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by Robert Muchamore

  basic, but it always tasted good. ‘Sami’s got a soft spot for you,’ Amo said. ‘But you want to be careful. Captain is very protective

  towards her and if you upset him, it’ll be you that comes off worst.’ I walked down the hill to help the others unload the truck. I passed a few people carrying stuff on the

  path. They all smiled and told me I did a good job. Sami was down by the truck, helping some of the others chop off branches and cut a clearing to hide the truck in. She went up on tiptoes and kissed my cheek. ‘MorningKiller.’ Jesus started singing, ‘Love is in the air.’ Sami gave him a filthy look, ‘Go stick your head down a toilet.’ Don loaded me up with three sacks of rice. By the time I got them up to camp, my camouflage was drowned in sweat. I threw my top off and headed back down the hill for a second load. I lost my footing and slipped. The dirt stuck to my wet skin, like breadcrumbs on a piece of fish.

  There wasn’t much left to carry. The truck had been driven as deep into the trees as possible. Palms and branches were laid all over it. Don and Jesus headed off with the last sacks slung over their backs, leaving me and Sami to carry four catering sized cans of beans. ‘Race you,’ Sami said. She stuck a giant can under each arm and started off running up the hill. Before I’d even had time to pick my cans up, Sami stumbled and hit the dirt. I burst out laughing, then started running with my cans. Sami stuck her leg out and tripped me up. One of my cans rolled off down the hill. I was too tired to go after it. We sat there and watched it crash through the bushes while we brushed dust off ourselves. ‘Cheat,’ Sami said. ‘You tripped me up.’ Sami went for my nipple again. ‘Stop doing that, it’s bloody agony.’ ‘Make me Killer.’ I jumped on top of her and wrestled her fingers off me. She tried to tickle my ribs, but I managed to

  pin both of her wrists to the ground. She relaxed all her muscles and smiled at me. I stared into her eyes. ‘Am I gonna lay here like this all day, or are you going to kiss me?’ Sami asked.

  11. RAIDS

  The first few days, me and Sami just kissed and cuddled. The forth morning we started messing about, wrestling on the sleeping mat. We both got really horny and ended up having sex. I felt like climbing up the highest tree and shouting to the whole world that I’d lost my virginity to a hot African chic. I reconsidered when I remembered that the hot African chic’s Dad had an office with dried blood on the floor and a tendency to pull out people’s teeth.

  To start with we were at it every half hour; but Sami was scared of getting pregnant. There wasn’t any contraception around, so we had to give up except for special occasions. We were always looking for excuses: a successful mission, a nice sunset, Sami bending over in front of me. What was the point being sensible? We could be dead in a few hours.

  . . .

  The rebels didn’t have the muscle to fight the army head on. Our job was to cut off supplies of fuel, food and weapons being sent to government troops on the front line further east. Most missions were ambushes. We walked fifteen or twenty kilometres, chopped down a few trees to block a road and waited. As soon as the truck drivers saw the blockade, they knew it was an ambush and tried to escape. You had to shoot out the back tyres to stop them reversing away. Once the tyres were gone, they usually tried to escape into the bushes. A few put up a fight, but they never got more than a couple of shots off before they died.

  What happened next depended on who was in charge. Don and Jesus killed the soldiers even when they put their hands up to surrender. Desi and some of the others took their weapons and boots and let them go. If Sami was in charge, it depended on what mood she was in.

  Killing was easy. When it’s pitch dark, steaming hot, your heart is banging in your ears and any second someone could waste you, whatever kind of morality you have goes out the window. I had a driver beg for his life on his knees in front of me. Maybe he was a nice guy. Maybe the money he sent home to the city was all that stopped his kids from starving. But all I could think about was that I’d be in a bit less danger if he was dead. So one tiny pull on the AK47 and a line of bullets blew him to pieces. I’ve watched him die a thousand times in my head. I can hear the little groan he made as his chest exploded. Sometimes I hate myself for doing it, but put me back there and I’d do it again.

  Single truck ambushes were most common and easiest to handle. Convoys of two and three were OK. You threw a few grenades and made a big mess, then picked off as many soldiers as you could before burning out the trucks.

