Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  Chapter 32

  "Jacob," Veronica says, her voice frantic. "Jacob, wake up, please. Please, you have to wake up. Jacob, please!"

  Jacob's world is pain. He is shaking. No, he is being shaken, someone's hands are on his shoulders, pushing and pulling. Veronica's hands. He opens his eyes, and his mouth too, to complain. It is night and he can barely make out Veronica's face as she kneels over him. There are tears in her eyes. A glittering curtain of stars hangs above her. He lies on a bed of rough earth and jagged stones, poorly cushioned by grass as dry as sandpaper. He can't remember why.

  "Wha's going on?" Jacob manages.

  Veronica takes a deep, relieved breath, then says, "They've stopped the train down the track, I don't know how exactly, but we heard shots. They're coming. We have to go."

  There is a black man standing beside her, a man with a gun in his hand, watching silently, a man Jacob feels like he knows. He searches his mind and finds a dim memory of a train, a vague notion that they are being chased. He gets up. He feels like he is watching himself stand, a witness rather than a participant; he observes with admiration as his limbs coordinate to draw his battered body up into a gravity-defying bipedal configuration, and his muscles fight to keep him there. He has new bruises aplenty, but nothing seems torn or broken. His head has taken at least some of the impact of the fall. Jacob takes a single step and suddenly comes back to himself. It feels like imploding. He falls to his knees and throws up, his abdominal muscles cramp with agony as he retches and shudders. Veronica kneels and hovers over him, holding his shoulders lightly with nervous hands.

  "I'm fine," he manages to say. "It's okay. I'm back." Then he is throwing up again. But when it is finally over he does feel stronger, as if he has purged himself of some weakness, left nothing but animal vitality. He can feel pain across a frightening amount of his body, but it is like he feels it through a cushion, he is aware of it but unaffected. Jacob staggers back to his feet and looks around. The lights of the train are dimly visible about a kilometre down the track. They are in a field of dry waist-high grass. About a hundred feet from the railway track he can see a sparse forest of withered, leafless trees silhouetted by moonlight.

  "What do we do?" he asks Veronica and Lovemore. He remembers Lovemore again, remembers dangling from the edge of the train and letting go. He supposes he suffered a concussion in the fall. He feels physically capable again but his mind is like scrambled eggs, he is in no shape to make any decisions. At least they were right that the soldiers would not follow, the train wasn't moving too fast but nobody would throw themselves from it who didn't actually have to.

  She says, "We run."

  "I'm sick of running," he says petulantly.

  "If you have a better idea I'd love to hear it."

  Jacob looks back to the train and tries to make his brain work. He can see motion in the dry grass beside the tracks. Soldiers coming after them. If he can see them, beneath this hatefully bright moon, then they can see him, and hiding in this drought-shrivelled grass will never work.

  "OK," he says. "Maybe we can lose them in the trees."

  But either their motion stands out too sharply in the moonlight, or one of the soldiers has preternaturally good night vision. They can't have nightvision goggles, Jacob thinks loopily, they don't have any money for that, it would take a whole backpack full of Zimbabwe dollars to buy a single pair, and besides the country is under sanctions, no military technology sales allowed, that's why Gorokwe has to smuggle his missiles in from Russia - but whatever the reason, every time he looks over his shoulder, the rustling motion of the soldiers is a little closer.

  Jacob is too unsteady on his feet to sprint, Lovemore is now moving with a definite limp, and Veronica is bruised too; the best they can do is jog. Their heavy footsteps rustle loudly, cutting through the slight whispers of the dry grass in the night wind. Even in pitch black the soldiers might be able to track them by sound. Ahead of them an open savannah of arid grass and trees stretches on to the moonlit horizon. Behind them, the soldiers are less than half a kilometre away and closing fast.

  * * *

  "I think we're fucked," Jacob gasps.

  Veronica says, "Do you have any money? Zim dollars?"

  Jacob finds the question so bizarre he almost stops in his tracks. "What do you want to do, bribe them?"

