This made the fleas hungrier because the blood they craved and needed to survive could not reach the intestinal tract for digestion, making them bite even more in an effort to get food.
In frustration, they had fled their host, moved on to another to try to assuage their increasing hunger, but to no avail. Their bodies merely regurgitated the blood back into their host, passing on their infection.
More of the rats continued to die, but a few proved resistant to the disease, becoming infected themselves and thus infecting the fleas that so far had managed to remain free of the plague.
Their numbers were reduced dramatically.
The leader of the rats could smell the food in the small bag that lay beside the dying human; traces of fruit, vegetables and stale bread with the aroma of cooked meat adding to the fragrant mix.
The rat ventured forward slowly, whiskers twitching, tentatively avoiding the diseased human by the side of the bag, nosing aside the flap and creeping stealthily into its welcoming warm darkness.
The material was stained and soaked with the juice from the fruit and the rat tried to nibble at the canvas, but it was too tough for the incisors to puncture, so it turned aside and simply gobbled up the few crumbs of bread that remained there.
As it poked its head out of the bag, the human stirred in its fever, screaming loudly and startling the rat, making it freeze in its tracks and leaving it vulnerable to the hefty boot that shot forward to crush its skull against the bulkhead of the cabin.
The fleas on its hide sensed that their host was dying and were desperate to find more food, even though they could not ingest the blood when they bit.
They leaped onto the pale moist flesh of the human hidden under the oil soaked rags and began to bite him, vomiting back infected blood into his veins...
A raging fever gripped Fires’ body and he was hallucinating again, his mind filled with horrific images.
He could see his father, grinning maniacally and holding a Mauser rifle to the window of the burning cabin, firing shots out onto the Veldt, taunting the invaders and inviting them to come closer and eat some lead as he re-loaded and fired again.
The flames were licking at and dancing over his baggy trousers and shirt, his hair smouldering from the heat and his flesh melting like wax. His face slithered like tallow from the skull, exposing the bone and the muscles working frantically to make a sound with his writhing tongue, but only a dry rasping hiss managed to escape from teeth that had no lips to frame the words,
‘Fe-e-e-e-d on m-e-e-e...Fe-e-e-e-d...Fires...Fe-e-e-e-d...’
Father’s wild eyes stared down at Fires, rolled in the sockets as his body burned and he let the rifle slip through his melting fingers, walking slowly towards his son, arms outstretched as if to embrace him.
Fires turned and fled into the night, running across the back field of their farm, straight into the internment camp, full of emaciated women and children. There were thousands of ragged, filthy tents for as far as the eye could see, and these were all full of soldiers unashamedly copulating with blank-eyed naked women, their limp sagging breasts swinging to the rhythm of the soldiers thrusting hips. Gasps of pain, moans of pleasure and filthy exhortation could be heard rasping through their dry cracked lips,
‘Fe-e-e-e-d...F-e-e-e-e-d on m-e-e-e...F-e-e-e-e-d...’
Fires was shocked to see his mother through the flapping canvas entrance of one of these tents, her legs parted widely, exposing her vagina, ribs poking out through the skin of her torso.
She was beckoning more and more of the soldiers to enter her and a line had formed outside the back entrance, with dozens of eager erections to satisfy her, poking from their unbuttoned trousers.
He screamed at her to stop, but his voice was drowned out by her cries for the next one in line to slide his hot hard cock into her ejaculate-filled hole, to slide their slippery tumescence into her, to copulate with her, to fuck her brains out and the shock of this had silenced his protests.
One of the soldiers turned her onto her stomach, and then roughly pulled her up by her hips onto all fours to slide a huge erection into her anus, as one of his comrades put his own throbbing penis into her mouth, stifling her cries for more.
As the soldier thrust his hips forward brutally and ejaculated into her mouth, the back of his mother’s head split wide open, sending her brains dribbling out in a gooey grey and red slime, congealing and coalescing on her shoulders.
