The Demon Stone

by Christopher Datta

  “We’re headed straight to my clinic at the camp,” said Bill. “It’s about thirty kilometers outside of town.”

  “We won’t look around the capital first?” asked Kevin.

  Bill shrugged. “Nothing to see. The city has changed hands several times during the war. There’s not much left besides rubble, burned-out homes and soldiers. But I’ll give you a windshield tour as we pass through.”

  Bill, Kevin discovered, was not exaggerating, and there wasn’t much to see besides crumbling, war-scarred buildings and soldiers. The rebels, Bill explained, had captured the town about a year before, and when they were driven out again by foreign peacekeeping troops, what the shelling didn’t destroy the rebels looted and burned as they retreated. When they finally left, the returning government troops stole what little remained.

  It reminded Kevin of old newsreel footage he’d seen of Europe after World War II. The walls still standing were pockmarked by bullets and gouged by shrapnel, with occasional great openings blown out of buildings by artillery fire. Kevin reflected it was the kind of devastation not seen in the United States since the Civil War. Driving through it, he recalled all he’d read about the atrocities committed during the fighting, including the seemingly random rebel amputations of the arms and legs of even women and children.

  Along the road and scattered between the shattered buildings were makeshift market stalls constructed from the scraps of the demolished city. From what he could see, the merchants sold canned food, cigarettes, candy, fruit, soft drinks and a peculiar mix of odds and ends doubtless pulled from the rubble. In particular, he noticed one stuffed teddy bear hanging by a string from a display rack, looking threadbare, dusty and obviously secondhand. He wondered with a shudder what had happened to the child who’d originally owned it. Did he still miss the comfort of his old toy, or was he even alive? Something told him with a certainty he could not explain that the child was not, and he shook the thought from his mind to escape the awful sadness of it.

  As they approached the city center, Bill pointed to recently repaired buildings. “This is the UN sector, and those groups of blue-helmeted soldiers you see are international peacekeepers.”

  Kevin noticed that they, too, had rifles slung casually over their shoulders, and he found the presence of so many armed men in plain sight unnerving, just as at the airport.

  Bill directed Kevin’s attention to a group of white men and women dressed stylishly in khaki shorts and brightly colored shirts, all holding cameras. “Those,” he said, “are disaster tourists, people who get a thrill from seeing the aftermath of war, like flies on corpses after a battle. Their favorite destination is the ‘arm yard,’ a fenced lot where the rebels tossed hundreds of the arms and legs they severed. It’s now a massive pile of bones, the flesh picked clean by insects, buzzards and rats long ago. Everyone,” he said with disgust, “has to have a picture taken there. Kids will sell you rings looted from fingers as souvenirs. These touristic vultures spend thousands of dollars to get their sick kicks, money that I and others could use to save lives. If they faced any actual fighting, they’d piss their pants in terror. What’s wrong with them is no small thing.”

  “And how is my being here any different?” asked Kevin.

  Bill laughed. “If it weren’t for me you’d never have come at all. Besides, unlike them, you’re here to work.”

  Outside the city the car quickly climbed into the mountains and the greenest landscape Kevin had ever seen. Not jungle exactly, but a forest resembling nothing like home. The trees were shorter and the leaves oddly shaped, or so it seemed to Kevin’s eye. But most of all it was simply greener.

  Kevin didn’t think it possible, but the road got worse until it was hardly a road at all, but simply a broken dirt track. He was surprised that the villages they passed were almost all deserted. More than that, he saw no animals, not even dogs. Bill explained that the war had driven most farmers off the land and both armies had stolen and killed nearly all the available livestock for food, including the dogs. “Over half the country,” said Bill, “is in refugee camps or some kind of temporary shelter. The farmers are terrified of the rebels and almost as afraid of the government soldiers. Discipline in both armies is poor to nonexistent, and all of them routinely plunder the homes of whomever they encounter. The rebels are probably worse because of the amputations, but both immediately execute anyone even suspected of supporting the other side. Neighbors sometimes kill an old enemy by ratting him out to one side or the other, even when they know the person is innocent. Fear and paranoia are the rule of the day, and no one trusts anyone. It’s a nightmare.”

