The Prey (42 page)

‘Look, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest,’ Dougal said as he turned to follow the course of a wide vlei.

‘Where?’ she asked. Cameron pointed them out for her and she spotted the tan-coloured antelope. There were about twenty of them in the herd, including babies.

Kylie slid across the seat a little so that her thigh was touching Cameron’s. Sunlight was streaming into the fuselage. He put his arm around her and kissed her, first on the cheek and then on the mouth.

He kept her in his embrace as they both looked out the window again. Dougal continued over the countryside as it opened into a series of wide plains, delineated here and there by glittering streams. Cameron spotted a couple of elephant and it was almost as exciting seeing them from the air, raising their faces and trunks to inspect them, as it had been from the safari vehicle at Lion Plains.

‘This place is wild,’ Cameron said into her headphone.

‘Wild, and beautiful,’ she said. She wanted to kiss him again; all day, in fact, and all night.

Then the aircraft exploded.

T
he wind shook the sycamore fig and rippled the normally smooth waters of the Sabie River. The fisherman puffed up his feathers at the chill and huddled next to his chick and his partner in the hollow of the tree.

At their feet was the almost picked-clean bones of what had been a fat barbel. The fisherman and his family were temporarily sated by the fat oily flesh of the catfish. The fluffy down that had covered the chick since birth had now given way to feathers, and in recent days the fisherman’s surviving offspring had clearly been itching to leave the nest. The little bird had begun flapping his wings and jumping higher and higher in the nest and onto the branch of the fig.

The chick had survived the deadly attack by Inkwazi, the fish eagle, which had taken its weaker sibling, and had narrowly avoided being gulped down as an appetiser by Ingwe, the leopard, thanks to the fisherman’s faking of an injury.

Now, as the gusting wind heralded the closing of winter and the storms which would soon follow from Mozambique, it seemed the chick might be blown from the tree if it decided to venture out onto the branch, as it was doing more frequently these days. The youngster was keen to take its next and most momentous step of its life.

A lion called in the night, as if reminding them all of the dangers that lurked in and along the river of fear, but in those same churning waters a tigerfish jumped, its silvery flank and stripes visible for a split second in the glint of the moonlight, reminding them of the riches that awaited the chick as he learned to hunt.

The fisherman perched on the branch and rotated his head to scan for danger. All was quiet, save for the rustle of the leaves. Even the lion had finished his talking. His partner turned to look at their chick. It was time.

The little one flapped his wings and screeched; his parents watched him closely. Unsteadily at first he hopped from the nest, lost then regained his balance, and in a blur of madly beating feathers he was gone. The fisherman left his perch and followed his youngster’s erratic first flight to the ground. But the chick landed safely and within a few seconds, after seeming to gather his wits, he was off.

A booming call from his mate made the fisherman turn back. At that moment a powerful gust of wind tore through the sycamore tree. The bough in which they had made their home snapped with an almighty crack.

The branch tumbled into the swirling waters of the Sabie below and the pair and their chick watched as it drifted away. Now they would need to find a new home.

J
essica and Mandy were listening to Elvis Blue on Mandy’s iPod with one ear bud each as they sat on Mandy’s bed. Her father had SMSed her from Zambia in the morning, saying he was on a charter aircraft to Kitwe, but she hadn’t heard from him since. Perhaps, she thought, the phone signal wasn’t good where he had been heading.

They had been home from school for an hour. Jess liked school, but it was home she was dreading. She was meeting her mother for coffee at the Wimpy in half an hour. ‘I don’t want to go.’

‘
Sheesh
, man, I know what she did was hectic, but she’s still, like, your mom,’ Mandy said, pulling the bud out of her ear.

‘Jess?’ called Mandy’s mother. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’

‘Oh my god, I hope she hasn’t come to collect me. I don’t want your mom having to talk to her,’ Jessica said. ‘How embarrassing.’

Mandy’s mother, Charmaine, was at the doorway. ‘Jess, are you expecting someone from the mine to come and fetch you?’

‘No, Mandy and I were just going to walk to the Wimpy, why?’ It was only a short walk, and Mandy’s mother would need her car to go pick up Mandy’s younger brother, Gareth, from rugby practice.

‘The dominee’s here, with a guy from the mine. Please come to the door, Jess.’

