Max Annas - The Wall

“Celeste Rubin,” he said again. “She’s 57.” The photo was a few years old. Thembinkosi felt around the other pocket. Empty. “Let’s put her back in.”

“I can’t,” Nozipho declared. “The dress won’t make it.”

“True.”

He turned Celeste onto her back, then he reached under her armpits and slowly straightened up. A person like this is heavy , he thought. And this person was really cold, too. Much colder than she had been just a few minutes ago. He lifted the body over the edge of the freezer and released it. The containers of frozen food clattered.

Thembinkosi shut the chest. “Or would you like to take the shrimp with us? You love them.”

“But not frozen ones. Idiot!” Nozipho reminded him. She was holding the door open that led from the garage to the house.

Moses jumped down the last few steps to the lounge. He lost his footing on a runner that lay in his path. He quickly scrambled to his feet as he heard footsteps on the floor above. Also the couple’s voices, but he couldn’t understand anything they were saying. All he had to do was push open the terrace door. Out and back in the direction from which he’d come. Just had to make sure to not get any further away from the exit.

Rapidly cleared the hedges and walls. The other guy wouldn’t run after him. Moses had seen the condition he’d been in. Around the corner in the outer wall and right on going. Another jump, solid landing, keep running. All of a sudden, the man in the rugby shirt was standing in front of him. He wasn’t fit or all that fast, at least he didn’t look like it. But he was standing in his way. Moses knocked him down. And got caught. The sharks guy was clinging to him. He had wrapped his arms around both of Moses’ legs.

“We know what you did!” he cried.

Moses tried to kick free, but in vain. The other man had strong arms.

“You won’t get out of here!” the rugby man said as his breath grew shorter.

But the kicking still wasn’t helping. Moses swung at the man’s head. First with his hand, then with his fist. The man clutched at his head with one hand, trying to protect it. As he did that, he tightened his grip with the other hand. Moses was still lying half on top of him. Kick harder, break his grip. He was slowly gaining more maneuvering room. Moses only needed a second. He stretched out his right leg and then brought his knee up hard. It landed in the middle of the rugby man’s face.

He hollered in pain.

Then, there was another voice.

“Help!” a woman screamed. “He’s killing him! Hellllllp!”

Moses had already freed himself by the time the woman who had come out of the house nailed him with a plastic chair in his lower back. Keep running , he told himself.

But instead he stayed where he was and tried to deflect the next blow. Pulling back his arm, he slapped the woman hard across the face. As his body twisted with the momentum, he heard more than saw her glasses land somewhere. By the time Moses tightened his muscles for the next jump, the woman had begun to cry.

“They’re still standing there,” Thembinkosi said.

“More keep coming,” Nozipho added. “They’re going to a lot of trouble. How many do you think there are?”

“By this point? I’ve seen about fifteen of them. Maybe more.”

“And then there’s the ones you probably haven’t seen. Shit.”

“But why are they standing around here of all places?”

“I was wondering that, too,” Nozipho agreed. Outside, the older white man had gathered several uniformed guards around him. He was giving orders. “I think this has to be the central street through the gated community.”

“I’d stay up at the exit.”

“Another group is probably already set up there.”

“And you think the rest of them are staying around here because this is the main street.”

“Can you think of any other reason?”

“Shit,” Thembinkosi said. “Then it’s a good thing we did that with the clothes.”

“What should we do? Head straight for the exit?”

“Straight for the exit.”

“Now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if something goes wrong?”

“What could go wrong?”

Nozipho had to think about this for a second. “Well… If the security people know this area, they might know that we don’t live here.”

“So? We could be visiting.”

“But what if they know that these people…” Nozipho hesitated. “Look around. They don’t have any black friends!”

“Fine. Then we’re business partners.”

“And what kind of business are these people in?”

Thembinkosi considered this for a moment. “We might be buying a car from them.”

“Okay,” Nozipho concurred. “We could be doing that. It might work.”

“Regardless, we won’t have to justify anything. We’re simply two people who have walked out of this house and want to go somewhere else. For example, to the exit.”

“But if we just bought a car from them… Why are we walking?”

Gerrit van Lange stood on the street that ran through the center of the gated community and thought about the fact he was slowly getting too old for situations like this. Not because he couldn’t get the upper hand anymore. He was an old hat at this, experienced in the struggles for physical safety and undamaged property. He had been through more than enough of these stories. But what could he do? He was still a few years away from retirement. And he had no training to do anything except the job he currently had. Security. When you managed a security company, you couldn’t simply retrain for something else.

His phone rang.

“What’s going on?”

Van Lange listened, interjecting an occasional “Yes!” He rolled his eyes at the people gathered around and watching him. He then exhaled through his lips and added one more “Yes!” When the conversation eventually came to an end, he added an “Uiuiuiuiui!”

He walked over to his car and picked up the radio receiver. Pressed the button: “Listen everyone. Our suspect is back on the run. He’s about twenty years old. In jeans and a yellow t-shirt. A conspicuous afro.” Van Lange paused. After this incident, he would need to instruct his people to knuckle down a little harder for a few weeks. Until he started to get calls from people complaining about rough treatment. Or about friends or relatives who had been harassed or asked to show their IDs. To hell with that! “We have no idea,” he continued, “how long he’s been in here, but we do know the following: He broke in a house and stole jewelry and cash. A pretty good haul. He then tried to rape a woman.” Van Lange took a moment to consider his next comment, but why should he hide it? “A white woman,” he added. “And then he brutally assaulted an older couple.”

He ended the radio connection. He should actually call the police. There was enough justification to do that. But from past experience, he knew his people’s attentiveness would wane as soon as they knew the cops were on their way. And besides, where the cops were concerned, you never really knew if they would show up.

He pressed the radio button again: “We will do everything to locate this criminal and bring him down. And… if you must use force… do it in God’s name.”

Moses felt pain in his back. The woman had hit him as hard as she could. He hadn’t done anything to either one of them. Maybe they knew the white woman in whose house he’d just been. Had she called them? Nonsense. Had they heard the screams? The distance was too far. He now had to get away from the outer wall, because there was only one way out of here. One which led away from the wall. One more leap, and he would return to the street to run. That was easier and would go faster.