  “I’ve read about the amputations, but don’t understand it,” said Kevin. “Why do the rebels hack off limbs, especially those of children and women?”

  Bill shrugged and nodded to Peter. “Ask him. He’s a former rebel.”

  Kevin thought Bill was joking, but Peter smiled that eerie disfigured grin of his and in broken English said he’d spent two years fighting.

  “Did you ever cut off anyone’s arm?” asked Kevin.

  “Oh yeah, too many.”

  He sounded to Kevin like someone back home relating how he had cut the grass in his yard last week.

  “Why did you do it?” Kevin asked.

  He shrugged. It started, he said, with an election. The rebels ordered a boycott. Those who did cast ballots had a finger dipped in ink to prevent multiple voting. The rebels simply cut off all of the hands they found marked with ink. “Den all da people dey got da big scare,” he said. “When da rebels dey say no do de vote, no one do de vote afder dat.”

  “That was just the beginning,” Bill said. “The rebels found their strategy worked so well it became routine practice, sometimes done at random just to keep everyone in complete terror of ever crossing them.”

  The car fell silent. It still didn’t make any sense to Kevin. He finally asked Peter, “What do the rebels want?”

  Peter laughed. “De power,” he said. “You got ta grab de power. Can’t be rich man widout you got dat.” The rebel leaders, he said, promised to make them wealthy. They’d kill all the corrupt families who controlled the country and had stolen from its poor for so long, and with their money, money taken from them in the first place, the rebels would make themselves rich.

  “Why did you leave the rebels?” asked Kevin

  He shrugged. “Dey bad, bad men. Doan keep der promise, do bad tings and I jus tire a de fight’n all de day.” He said he had met Mr. Bill, who gave him a good job. That’s all he wanted, a job and no more fighting.

  “And the others?” asked Kevin. “Do more of the rebels want to quit?”

  Peter nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “so many wan like me, but not so easy for dem.”

  “Why’s it not easy?”

  Peter pointed to the scars on this face.

  Kevin looked to Bill, puzzled.

  “The scarring exposes him as a rebel,” said Bill.

  “I thought they were ritual markings,” said Kevin.

  Bill shook his head. “Not like this. This is about drugs. The rebels cut themselves on the face and push drugs into the wounds before battles. They think the high is better that way and the commanders encourage it because it marks the men. That makes it hard to desert because government troops shoot anyone on sight they find scarred this way, and if they don’t kill them, then civilians who’ve lost friends and family to rebel atrocities are sure to. Peter is only safe because he’s with me.”

  “I still don’t understand what the rebels fight for.”

  Bill paused and sighed. “We come from a place where many think we’d be better off without government. Well, there is none here, at least not in any form we understand as government. There’s a complete breakdown of central authority, and instead you have rule by the gun. It’s an NRA paradise and a poster child for their ideal society. Everyone is armed and there’s no one to take your gun away. Of course, every thug is armed and there’s no one to b
ring them to justice, either.”

  “How did it get this way?” asked Kevin.

  “The way to wealth is through political power, and those who had it used it to enrich themselves at the expense of the people they were supposed to govern.”

  “And how’s that different from us?” snorted Kevin.

  “There’s a joke an African told me a few years back. He said the mayor of an African town went to America to see how an American city worked. The American mayor showed him all the wonders of his city and then took him home for dinner. The mayor’s house was a beautiful mansion with marble floors and golden doorknobs. The African mayor marveled at the wealth of the home and asked the American how he could afford it. He led the African to a window and asked him what he saw. ‘A bridge over a river,’ he answered. ‘I got ten percent,’ answered the American.

