Orphan (Hunger Book 1)

by Scott Richards

  Orphan

  Hunger, Volume 1

  Scott Richards

  Published by Scott Richards, 2017.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Orphan (Hunger, #1)

  Christopholus Janse Van Vuuren was born on April 7th 1890 to a peasant farming couple, whose own set of parents were part of the original group of Voortrekkers from 1852.

  They nicknamed him “Fires”.

  They did their best not to take sides, to stay out of the conflict, to raise their meagre crops and their only son, and to live peacefully on a small piece of land on the outskirts of North West Pretoria.

  It was midwinter on the Highveld when Pretoria fell to the British troops in the July of 1900, and by September of that year, refugee camps began to appear and spread across the landscape, along with the marauding, often lawless and undisciplined, raiding parties that were enforcing the British scorched earth policy against the Boers.

  Fires’ short life had been in endless turmoil for as long as he could remember, particularly since the night of the fire, when his father stoically defended their farm against insurmountable odds.

  The boy had vague memories of being awakened in the night, and hastily helped into his coarse daytime clothing by his mother, who was wearing a shabby frayed housecoat, as she wailed frantically to her husband, imploring him to pack a bag and to run with them.

  ‘Just take the boy,’ he growled at her as he loaded a rifle.

  Her large brown eyes were wide with panic, fingers scrabbling and fumbling with the buttons on dirt encrusted clothing, then pulling the boy to her emaciated bosom, shielding him with her frail arms.

  She pleaded with his father to abandon it all, to flee into the night with them and not to fight for what was obviously a lost cause, but he pushed her aside roughly, ordering her to leave, as he reloaded the old Mauser rifle.

  Fires could hear the high-pitched whine of lead whipping through the cold night air, causing splinters of wood to spit and spray off the rough hewn timber walls as bullets ripped through, shattering glass and crockery on their journey, or making dull thudding noises as they hit the coarse horse hair stuffing of the furniture.

  The boy fell to his knees, terrified, pressing his hands hard over his ears whilst crawling carefully over the bare boards, through the sharp splinters and jagged fragments of broken pottery or glass, desperately trying to ignore the pain that they caused.

  His mother’s warm body pressed down over him to protect him, to shield him from harm, but pulling him inexorably to the rear of their homestead and, hopefully, safety.

  His father shouted hysterically above the noise of the gunfire, with a demented look in his eyes, urging the boy to go with his mother before it was too late for all of them.

  The boy vividly recalled stumbling blindly out onto the cold black porch, scuttling across the fields as more bullets whistled past and thudded into the rich dark soil.

  His mother screamed in panic and instinctively drew him tighter to her lithe warm body as they hurriedly made for the perimeter fence and clumsily clambered over it, pausing briefly and looking back to see their home becoming engulfed in flames, with British soldiers dancing around it, braying like donkeys and emptying their guns into the crackling conflagration.

  His home was gone.

  His father was gone.

  Fires was ten years old.

  He was cold, frightened and hungry.

  After that horrendous night, things only seemed to get worse for him, as he and his mother drifted in a disjointed, aimless fashion across the vast expanse of the veldt.

  They roamed nomadically from one desolate burned-out farmstead to another, from one shattered and looted township to yet another, avoiding the main roads, avoiding people and any signs of conflict wherever possible, sheltering and hiding from British soldiers with their bombs, their shelling and their gunshots.

  She protected him as best she could, reassured him when he felt afraid, calmed him when he threatened to become overwhelmed by panic and tried to help him come to terms with the death of his father.

  She fed them both by whatever means she could; either using the field-craft her parents had taught her as a child on the Great Trek, or stealing for sustenance.

  Sometimes they would scavenge from the uncollected harvests left in the fields of the abandoned farms, looking warily around at the charred and blackened ruins of the buildings, their beams pointing skywards, accusingly indignant at the British soldiers’ stupidity and callousness.

  At night time, he would often hear his mother sobbing, and feel her breasts heaving in a hitching rhythm as she cradled him, to share their warmth against the biting coldness of the Transvaal nights.

  During the daytime, the nauseating stench of death and decay was constantly assailing their nostrils, and during the hottest part of the day, they were pestered by clouds of black flies blown from the rotting corpses, as maggots hatched within the putrefied flesh of dead freedom fighters and oppressors alike.

  They trudged wearily along, trying to find sanctuary and escape from the evil of this brutal warfare, but the wild and untamed land that had been their home for as long as they could remember was a pock-marked blistered battlefield, relentlessly cruel and cold, and inhospitable to them.

  Memories of home and comfort, although fleeting and rapidly diminishing, tormented them constantly.

  In abject despair and desperation, dirty, dusty and hungry, they had finally succumbed and surrendered meekly to the small cadre of British soldiers they encountered on a gloriously sunny December morning on the road to Rustenburg. They threw themselves at the mercy of the soldiers and hoped that the hastily erected prisoner of war camps, and the makeshift refugee camps, would provide them with much needed food and shelter.