  Big convoys were a nightmare: ten or more trucks, all with at least two men on board. You wanted to run away, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. There were usually three or four of us on a raid. One would drop back and shoot at anyone who touched the roadblock. The rest ran through the bushes, throwing grenades into the back of the trucks. The trucks at the back didn’t know what the hold up was at the front, so they wouldn’t try and reverse out. The bad thing was, a big convoy was always guarded by mercenaries or a group of special guards. They were good shooters, fast runners and they were paid a special bounty if they caught one of us alive. If you got chased, you had to stay in the jungle for a couple of days in case you were being tracked.

  Back at camp, you were too stressed to live a normal life. I took Becky swimming and went hunting a few times, but my heart wasn’t in it. All the fighters were the same. We’d wake up, often with a hangover, then sit about camp all day, spoiling for a row and bored off our heads. We were usually tired, but it was too hot to sleep.

  The ultimate nightmare was having your rifle jam. I spent an hour every day, cleaning, lubricating and polishing off specks of rust. Guns were sacred objects. We each had our own ritual of checking and double checking for faults. There were as many opinions about guns as there were soldiers. Some reckoned new guns were best and got a fresh one whenever they could. Sami, used a decrepit Chinese AK47. She swore it hadn’t jammed in the five years she’d had it and wouldn’t give it up for anything. Don reckoned Chinese made AK47s were rubbish. He went around with two short stocked M16s in holsters, like a gunslinger. Desi reckoned short guns were stupid, because you couldn’t hold them to aim. I heard the same crap every day, but I always tuned in, hoping for the little gem of advice that might save my life.

  Sometimes there was wood to chop or a building to repair, but it was never much. Mid-afternoon, Captain always called us into a circle for a briefing. He told us who was going where that night, what intelligence reports he’d had on where convoys were heading and which of the local bases had supplies worth stealing.

  Unless it was more than twenty kilometres, we usually set off just after sundown. It was the peak time for mosquitoes and there was a sense of dread about the walk. My thighs and ankles never stopped hurting. Once my feet hardened off I stopped getting blisters, but they still ached the whole time. The back of my camouflage was permanently stained with blood where my pack scoured off my skin.

  We walked four hours on average, followed by several hours waiting if it was an ambush. As you got closer, the adrenalin kicked in and time started to move slow. The raids themselves never lasted long. Ambushes were over in five minutes. If you raided an army base, you were rarely inside more than twenty. These flashes of excitement seemed like my whole life. The rest of the time was like being in suspended animation, wondering if you’d be alive this time the next day.

  If you had to walk back to camp, it would be at least 3AM before you arrived. A lot of the time, it took a few beers to numb the pain in my shoulders and legs, and calm down enough to sleep. Half the time you’d keep waking up with nightmares. By 7AM the sun was blasting your hut. If you got five hours a night, you were lucky. . . .

  Sami was laughing her head off. ‘I’m never gonna be able to do this,’ I moaned. ‘Calm down killer. Push down the clutch and turn the engine back on.’ The engine of the pickup choked a few times before it started to turn. A blue plume rose out of the

  exhaust. I lifted the clutch as gently as I could and the Subaru started to roll. ‘That was excellent,�
� Sami said. ‘Now, change up to second… Keep looking where you’re going, not

  down at the gears.’ We started to get up a bit of speed. There were so many bumps, it was like I was doing ten rounds with

  the steering wheel. ‘Put it into third gear.’ I flicked it neatly into third and finally started to feel I was getting the hang of driving. I had to squint to avoid the sun. The inside of the cab was about 50C and the air conditioning had a piece of tape over it saying Do Not Use. Every piece of trim rattled and you got the impression that the whole shebang would disintegrate on the next bump. ‘This is cool,’ I said. ‘So how come we can drive down here in daylight?’ ‘No road is totally safe, but the army always travels east to west, this is a dead end heading south. The

  only way they’d ever come down here is if they’re lost, or hunting for the likes of us.’ ‘Turn left here,’ Sami said. ‘Start slowing down and drop into second gear.’ We pulled up at a village of abandoned wooden huts. They looked more solid than the makeshift affairs