Mandy’s mother had gone pale. She looked at Mandy, who put her hand over her mouth and looked at her mother. Jessica felt a sudden pang of terror. She remembered Mandy talking about the day her dad died, in an accident at the mine, and how the local clergyman, the dominee from the NG Kerk, the Dutch Reformed Church, had come with Jess’s father to deliver the news. Jess’s dad had come home afterwards and cried.

‘No.’

‘Please, Jess. Come see what they want.’

Jess felt her legs turn to jelly as she tried to stand. Mandy’s mother put an arm around her and Mandy followed close behind as they walked to the door. The dominee was a tall thin man, with grey hair and a long, skinny face. ‘Jessica, I have news. This is Solomon, he is a driver at the mine. He was sent to fetch me.’

The man behind the dominee bobbed his head. Jess recognised the Global Resources uniform but not the driver. But she remembered the dominee. She’d stopped going to church about a year earlier, when her mother had overheard some of the other parishioners saying something about her after a service and vowed never to go again.

‘I’m very sorry, Jessica …’ said the dominee.

‘No. I don’t want to hear if something’s happened to him.’

She started to turn, but Mandy’s mother held her in a tight embrace.

‘There has been a plane crash, in Zambia, the flight your father was taking with the Australian woman, on business. Solomon was sent on the orders of Mr Coetzee, the new mine manager, to fetch me. I checked on my computer, on News24, just before I left home. The reports are that there were no survivors, Jessica.’

‘No! He can’t be dead. They must check the bodies. He’s alive!’

‘The reports are there were no survivors,’ the dominee said again. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, but we must be strong.’

The man in the mining company shirt shuffled forward a pace. ‘Mr Coetzee says you must come to the mine, miss,’ he said to Jess. ‘Your mother is coming there now. She knows we are coming to get you.’

‘We must go there,’ the dominee said, nodding his head. ‘We will get more facts, do some more investigating.’

‘You’re sure her mother knows about this?’ Mandy’s mother said.

‘Yes, madam,’ said the mine man. ‘She was crying. She said she didn’t know if she could come for Jessica now. She wanted to go to the mine to find out more from Mr Coetzee.’

Mandy’s mother harrumphed as if, Jess thought, she would have expected nothing less from Jess’s mother. Jess felt a prickle of defensiveness. ‘I need to see her now. I’ll get my things.’

She walked back to Mandy’s room and grabbed her bag. Her vision started to blur at the edges and she choked as the tears rose in her throat. Not her dad. It couldn’t be. Not him.

The dominee put his bony arm around her and she cringed, but she let the men lead her to the mine
bakkie
. Jess turned and waved to Mandy and her mother.

‘I’ll come as soon as I’ve collected Gareth. We’ll all come and you can stay here tonight if you don’t want to go home, Jess. For as long as you like.’ Mandy was crying too now and Jess turned away from the window as the
bakkie
pulled away.

The dominee sat in the front passenger seat, and Jess was all alone in the back of the double cab. She sniffed and tried to dry her eyes. It had to be a mistake. Solomon was driving very fast. Her dad would have told him off, as he always did anyone who broke the speed limit in a company vehicle.

She leaned forward, between the two front seats. ‘How long have you worked at the mine, Solomon?’

‘I am only new, miss. I am very sorry to hear about your father. I know he was a good man. Everyone said so.’

‘Amen,’ said the dominee.

Jess saw a glint of metal as Solomon depressed the clutch to change gear. He wore a company shirt, and jeans, like many of the guys who worked above ground, but his shoes were soft polished leather with little chains across the top of them. They looked expensive.

The driver glanced back at her and saw her looking down at his shoes.

‘Nice shoes,’ she said.

‘Thank you, miss.’ He licked his lips and Jessica felt the car start to move faster. They were through Barberton now, on the road to the mine. She knew the turn-off was coming up soon. It was funny, then, that he was speeding up.

‘I feel sick,’ she said.

The dominee swivelled in his seat. ‘What’s wrong, my child? Is it the shock?’

She nodded. ‘Please, pull over, Solomon, I think I need to be ill.’

He glanced back at her again. ‘Nearly at the mine, miss. We will find somewhere for you to lie down there.’

‘Solomon, if the child is going to be ill, better it not be in the vehicle. Pull over, man.’