One of the soldiers casually inserted the long barrel of his rifle into her body and pulled the trigger, making her abdomen balloon out and then explode with a spray of crimson shrapnel, but still she cried out for more,
‘Fe-e-e-e-d...F-e-e-e-e-d on m-e-e-e...F-e-e-e-e-d...’
Fires continued to scream silently, covering his face with his arm to blot out this horror, but it was pulled away by the skeletal hands of a corpse, and he suddenly realised that he was now standing on a swirling writhing mass of dead bodies.
Hideously deformed children, skeletal and burned, charred almost beyond recognition were whispering his name.
Naked bodies that were covered in filthy pustules and open sores began clawing at his legs, pulling at his trembling young thighs and tearing his trousers. The material was ripping, giving way and dropping apart and being dragged from his body by eager hands, exposing his naked groin as the indistinct murmur began as a low chant beneath him,
‘Fe-e-e-e-d...F-e-e-e-e-d on m-e-e-e...F-e-e-e-e-d...’
There were so many that he could not count them; hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, pulling at him and dragging him deeper into their fetid, corrupt mound, and he felt their smooth skinless bones brushing eagerly against his young bare flesh, fondling him, caressing him. They stroked at his flaccid penis and he felt it stiffening as a huge tongue protruded from the head of the nearest child, lapping over his scrotum, teasing his testicles and wrapping itself around the base of his aroused member,
‘Fe-e-e-e-d...F-e-e-e-e-d on m-e-e-e...F-e-e-e-e-d...’
Then the top of the skull lifted from the bottom jaw, making a huge maw that gaped with hundreds of shining needle sharp teeth, with glaring baleful eyes transfixing him, hypnotizing him before clamping down sharply to cut off his penis.
He screamed and kicked as darkness enfolded him...
The rats scurried back into hiding at the death of their leader, now convinced that they would have to move on to a safer place.
A place where the smooth-skinned humans could be avoided and a more reliable food source found...
The fleas bit deeper and harder into the epidermis of the thrashing pink human, trying to find sustenance but failing and spewing back the clotted blood that had congealed in their oesophagus...
The Yersinia Pestis Bacillus raced into the human’s blood stream to mix with the bacterial soup that had already infected their host and caused the fever.
Hendricke ‘Hennie’ Lubner was a huge bear of a man, standing at a fraction under six feet four inches tall and almost as broad, with a thick matting of coarse dark hair over his shoulders, chest and back. He had piercing flint-grey eyes overarched by dark bushy brows and surrounded by the needle like creases that are the tell-tale signs of encroaching age or of a lifetime of laughter, and in Hennie’s case, it had always been the latter.
At forty-seven years of age, Hennie had laughed for a lot of those years and the women loved him for it; that and his size.
He shaved his head on a daily basis with a vicious looking cut-throat to make it smooth and shiny, but he sported a thick waxed black handlebar moustache on his upper lip that was constantly coated in food crumbs, or sweat, and sometimes both during his days of labour in the engineering section of the ship.
He had been in the merchant navy for almost twenty years, served on the SS Wardha for the last three years avoiding the conflict in his native South Africa, but as a result, he had seen most of the world.
The Wardha was conscripted and used as a troop carrier for the British Army between Bombay and
Durban, although he kept well away from them on the voyage to avert the disputes that his broad Afrikaans accent might have engendered.
He was standing over a thrashing bundle of rags beneath his work bench, legs splayed, hands on hips, clad only in his sweat stained work vest and baggy overalls, gently prodding at it with the toe of his massive boot.
‘Hey, boetie...Wake up...What are you doing under there?’
The boy stirred, his hair thickly plastered to his skull, his face wan with a sickly grey sheen to it, as he nervously peered up through squinting unfocused eyes at the giant.
The boy was obviously afraid, and quickly pulled the oily blanket closer around his body in a defensive gesture, unsure as to what might happen to him next.
‘What did they do to a stowaway on a ship?’
His throat was dry from the fever as he tried to swallow past the lump there and he meekly murmured in Afrikaans,
‘Kan,’ he coughed, ‘Kan u my help...? Asseblief, Meneer...?’
Hennie laughed, responding in Afrikaans,
‘Hoe gaan dit met u...? Wat is u naam, boetie...?’