  They soon discovered, however, that this false hope was a totally forlorn one as they entered the camp, and realised the true horror being inflicted upon them by the British.

  Kitchener was trying to break the Boers spirit and end the guerrilla warfare tactics that they adopted by sweeping the countryside bare of anything that would give the fighters shelter or sustenance.

  Having organised systematic drives, much like a sporting shoot, to bag, kill or capture as many men as possible, he wanted to uproot a nation by the wholesale clearance of civilians, and the women and children were suffering as a result.

  Hundreds, if not thousands, were herded together like cattle in the tented camps, with poor sanitation and rampant disease ripping through the imprisoned populace to decimate them.

  Typhoid and dysentery, malaria and scarlet fever claimed lives on a massive scale, with precious little food or clean drinking water to be had. Summer rainfall was late that year and the riverbeds and reservoirs were bone dry.

  Mother kept him close by her side for the first few days after they arrived at the camp, avoiding the menacing stares of the soldiers by mingling with and trying to blend into the crowds of starving women and children.

  The blank-eyed hollow faces of the skeletally thin, that spent their empty existence shuffling aimlessly around, barefoot and stinking of death, or of the dung poultices applied to their gaping wounds, revolted him.

  Then, one night, a trio of drunken soldiers came upon the pair as they cowered behind the flapping canvas of their makeshift tent on the perimeter of the camp and brought a new horror to the boy.

  They were off duty, and all of them stank of beer and whisky, and they were obviously bored, looking for some kind of sport.

  Neither he nor his mother understood any of their English babble, but their demeanour and tone told them all that they needed to know, and they could sense that they were now in grave danger.

  One of
the men pulled his mother roughly to her feet, leering at her in his drunken stupor, and Fires leaped forward, his jaw jutting defiantly upwards in a challenging manner, to place his frail body between them and her.

  The soldier effortlessly batted him aside with the back of a huge hairy forearm before his two khaki clad companions grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him away, kicking and shouting out threats of retribution at them.

  He watched in horror as his mother’s pitifully inadequate clothing was mercilessly ripped from her body, shredded and discarded, and he closed his eyes, trying to blot out her screams as she scrabbled frantically to cover her emaciated nakedness with her hands.

  The soldier balled his hand into a stream shovel fist and ploughed it hard into her abdomen, knocking the wind from her, silencing her and doubling her over, then slapping her almost as hard across the face to send her sprawling onto the dirt.

  The few onlookers who were there quickly scuttled away from the melee and off into the shadow of the night, unwilling or unable to help the woman, reluctant to be involved.

  They had watched this type of behaviour before, and did not wish to bear witness to the brutality of their captors any more than they were forced to.

  Fires kicked out viciously at the soldiers’ ankles and shins, gritting his teeth and cursing at them in Afrikaans, but they quickly hoisted him from the ground, and then one of them slammed the butt of a rifle down onto the young man’s skull.

  His head swam with hundreds of brightly coloured dots before his vision gradually faded to black...

  When consciousness finally came back to him, he was pinned to the ground under the weight of one of the soldiers sitting astride him and watching as his friends systematically raped his mother.

  They were laughing and gibbering to one another in that strange language, encouraging one another as they beat and abused her.

  He struggled to free himself, but found it was pointless.

  He was forced to look on in abject misery as the woman became buried under the bulk of one of these filthy British pigs, pushing his trousers hastily down around his ankles, exposing his pale hairy buttocks as they began to thrust harshly at her groin.

  Her screams became dull moans of pain as she tried to block out the reality of her plight and she whimpered through her tears as she implored them to stop, to spare her and her child of this vile and merciless ordeal, but they either did not understand her or they chose simply to ignore her.

  No-one in the camp was remotely interested in helping her and, in the flickering light of the surrounding camp fires, all she could see were the glassy-eyed aimless heads of others like her; the women and the children who had become undesirables and prisoners in their own country, their humanity stripped from them layer by layer on a daily basis.

  Once the soldiers tired of their fun, they hitched up their trousers and, as one of them fumbled with the huge gleaming buckle of his belt, another casually drew his pistol and put a bullet through her head.

  Fires screamed his impotent rage into the cold dark night over the limp and lifeless corpse of his mother; the woman who had raised him, fed him and given him nothing but love for the last ten years, and whose body now lay limp and lifeless like a discarded doll on the blood spattered soil beneath her.

  His bewildered mind could only ask why they had done this to her.

  He did not know the names of the men who did this to her, but he etched their faces onto his memory and would never forget them.

  At some point during the night, they had wrenched him from her stiffening body and then dragged it by the legs to the outskirts of the camp perimeter, her shattered head lolling and bouncing over the rough terrain at crazy and unnatural angles, sightless eyes that gazed skywards without blinking.

  They cast the corpse thoughtlessly atop the putrefying pile of other nameless, lifeless mannequins to bake in the sun, whilst waiting to be consigned to yet another mass grave.

  There it would bloat, fester and rot, feed the flies and their larvae before splitting open and spewing its contents out to the wind.

