his door and locking it once inside.  He was hyperventilating and his knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel, “Shit, oh shit, oh shit,” he repeated as he tried to stop himself from drowning in oxygen and fainting.  Using all of his willpower to focus his mind he started the engine and reversed the Niva up the track.  The cable tightened and the front of the Land Cruiser began to rise; it was working.  The Land Cruiser shifted out of the ditch and slid to the side a little before falling back into the stream.  It hadn’t moved much but enough for the Niva to squeeze past.  Tim forced himself to get back out of his steel and glass cocoon and run, gun in hand, to unhook the tow cable.  He ran back to the front of his car and engaged the electric winch; it wound painfully slowly and the noise it made seemed to be amplified beyond all recognition as he repeatedly scanned the trees around him.  Finally the hook was secure in its fastening and he was able to retreat back to the safety of the vehicle. 

Shifting into low gear he ploughed into the stream, the body of the Land Cruiser scraping green grooves into the side of the Niva as he passed.  Briefly he though he might not make it, becoming trapped like the other car, but the shorter wheelbase meant he was able to traverse the dip without becoming wedged in, the Russian engine growling deeply as he pulled up the other side.  At the spot where Asefa had disappeared he looked into the undergrowth one last time.  He knew his friend was dead.  He was alone.

He drove on for hours, taking great care not to slide off the road.  He did not want to get out of the car to winch himself out.  Without Asefa everything seemed more ominous and threatening.  Several times animals darted across his path, nearly making him lose control.  Tears ran down his face, he had never felt so despairing; had he not had a destination, he thought he would go mad with it.  His mind was running again and again over all those presumed lost and he tried not to think of what London would be like had this sickness reached there.  The cities would bear the worst of it he thought; yet that was where he was going.  Juba was the capital of South Sudan and it certainly had enough people to create its own nightmare.  At least he knew where Sarah should be staying,
The Lion Den
, even if he had little idea how to find it once he got there.  There were so few roads in South Sudan that it was almost impossible to get lost on the way, as long as he and the car could hold together.  Ending up on foot would be a death sentence.  He became a man possessed.  There would be no more rests, no more stops, no more breaks; he would drive until he reached her or died trying. 

Twenty hours later, hallucinating with fatigue, he arrived in the outskirts of Juba.  Once he had reached the blacktop road on the Sudanese side, he’d made good progress in the daylight, but at night he’d had to travel more slowly to avoid the cars and khat trucks illuminated in his headlights.  He had made it this far but felt sick and shaky, from sugar, caffeine and the lack of sleep.  Now the fear grew about what he would find if he did reach her.

He jolted awake and cursed himself.  When he had pulled over to survey the town, he must have drifted off, not for long he guessed; there was still daylight, although the African sun was getting heavy in the evening sky.  He looked past his anger and felt surprisingly rejuvenated for the shortness of the rest; the shaky feeling had gone and he felt like he could once again focus.  He looked at the fuel gauge, the needle was on
E
.  He got out and took the last of the jerry cans from the back and poured them into the tank.  Back in the driver’s seat he looked at the smouldering skyline.  This was it he thought and sped towards the dusty city.

As he approached he was surprised to see the shapes of men walking.  Perhaps it was OK here? Perhaps she was OK.  But as he drew closer, he could see the men were far from OK.  Those on the outskirts were wandering aimlessly, like lost children, a vacant look in their eyes.  He pulled up alongside one, a Dinka tribesman, as tall as he was dark, and called out to him; but the man ignored him and kept on going, walking out into the empty savannah.  It was not these men who troubled him, but the others.  As he drove on he noticed men not walking, but running wildly in the streets, attacking violently those who walked, as if for a game; knocking them down and beating them gruesomely into the dust like angry apes.  Some had formed pairs or small groups, men and women, and were running together as wolves, chasing down lone runners and pulling them to the ground.  For a moment he thought it may have been an organised rout to purge the city of the mindless, but he realised quickly that this was not the case.  He could see a few white faces mixed in with the runners, some were big men in fatigues, security types; they would not have run in such a way, nor been drawn in to some kind of opportunist ethnic cleansing.  This was part of
it
, whatever it was; a new terrible phase and one he would have to pass through to reach what he needed, if his mind was not to come apart by morning.

As he approached, a group of three men and one woman advanced with grimaced faces, almost skipping, towards the car.  He knocked the leading man out of the way with the bumper and he fell, but the other three beat on the side of the car howling and whooping as he passed.  In the shadows he could see more of the fallen, some were curled in the foetal position, clutching wounds and rocking pathetically.  Packs of men and women were bent over the half devoured flesh of victims; fighting for entrails, establishing pecking orders.  The End Times had arrived if it had come to this; was that all we were without our civilisation and morality; fragile objects to be tormented and devoured?  He told himself again that these people were no longer human, therefore had no humanity to lose.  They had become creatures, worse than creatures, for even creatures knew, or at least used to know, the rules of their kind.  They had no rules, although he could see through the chaos a type of mad order beginning to evolve.  Whatever had happened seemed to have affected people differently, perhaps simply revealing their individual base instincts, bringing each person’s deep and true nature to the fore.  Not everyone was running, some of those he passed were still much as he had found the old mechanic; alive, but mindless and lying where they fell.  He pitied those helpless ones who would soon be dead of sunstroke, thirst or worse. 

