Reconciliation for the Dead

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘The doctor.’

  ‘No. The other one.’

  ‘He’s with us.’

  ‘No, Straker. Not.’

  ‘Get back. Let me open the door.’

  Brigade held fast, stopped Clay from turning the key.

  ‘He’s bad.’

  ‘He was pretending. He’s with us.’

  ‘No. I’ve seen him. Here.’

  Clay pushed the gun into the waistband of his trousers, and with his free hand pried Brigade’s fingers away from the key. ‘I don’t have time to explain,’ he said. He opened the cell door, handed Brigade the lab coat.

  ‘What about them?’ said Brigade, motioning towards the other cages.

  ‘Come on,’ Clay said, turning away and starting back towards the others.

  If Cobra knew Brigade, he gave no sign of it. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You think we can just walk back out of here, with one more body than we came in with?’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ said Vivian.

  ‘Change of plan,’ said Clay, levelling his pistol at Grasson. ‘The doctor here is going to call the night clerk and authorise a special shipment. He’s going to authorise us to take one black subject out with us, to be delivered to another laboratory.’

  Cobra glanced at Clay and nodded. Then he jabbed his gun into Grasson’s side, started pushing him towards the door. ‘Okay Straker. I’ll take him to his office. He can make the call from there. You three meet me at the back door where we came in. Two minutes. And make it look good. Tie the black’s hands. Straker you will have to be on the stretcher again.’

  They started towards the door. Thirty-eight voices, man and beast, screamed in desperation as they left. And then the lights were out and Clay and Brigade and Vivian were walking back along the night-lit corridor and through the double doors into the east wing.

  They retrieved the stretcher from the examination room where they’d left it, reaching the back door a moment later. Clay looked out through the window, across the floodlit tarmac towards the rear gate. The compound was quiet, the ambulance parked where they’d left it. There was no sign of the guards.

  Clay pulled a lace from one of his shoes. ‘Turn around,’ he said to Brigade.

  Brigade held out his wrists. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Clay tied Brigade’s wrists tight, then lay on the stretcher and pulled the blanket up to his neck.

  ‘Do not trust him,’ said Brigade, looking down the corridor.

  ‘He’s good,’ said Vivian. ‘He is Torch Commando. Just like me.’

  Brigade shook his head. ‘No.’

  Just then, Cobra appeared at the end of the hall. His gait was steady, even, empty-handed and powerful. ‘Okay,’ he breathed as he reached them. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Grasson has kindly initiated quarantine protocol for the receiving area of the facility. The clerk and the guards have moved to the safe area at the front of the complex. I’ve disabled the exterior cameras, and I have the codes to unlock the rear gate. Forget about the stretcher, Straker.’ He looked at Vivian, his pale eyes flat and expressionless. ‘Ready, Doctor?’

  She nodded. ‘What about Grasson?’

  Cobra held her gaze. ‘What about him?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Me? Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  Cobra stared at Brigade a moment. ‘He was killed by a lone black prisoner who subsequently escaped.’

  Clay could have sworn he saw Vivian’s eyes light up.

  32

  He has a decade and a half to replay it in his mind.

  Sitting on the veranda of that same seaside hotel in that decidedly foreign port, and nothing much has changed. The old man who came by every morning thirteen years ago selling roasted groundnuts in little paper scoops is still there, his gait a little stiffer, the stoop in his back a little more pronounced. And every morning, just before dawn, the molybdenum sea still lies flat and expectant all the way across to Madagascar, as it will long after he is gone.

  Clay is in the back of the ambulance. Brigade is there with him, his face battered and swollen so that Clay barely recognises him. They sway on the stretchers as Cobra hurtles the vehicle through the night. Vivian is up front with Cobra, and when Clay leans towards the driver’s side of the rear compartment, he can just make out her slender right forearm, bare in the pale illumination of the instrument panel, tresses of now-black hair snaking loose across her shoulder.

  Brigade clasps his hand around Clay’s knee, looks straight into his soul. What they did, he says. What they are doing. There are tears in his eyes. Clay says nothing, tries to look back into the place from which the other man is speaking, but cannot. He knows then, but does not realise why until much later, that he lacks some essential quality indispensable for this task. A starting point, an anchor, some point of comparison. Belief.

