Ian McDonald - Chaga

Haran smiled. It was like the skin peeling back from a skull.

‘Fetch the visa,’ he said to Leathercoat. To Mombi he said, ‘Now you show yourself for the fool you have always been. There is nothing here for us, can you understand that?’

‘The fool is the one who thinks he can run from the Chaga forever,’ Mombi said. ‘It will catch you in the end. That is why you will stay with me, Haran. You will come with me into the Chaga. There is a new network growing in there; its mesh is fullerene carbon, not optical fibre, but it can still feed fisherman with the skill to cast it and trawl its rich catch. You will work with me, Haran. We will reclaim everything that has been taken from us. We will succeed beyond all our dreams of greatness. It is the future in there. To stay out here is to be pushed into the past. You will not make it out here, Haran. There is nothing left out here but more and more of this. You should thank me, that I still offer you this after you try to betray me.’

Leathercoat cautiously placed two sheets of paper on the glass table top.

‘Put them in the box,’ Gaby said. ‘Give the box to me.’

‘Go now,’ Mombi said. ‘Get your friend out of the country, since he has decided he must go. Haran will not harm you. You are under my protection now.’

Gaby lifted the Ethiopic scripture case one-handed and cautiously backed along the balcony. The gun was fluttering now. The pain in her right arm was incredible.

‘Go!’ Mombi ordered.

Gaby turned and ran. She ran through the back rooms, and through the Cascade Club where the bar staff washed glasses and the boys played down in the pit. She ran down the steep street stairs. She met a posseboy coming up. She shouted at him, waved the big gun. He flattened himself against the wall as she exploded out onto the street and saw a phalanx of camouflaged picknis and army surplus APCs advancing down the street.

She stopped dead. The vehicles stopped dead. The wind stirred the lion’s head Black Simba cartel banners on their pennons and aerials. The door of the lead pickni opened. A black man wearing a fluorescent orange jacket stepped out.

‘It seems that you do not need John Wayne and the 7th Cavalry to come over the hill to rescue you,’ Faraway said. ‘But I think they are going to come over the hill anyway, because they have wrongs to right.’

Gaby ran and hit him like a free kick from the edge of the box. Faraway held on to her. He had always been a better goalkeeper than his cool allowed. He whirled her away through the battle lines as the Black Simbas advanced on the Cascade Club.

‘I got it,’ Gaby said, holding up the scripture case. ‘The visa. I got it.’ Then the shakes started. Faraway just caught the scripture case in time. He took Gaby to the main street and through the crowds of spectators hoping to see blood to a coffee stall. He bought her sweet milky Kenyan chai and sat her on the kerb until she could talk through the shivering. He eased the gun out of her hand, looked at it, set it aside.

‘I got out, Faraway,’ Gaby whispered. ‘I got Tembo’s visa back. Mombi made him give it to me. Don’t let them hurt Mombi, she saved me. They can do what they like to Haran.’

The sound of heavy automatic weapon fire came from across the avenue, and was answered by the short flat barks of shotguns and hand pieces.

Day Zero.

The crowd outside the gates on the airport road had been the worst Gaby had ever seen, but she had managed to push the Landcruiser and its passengers through, past the soldiers who looked as if they knew that they could only hold the wire so long. She had thought that once they were inside the airport it would be all right. She was wrong. The crowd inside the departures hall was worse.

They stood in the lobby between inner and outer doors. Tembo clutched his exit visa. Mrs Tembo clutched After-the-Rains. Sarah clutched her best doll; Etambele clutched her favourite toy, which was a matted furry pencil case. They stood with their identity badges pinned to their clothes and looked at the crowd. It was almost religious; so many people so close in such a confined space. Souls wedged in a glass and concrete box, awaiting exodus, or judgment.

‘Oh my God,’ Gaby said.

Doubtless important PA announcements went unheard and unheeded over the babel of voices in the concourse. The people were too densely packed to obey them.

‘There are people in white uniforms at the check-in desks,’ Faraway said, seeing over the heads of the crowd. ‘We have the camera with us, the News Team trick might work again.’

‘With children and luggage?’ Gaby asked. She took a deep breath to prepare herself for the annihilation of the crowd. Faraway plunged into the crowd, swinging one hundred thousand shillings of video camera like a riot baton. Tembo and his family tucked into his slip-stream. Gaby took the rearguard, waving a microphone and shouting, ‘SkyNet News team! Let us through, please!’ The way Faraway smiled as he elbowed you away from the check-in desk, you would feel he was doing you a personal favour.

‘Five to travel,’ he announced to the woman in UN white at the desk, who did not care if people jumped the queue as long as her ticket out was safe in the back pocket of her pants. She checked the exit visas and tapped information up on her screen. She took such a long time doing it that Gaby wanted to drag her out of her little booth and press any key, every key, that might do something. The woman studied the words on her screen for a long time, and the visa for a longer time. She took Tembo’s passport and examined it for the longest time. She checked the names of wife and children against the passport and the exit visas and the screen. She checked the photo badges against the passport and the visa and the screen. Then she gestured for them to put their bags on the scales. Baggage allowance on the relief flights was one piece each, adult and child. Tembo and Mrs Tembo had managed to reduce it all to two big cases, which they dragged, and a backpack for Sarah. Etambele had not wanted to be left out, so she had a backpack too, a little cloth one Mrs Tembo had sewn together. It held her dolls’ clothes, one dress and her washing things. Gaby did not think she could be so merciless with personal possessions. Take little, leave little, lose little was her professional motto. The UN woman looked at the bags, but did not move to weigh or tag them.

Gaby was about to scream.

Faraway was about to hit the woman with the camera.

Tembo was fidgeting from foot to foot.

Mrs Tembo was transfixed with a dread that had begun with the Skateboard Kid and would not end until she breathed in the clove breezes of Zanzibar.

Sarah and Etambele looked about to burst into tears.

The woman at the desk rattled through a box of rubber stamps, picked one and looked it. Then, so suddenly that everyone almost missed it, she stamped the visas, tagged the bags and printed out boarding cards.

Tembo beamed as if Jesus had touched his brow. Mrs Tembo hugged him, her children, Faraway, and even Gaby. Faraway shepherded people and bags through the departure gate.

Down on the field, the big Antonov mass lifters were wing-tip to wing-tip, winding black threads of refugees into their cargo bays. Blue-helmets with clip-boards waved the people along the edge of the apron. Gaby’s hair blew in the hot back blast from the taxiing airlifters. Tembo and Faraway fought with the suitcases. Mrs Tembo pressed the precious boarding passes closer to her than even After-the-Rains. Sarah and Etambele struggled determinedly onward with their back packs.

A blue helmet stopped the line while a plane moved off its stand onto the taxiway. He checked Tembo’s exit visa and Gaby and Faraway’s press cards and sent them to the next aircraft. It was a little An72F. It had a Cyrillic name stencilled on its side. Dostoinsuvo. Gaby knew it would be all right now. She could trust them to Oksana’s care, the shaven-headed, shaman-angel of the turbofans. A woman was standing at the foot of the tail ramp collecting boarding passes. And Gaby realized that this was it. They were leaving her. She hugged Tembo.