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The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.
-Herodotus
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2033
Mwamba wasn’t sure where he was. Fear’s steely talons gripped his adolescent mind as he lay in the sweaty, salty rear of a Jeep, eyes covered, mouth gagged, hands bound. Although he couldn’t be sure, he thought that he was lying next to a corpse. Something wet and warm had soaked his pants; whoever the body had once belonged to had been thrown carelessly into the bed of the truck just as he had been. The only difference between them was that the force of the impact had cracked the other occupant’s skull, thus accounting for the warm sticky stain crawling up the fabric of his pant leg.
The men driving were obviously drunk, the thick smell of cheap whiskey floated on the wafting air as they spoke to each other and haphazardly navigated the vehicle over rough paths. The sound of other vehicles told Mwamba that he was in a convoy of sorts, and he guessed that he had been taken prisoner by them, but the reason that he was kept alive he couldn’t imagine. One of the men belched loudly, the smell mixed with the odor of blood and the thought of being bound and gagged next to the deceased remains of someone he had grown up around made him retch. Unfortunately for Mwamba, the cloth that was tightly wound around his mouth forced him to swallow the vomit. Unpleasant certainly, but a better fate than choking on it and sharing the one-way ticket out of this cursed existence with the traveling companion next to him.
A new stench entered Mwamba’s keen nostrils: the smell of smoke and burning flesh. So too new sounds gradually became discernible over the drumming of the Jeep’s engine, of people talking and shouting. All the voices were male that he could make out, and all had the malevolent edge shared by his own drunken captors. Suddenly the vehicle came to a halt, having driven over a more substantial bump and sliding slightly as though across a muddy slick. One of the men cursed.
“Fuck man, did you run over that goat?”
“Ehh, whatever, tell Briggs to get over here and get it cooking so the meat doesn’t go foul, I’ll deal with booking the new… arrivals.”
“Right, fuck you, mate. I go and clean up your road kill why you go collect the bounty? Fuck off!”
“Oh well, Briggs will just have to figure it out after we share the bounty on these two!” The Jeep lurched forward again at the hands of the drunken compatriots, and drove on for another few hundred feet through the stifling air of the camp, thick with pungent and questionable odors.
Cloth doors slapped shut, and the rear gate was lowered with a tangible thud. The body next to Mwamba began to be shaken by one of the men. “Get up you little piece of shit, get up now…” He must have found the pool of blood that had been silently spreading across Mwamba’s pant leg. “Oh wonderful, you killed the bloody little bastard! Hey, Edjemba, I’m talking to you, you prick! You killed this one, you drunken fool!” A barely audible fuck off sounded from a few feet away over the sound of public urination.
“Great, and what about you, you still all in one piece?” Rough calloused hands seized Mwamba and forced him to sit up. Seeing that he was still conscious and otherwise unharmed, the man untied the binds around his ankles and scooped him out of the Jeep, setting him on his feet. “That blood ain’t yours, is it?” A poor attempt at a joke.
Silence.
“Oh, right, bit hard to speak when you’re mouth is all done up, eh bru?” The cold steel of a knife slid across Mwamba’s cheek, causing hairs to rise all over his body. He wanted to scream, but then with a forcible flick the knife cut the gag off his face and it fell to the ground. “There, you ain’t hurt are you?” The man’s coarse hands once again gripped the boy’s face roughly as he appropriated the youth more carefully. Mwamba recoiled at the touch, and the vile sensation that it brought with it.
Not knowing what to say, feeling suddenly all of the rage that he didn’t know how to express, Mwamba fumbled as sounds without words trickled from his mouth.
“Mumble mumble, yes or no, you little shit, are you hurt?” The savage man’s accent hinted at a South African origin, although nothing was certain, since most of the African borders had all but dissolved after the Fall.
“No.”
“See, much better, now let’s go and have the old man take a look at you, bru.” Releasing his face at last, the man’s fingers instead pressed themselves beneath Mwamba’s right armpit as he was forcibly guided forward, still blinded by the cloth stretched over his eyes.
“Umm… sir? Could you take my blindfold off, it’s hard to walk with it on,” Mwamba hated being civil with the beast of a man, but knew that he was in a position of submission at the moment, and instinctually felt that if he could lull his captors into a sense of complacency he would have a better chance of escaping. Of course, where would he even escape to? Somehow it still didn’t feel real; the image of his grandmother’s dying eyes haunted him and reminded him that everything he had ever known was dead and gone, destroyed in a single bloody afternoon.