  The miles flood by, are frozen in place the moment they pass. The vehicle’s suspension groans as they leave the paved main road for the potholed gravel track leading to the township. Brigade hides his face in his hands and drops his head to his knees. This hardened warrior, child of repression, cries. His shoulders shake. The smell of his tears comes thick over the other smells of the ambulance. All of this like prehistory, locked in permafrost. Eben was right.

  After that, everything accelerates. It’s as if time decides to double up, run ten minutes in five, compress itself in some sort of quantum rearrangement, a last sprint towards its final prison. The ambulance stops. They step out into cold night. There are lights. Open fires. Wood smoke drifts in the narrow lanes between rows of flotsam shacks. Oil lamps shine through makeshift windows. The house is grander than most, has a concrete foundation, glass in a few of the windows. The owner appears. He is a big man. His face is kind. He smiles at Vivian, hugs her tight. His sons hide the ambulance in a makeshift garage. This is the rest of her Torch cell.

  The owner ushers them inside. No one is introduced. Names are not used. There is a thickness to everything, a palpable sense of loss pressing down on them. Clothes are brought for Brigade, bandages. Vivian hovers close to Cobra, seems not to want to leave his side.

  In another place, in another time, perhaps events might have unfolded differently. Perhaps motivations, upbringings, the fundamental reckoning people have of the purpose of their own existence, of what life should mean, could have catalysed a different outcome. If you believed in that shit.

  He remembers dogs barking. A single mournful cry at first, somewhere in the distance. And then others joining in, a wave coming closer, crashing towards them. Cobra hears it, too. Clay sees him shift towards the wall, away from the door. He reaches for his weapon, grabs Vivian’s arm with his free hand.

  The owner, too, has noticed, and starts towards the front door. He is standing two paces from the door when the thin sheet metal blows apart. The owner is thrown back as if hit by a wave, toppled. His chest is full of holes. Clay dives behind a table, pulls out the Beretta Cobra gave him. Something clatters off the far wall, spins across the floor, a silver canister. Clay recognises it immediately. It explodes somewhere to Clay’s right. The room starts to fill with smoke. Clay takes a deep breath of clean air. The last thing he sees before he closes his eyes is Cobra crouching near the far wall. Vivian is gathered in his arms.

  Clay waits, prone, eyes closed tight, not breathing. He hears Vivian coughing, spluttering. Then a bang as what is left of the front door is kicked in. Footsteps. Clay opens his eyes. The first man through the door is wearing a gas mask. Clay aims, fires twice. The man crashes to the floor in a heap. Someone is screaming outside, a woman. Clay’s eyes burn. Tears stream across his face. Another man appears at the door, a shadow through the smoke. Blind, Clay raises the gun, pulls the trigger. Nothing. A jam. He pulls back the action, tries to clear the round by feel, pushing his finger into the chamber. The gun is empty. He is out of ammunition.

  Clay scrambles to his feet, reaches out for the wall, feels
his way towards where he remembers seeing a doorway, a kitchen beyond. His lungs are screaming. He starts a slow, deliberate exhalation. Soon he will have to breathe and the CS will flood his lungs. He stumbles along the wall. Gunshots crash outside, the buzz of an Uzi, screams.

  And then he is hit hard in the stomach. Clay doubles over, gasps. The chlorobenzalmalononitrile hits his lungs. He retches uncontrollably. It is as if he has been turned inside out, doused in acid. Something jerks at his collar, and he is being dragged across the floor, out into the night. He tries to open his eyes, cannot. He is thrown to the ground. The air here is clean, and he gulps it in, tries to purge his lungs.

  That’s when he hears the voice. That same plaintive growl Clay had heard first in Ovamboland, that day at the airstrip, then again in the hospital. I have to thank you, Straker, says the voice in Afrikaans, close by. I am grateful to you both, he says. We have been trying to eliminate this cell for a long time. If the doctor hadn’t saved you, we would never have been able to do it.