Fires recognised the voice now from the crowds and smiled a little at the stranger who spoke his native tongue.
‘My naam is Janse Van Vuuren, Meneer...Fires Van Vuuren.’
Hennie extended a huge hairy hand to the boy, still smiling broadly through the luxuriously thick moustache,
‘Bly te kenne, Janse Van Vuuren... Bly te kenne...’
The boy took his hand tentatively, felt his own being completely engulfed by the hairy mitt, before the giant pulled him gently from the hiding place beneath the bench, the oily rags dropping away to reveal the dusty ill-fitting clothing and battered haversack.
Fires found his footing and stood up to face the man.
‘Waarvandaan kom u, Janse...?’ Hennie asked him.
‘Fires, Meneer...Ek kom van Pretoria...’
‘Pretoria?’ Hennie asked with incredulity and whistled through the clenched teeth of his unflinching smile.
‘Ja...Pretoria...Meneer...?’
‘Hennie. My naam is Hennie. Hennie Lubner. Het jy daarvan hier gehou?’ he asked the boy, imperiously waving at his surroundings, before laughing again and answering his own question,
‘No, of course you don’t like it here. Who would...? Please don’t be afraid, Fires Van Vuuren, you’re safe here with me.’
Fires looked at him quizzically.
‘Praat jy Engels, Fires?’ Hennie asked him and was greeted with a guilty shrug of the boy’s shoulders, then added,
‘Moenie jou kwel nie...Don’t worry...I’ll teach you.’
Fires relaxed a little at this, and when Hennie gestured to a nearby seat and then invited him to take the weight of his legs, the boy gratefully sat down as the giant knelt before him and continued to speak in Afrikaans.
‘Now, how did you get here, young Fires...All the way down from Pretoria to Natal?’
‘I don’t feel well, Meneer,’ Fires responded, ignoring the question.
‘Okay...You don’t look so well...and you seem a little feverish, I’ll fetch you some water. Wait here, I won’t be long...’
Hennie stood and strode from the room, leaving him alone for a few moments, but returned with a chipped china teacup filled with ice cold water which Fires took gratefully and then greedily gulped down before asking for more.
Hennie laughed and shook his head before departing yet again to return with more water, but this time in a much larger container.
Fires swallowed down most of the cool liquid, dribbling quite a lot down his chin in his haste to take in the water and when his thirst had been slaked, he began to recount his recent journey, setting the container down between his feet.
Hennie perched easily on the edge of the workbench, legs dangling down almost to the ground as he listened to the edited tale of woe, amazed that a small young man like this could have made such a long journey on his own, particularly after the traumatic events he said that he had witnessed and endured.
‘How did you find your way?’
‘Using the stars...My father taught me how to do it when we went out hunting on the Veldt together. It’s easy.’
‘Yes...like a true sailor...but what about food? What did you eat?’
Fires looked a little uncomfortable with this, evasive and nervous at the question, but answered it blithely hoping that Hennie would not sense any of the deliberate omissions,
‘Mostly stuff that I could get from scavenging around...crops and the like...sometimes the flesh of burned cattle that had been killed when the British were out on a killing spree...’
Hennie spat on the floor,
‘The British...One day we’ll be free of those bastards...’
Eventually, Fires finished telling this giant his lengthy tale, and answering most of Hennie’s questions as honestly as possible, so he shrugged his shoulders once more, took another long burbling drink of water that emptied the last dregs from the container, and then he fixed the huge man with a serious look that was a mixture of apprehension and fear.
‘What will you do now, Hennie...? Report me...?’
‘No, lad...You’ll stay here, safely hidden until we reach port and then I’m going to take you to see some friends of mine during my shore leave...’
‘Where are we going?’ Fires asked, hoping that Hennie would tell him that the ship he had stowed away on was bound for the Cape and then on to America.
‘We should be docking in Bombay in about seventeen days time, lad...India. Luckily most of the plague is over now, so we won’t have to worry too much about that...’