  “A year later the American went to visit the African mayor. He was shown all around the city and later they went to the African’s home for dinner. The house was even bigger than the American’s, with marble floors and golden doorknobs and large crystal chandeliers. The American marveled at the home and asked the African mayor how he could possibly afford such a palace. The African took him to a window and opened it. He said, ‘Do you see the bridge over the river?’ The American looked and said no, he saw no bridge. ‘One hundred percent,’ he answered.

  “The rebels are the poorest of the poor who’ve suffered years of criminal misrule and abuse. In taking up arms they have nothing to lose and they are told they have everything to gain. Their anger and frustration make them easy to manipulate with false promises by new leaders who are even more corrupt than the old ones. But no one will understand that until the rebels take power and the promises to share the wealth are broken.”

  Chapter 6

  Minnesota

  Liz pulled another Marlboro Light from her pocket. Sitting on the back bumper of Kevin’s green Taurus station wagon, she watched Kevin and his daughter Beth load their camping gear into a beat-up old aluminum canoe floating just off from where the road ended in the lake. In a few minutes, she would join them to paddle across that lake even deeper into the forest primeval of northern Minnesota, in a day or two crossing the border into Canada. It might well be a week or more before she’d see another human being besides Kevin and Beth.

  Kevin’s black-and-white collie, sitting unnoticed in front of her, jammed his nose into her crotch.

  “Hampton,” Liz scolded, pushing his head away, “back off, you pervert.” She did not like dogs, and this goofy character was more annoying than most.

  Hampton sat looking like he’d just played the world’s funniest joke on her. She sighed and scratched the dog’s head, looking around. The early September air felt cool. It had rained, and the pine forest and dirt road smelled of Christmas and Halloween, new birth and rot. It was, she supposed, the raw odor of damp Mother Earth. She thought it ought to be familiar through some genetic memory passed down by thousands of ancestors who had scratched a living from some similar primitive forest home. But it wasn’t familiar and she missed San Francisco and the clean, hygienic atmosphere of her nursing career.

  Liz got up and pinned up her hair in a tight bun, then covered it with a tan canvas hat she’d bought for the trip. Her mother was Thai and her father Irish-American, and she had the dark hair and delicately round face of her mother and the green eyes of her dad. In her early fifties, she was still a very attractive woman.

  “What the hell am I doing?” she asked the dog quietly. “I hate camping. I mean, I don’t even like picnics, for God’s sake, or any activity that requires sharing space with insects. An outdoor café is my idea of life in the wild.

  “And if that isn’t enough, let’s not forget that the daughter is sulking because she’s even more unhappy than me about being dragged along on this trip. Not that I blame her. Being trapped in a canoe for ten days with nothing but two old coots for company is the least of her problems, after her parent’s divorce and what happened to her grandparents. And this old coot is wondering why she’s invited here only a month after that divorce was finalized. I tell you, dog, something is rotten in Denmark and it’s not just your breath.”

  Liz leaned down and pushed her nose against the dog’s face. “And last but not least, thanks to sharing a tent with you I’ll stink like a dog in about twenty-four hours.” She stood and shook her head.

  She’d known Kevin since college. That seemed like three lifetimes ago, yet through all those years they’d remained close, in the careful way that former lovers sometimes do. Why they were friends she could not say except, she reflected, that there are times in a lifetime, moments of opening to a new person or place, where what happens stays with you forever. College and Kevin had certainly been such a time for her.

  Kevin’s divorce from Morgan had surprised her, despite the fact that she’d never understood their connection in the first place. He was, or at least had been, outgoing and warm. Morgan was difficult to know and intensely insecure.

  Morgan did not like her, and never had, which was not completely unexpected considering her past connection to Kevin. Yet Liz knew it went deeper, as though Morgan somehow felt vulnerable to Liz. The irony to Liz was that it was Morgan who’d married Kevin, and it should have been Liz feeling the resentment. Sometimes, she had to admit, she had.

