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2033
“The next move is yours, boy.” The old man’s voice cut through the air with the precision of a scalpel, and it sent a chill down Mwamba’s young spine.
The two men also occupying the room seemed suddenly forgotten, and they felt that they were no longer wanted or needed.
“Uhh, boss? What should we do with the dead one?”
“Take it to the basement; just leave it in my lair.” Hairs raised on Mwamba’s neck at the insolence and graven disrespect for the dead displayed by the old man, referring to his best friend as an it. Edjembe didn’t seem particularly thrilled with the idea, but his hesitation was only momentary. Repositioning Lokomo’s limp body in his arms as though the corpse were a sack of potatoes, he cautiously crept over to the door where the withered old man had entered the room. Disappearing through the portal, his lumbering weight caused the floorboards to groan in misery as waterlogged wood was stressed by his overweight body.
Again moving with too much dexterity, the living corpse of a man slid across the floor without a sound, and began to gaze out the window.
“Smell that, boy?” Thus far Mwamba had been doing his best not to smell the air too much. “That’s the smell of life mixed with death.” The camp buzzed and the noises from outside grew more acute in Mwamba’s tender ears. “Life mixed with death, such a precarious combination, but of course, all life is mixed inevitably with death. Life depends on it really, life survives for it’s bitter shining moment only through the power afforded by the death of other life. Think for a moment, boy, when was the last time that you ate something that had not once been alive?”
Mwamba was caught off-guard by the question; what was the old fool driving at?
“Think about it, boy: you eat a chicken, it obviously had once been alive. But even if you are a vegetarian, do not think that you don’t take the life force of others in order to sustain your own. Even the yam that you ate for breakfast was once alive, was once another living thing, just like yourself. Yet you ate it, you took its life energy and you absorbed it, in this case through the lining of your stomach, but regardless you took its life and made it your own. All life does this, continues this cycle. One dies so another may live, it is the natural order.
“Even plants, the most inane of life forms in a certain sense, survive off the dead remains of other plants and animals. Beneath your feet at every moment of every day you walk over the deceased remnants of billions of creatures and life-forms. Yes, boy, the dirt between your toes at this very moment is a composition of untold numbers of particles from the dead. The life force contained in that magical black and brown mixture of decomposing organisms is what gives the life for the grain to grow, the trees to blossom, and ultimately allows for us to survive as well. Death; death is what grants life, and without it paradoxically life could not sustain itself, because only through death can life be furthered. Just as light is understood only when considered with its opposite, darkness, so too life is only made possible through the cycle of death.
“Humans have a problematic position on the subject, however, for somewhere along the way humanity came to believe that life itself is a thing to be worshipped, to be praised, while death is relegated to an immoral monster that takes the weak and the old. We spend our entire lives running from it, and yet constantly having to rely on it. We must rely on the once living, the deceased flesh of plants and animals in order to survive. We cannot artificially manufacture life energy, it must be harvested from other living things. This is natural.”
The old man paused for a moment, realizing how little Mwamba was even listening. “What is running through your head, boy? Are you imagining what your grandmother’s corpse must look like, all of that blood matted in her hair, lying there on the ground? Well, you need not worry, you see, for she will be given a… proper burial. Come and see for yourself.”
Although lagging a moment, Jorge realized that the old man was beckoning the two of them over to him and his view out the window. Edjembe could still be heard rustling around in the basement causing boards throughout the building to moan in protest. The light filtering through the partially boarded up window was blinding at first; Mwamba hadn’t realized how dark it was in the room, as though it were illuminated by some unnatural and equally undetectable light source.
The scene outside was just as he expected, muddy, dirty, sweaty, and bloody. A group of people were bustling about, coming to and fro, unloading the line of military vehicles that were parked in the clearing in front of the old plantation house. The distance couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty meters, but it seemed unnaturally remote, removed as though he were peering into a an alternate dimension inhabited entirely by illusory phantoms. Perhaps it was simply the difficult angle combined with the poor visibility caused by the intense black smoke that permeated the entire camp, but it took a moment for Mwamba to make out what was going on.
What he had at first mistaken for bags of loot were actually human bodies.
Why did they take the dead with them? he wondered.
Although Mwamba was largely naïve to the world, it didn’t make sense to him for the raiders to have taken the bodies with them, what possible use could…
An immensely large man, towering over the rest of the workers, staggered over to the pile of bodies that had been unloaded from the truck convoy and picked out one of them. The man was a living nightmare, mostly bald with a scattering of greasy scraggly hair patches, wearing a white butcher’s uniform that looked as though it had never been washed, covered in a variety of blood stains ranging from fresh crimson to deep rusty brown. Plucking a body from the pile with one hand as though it were a ham, the massive beast of a man threw the body over his shoulder and waddled over to a metal water tower that was precariously perched a little further away.
A thick burst of smoke obstructed the view for a moment, and Mwamba tried to turn away, but suddenly the old monster’s icy hands were iron around his jaw, forcing him to watch. The smoke cleared, and Mwamba saw clearly through the haze as the towering figure lifted the body high up, and secured it to a hanging butcher’s hook that was chained to the underside of the water tower. Although the distance and visibility should have kept the corpse anonymous, suddenly Mwamba’s vision became startlingly acute, and though the clarity lasted but an instant, he recognized with full certainty the frail figure of his grandmother on the hook as the macabre butcher walked away for a moment to gather his implements.
Struggling to turn away, to close his eyes, to do anything that would prevent the grisly scene from unfolding, Mwamba was frozen in place, held tight by the ancient monster’s steely fingers.
“Yes… good… you see your beloved grandmother… you see clearly now…” The butcher returned to the dangling body and began to feel what was once Mwamba’s caretaker, the woman who had saved him and taught him everything he knew; he returned to feel her body for meat. A single fiery tear rolled down Mwamba’s terrified face, only to be caught by the leathery finger tip of the old man.
Given a moment’s respite from the ghastly scene, Mwamba watched as the skeletal figure carefully raised the tear drop to its withered lips. Closing its eyes, the monster savored the taste of the tear as though it were fine wine, adding only further to the terror of the world he had been plunged into. Mwamba was repulsed by the act but further disturbed by the very slight improvement in the color of the cheeks of the ancient creature.
“Mmm… yes…” the old man spoke between hissing breaths that echoed faintly of the viper, “you certainly have the fire of resistance, boy… yes… delicate and hopeful, you are exactly what I have been looking for.” Savagely wrenching Mwamba’s face back towards the scene of bloody carnage being committed only a stone’s throw away, the serpentine voice hissed in Mwamba’s tender ear, “Like I said boy, death mixed with life. The death of your grandmother gives life to me and my men.
“It’s the natural order of things you know.”
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