  33

  A Distant Port

  The dose of CS gas he’d received was relatively small, one half-breath, a blink – enough to align the Z88’s barrel with the intruder’s chest. They’d been gassed with CS during training, the day before his nineteenth birthday, all of them crowded into that room and then a couple of canisters tossed in, the sergeants watching them through the glass, laughing. After that they knew why it was called tear gas.

  But Vivian hadn’t been so lucky. She lay in the dirt beside him, spluttering and retching, her eyes streaming.

  He reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘It won’t last long,’ he said. ‘An hour at most.’ Clay blinked his eyes open for a moment and caught sight of two figures standing nearby, a twin blur against a swirling night-lit surface. He pushed himself up to his knees and faced the figures.

  ‘Where is the other one?’ he heard one man say. ‘The black.’ It was Botha. Jesus. He must have followed them from the laboratory.

  In the distance, a shouted reply in Afrikaans. ‘Can’t find him, baas.’

  ‘Kak,’ said Botha.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ said the other man. ‘We’ve got what we wanted. Let’s get out of here.’

  Clay’s throat tightened up, realisation cascading through him. ‘You bastard,’ he spluttered.

  The other man laughed. ‘I thought it would be harder, convincing you. One broken finger and a little blood was all it took.’

  Vivian shuddered then spewed vomit into the dirt. ‘No,’ she hissed.

  ‘Yes,’ said the second man.

  ‘John?’ she gasped.

  The second man laughed. Clay did not know his name. It was the man in his own mind he called Cobra.

  ‘What do you think, poppie?’ Cobra said.

  Vivian slumped to the ground. Desperate sobs shook through her body. It wasn’t the CS.

  ‘Search the ambulance,’ shouted Botha. ‘Retrieve any documents and the camera.’

  ‘Time to go,’ said Cobra. ‘On your feet, Straker. Help the doctor.’

  Clay wasn’t going to ask what they were going to do. They would find out soon enough. He stood and lifted Vivian to her feet. She leaned unsteadily against him.

  ‘Turn to your left,’ said Cobra. ‘Walk.’

  Clay started forward, snatched a blink. His eyes were already recovering. He could keep them open for almost a second at a time now, enough to scan a quick arc of liquid ground. They were approaching a vehicle of some sort.

  A loud bang cut the night. A shotgun going off, somewhere close. Clay crouched instinctively, pulling Vivian down with him.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he heard Botha say. And then a moment later. ‘Keep going, Straker.’

  Clay straightened, made as if he was fumbling with Vivian, let her fall to the ground.

  ‘Get the fok up,’ barked Botha.

  And then, closer this time, another blast – very loud so that the concussion slammed through his chest. And then all around, close, the sounds of gunfire, a 9 mm handgun banging off six, seven quick shots – Botha’s? – then, very close, the same shotgun; the shot ripping through metal.

  Clay pushed Vivian to the ground, dropped and rolled his body over hers. He heard a vehicle door slam shut, an engine starting, revving wildly. Then wheels spinning on gravel, stones spraying wooden doors, clattering from tin sheeting, and then the sound of the engine slowly fading in the distance.

  As soon as he rolled off Vivian he knew something was wrong. At first he thought it might be the mucus that still streamed from her nose from the CS, a heavy wetness that seemed to cover his chest and arms. He opened his eyes. It was like looking out across the dark water of a rippled sea, the lights of a distant port playing out across the waves, prisming from a million surfaces, gas-flame blue, kerosene yellow, standby red, and the harsh white neon of overhead tubes. And spreading across her abdomen, a hot black stain.

  ‘We must go.’

  Clay looked up. It was Brigade. He was holding a pump-action shotgun.

  ‘Help me,’ Brigade said, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder, stooping to pull Vivian to her feet.

  ‘Clay?’ Vivian’s voice was hoarse from the gas, weak. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘Clay, I must tell you something.’

  ‘Quiet, now,’ said Clay. ‘We’re going to get you to a doctor.’

  ‘Please, listen to me,’ she whispered. ‘I know what they are doing. You must listen to me and remember.’