  "Just tell me!"

  "Yes. A million." He changed ten US dollars yesterday, at the hotel.

  "Give me."

  She stops. He follows suit, and, unable to imagine what she wants with it, pulls out his wallet and passes over the fifty pink twenty-thousand-dollar bills, cheap paper printed only one one side. Veronica has something metal in her hand. Her Zippo lighter. She touches its flame to the wad of money.

  "No, they'll see it," Jacob says, still utterly baffled.

  "Let them." When the flame has taken a secure hold of the wedge of bills, Veronica simply stoops and puts them down on the ground. There is a thick mesh of dead grass beneath those arid blades still waving in the air. This carpet of dry vegetation catches fire almost immediately. Jacob's eyes widen as he understands. Drought as a weapon.

  The heat of the surging flames begins to warm him. Over the crackling sounds of the fire he hears dim cries of dismay from the pursuing soldiers.

  "We must run faster," Lovemore says.

  Jacob doesn't need to be told twice. The night wind is coming from the train tracks, the fire will follow them. He turns and sprints. Veronica and Lovemore run behind him. A bright glow is already emanating from behind them.

  When Jacob next looks over his shoulder the burgeoning bushfire is already several metres across, growing towards them in a wedge shape, fanned by the wind. Two anorexic trees are already aflame. He can't see the soldiers through the firelight and thick smoke. Jacob supposes that's a good thing. He just hopes they can outrun the bushfire.

  Lovemore soon passes him, running fast despite his awkward, painful limp. Veronica follows behind. Jacob is gasping for breath with every step, and both his legs and lungs are cramping when they unexpectedly run across a dirt track that cuts across this desolate grassland. It is only a few feet wide, but it is a sign of civilization, and more importantly it could act as a firebreak.

  He stops on the road and doubles over. It takes him a few seconds before he can even manage to gasp, "I need to rest."

  "All right," Veronica says.

  Lovemore advises, "Keep on walking."

  "Who are you, Johnnie Walker?" Jacob grunts, but he obeys.

  A minute later he has recovered enough to take in their surroundings. The dirt track runs east and west as far as he can see. To the north, towards the train tracks, the approaching red-and-yellow glow has devoured almost the entire horizon. To the south, barely visible on the horizon, the ground leads up to odd rounded silhouettes protruding from the earth.

  "What are those?" Jacob asks.

  Lovemore glances. "Koppies."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Big rocks, granite boulders. Very common in Zimbabwe."

  Veronica says, "Should we take the road?"

  Jacob takes a deep breath. He wants to, it would be so much easier than crossing the rough and grassy ground, but - "No. The fire will burn right up to it. If it doesn't cross. And they'll come looking for us in the morning. We have to keep running as long as we can."

  They set out again. Jacob makes it as far as the looming koppies before he collapses and can go no further. Veronica and Lovemore too are near the end of their strength. They pass a wordless and delirious night on the hard, cold ground between two of the massive boulders, all three of them clinging tightly to one another for warmth, lapsing only occasionally into sleep, as the bushfire rages and burns in the distance, much too far away to warm their shivering bodies.

  * * *

  "I feel like the Tin Woodsman," Jacob croaks, as Veronica and Lovemore help him to his feet. They have to support almost all his weight. His muscles are powerless. His joints feel like they have rusted
into place. If it was warmer he would try to insist on sleeping longer, but the unforgiving cold of the hard ground and predawn air has seeped into his whole shivering body, invaded every aperture in his clothing, and made the suffering of motion seem less awful than the suffering of inaction. The cold night makes him irrationally angry. Africa is supposed to be warm, everyone knows that. But Zimbabwe is two thousand kilometres south of the equator, and its vast central plateau a thousand metres above sea level.

  "You'll feel better when we start moving," Veronica says.

