Francesco Mazzotta - Cellular Activity

“Good, good, you stupid beast! Help me getting hold of it”, shouts Wahid.

However, there is no way to calm the animal. It’s only after blindfolding it that the three can put the old man on its back, securing his body with leather straps.

“The animals are nervous, perhaps for the fire and this stench… Let’s hurry and leave. And you, Ahmed, keep that little bastard away, its growls are getting on my nerves.”

The small caravan heads for the desert, on that time of magic and restlessness when the sun has gone down and the violet sky on the horizon gets tinged with pink and orange shades.

The silence is broken only by the grunts of dromedaries, whose irritation doesn’t subside despite the group moving away from the accident site.

Wahid is talking: “Yidir, you said you’ve seen something over there…”

Yidir broods for a while before giving voice to his thoughts. “Yes, it’s true. I have no idea what it was, but whatever it was… I’ve never seen anything as absolutely disgusting as that. It looked like a piece of carved wood, a kind of statue. There were arms… legs… heads of people and beasts…”

Yidir waits, as if to find the right words, “… but they were wrong, you know? Distorted. Put together as if they were a single body. And you know what’s the worst thing? They seemed alive.”

“What do you mean by that?!? Did they move?”

“No, no, not moving, thank God, but… Whatever. Don’t talk about it anymore. I really hope I never see such a thing again in my life.”

Meanwhile, Ahmed keeps walking, even if it’s dark. The sand beneath his soles is still very hot. He has moved away from the group, because he is slower and to keep away the dog, which keeps growling nervously to the others.

“Easy”, he murmurs to the animal. “It’s just an old man, speaking an incomprehensible language that we can’t understand. He’s also badly injured, he can’t hurt us anyway.”

Suddenly, a blinding light turns on in the darkness, right in front of the group that precedes the boy a few tens of meters.

Obeying his instincts, Ahmed rushes to get down, frightened, hiding behind a small dune. The dog snaps toward the lights, he can’t do anything to stop his pet.

Voices…

Shouts…

Ahmed leans just enough to see what’s going on, but the intense lights make his vision blurred and indistinct.

There are at least two cars, maybe jeeps. He already has seen one of them in the past and once he was allowed to take a ride, along with his brother and other villagers. That was the first time he had seen men who didn’t belong to his own people. They had pale skin, blond hair… and a car! Mohamed-the-Elder told him they were crazy people, men and women who used to challenge the desert just for curiosity, to have fun watching the world with those little boxes that capture the images. His personal way of defining tourists or explorers.

“What kind of fun is there in the desert?”, asked the elder. Ahmed, however, had a different opinion when later they took him on board for a quick run up and down the dunes.

The hoarse voices he hears now have nothing in common with the kind and smiling men he had met that time. The two cars, which are now a few tens of meters in front of him, don’t seem to carry friendly people. The voices have a sense of violence, shouting orders, but Ahmed is far away and he can get only a few sentences.

Those few words, however, let him understand the situation: they are what Mohamed called mavericks with weapons .

The old man’s words resonate in the minds of Ahmed: “… they are people without understanding. They only believe to the nonsense of those who sell them weapons, and they go around killing in the name of a God they don’t know anything about. A man can kill for his land, for his family, but not for God. What kind of God may ever be the one who needs men to kill other men? ”

Ahmed shakes his head, to wipe away that memory and focus on the present.

He seems to understand that the newcomers want to take away the survivor, but Wahid and Yidir refuse to deliver him. The discussion degenerates. There are some long and critical moments. Ahmed hears sudden shouts, immediately followed by the terrible sound of automatic weapons. The boy lowers his head behind the dune, torn between the will to see what is happening, concerned about the fate of his brother and his friends, and the fear and the survival instinct that makes him keep his head down.

The dog is gone, rushed forward, fading into the glare of the headlights on the cars.

The gunfire ceases as quickly as it started. Nobody screams anymore. The men talk rapidly, their voice is too low and far away to be understood by Ahmed. Hidden behind the small dune, the boy sees the light beams rotating in the air, while the noise of the jeeps begins to fade, along with the barking of the dog.

Only then, trembling and with his skin wet with cold sweat, Ahmed finds the courage to stand up and walk.

The two cars are already small light spots that move quickly away into the night.

The boy walks unsteadily at first, then his pace become quicker with every step, as a terrible feeling makes its way into his heart due to the sudden and total silence. He runs toward some dark figures that stand motionless on the lighter sand, under the light of dusk. Without him realizing it, tears begin to slip on his face, sticking to the fabric of his targui . After a seemingly endless run, short of breath and still in tears, Ahmed reaches the small group of friends on the ground.

Nobody moves, nobody speaks. The stench left by the unknown firearms, mixed with the sweet smell of blood and the sickening stench of the feces of dead humans and animals floats around in the air.

The dromedaries are on ground too, lifeless. Ahmed kneels beside the still warm body of Yidir. His wide open eyes stare at the sky. The boy shakes his older brother to awaken him, screaming, crying…

His sobs are lost in the infinite indifference of an unknown desert.

Emily Moore looks at the endless darkness outside the window with a worried stare, without actually seeing anything. She’s nervous, everything happened too fast, like an ocean wave that catches you and scrambles you when you don’t expect it. She closes her eyes, the last events’ sequence plays in her mind as a high-speed film.

A helicopter hasted to pick her up only few hours earlier, landing on the heliport on the roof of the headquarter of the government agency where she is employed as a researcher for emergency threats where biological weapons are involved.

The section was established in the wake of the measures undertaken by the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which became operational with President H.W. Bush in May 1990. Despite her young age, she is currently directing the operating units of one entire section. She has humble origins, and she has always worked hard, since she was barely more than a child, often forgetting about sleeping, eating, or having true social relations. She graduated two years ahead of the average of her faculty mates and she has always received the highest ratings, also in the many subsequent post-graduate courses she attended.

Sometimes, in the rare moments when she tries to have a break, her thoughts take her in flights of fancy.

Meeting a man, raising a family or just hanging out with friends…

Yes, but which ones?

She simply doesn’t have any, except for some former classmates with whom she exchanges banal phone calls once a year. Job and research are everything to her and, when she’s busy in her laboratory to sequence long DNA chains, time stops flowing normally.