More of the runners hurled their fists at his car as it past, as if it were some metallic spirit to be scared away.  They would run after him until he turned a corner or became too distant to their senses.  He was driving aimlessly, not knowing which way to turn, only guided by the route with the least obstacles.  If he stopped he would be swamped, but he knew he would have to eventually, if he ever found her hotel.

He drove around the city for almost an hour, sometimes doubling back on himself, which was always worse.  When the runners had seen him once, they were more intrigued and incensed by his presence the second or third time; and chased him for longer.  He was glad for the Niva’s sturdy bull-bar as he had knocked down several people, including a large Sudanese man in a smart suit, who he’d sent tumbling awkwardly into the dust. 

The fires seemed to have been less bad than he had seen in the big towns in Ethiopia, perhaps due to the lack of mains electricity and the concrete walls of the buildings, with their corrugated metal roofs.  He had still seen some smoke, rising from the windows of several of the bigger buildings.  He was therefore relieved, when he finally came across
The Lion Den
, to see that it appeared intact.  In his haste to escape a particularly aggravated pack, he had almost driven past the small sign above the high main gates to the walled, razor wire topped, hotel compound.  In his mirror he could see the pack getting closer and more runners coming towards him from a side street several yards in front.  He quickly pulled away and drove down a few blocks before turning a corner and slowing down.  How could he get in without stopping? He would need to do as he did back at the Institute: pull up outside the gates, jump onto the car roof, climb over and unlock them from the inside, then bring the car in.  But to do that he’d need time, at least a minute or two. 

From the recesses of his childhood he remembered the story of the Pied Piper.  He would lure as many of the runners away to another part of the city as he could, then drive quickly back to the hotel, leaving them behind, knowing they would not find their way back, except by chance.  He doubled back, and blasted the horn – too loud he thought, he didn’t want to attract more of them from other areas.  He cracked his window slightly and turned on the car stereo.  Zangaliwah.  The joyous Cameroonian tones seemed surreal and out of place and he wept as he thought of the last time he had heard it and when he had danced with Sarah, warm from Asefa’s damned moonshine.  It worked, almost too well.  The runners ran towards him, some trying to reach through the gap in the window and pull it open.  He sped up a little and those clinging on fell away, then slowed down to allow the crowd, which now numbered about twenty, to catch up.  He had to stay close enough to keep them interested but far enough away that they couldn’t catch him entirely.  The heat and the adrenaline drenched him with sweat.  If they surrounded the car, he didn’t know what he would do, could he shoot them all?  He feared the sound of gunfire would bring an endless stream of bodies, trapping him in his vehicle or else ripping him from it to meet a brutal end at the hands of the frenzied mob.  The more people that followed him the faster they seemed to join the fray. 

After circling the block twice and slowly driving some fifteen blocks down he then sped up for a further two blocks, turning the music up and blasting the horn as he did so.  A sharp turn took him onto a quiet side street and out of sight.  He immediately turned off the stereo and dropped the clutch, coasting onto the next parallel main road.  Keeping the car in third, so as to keep the engine quiet, he made his way back to a side street that would take him back to the hotel.  For the last hundred yards he turned off the engine and let the car roll almost silently in neutral to a stop outside the gates.  Without stopping to look he jumped out, clambered onto the bonnet, onto the roof and over the gate. 

His feet were now resting on the iron crossbar on the inside of the gate, with his back to the compound.  He was about to jump down and slide open the lock when he saw ten or more tall black figures streaming down the street towards the car.  There would be no time to drive inside.  He quickly ducked down behind the gate, hoping they would be attracted only by the car and would not have the presence of mind to understand its strategic placement for use as an improvised ladder.  Before he had finished the thought something inside the compound grabbed him by the ankle.  Losing his footing, he crashed to the floor, catching his chin on the gate on the way down and cutting it open.  He spun onto his back to face the wild blood-encrusted face of a twenty-something white woman; an aid worker no doubt.  Her clothes were torn and breasts exposed, covered only by her grimy hair.  She grabbed at the wound on his chin, yelping excitedly at the sight of blood.  Behind her he could see the movement of others but couldn’t tell how many.  He regained himself and landed an awkward blow across her jaw, sending her sprawling into the dirt and revealing the three other men behind her across the courtyard.  Attracted by the scuffle the men were rising from some other unfortunate distraction, lying motionless behind some grubby plastic garden furniture.  Under the dirt, he could see two of the men were white but the leader of their pack was a large Sudanese man, nearly seven feet tall and dressed in a stained khaki guard’s uniform.  For a moment there was a standoff; Tim lying on the ground, head up and staring at this new threat and the pack staring back at him.  His eyes darted to the reception area, which led to the rooms; it was slightly closer to him than they were.  The door was ajar and looked sturdy, he might just be able to make it. 

The pack acted first, smashing plastic chairs out of their way and running towards him.  He scrambled to his feet and ran for the door, ducking a hand that grabbed for him as the pack overshot, not comprehending his plan of escape.  He slammed the metal door and slid the heavy bar lock closed, to the sound of furious thumping on the other side.  Running to the other side of the small reception desk he scanned the guest logbook – there she was,
Sarah Whitfield, Room 9
, and a familiar signature.  His heart leapt, she was here.  He took the keys for the room from the board on the wall behind the desk, noticing with dismay that most of the other rooms were also occupied, then ran into the dark hall.