Paul Theroux - O-Zone

It was Mr. Blue, one of his quiet orders. The boy obeyed.

"I don't hear anything," he said. "They're not signaling."

Mr. Blue sighed and said, "I can sense them there. . and there" — perhaps he was motioning. