Lit Fic. Chapter 16 of Heart of September (aka November)
Tipu Sends Killers; a Rape Survivor Kills
«««one»»»
Kurtz sat on his suitcases. Outside. Smoking a joint. Smiling at the sparks and flames brightening the darkness that surrounded the village.
“Pretty cool, eh?”
“Ass.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“And you are. Much worse.”
The old hotel with their rooms burnt in the night. Housewives, soldiers, neighbors and firefighters rushed buckets of water at the structure. The hotel owner threw fistfuls of dirt at it while his wife dragged ragged smoldering furniture out as it hissed smoke into the dark sky.
“Guess we need to find another place to hang out, eh?”
“Shut up, Kurtz.”
“I’m not hanging out with this asshole. I’d rather be with Tipu Tip. At least he’s an honest rapist.” Amelia grabbed her backpack.
“Hey! I asked and you said ‘yes’. Don’t go blaming me for your lose morals. Your immorality. Your, your…”
Amelia slugged Kurtz with her bag, tearing a gash across his forehead, and stormed off into Rwanda.
“Fucking bitch,” Kurtz mumbled as he dammed the blood flowing from his head with his dirty fingers. “Well, guys, I guess it’s just us, eh?” he grunted.
“Fuck off, Kurtz,” Hairball grumbled and marched after Amelia.
Sakombí gathered his belongings, gave Kurtz an angry stare, pressed the bandage against his bloody nose, and rushed after Hairball and Amelia.
“What now?” Hairball asked.
“Find a place to sleep, I guess. In the morning we head off to the airport.”
The trio walked toward Kigali, knowing they couldn’t walk the entire distance but knew they wanted to distance themselves from the border, the burning hotel, and Kurtz.
They walked in silence, each buried by their own thoughts.
Amelia worked on ignoring the past few days. Worked on rebuilding her emotions; tried to get back to the woman she was before… before that Asshole! and Tip. She feared she was going to become a bitter, revengeful woman. She didn’t want to be that. She didn’t want to be an angry woman who hated everyone. She wanted to be that cheerful — Adventurous — girl she was when she left Australia. She wanted to laugh and jump naked into the ocean without fearing sharks or morons and assholes like Kurtz. She wanted to laugh whenever she felt like it; not looking over her shoulder at the ghosts of life past or ugly creations creeping up on her. Would she ever? Could she ever be that girl again? Or was it time to grow up?
Hairball worried about his future. Would he be able to return to normal society? To normal Wisconsin life? Would he be able to look at people knowing they could explode or die or have a snake wrap themselves around them in an instant? Or kill? Would he demote his Congo experience to just a fleeting moment in his life? Just a few days out of his life that he could ignore, forget, refuse to admit existed when, in fact, they were the most troubling, vicious days of his life? He looked at Amelia as she lead the way to the next town. Would she? he wondered, forget what happened to her.
Sakombí worried about food, a place to sleep, and whether the police would arrest him. If arrested, the best possibility was being sent back to the Congo. The worst was taking a ride out in the lake with three armed guards and finding himself floating in the lake with five bullet holes in his back.
“How far we going to walk?” Hairball asked. He looked back at Sakombí.
Sakombí looked around to ask someone but Amelia interrupted him with a direct observation.
“Until I get tired.”
The two men nodded. They could only assist when she needed them. They walked at her pace and her direction. She was in charge now. It was her show.
««« two »»»
Amelia grunted. Blood seeped from her shoulder. The small café served lukewarm drinks and questionable fruits and vegetables that Sakombí guessed were gathered in the streets. But it was a place to sit, a place to gather their thoughts and develop a plan. And for Amelia to rest. But blood darkening her shirt was a new – worrisome – reality.
“We should get you to a …”
“We,” she glared at Hairball, “should mind your own business and help us,” she nodded at Sakombí, “find that bastard.” She looked into the jungle. “Before he kills us.”
Sakombí looked at the little boy, not more than eight or nine, who served them warm sodas and dubious mangoes which went largely untouched except by Sakombí who tested it for the other two. “What bastard are you talking about? Kurtz or Tipu?”
“Both.”
Sakombí watched the little boy’s mother. She sat in the shade of her makeshift cafe beside a large metal cooler. She stared at the three of them. When they first sat down, she whispered to her older son. He ran off. She stared at the three of them and tapped her foot. Was she anxious of having two white people in her cafe? Or with three armed strangers, their AK-47s slung across their backs?
“Ya know,” Sakombí hesitated. He whispered his concerns about the mother: poor, staring, whispering, sending a child off with to who knows with a message to who knows who; but he could guess. “She could be one of Tipu’s spies; people willing to give him information for a small fee.”
“If he shows up, we shoot him.”
“He won’t show up. One of his killers will. Or, several of his killers.”
“In the good old US of A, they’d just drive by and shoot at all of his. Kids and mother included. And hope to kill their target.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Amelia grumbled, “this isn’t America.”
“He could be right.” Sakombí noticed the mother get up from her chair. She took a quick glance at each of them; Hairball, Amelia, and then holding her gaze, him. She turned. She walked out of the cafe. She looked left and right on the street with no pedestrians or traffic. She shouted at her son. “Come!” And walked away.
“Something’s happening here.”
“We should …”
“You have a lot of opinions about what we should be doing, Hairball.” Amelia held her shoulder as if her bare hand could stop the blood blanching her shirt; she couldn’t believe that less than a week earlier her parents and younger sister were shouting words of encouragement at her as she boarded the plane in Sidney. This was her gap year, the year she’d learn about the people of the Congo, explore the wilds and jungles that Livingston once trampled, and improve her French. She was full of hopes, dreams, and wonderment. She was hoping to right the wrongs the white supremacists of generations ago wreaked on the poor natives; in her own little way. A week ago.
Now, raped, shot and bleeding, grasping a Russian automatic weapon in her dirty hands, seeking out her rapists, she wondered what was going to happen to her next; what she was next capable of doing.
“No,” Sakombí agreed. “We should.” He stood up. “Oh, dear.”
Four men dressed in black balaclava marched toward the café. Each had a 9 mm Glock strapped to their thighs and AK-47s in their hands. Their sunglasses glinted evil in the sunlight.
“Crap,” Amelia spit, raised her AK-47 in one hand. And without hesitating, without reflecting on her Adelaide life of privilege, pulled the trigger.
Dirt, dust, grime, and bullets splattered the street, shot past the four henchmen, slapped into cars and trucks.
No one was hit. No one died. They scattered. Shooting as they ran. Two to the left, two to the right. They jumped. Behind cars walls trees buildings they scrambled.
“Damn.” Hairball flattened below the café’s lone table.
Sakombí rushed Amelia to the metal cooler. His body between her and Tipu’s henchmen. They scrunched down behind the cooler. Sakombí balanced her AK-47 on the cooler. ,
“I’m going left!”
Hairball and Amelia fired at the henchmen. Hitting cars walls trees and buildings; scaring the killers to keep low. Sakombí hunched and running, jumped into a small depression beside the café.
One balaclava poked his head out from behind a thin tree.
Three AK-47s opened fired.
The balaclava burst red; a rifle clattered to the earthen road. The tree collapsed.
An unseen killer fired from a window. Two other killers ran to new hiding places; closer to Amelia, Sakombí, and Hairball.
Sakombí aimed. Fired.
A killer sprawled across the street. He twitched. He groaned. He crawled.
Amelia fired.
The killer harvested three hot chunks of speeding metal: in his kidney, liver, and neck. He stopped moving.
A third killer hesitated. He studied his dead friends. He aimed at Hairball. He fired.
The café’s lone table danced into the sky like a wounded kite.
The third killer met a barrage of anger from the three amateurs he was sent to kill. He cowered behind a 1962 rust-covered Mercedes. He heard metal snap off the car; he heard glass break. Tires flattened. Then. Silence. He got to his feet. And ran.
Three shots followed him. A chunk of metal sliced through his spleen. Another skewered deep into his pancreas. The third didn’t hesitate to spin through his left lung, near his heart, and hurry through his chest to a bullet-scared tree trunk. He dropped to his knees.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered. He fell on his face. Gasped for a breath that didn’t come. And laid still.
“Where’s the other one! Where’s the other one!”
“Building!”
Sakombí, Amelia, and Hairball studied the building. Looked for the sniper. Looked for movement. The building stood quietly; the windows silent. Hairball watched the small street beside the building.
Suddenly! Movement! Rapid! Then, silence.
“Somebody’s in that alley.” Hairball steadied his aim at the street.
“I don’t see anyone.”
