There were men out there in the forest who had done this thing. Men perhaps close nearby. To her feeling of horror was added a new one: terror.
She found herself beside the Land Rover and knew that she had run away. Holding herself still, holding every quivering muscle of her body still by the same exercise of mental power which had enabled Harry to hold the Land Rover upright when he had swerved to avoid the first body, she made herself stand there. Her stomach clenched agonisingly as though she had contracted the most virulent food poisoning. She needed the toilet urgently. She needed to vomit again. Instead, she stood absolutely still while she willed her heartbeat to slow down. After a time, she thought it might be safe to move. She tore open the door and reached inside for her carry-all. She ripped it open, pulled out a roll of film and reloaded her camera. Then she took a deep breath. Turning round was the bravest thing she had ever done. Walking back took so much courage it was worth a Congressional Medal of Honour.
Harry looked up as she returned. There was profound respect in his eyes: he had never seen terror more ruthlessly overcome. Ann noticed nothing of this. ‘I want to get the sequence right while I still have the light,’ she said. ‘A series of pictures in the right sequence to show what order it happened in.’
‘They came out of the forest and through the torn stockade,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they used vehicles. Just large numbers and automatic weapons. There were only old men and boys here.’
She framed the distant forest with the sun glinting off tall trunks and eyes and teeth in the lower shadows. She framed the pathetic pile of tumbled thorn bushes. The untidy jumble of riddled bodies. A withered hand still holding a carved club. A young fist holding a shattered spear.
‘Then they wiped out all the old women and the children.’ Robert took up the story as she finished recording the single-bullet executions made so much more simple when the babies were clutched to withered breasts and a brain shot became a heart shot and carried on right through. ‘Then they rounded up the young good-looking ones and took their time. Did some raping and played a couple of games.’ He was worrying more nubile bodies out of the centre of the pile and placing them beside the ones Ann had already photographed. Time after time the strange pattern of wounds was repeated.
‘Tell me,’ Ann demanded, alerted by the tone of his voice.
‘Target practice.’ He rolled one of the bodies over gently and the pattern of wounds on the front immediately made its own obscene, horrific sense. ‘Stand them against a wall. Restrain them if necessary,’ said Robert, his voice dead. ‘Use six bullets. Got to be quick. Accurate. It’s a sort of ritual. Only a certain kind can do it.’ Robert pointed distantly, his whole body as far away from the dead N’Kuru girl as he could practically get and still be clear in his explanation. ‘One shot through the pubic bone, one through the belly button, one for each nipple and one for each eye.’
Ann’s knees buckled and she found herself kneeling by the ravaged corpse. Her camera dangled at the end of her numb arm, the last vestige of its fictitious protection gone. What she really wanted to do was scream and scream.
‘And these poor girls stood there? And allowed them to do this?’
‘They’ll have let some off, maybe taken them with them,’ said Robert. ‘Held the rest in place with ropes tied round their wrists.’
‘And those who refused got an alternative.’ Harry gestured to the pile of corpses he had been dealing with. The strange wounds in their upper chests, shoulders and faces made all too much sense now. They were all exit wounds where bullets had torn out. There were no entry wounds. No obvious entry wounds at all. ‘That’s what happens,’ said Harry quietly, incongruously, as though he was talking of gardening or cricket. ‘That’s what happens when you’re raped with a rifle.’
Ann went out then, as though she had been clubbed over the head. It was simply too much for her to handle. Her brain shorted out like an electric machine on overload. She pitched forward into a bundle on the ground, seemingly as dead as the rest of the women in the compound. Harry reached over and pushed his hand under the scarf covering her neck. His fingers, thickly crusted with dried blood, felt the powerful surge of her pulse. ‘She’ll be OK. Put her in the Land Rover, would you?’
Robert picked her up with the same tenderness he had shown the corpses. She had left the back door of the Land Rover open and so he had no difficulty in lying her along the back seat, using her hold-all as a pillow. He twisted her legs enough to allow the door to close so that she would not get covered by flies before she came to. The last thing he did was to take her camera.
As the western sky, hill of red dust from the dry farms, went the same colour as the blood leaking from the pathetic pile of corpses and the short sharp tropical evening closed down upon them, they finished sorting the corpses into some kind of order. Robert used the last of the light to complete the series of photographs that Ann had begun. Made ruthless by the depth of his outrage, he spared the potential viewer nothing, filling the viewfinder with close-ups of faces with their eyes blasted out of their sockets. Of heads riddled from beneath soft chins by point-blank automatic gunfire.
Then, as the whole landscape around them seemed to sink in a sea of blood, the two men stood back, knowing that the darkness had beaten them in the end.
‘I counted two hundred,’ said Robert.
‘About that. Two hundred women, children and old men. I wonder where the warriors have gone.’
‘The word in the camps is “taken by the Lions”.’
‘Taken as in recruited? Or kidnapped? Or killed?’
‘Christ knows.’
‘I think we’re going to find out, though. Soon.’
‘Yeah. No way round that.’
‘Still…’
The first lion, made brave by the thickening shadows, leaped over the ruined thorn stockade, like the vanguard of a new army.
‘Time to go,’ said Robert as the sound from the forest swept towards them like the charge of a screaming horde.
They walked slowly back to the Land Rover, their eyes everywhere, knowing they were relatively safe because they were surrounded by so much easily taken food, but concerned that sudden movement might trigger some reaction from the blood-crazed animals around them.
In the Land Rover, they peeled off the crusted gloves, then sat, side by side, too stunned and emotionally drained for decision or action. Mercifully, the night came quickly and, although there were stars, there was no moon due until much later. It was a mercy that they could not see the sights which accompanied the cacophony of sickening sounds with which they were soon surrounded. Like corpses propped up on the Land Rover’s seats, they stayed for an uncounted period of time, and it was not until a leopard charged up onto the bonnet, making an escape with its prize stolen from an angry group of hyenas, then leaped up onto the roof to feed, that the men were jolted out of their shock. The vehicle rocked forward as the big cat leaped up, then the heavy canvas roof sagged dangerously beneath it as it settled just above Robert’s head. The eyeless head and burst torso of one of the girls who had been used for target practice slammed face down across the windscreen mere inches from the black man’s eyes and he jumped awake with a scream. Harry exploded into wakefulness beside him. ‘Go!’ screamed Robert. Harry fired up the ignition and the Land Rover quivered into life. He stamped on the clutch and shoved the big old gearshift into reverse. Robert slammed the Remington’s barrel up into the snarling softness above his head. ‘Go!’ he screamed again and pulled the trigger, so that when the Land Rover leaped backwards towards the opening in the stockade behind them, the cat and its meal were blasted up into the air to tumble back down upon the flat bonnet and away. As the vehicle shot backwards, both of Harry’s hands upon the wheel, Robert leant forward and hit the lights. Twin beams of brightness wavered wildly over the unspeakable feast going on there but all that could be seen clearly was the group of thwarted hyenas moving in around the headless leopard. Over the sound of the shrieking engine, the mad cackle of their victorious laughter followed the horrified humans into the night.