‘Plague...?’ Fires asked, rolling the unfamiliar word gently on his tongue.
‘Yes, Bubonic Plague...started in Bombay, sometime around 1896 or so they say, and there are some folk who reckon that it’s killed about eight hundred and fifty thousand people so far...at least that’s what they reckon...’
Fires’ jaw dropped in shock at this, awed by the sheer scale of the numbers involved.
Surely, there weren’t even that many people in the whole world?
‘Don’t worry though, boetie...They say that it’s over now and the family that I’m going to take you to see are resistant to it, or at least what’s left of them are...’
Fires smiled at this, although he didn’t really know why.
It simply felt like the right thing to do.
Hennie, looked at the boy, tousled his hair, and then spoke gently to him,
‘Now, you just make yourself comfortable, lad, and old Hennie will be back later with some supper for us both...’
He ruffled the boy’s dark hair again, walked across the work room, then looked back into anxious dark brown eyes as he clambered through the cabin hatch...
‘You must be as quiet as a mouse for me, my friend...’ he put his huge forefinger over pursed lips, made a ‘shushing’ noise, and then smiled and closed the door.
Fires slithered back under the bench, pulled the rags snugly over his body and began to drift off into sleep once more.
Bombay...? India...? Plague...?
This really was the start of a strange new life for him.
As Fires slept, the last of the fever subsided and he awoke feeling refreshed, but very hungry. He slid out from his hiding place under the bench quietly and began to look around, but soon discovered that this was only a part of the engineering section, and quite a tedious place, littered with nothing but spanners and screwdrivers and other tools that he had no idea about.
‘Boring...’ he muttered under his breath.
Then he heard the hatch dogs being moved and the door opened.
Fires held his breath for a moment as Hennie carefully stooped his massive body under the hatch frame with a bowl of hot steaming broth in one hand and a large chunk of crusty bread in the other.
‘A little supper for us, boetie...get this inside you...’
Fires took the bowl gratefully, muttering his thanks to Hennie so
ftly, before sitting on a stool that Hennie salvaged earlier from a cupboard on one of the upper decks.
Fires placed the bowl on the bench in front of him and started spooning the broth into his mouth, dipping large wads of bread into the liquid to soak it up.
‘This is delicious, Hennie...Did you make it?’
‘No, lad, we have a good chef on board, but we keep him busy. It would be no use us putting to sea with over a hundred hungry men and a useless cook...There’d be a mutiny quick-quick I reckon...’
Fires laughed and finished the bowl, scraping the inside with the last of the bread.
‘I think we need to move you now...’
Fires frowned and looked into Hennie’s grey eyes with concern.
‘Don’t worry...the watch will be changing in half an hour and I’m back on shift in the engine room...Can’t run the risk of someone else finding you in here...Luckily for you, my Chinese bunk mate jumped ship at the last port and left a vacant bed in my cabin.’
‘Chinese...?’
‘Yeah...We get a lot of those little slanty-eyed beggars coming and going in this line of work. They’re mainly working their passage to another country, where they’ll grab their gear and jump ship and we never see them again...Casual labour, I suppose...Still, there’s an empty bunk now, and you’ll be safer in my cabin. Not many folks want to invade my privacy...’
Fires laughed at this, but again wasn’t sure why, possibly nerves.
Hennie was a big man, and probably scared a lot of the other crew members because of it.
‘Now, you stay close behind me...it’s not far and there shouldn’t be many folk around, and any that are will be more intent on the shift change, but if we are stopped, then just let me do the talking, lad, okay?’
Fires nodded, and followed Hennie out through the hatch and into the maze of corridors. They met no-one else on the short journey, although sounds of people moving around, running and shouting in corridors, echoed down from the decks above.
Once inside Hennie’s cabin, Fires clambered hastily up onto the top bunk, rolling on the soft mattress and telling Hennie that it felt so good after his seemingly endless days of roughing it on the road and then sleeping on the cold metal floor of the workshop, but he soon tired of the luxury, and slithered back down the small ladder to the floor and began to nosey around the cabin.
Orphan (Hunger Book 1) Page 3