An alcoholic grunt was the only response, as the hardened fingers of a hand scraped across Mwamba’s face, taking the blindfold with it.
Blinking as the hot African sun blinded his youthful eyes, gradually the world came into focus. In the heart of the jungle, a rough camp had been erected. Scanning around himself as he was again marched forward, Mwamba guessed that there were maybe twenty buildings in the camp proper, thick acrid smoke rising from a few of them. The smells were atrocious, blood mixed with sweat, decaying flesh mixed with fresh mud from a recent shower. Mwamba barely kept himself from retching again.
“Come on asshole, let’s go get whatever we get for this one, since you killed the other one!” The second captor finished relieving himself and came to join the pair as they neared one of the larger buildings, or shacks more appropriately. Combinations of sheets of rusty metal, warped wood, baling wire, duct tape, and other such ingredients were thrown together with the expertise of a hyperactive child building a playhouse, twisted into frankensteinian creations that assaulted the senses, and did little more than ward off the basic elements. The house that they were walking toward seemed to be the only one of the camp that looked well built, and very likely predated the creation of the camp itself. Although its construction heralded a plantation from over a century before, the elements had helped it to decay over the decades, and so it had been patched in much the same method as the rest of the housing had been built. The door was a prime example of this sort of primitive architecture, a thick metal sheet that had been reinforced and hung on impromptu hinges. It groaned painfully as the man guiding Mwamba opened it.
“We’ve got another one for you, old man!” The smell inside the house was atrocious, a combination of formaldehyde and mildew, turning Mwamba’s stomach yet again. The room into which the party entered was likely once the parlor of the historical plantation house, although water spots spread like a Rorschach across the sagging ceiling, a reminder that the elements had not been kind. The furniture was grotesque, for just as the house it had once been elegant and regal, yet years of disrepair had left the fine fabrics stained and riddled with mildew, the hand-crafted wood eaten by insects and warped with water damage. The other man, who had been called Edjembe, staggered over to one of the chairs and plopped down in it, apparently uncaring about the cesspool of mold and moisture that let out a sickly groan induced by his weight.
“You in here, old man?” The hardened voice echoed through the house with a slight timbre of uncertainty. Something in the tone of the man’s voice made Mwamba detect a strain of fear embedded deep within the apparent bravado. “We… we don’t have all day, old man!”
Silence.
Slowly at first, footsteps began to echo in the rotted floorboards, and at one end of the long room a door opened, apparently an entrance to a basement or cellar, as the current of air that flowed out of the passage was thick with the deep musk of the earth. An ancient figure was born from the doorway, and the very sight of him made Mwamba recoil as a subconscious terror assaulted the foundations of his soul.
Human beings have an innate sense of danger, a deep instinctual response buried beneath millions of years of evolution, a reminder of the times when humanity as a species slept beneath the stars and actively competed with other animals for existence. It is precisely this instinctual core that becomes excited when walking through the forest the sound of a rattlesnake erupts from beneath a nearby rock, or when lying in bed reading a book a scorpion begins to crawl along the baseboard, or when at night the very wind itself seems to carry deep in its somber voice a warning of dangers lurking in the darkness…
The physical presence of the man was slight at best; his aged back was bent over and twisted like a misshapen root. Although the man was obviously African by his features, his skin was as white as ash. Mwamba was unsure whether it was a skin disorder or simply a lack of sunlight that had created such a startling blend of color and feature, but the combination was unnerving at best. Something just wasn’t right about the elderly man, something unnatural that made Mwamba want to turn and flee from the room in terror. Meanwhile, the man holding him tightened his grip unconsciously, a sign that he too didn’t feel right in the presence of the ancient fellow.
“Oh, and what have we here my loyal soldiers?” Nails scratching across chalkboards, Styrofoam pieces rubbing together, felines caterwauling in the night, all of these things seemed somehow more peaceful than the timbre of the man’s voice. Wrecked by unknown decades, there was a vicious edge in the voice that seemed to perfectly match the grotesque visage the man presented. “Oh, you have brought me a good one today, Jorge, yes you have!” The drunken man smiled uneasily, but seemed impatient to leave all the same.