  His sobbing gradually subsided and hitched to a halt, but his anger smouldered within him and a determined conviction blossomed within his heaving chest.

  He glared at the soldiers from the shadows and reassured himself with the determined decision that not only would he get out of this place, but he would also have his vengeance on these men, and for several days and nights his mind had replayed this disgusting and distressing vision, causing him to choke back on more tears and more grief for the loss of his mother...but he swallowed it down, moulding it into a solid ball of pure hot hatred within his guts.

  One evening, he watched the movements of the soldiers from the relative sanctuary of a nearby tent flap and noted that the bodies of dead children were being dumped unceremoniously into wooden packing crates of various sizes, and, once full, they were sealed and then transported out of the camp on horse-drawn wagons.

  The escape plan that he formulated in his ten year old boy’s brain was not an ideal one, but at least it was one that he must try.

  ‘After all,’ he reasoned, ‘what do I have to lose now?’

  He was thirsty, hungry and getting weaker as the days passed, and it would not be too long before he joined the other children in the crates anyway.

  He sneaked silently past several guards who, as usual, were found dozing drunkenly at their post and crept around to the back of one of the largest tents where the crates were being stored and filled.

  He peered over the rim of the nearest box at the few glass-eyed, cold-skinned, pale blue corpses that had recently been dumped in there, and then hesitated for a few seconds, feeling nauseated at the prospect of joining them.

  He looked around furtively, gritted his teeth, held his breath and then hastily climbed inside, feeling their waxy blue and unyielding flesh pressing against his.

  He almost vomited at the cool slippery sensation of the dead meat against his own and the smell of it made him gag even more, but his stomach had nothing to give up other than retching cramps.

  He wriggled and squirmed, pushing further and deeper down into the crate and actually snapped an errant limb of one of the corpses before nestling in the darkest recesses at the bottom of the crate.

  He curled up into a tight foetal ball, closed his eyes and then slept fitfully until the following morning, although his mind was still constantly replaying the horror of his mother’s death.

  He was rudely awakened by the raucous laughter of soldiers, and the pressing weight of more bodies being deposited into the top of the crate he was hiding in, making him feel as though he were being crushed, buried alive by a mountain of cadavers.

  He could hardly breathe from the pressure, and slowly turned his head to one side to suck in a steady lungful of fresh air through the narrow slats in the side of the crate.

  It was then that his gaze fixed upon the pile of bodies just outside the camp. Almost at the top of this heap, he could discern the unfocused staring eyes of his dead mother, the back of her head a black and ragged mess of broken bone and spattered brain that had mingled and congealed in her once flaxen hair.

  He almost sobbed out from the loss once more, but held it back.

  No matter how much pain he felt because of her death, he could not risk giving his position away and jeopardising his escape.

  His body had started feeding upon itself now, severely dehydrated, and he was soiling himself and hallucinating; imagining the corpses were whispering to him, calling to him.

  He dozed fitfully in the heat of midday, feeling more pressure bear down on him from above as yet more dead children were pushed into the crate, and then he was awakened fully by the sound of the makeshift lid being fixed and fastened down and the mules being attached to the cart.

  Soon, he found that he was being rocked to the strange rhythm of the ragged road beneath the cart’s wheels and heading out to the edge of the camp, where he knew more crates would be added, but
the whispers continued in his mind, inviting him to feed. His last lucid recollection was of the feel of the clammy-cold decomposing flesh brushing against his lips as the blazing light of the setting sun winked at him through the slats of his wooden prison.

  At nightfall, he finally surrendered to the urge screaming within his painfully swollen but empty stomach and bit deeply into the limb that lay across his face. The meat was tough and sinewy, difficult to chew, but moist all the same, and before long he had chewed it all the way down to the bone...

  Bright morning sunlight pulled him harshly back into reality with searing relentless heat to remind him of the horror of what he had done, but despite feeling sickened and ashamed, his stomach was full and he felt a little stronger.

  The cart rumbled out of the camp through the barbed wire fencing and ambled along as he slipped in and out of consciousness until the middle of the morning, when the cart finally stopped and the soldiers clambered onto the flat bed and began to push the crates towards the back of the cart.

  They manhandled them down and piled them in a rough heap on a bare patch of Veldt, with his crate at the bottom of the pile and furthest away from the cart.

  Then the soldiers began methodically piling kindling and loose dry grasses around the base, pouring some foul smelling oil over the tinder before striking a match.

  He realised that he was trapped inside what may well be his own funeral pyre.

  The tinder took the flame greedily, making it lap and leap over the dry grasses and twigs, crackling and causing thick acrid smoke to swirl rapidly up to the sky, and Fires felt the heat increase within his crate. If he did not act now, he would be cremated along with the other bodies.

  He stretched out his wiry frame wriggling through the cadavers to brace his young and emaciated body hard against the woodwork, pressing his feet against the lowest slats, and his back against the nearest body.

  He felt the wood beginning to bow outwards as the heat increased and he saw the first flames licking at the far side of his crate.