  She doesn't sound confident. He can't blame her. Standing makes him dizzy, he has to lean on Lovemore or fall. His hands are covered by a mixture of dirt and his own dried blood, he half-skinned them when he fell from the train. He looks around. The dawn illuminates a few trees growing at unnatural angles from clefts in the smoothly rounded koppies. Beyond this bizarre cluster of house-sized boulders, which look like they have been dropped onto this grassland from outer space, the ground climbs southwards through more grassland. To the north, the kilometre-wide belt demarcated by the railway and the dirt cart track has been reduced to a still-smoking plain of black ash that continues east and west as far as Lucas could see.

  They start south. Walking is a struggle. At first he has to lean on Lovemore. But after a few minutes, despite or perhaps because of the pain in his blistered feet, Jacob's head begins to clear and unexpected reservoirs of strength reopen. He thinks he might even be able to run again. For a short distance.

  "Do you think they'll come after us?" he asks.

  "Yes," Lovemore says.

  "They haven't yet."

  "Perhaps they were also waiting for dawn. Perhaps they went to get new orders. But they will come after us."

  "Where can we go?" Veronica asks.

  Lovemore says, simply, "Forward."

  They walk on in silence. Lovemore moves steadily forward, and makes no complaint, but Jacob sees his face is taut with pain and realizes his limping leg is badly injured. At least Veronica seems to have survived the fall from the moving train relatively unscathed.

  He imagines himself far away, in his favourite bar, the Duke of Gloucester on Yonge Street back in Canada, telling his story to a rapt audience. Maybe then it will all seem worth it. What Jacob has learned about adventure is that it is wonderful only in retrospect; at the time, it's unspeakably awful. He never wants to have another adventure again. All he wants is to be back home. He limps onward, propelled by that vision. If they can just get out of Africa they will be safe, the Interpol charges will never stick.

  The sun rises and warms them. They follow a shallow dry watercourse for awhile, snaking its way up and south. Around them the world is a vast tawny field of dried grass dotted with koppies and clumps of trees. It is bleak but starkly beautiful. Here the trees at least are green, there must be some subsurface water left. Jacob wonders if they can somehow dig for it. His throat feels like it is cracking with thirst. But whatever water is left beneath this parched soil must be buried deep.

  "All Zimbabwe prays for rain," Lovemore says, in a rasping voice. "Last year's rainy season did not even begin. If the drought continues… " He leaves the sentence unfinished. "These are hard times."

  About an hour past dawn they come across what was once a fence. The posts still stand in the ground, stretching towards the horizon to their left and right, but the three strands of rusted barbed wire that once connected them have fallen in so many places that what remains is more the idea of a fence than an actual barrier. The dried grass beyond has a different character, more geometric, and there are ragged patches of ground covered by the withered remains of different vegetation.

  "Tobacco. This was a farm, once." Lovemore sounds worried. He stops walking and looks around warily.

  Jacob looks at him, confused. "What's wrong?"

  "An abandoned farm means war vets. War vets mean trouble."

  Veronica shrugs helplessly. "You got somewhere else to go?"

  She keeps walking forward. After a moment Jacob joins her. They have nowhere else to go, and little strength left, and his thirst has turned from an ache into a fiery need. Eventually Lovemore follows too.

  They keep going, crossing rolling hills for about twenty minutes before coming across the remains of a tractor trail. The tread marks in the dried dirt look like a paleontological discovery.

  "It feels like the end of the world," Veronica says in a near-whisper, "like there's no one else alive."

  They follow the trail past a few rusted pipes that are all that remain of what was once an advanced irrigation system. After the withered fields they pass into a huge orchard of dead orange trees, where branches flutter and whisper eerily in the light wind. When they crest a ridge on the other side they see a copse of silver-leafed eucalyptus trees, and in their midst, buildings: a big house and two barns, near a pool of muddy sludge created by damming a local stream.