  we lived in, although the land was overgrown with weeds. We parked the Subaru out of sight of the road. ‘I remember when about a hundred people lived here,’ Sami said. ‘What happened to them?’ ‘Same as every other village. The men and boys either ran into the hills and joined the rebels, or got forced into the army. We stole all the food. When they got hungry, most of the women tried to go west towards the capital, but they had little kids and stuff. Not many of them made it. The only civilians left in these parts were a few old timers. Most of them are dead now.’ ‘Why did you steal their food?’ ‘We were too busy fighting to hunt. If we didn’t steal the food, the army burned it to stop us getting it. In the west, we burned food so the army couldn’t feed it’s troops. People think weapons are the most important thing in a war, but you’re nothing without a bit of food in your belly.’ ‘Some people must have starved.’ ‘Dad saw a newspaper,’ Sami said. ‘It claimed forty thousand people died fighting in the first year of the war, but over a million starved. Half of them were children.’ ‘Fucking hell.’ ‘Yeah, hell,’ Sami shrugged. ‘That’s where everyone in this country is heading.’ ‘You were only a kid,’ I said. ‘You can hardly blame yourself.’ ‘My very first raid, we went into a village like this one. Threatened everyone with guns and took their food. I was only eleven, but they needed an extra set of hands to carry everything away. All the women were crying and begging. A couple of them got slapped around.’ ‘I thought I was fighting for the good guys,’ I said. ‘It’s a war, Killer. There aren’t any good guys, just people doing what they can to stay alive.’ We wandered around the village, looking inside the huts. The villagers had only taken what they could carry. In one musty hut I picked a cockroach nibbled book off the floor. I opened the page to a cartoon of Noah’s ark, with penguins on the deck and two giraffes heads poking through the roof. I couldn’t read the text, it was all in French, but I could imagine a bunch of kids sitting under a tree listening to an old woman reading the bible stories. A postcard of the Eiffel tower slid out from between the pages. I showed it to Sami. ‘That’s where I’m taking you when this is over.’ ‘Yeah right,’ Sami laughed, ‘It’s in Paris isn’t it?’ ‘They say it’s the most romantic city on earth.’ ‘Have you been there?’ Sami asked. ‘Once. I thought it was really boring, but I was only a kid.’ ‘I’ll miss you if you go home, Jake.’ I’d realised I might have to choose between Sami and going home. It was something I tried not to think about, but Sami mentioning it choked me up. She looked a upset as well. We went outside and sat in the sun with our arms around each other’s backs.

  . . .

  Rebel groups met on neutral ground, so if the army caught you, you only knew the location of your own camp. Meetings between units were a complicated business. Everyone suspected everyone else, and was terrified of being ambushed by mercenaries or followed by spies.

  We were in the village to meet two soldiers from Casino’s unit. His was supposed to be the largest and most active rebel group in our area, with sixty fighters and three separate camps; but nobody knew anything for sure. We had an envelope of written messages from Captain. The back of the pickup was full with grenades and flour, which we were exchanging for some lightweight pistols and ammunition.

  Our contacts were over an hour late. Sami was getting nervous. If they’d been captured by the army and given our location away, we were in deep shit. ‘Ten minutes,’ Sami said, looking at my watch. ‘It’s dodgy to wait any longer.’ Right after she said it, we heard something on the road. We clicked our rifles onto automatic fire and hid in the bushes near the pickup. An army jeep pulled up on the other side of the village. Sami fired a single revolver shot into the air. One of the women in the jeep fired two shots back. If she’d returned a single shot, it would have been a signal to bail. ‘Showtime,killer.’

  We climbed out of the bushes. The jeep drove between the huts and pulled up beside our pickup. The two women were nearly as tall as me, with giant arses bulking up their camouflage. They jumped down and started hugging Sami. ‘Hey Sami. How’s business up your way?’ Sami nodded, ‘Not bad. Plenty of supplies, but we’ve lost a few men lately.’ ‘Same for us,’ one or the women said. ‘According to Rebel Radio, we’re mounting a big push. We

  might not be cut off from the east for much longer.’ ‘I miss the radio,’ Sami said. ‘Ours got broke the last time we moved camp.’ ‘And who is the handsome young stranger?’ Sami smiled, ‘We call him Killer. He fell out of the sky.’ ‘He’s lovely, can I give him a kiss?’ ‘Feel free,’ Sami giggled. One of the fat women smothered me and sucked my face. As she did it, she cupped her hand between

  my legs and rubbed it against my balls. ‘What a lovely boy,’ she howled. Sami was killing herself laughing. ‘What he really likes,’ Sami said. ‘Is if you twist his nipple really hard, like this.’ I dived backwards, but Sami was too fast. I screamed in pain and the three women laughed for about ten minutes. I was steaming, but I knew I’d only make it worse if I got angry.