Amelia swept her eyes across the front of the building, checking each window for any sign a person was in the room: a moving curtain, a reflection off of a telescope, the top of a head eyeball height in the corner of the window. But. “Nothing,” she said.
Hairball adjusted his aim to encompass a side door. “Think he left?”
“Stand up. We’ll find out.”
Nobody moved.
A howl broke the silence. Footsteps crashed against the raggedy stairs. The front door burst open. The fourth killer ran into the street. Unarmed. Frightened. He ran toward the café; facing the three AK-47s. But he didn’t make it.
A snake – fast, deadly, hungry – tore out of the building, slapped its scaly black and red body around the killer. It squeezed, a love pat designed to squash the air out of the prey’s lungs, paralyze it from the neck down, and cause it to surrender – in a frightened panic – to his inevitable end: being devoured by this snake after he loses consciousness, slowly, as the snake enveloped him from his feet to his scalp; if still living, his last vision would be a darkened sky as the mouth slid over his eyes.
“Stand down!” a woman yelled. “Don’t shoot!” She stepped through the front door of the suspect building.
“Nyoka,” Hairball whispered. He watched her skin flicker like that of the snake, but deadlier and more beautiful; the skin of a human.
Nyoka walked over to the man surrounded by constrictor skin as it slowly pulled itself tighter around the man’s lungs, stomach, and nose. “Troubled?” Nyoka smiled. “I would be troubled if a snake that size were squeezing the life out of me.” She hunched down on her heels to stare at the man’s frightened hopeful pessimistic eyes. “Need a hand?” She pulled her black-handled knife from its quiver. She traced a thin line across the man’s forehead. Blood dribbled into his eyes, the corner of his mouth, and landed in silence on the snake’s belly. “You tell me where Tipu Tip is, and I’ll see if I can get this snake off of you. Understand?”
The man nodded.
“Where is he?”
The man flicked his eyes down the street.
Nyoka looked up. “Don’t see him.” She stood up. “Pity. But you’re providing food for the snake. The circle of life, ya know?”
The man mumbled a frantic shout.
Nyoka got down on her knees. “Want to say something?”
The man nodded as if his life depended on it, which it did.
“Well, I don’t know.” She pushed the snake down away from the man’s mouth. “Spit it out.”
“Concrete house. By the river. Green. Door. Let me out. Get him off of me!”
“Him? You think this loving snake is a him?” Nyoka looked at Sakombí and Hairball. She settled on the only one of the three standing: Amelia. “Did you hear that? Tipu Tip is in a concrete house with a green door down by the river.” She looked down at the killer. “How many are with him?”
“Two or three. I don’t…”
The snake cinched her body tighter around the rapist-thug-killer.
“With two or three others.” Nyoka bent down at the head of the snake and sang a quiet children’s song in a haunting rhythm in a low ominous voice. She stood. She frowned. “I tried,” she said to the struggling killer. “But the snake seems intent on having you for dinner.”
The man howled a muffled scream. He shook his body like a dervish hoping to escape.
“But, do you remember Grace?”
The man pleaded with his eyes.
“M’Buti woman you raped. You’d better hope Grace doesn’t find you before the snake’s finished. Grace is a rarity among female pygmies. A hunter. Proficient with both a bow and arrow and…” Nyoka stared into the killer’s eyes, her nose pressed against the snake. “…knife. Grace knows how to kill.” She smiled. She stood up. She watched the snake tighten its curl around the man’s head, hiding his fear from witnesses, victims, and the sunlight.
Nyoka turned to Amelia. “Well? What’re you waiting for?”
Amelia looked behind the woman the color of deep night. “Grace?” Amelia faced the M’Buti woman. She looked concerned as she bent to talk to the shorter woman.
“I look for French man. Your French man.”
“Kurtz?”
“No. No Kurtz. Shandy. He calls himself Shandy.”
“Why?”
Grace glared at Amelia as if she of all people should know why she wanted to find Kurtz or, as she remembered him, Shandy. Grace looked at Hairball but had nothing to say to him; he was just a white man come to save the M’Buti from themselves. But the woman, the snake woman. She’d heard of Nyoka; everyone in the villages that dotted the sides of the great river heard of the woman whose skin was the darkest in Africa. “You know where Shandy is?”
“No. No, I don’t. But I know where Tipu Tip is.” Amelia glanced at the girl and the river.
“Show me.”