The kid is startled and skids the Suzuki to a halt. Andre has the door open even before it’s stopped moving. Engine parts are sprayed across the road, and two charred corpses lie contorted in the wreckage. Andre puts the camera to his eye and crouches down, moving from angle to angle, his motor drive whirring.
“Na’ bad bad place dis,” the kid says, turning to Daniel apologetically. “So so rebel, ah no’ go able koba yu oh.”
Lots of rebels, he can’t protect us, Daniel thinks—something along those lines. “Andre!” Daniel shouts. “Andre, come on, let’s go. It’s not safe.”
Andre doesn’t answer. He’s close up to one of the corpses now, the camera right in its face, click, whir, click, whir. Embarrassment tugs at Daniel, but the kid could care less about the dignity of dead rebels at the moment. He’s too worried about live ones.
“Na’ bad bad place dis,” the kid repeats, still convinced Daniel can do something. “Na’ rebel ah de watch for so.”
Daniel just shrugs. The kid waits another moment, looking at him hopefully, and then gets out of the truck with his gun and walks out to the middle of the road. He starts turning slowly in a circle with the gun at his shoulder, scanning the forest for trouble. Jesus, he’d die for us right here if he had to, Daniel thinks. There’s nothing else to do, so Daniel climbs out of the truck too and walks over to the wreckage and looks down at one of the rebels. His arms are flung over his head and he has a shocked expression on his face, as if in that final moment he had time to register his disbelief. Mouth open, eyes wide, teeth bared. Andre straightens up and drops the camera back onto his neck.
“Okay,” he says. “Done. Let’s go.”
The kid looks over with relief when he sees them move back toward the truck. He lowers his gun and hurries over. “Na’ bad bad place dis.”
Soon they’re speeding down the road again, the forest a pale blur on both sides. Andre empties his camera and slides the roll into his vest pocket and loads a fresh roll. “The editors will never run those photos, but it’s good to send that kind of stuff,” he shouts over the wind. “It reminds them where the fuck you are.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says without much interest. The stunned expression on the dead guy’s face is still in his head. “It sure does.”
The next time the car slows down, it’s half an hour later and Daniel is thinking about Nairobi—about Jennifer, more precisely. It’s been a month since she left him, and they’ve spoken a few times on the phone, but it’s mostly a charade of pretending there’s something left. He carries a kind of bleak nostalgia for her that he realizes—in his better moments—is more about fear than about love. The truck’s speed backs off a notch and Daniel can feel the kid braking—more of a question mark than a real braking action—and he looks up. “Shit,” Andre says.
At first he thinks it’s just another checkpoint, but those are manned by regular army. These guys are shirtless and ill-grouped, ranged along one side of the road with their weapons leveled. Daniel feels Andre go tense. “This doesn’t look good, mate,” he says.
It’s all wrong even before they pull to a full stop. Daniel recognizes the CDF commander from earlier that morning, standing apart from the others. The rest are training their guns on the car. One kid even has a grenade launcher leveled at them. If he fires it, he’ll kill us and half his friends, Daniel thinks. The commander is stripped to the waist and has an ammunition belt over his muscular chest. He’s strung with necklaces of cowry shells and amulets and leather satchels, and he’s got some kind of bowler on his head with a hatband made of more bullet shells. He’s holding a machete in one hand and a pistol in the other, and he walks toward the car pointing the machete at the driver and unloading an incomprehensible torrent of Krio invective. Daniel barely understands a word.
The kid in the driver’s seat puts his palms out and tries to explain himself, but the commander cuts him off in a fury and puts the machete under his chin. The kid falls silent, hands still up. Daniel catches something about the Suzuki and the captain back in town—it’s a matter of respect and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with them—but when Andre tries to intercede, one of the fighters swears and cocks his machine gun with a loud clack. He takes three steps backwards, everyone looks at him, and then with a sudden laugh he simply starts shooting.
Time doesn’t slow down or stop or do anything particularly exotic, and Daniel certainly doesn’t think anything brave. His mind is still wallowing in disbelief, encumbered by some Western sense that certain things are not allowed to happen and other things certainly can’t happen to him, when the gunfire crashes through the heavy midday air. It is only then that he realizes one of the other fighters must have grabbed the barrel of the gun and jerked it upward, because they’re wrestling for the gun now and otherwise the inconceivable would already have happened: he would now be doubled over in the backseat with his chest cavity impossibly opened up and the darkness rushing in on him like some final eclipse of the sun.
Daniel watches it all numbly and without much fear, a few stumbling thoughts about whether this is going to hurt and what his family will think. Andre is curled up in the front seat with his hands up, palms outward, while the kid frantically starts explaining something and the rest of the fighters start racking their guns. Several of them seem to be arguing with each other. The kid who did the shooting is now at the windshield screaming. The commander is silent. It goes on for a while, the argument rising and falling until at times it seems like they might start shooting each other. Then their attention turns back to the car and things slide again toward the unthinkable.
Daniel sits in the backseat wondering dully if diving out of the car at the last moment would save him—no thought of Andre or the driver here, only raw survival—when he catches the commander’s eye. The commander seems to have reached some decision. He shakes his head and raises his pistol and steps up to the kid in the driver’s seat, who is still pleading his case. The kid is still talking when the commander puts the pistol to his head and the kid is still talking when the commander cocks the hammer back and the kid is still talking and not daring to look when the commander tells him to shut the fuck up and then in midsentence he shoots the kid in the head just like that.
The execution is oddly undramatic: the kid stops talking and falls over. The commander laughs, and the other fighters start laughing. The laughter is almost worse than the murder itself, and all Daniel can think is that the amount of blood coming out of the kid is unbelievable. It’s everywhere, rivering between the seats and puddling beneath his shoes and covering all of them and everything, even the fighters on the far side of the truck. There’s so much blood on Daniel that in his dull confusion he wonders if maybe he hasn’t been shot as well. He’s not dying, though, and Andre’s not dying—everything is the same except that the kid is hanging strangely in his seat and the entire world seems to be made of his blood.
“Jesus,” Andre finally says. “He didn’t have to do that.”
They almost have to kill us now, Daniel thinks. That line has been crossed, and it’s easier to kill us than not to. The fighters glance at one another, and then one of them steps backwards. Another one backs up, and then a third, a widening circle studded with black little holes. This isn’t happening. Daniel feels his body go to wood.
“Just a minute,” Andre says loudly, no shake to his voice at all.
The fighters exchange looks. Daniel is too numb to be interested in what Andre is going to say. His tongue feels thick as a piece of wood and his vision has started to go dark around the edges. He watches Andre’s hands find refuge around his camera, automatic reflexes that he probably isn’t even aware of. His thumb flips the advance lever while the other hand cups the focus ring.