  . . .

  ‘Stop sulking and grow up for god’s sake,’ Sami said. ‘It was only a bit of fun.’ Sami was driving. She went about twice as fast as me and made it look easy. ‘My nipple’s really sore. If you carry on twisting it, it’s gonna drop off.’ ‘If you say so, Killer.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’ She started laughing so bad you could hardly understand what she was saying. ‘The look on your face when she grabbed your balls. Your eyebrows went up so high, I thought they

  were gonna shoot right off your head.’ I stared at my lap, sulking. ‘Tell you what, misery guts, lets do a quick detour.’ ‘Where?’ ‘We’re only a few kilometres from where me and Ben first found you. We could drive up there and see where your brother ended up.’

  12. ADAM

  We stopped the car briefly at the exact spot where I was found. It seemed weird to think that the kid who’d been laying in the road was alive and the fit rebel who stepped out of the pickup was dead.

  We drove a couple of kilometres, seeing nothing except trees. Sami kept it fairly slow, looking out for any buildings or turnings that Adam might have ventured into. I could imagine Adam, taking his little steps with his arms swinging, getting more and more desperate and probably sobbing for Mum. Maybe he crawled into the trees, curled himself in a ball and died. It was a sad thought, but it was almost comforting compared to some of the stuff I could imagine. The road went left and down a steep hill. ‘We’ll go another kilometre,’ Sami said. ‘We’ll have to turn back then.’ I looked out the window and tried not to get upset. ‘There,’ Sami shouted. She backed up and drove through an overgrown opening between the trees. There was a big house on two floors, built out of stone with a tin roof. It must have been the home of a wealthy European, back in colonial days. Half the roof was missing. The statues and windows were smashed and creepers covered the stone.

  The front door wasn’t locked. I stepped through with my gun drawn. My boot crunched some broken glass and a dank smell hit my nose. The floor
was covered in fruit skins and chocolate bar wrappers. ‘Adam?’ I shouted. I walked into the kitchen, half expecting to find his body. We checked all the rooms on the ground floor. As I turned to go up the stairs, I saw a skinny old woman with no teeth on the landing. Her hands were trembling. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve been a good girl today.’ She started creeping down the stairs. ‘Did you bring me food?’ I reached out to grab her arm and help her walk, but she flinched and burst into tears. ‘Please don’t hit me any more.’ I put my arm on her shoulder. ‘Nobody is going to hurt you,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘Don’t be frightened of us.’ I walked her to a table in the kitchen. Her whole body was shaking. She was so weak, I felt like my hand would go right through her. I helped her sit on the only unbroken chair at the dining table. Sami brought some fruit and cooked rice out of the pickup. The old lady smiled when she saw it. ‘This looks so nice,’ She said. She dug her grubby fingers in the rice and turned to Sami. ‘You’re a girl soldier. You don’t usually come here.’ Sami smiled at her, ‘I’ve never been here before. Do soldiers come here very often?’ ‘They hit me,’ the lady said. ‘And make me eat horrible food. It’s a big joke for them.’ ‘I’m looking for my brother,’ I said. ‘Did a little boy come in here? He was wearing a green shirt.’ The lady looked up brightly, ‘You mean Adam?’ I gasped with relief, ‘That’s right. I’m Adam’s brother, Jake.’ ‘He got water for you,’ the lady said brightly. ‘But he couldn’t find you when he went back. He was

  crying. I hid him from the soldiers. Then the fish soldier took him.’ ‘Who’s the fish soldier?’ I asked. ‘He comes sometimes and brings me fish. He’s not horrible like the others.’ I heard a car engine. Sami ran to the window. A big Nissan 4x4 was rolling into the driveway. ‘Oh shit,’ Sami shouted. ‘Army. We’re so screwed.’ ‘Don’t let them hurt me,’ the old lady sobbed. ‘They push me around. It’s a big joke to them.’ Four soldiers piled out of the Nissan and started shouting. ‘Hey Grandma. I hear you’ve been a naughty girl today.’ ‘Time for some punishment,’ another one said. They were all laughing, right until they noticed the pickup. There was no way we could get back on the road, the Nissan was in our way. We ran out of the kitchen into the corridor, just as a soldier burst through the back door. He bundled the old lady off her seat and pointed his gun at her head. ‘Where’s your visitors Grandma?’ he shouted.