  There are a dozen other shelters, round mud huts with wooden skeletons and raggedly thatched roofs, along the gravel road that runs between the barns and up to the house. Smoke rises from several of them. Clothes hang from a line stretched between two eucalyptus trees. Jacob sees sudden darting motions near the back of the house; children, running through the weed-strewn garden decorated with faded old lawn furniture. Plots of hand-tilled land surround the two barns. The gravel road runs from the house down through a kilometre more of dead farmland, in which a few dangerously lean cattle and maybe fifty goats graze, before it merges with a road that is dirt but for two paved strips barely wide enough for tires. The road was lined by fallen power and telephone wires.

  "War vets," Lovemore says, in the same way he might say crocodiles.

  They stand watching for a moment. Then Jacob says, his voice rattling in his parched throat, "I guess we go say hi."

  Chapter 33

  The children see them as they descend the gentle slope, and by the time they reach the house, the unexpected visitors have attracted a crowd of more than fifty people. About a dozen are adults. Their once-bright clothes are ragged and faded; several of the smaller children wear no clothes at all. A few of the adults looked dangerously thin. Some of the men carry hoes and big sticks, but Veronica is almost too exhausted to be afraid. If these people attack them, so be it. But she doesn't think they will. They look more to be pitied than frightened.

  "Hello," she says, as loudly as she could manage, and holds her hands up in the universal we-come-in-peace gesture.

  Lovemore greets the crowd that faces them in an African language. Shona, Veronica supposes. After a brief pause the eldest man answers. His voice is clear, but he is so thin and weak that he has to lean on another man, and there are visible sores on his face. He and the several other gaunt adults are dying of AIDS. Veronica guesses there are more in the house and the shelters, too weak to come see their visitors.

  Lovemore pauses in conversation with the eldest man to update Jacob and Veronica. "I told him we got off the train to look around when it stopped, and it left without us."

  "Are you sure that was a good idea?" Jacob asks, keeping his voice very low. Veronica supposes on one level that's sensible, English is the country's official language and some of them might speak it, but it also makes them look suspicious. "If they hear the army's looking for people from the train –"

  "Where else would we have come from?" Veronica asks, making a point of speaking normally. "I don't think it matters. I don't think they exactly keep up with current events out here."

  "She's right," Lovemore says. "That road no longer goes anywhere, it leads to a bridge that broke two years ago. They say they must take an oxcart twenty kilometres to reach the nearest taxi stop. He says they'll take us if we pay a good price."

  Veronica winces. "And we burned all our Zim dollars."

  Jacob says, "I'm sure even here they understand US dollars. But we're down to our last ten bucks."

  Lovemore says, "I have American dollars. Not many, but enough."

  The elderly man declai
ms something loud and rhythmic.

  "What was that?" Veronica asks.

  "He invited us to eat with them."

  Veronica's throat is aflame with thirst, and her stomach quickens at the thought of food.

  Jacob hesitates. "Can we trust them? They're war vets. What if they…"

  "What? Poison us? Don't be ridiculous," Veronica snaps, exasperated. "They're not the enemy. They're just people. If they wanted to come after us they'd just do it now. And I don't think I can talk much longer if I don't get something to drink. Tell him we accept."

  Lovemore nods and speaks to the old man in Shona.

  A crowd of children follow them as they continue to the house, which is in a half-rotted state, almost devoid of furniture and used largely for storage. The large ground-floor room off the entrance is inhabited by rusting tools and half-deflated cornmeal sacks marked by the depredations of vermin. There is obviously no power or running water any more, and without those, Veronica supposes African shelters are preferable to a big European-style house. Food is still prepared and washed on the kitchen's counters and sinks, but the cooking is done on an open fire in the back garden outside the kitchen. The dining room is dominated by a magnificent mahogany table, probably too big to have been removed from the house. The homemade wooden stools that now surround the table are crude but sturdy. Veronica wonders what the upstairs are like, if the bedrooms are used for anything or have simply been abandoned.

  She greedily accepts a pot of tea and metal cup and promptly burns her tongue, unable to wait to quench the edge of her thirst. She drinks four more cups before her body's sharp need for water begins to dull and awareness of her surroundings return.