  Now he was divorced and had asked her to come on this trip. He said that he needed a friend.

  Why camping? she’d asked him. Why not go to a quiet restaurant? They could sip margaritas, eat at their leisure food that someone else had cooked off plates that someone else would wash, and when they were done she could go home and sleep in her clean, soft bed. Why did it have to be a camping trip?

  Except that was vintage Kevin, the old Kevin she knew so well, keeping to what he viewed as the “basic” necessities and considering it wasteful to pay others to do what he could do for himself. He distrusted so much of what she found comfortable, and even distrusted comfort itself as a weakness. It was sharing values like that that had made him and Bill such good friends, she supposed, although Bill had taken it to an extreme. To the both of them, sleeping on the cold ground in a tent and peeing against a tree in the woods was paradise. Go figure, she thought. If it wasn’t for friendship, and her certainty of how desperately he needed her friendship right now, she would never have come.

  She watched Kevin at the end of the road drop a large green canvas pack into the canoe. I hope, she thought, he does not think that I am going to carry that monstrosity. My mother didn’t raise me to be a pack animal.

  She frowned, watching him struggle to position the heavy bag in the boat. He had always been trim, she thought, but he’d lost weight and too much of it.

  Liz stubbed out her cigarette against the car bumper and absently flicked the butt into the trees.

  “That’s a good way to burn up the forest,” said Beth, walking up from the beach and sitting down next to her on the car. “And those filters hang around for years, you know. Not to mention that you’re killing yourself, and probably me with your secondhand smoke.”

  Liz frowned at Beth. At sixteen, she was a pretty girl a little on the heavy side. Her overlong bangs fell constantly over one eye. She wore loose-fitting khaki pants and a matching shirt.

  “Honey,” said Liz, “with all the fresh air you’ll breathe up here in the next week, my smoke will keep your lungs from collapsing when we get back to the smog of civilization.”

  “I don’t want to be here, you know.”

  Liz smiled. “Yeah, I picked up on that.” She touched her on the shoulder. “Not getting along with the old man?”

  Beth patted Hampton on the head. He closed his eyes appreciatively.

  “It’s just the way he’s changed since Africa, since his friend Bill died. He never talks about it but nothing’s the same. I hate it.”

  Liz nodded. “Bill was his friend since high school. I don’t know what happened, but I’m sure it was hard for your father, sweet
ie.”

  “He’s turned all weird. And my mom’s even worse. It’s just too bad a kid can’t divorce her parents. That ought to be in the Constitution, some kind of Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights for children.”

  “I’ve known your dad a long time. I know how much he loves you. Maybe this trip will be good for you and good for him. Why not give it a chance?”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  Liz hesitated, unsure of touching on a wound she was sure was still raw, although months had passed. And yet it was on everyone’s mind. She could see it in Beth’s eyes. Ignoring it seemed pointless, even cowardly and an obstacle to any chance they had to form a friendship. “And what happened with your grandparents. I can only imagine how difficult that’s been for you.”

  Beth looked away, but not before Liz saw her eyes begin to tear.

  “You were close to them?” asked Liz.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Beth answered, glancing back at Liz and her expression now stony. “I don’t want to cry anymore. I try not to think about what happened at all and I don’t want to be here. Okay?”

  So like her father, Liz thought glumly. Getting these two to open up was like trying to open oysters with a toothpick. “Well, if you change your mind, I’m here.”

  Beth shrugged.

  “You two ready?” Kevin called from the shore, wiping his hands on his jeans. “The boat’s loaded. It’s the call of the wild.”

  He tried a smile. Liz noticed that his thick black hair was the same as it had been in college except for the graying at the temples.

  Liz saluted. “Aye, aye, captain. You’re sure it’s okay to leave the car for ten days like this by the side of the road?” she added, glancing back over her shoulder.

  “Do it all the time,” said Kevin.

  “And it’ll be here when we get back?”