The turn-off to Eureka was in sight. Solomon changed gears again and Jess knew there was something wrong.

‘His shoes, Dominee, his shoes!’

‘What, my child?’ the old man looked confused.

‘They’re not safety shoes – he doesn’t work for the mine!’

Solomon glared at her. The needle on the speedometer climbed above a hundred and thirty.

‘That was the turn-off, man,’ the dominee said, craning his head to look back. ‘Turn around, Solomon, you stupid …’

Solomon leaned forward, one hand on the wheel, and reached under his seat. When he sat up again he was pointing a black pistol at the dominee. ‘Shut up, you old fool, or I’ll kill you and the girl.’

Jessica grabbed Solomon’s arm with both her hands and bit it.

‘Ow!’ The gun boomed and Jessica screamed. She cowered back into the seat. ‘You stupid little bitch.’

‘Please, please, don’t hurt me,’ the dominee whined. He held up his hands in surrender. The bullet had passed him and gone out the open window.

They passed the turn-off to the Diggers’ Retreat Hotel. After that, Jess knew, it was just the Sheba mine and Sheba siding, where a lot of the illegal miners lived. She guessed he was one of them. From then on, it was just bush until the R38 joined the N4. No one would find them if he stopped out here.

Jessica moved to the door and saw Solomon check her out in the rear-view mirror. He stamped on the brakes and Jess was thrown into the back of the dominee’s seat as the car skidded and stopped on the gravel verge. ‘Get out,’ Solomon said to the dominee.

Jess saw her chance and fumbled open the back door, stumbled and fell to the dirt, then got up and started running.

‘Stop!’ Solomon called behind her.

She ran into the thornbushes on the roadside, not caring about the barbs that scratched her all over. ‘I’m going to kill him if you don’t come back, Jessica!’

Jess slowed her pace, then stopped.

‘Come out, come out wherever you are,’ he called.

Jessica was panting, her arms and legs criss-crossed with blood from the thorny branches. She was confused and terrified.

‘I’m going to count backwards from ten and then the churchman dies if you don’t come out, Jessica.’

Jess screwed her hands into her eyes. She didn’t even like the dominee. She thought he was creepy. But she slowly retraced her steps, until she came to a tree big enough to hide behind. She peered around the trunk and saw the old man, kneeling with his hands behind his head. He had cried like a girl, she thought, begging Solomon in the
bakkie
not to hurt him. What about her, she wondered.

‘Seven, six, five, four, three, two …’

Solomon’s arm was out straight and she could see, even from this distance, his finger curling around the trigger. She wished she had just kept running. She didn’t know what this man wanted with her and the minister but she couldn’t let him be killed.

‘Wait.’ She walked out from behind the tree with her hands up in the air.

‘No … my child,’ the dominee said through his sobs. There were tears running down his cheeks. ‘You should have run.’

‘Come closer,’ Solomon said, ‘or I will kill him.’

She walked towards him, trying not to show how scared she was.

‘Kneel down.’

She did as she was told.

The dominee sniffed back his tears. ‘And you, with a name from the Bible. You will burn in hell if you don’t release us now.’

The man laughed. ‘My name isn’t Solomon, it is Wellington Shumba. I am a general and a lion, and I take no orders from you.’

‘You’re Wellington?’ Jess said. It was a name she’d heard her father speak often.

He smiled down at her. ‘You should have listened to the preacher man, little girl.’

Wellington pulled the trigger and the dominee pitched forward.

*

A cellphone beeped and buzzed and Chris Loubser opened his eyes, momentarily disorientated by the sea of fluffy pillows he seemed to be drowning in.

Tertia Venter put her phone down on the bedside table, lit a cigarette, drew on it, then passed it to Chris, who struggled to shrug his way up to a sitting position and escape his prison of Egyptian cotton.

‘You fell asleep. Did I tire you out, my poor baby?’

‘Yes,’ he grinned. Chris took a puff, coughed and handed the vile cigarette back. He hadn’t smoked since he was sixteen, and he had hated it back then too. There were some things she couldn’t make him do, but, he reflected, not many. ‘That will kill you.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll die happy knowing I saved this place.’

He rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow. He was enchanted by her; not just her body, but by her toughness and her supreme confidence. She feared nothing. ‘What makes you so sure you have? It’s not over yet.’