  ‘You can do it yourself.’

  ‘No, Clay. We don’t have much time.’ She winced in pain, coughed. ‘The equipment we saw in the lab. It’s for isolating specific proteins – for discovering their structure and function within a living organism.’ She powered out, lay gasping for breath.

  ‘Vivian, please. This isn’t the time for a biology lesson.’ Clay and Brigade started to lift her. The front of her blouse was wet with blood.

  She spasmed with the pain, pushed him away. ‘Then you can develop drugs to target specific metabolic pathways. Do you see?’

  Clay shook his head, tried to open his eyes. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Those files we photographed. They explained how they were hydrolising protein samples into constituent amino acids. That’s what all the ovens were for. You saw the test tubes. Blood from apes, from men.’

  ‘Black and white.’

  Vivian panted, grabbing Clay’s arm. ‘Get the camera.’

  Clay looked at Brigade. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the house,’ said Vivian, weakening rapidly. She clawed Clay close. ‘You must remember what I am telling you. It was there in the files. You saw them.’ Her voice was no more than a thread now.

  ‘I remember,’ he said. The pages he’d seen were in his head, but the words meant nothing to him.

  ‘They’re searching for a racially specific gene, Clay. They want to make a “black bomb.” That’s what they call it in the files: swarts bom.

  Clay glanced at Brigade, back at Vivian. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘A chemical or biological agent they can release into the environment that will selectively kill black people, Clay. Blacks, but not whites. Kill, sexually sterilise, anything. And if they can’t find the gene, they’ll do it by direct delivery.’ Vivian collapsed, the effort of speaking too great.

  ‘Jesus Christ. A population control programme?’

  ‘No, Clay. Genocide.’

  Part V

  34

  Suicide Continent

  4th October 1981,

  Latitude 24° 43'S; Longitude 29° 37'E,

  Gauteng Province, South Africa

  They carried Vivian to the car. Brigade drove.

  She’d been shot in the stomach. Clay tried to staunch the flow of blood, but no matter what he did, it kept coming, welling up from deep inside her until it covered his hands and arms, and his clothes were soaked in it.

  At the main road, Brigade turned nor
th.

  ‘What are you doing?’ shouted Clay from the back seat. ‘Turn around. You’re going the wrong way. The closest hospital is in Pretoria.’ An hour away.

  Vivian grabbed his hand. ‘No, Clay,’ she breathed.

  Brigade kept going, north.

  ‘Turn around, damn it,’ Clay yelled.

  Vivian looked up at him in the darkness. The whites of her eyes shone briefly in the light from a passing car. ‘It will never work.’

  ‘What won’t work, Vivian?’ said Clay.

  She laughed, a thin rattle. ‘We are all the same.’

  He could barely hear her. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes, lay there, rocking limp and bloody in his arms as the car hurtled through the darkness. Sometime later she gasped and opened her eyes, stared right into him. Then she whispered something he could not make out, and she was gone.

  He sat there for a long time, her head in his lap, feeling her go cold in his arms, the road unwinding before them in the pitiful illumination of the headlights, the platteland dark and deserted as they struck north towards the border.

  It wouldn’t be until much later that any of his would become real to him, as if only in recollection, by processing through memory, might the events of this time in his life attain some measure of tangibility, become actual.

  Now, he felt nothing. Just a vague sense of detachment, a moving away from himself and his surroundings, from the cold night air buffeting through the car windows, from the smell of blood, from the solemnity of death.

  It was then that he realised he’d become used to it.

  After a while he tapped Brigade on the shoulder. ‘She’s gone,’ he said.

  Brigade nodded, kept driving.

  Clay lay Vivian’s head on the seat and stared into the myopia of the headlights. Cobra had played them. Whatever he’d said to Vivian to convince her, there in the woods outside the laboratory, had been a lie. Something about her husband, John. It must have been. Cobra had played with the most delicate part of her, the most desperate. Had he perhaps rekindled in her some hope that John was still alive, that he might help her find him again? That would explain her behaviour in the laboratory, the urgency with which she’d agreed with him, made of him an ally.