“Yeah, well, how much is he worth?”
“How easily you insult our guest! He is not simply cattle to be bartered, Jorge, how unfair you are to him!” Slithering across the floor like a snake, the old man did not seem troubled by decayed joints as Mwamba’s grandmother had been… had been, past tense, she was dead now, lying in a pool of her own blood where Mwamba had left her. The apparent ease of motion only contributed to the fleeting suspicion of the supernatural that the man aroused in everyone who laid eyes upon him.
The false humility and manners that the old man poured upon Mwamba only made the scene even more difficult to assimilate, and added to the unnerving surrealism that seemed to permeate the very air. Coming ever closer, the slender figure stopped short and raised a twisted hand to the boy’s face. “Mmm, you have very fine features boy, you should be proud of the inheritance that you were given. Here, stand up straight now, let me get a look at you.” Jorge’s iron grip tugged harshly at Mwamba’s slender arm and he straightened his back. The eyes of the old man slid up and down Mwamba’s figure like the groping hands of a pedophile, every glance made the boy shiver, every stare made his blood run icy in his veins. There was an odd desire, something more insidious and darker than mere sexual drive that shone behind his withered ashen eyes.
“Jorge, for once you haven’t… fucked up. This is a fine specimen, he will make a wonderful addition. I will give you a full half kilo for this boy.” At once both Jorge and Edjembe seemed to perk up and life flowed into them. “Here, let me write you a ticket for him.” Once again slithering across the floor in a single continuous motion, the old man came to rest upon a warped old wooden desk chair at a roll-top desk that had long ceased to be able to roll, and instead was frozen in a partially open yawn, its contents haphazardly shoved therein. The twisted old man spoke as he scribbled something on an official looking light green pad reminiscent of a receipt booklet, “is he the only one, I thought you had two with you this time?” The two men froze, looking at each other with a quizzical stare of ‘how did he know…’ but neither deigned to speak a word of it aloud lest their conspiracy be detected by the withered figure across the room.
Finally, fearing the silence itself might become noticeable, Jorge spoke, “yeah boss, we did get another one, the only two in the village that we could find… but donkey brains over there was too plastered and the kid’s head got cracked.”
Silence.
“I didn’t mean to, really, I just set him down… but the damn little thing was so brittle, like a tea pot he was!” The old man stopped for a moment and glared out of the corner of only one of his glassy eyes, Mwamba could swear that the pupil was a slit, and while the glance lasted only a second or two, it was plenty long enough to make the temperature in the room palpably drop.
Before either of the men could speak again, the old man seemed to shrug off the issue and scribbled something else on the paper.
“You two are lucky that I am a benevolent god, especially you Edjembe,” although there was a note of sarcasm, Mwamba was not sure whether the man truly believed his own words, “I have added another three grams to your pay quota for the… body.” Jorge breathed a sigh of relief and Edjembe swallowed a golf ball at last. The latter of the two suddenly jumped up so as to retrieve the body of the deceased child in question. Mwamba began to wonder who it was… who it was that he had lain prostrate next to while the last pulses of life soaked into his pant leg? The answer returned born on a pair of burly black arms moments later.
“Lokomo…” the name slipped across his lips before he could stop it from leaking out. It was the body of his closest friend in the village, hair matted with blood, eyes still covered by a scarf, mouth gagged open and stuffed with a ball of cloth, hands and feet bound tightly with nylon cording, just as he had been. Yet the already stiff joints and ashy skin were obvious signs of the boy’s violent demise. The divine coin had been flipped, and now Mwamba stood with a single tear collecting at the corner of his eye, while his best friend’s limp body was handled like so much freight by uncaring hands. Mwamba wondered for a moment whether he was better off being alive, or if his friend had gotten the better deal by dying so quickly that he was spared the knowledge of the fate of the village.
As thoughts swirled in his adolescent mind, Mwamba began to notice that the old man was studying him as a scientist might study a rat in a maze, wondering what’s going on in its insignificant little brain. Mwamba resolved himself that he wouldn’t give him the pleasure. He wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t show emotion, he wouldn’t let the old man feed on his pain and suffering. Slowly, he raised his hand and wiped the solitary tear from his duct before it could be shed. He would give nothing.
Mwamba stared back at the twisted figure and gave him only silence.
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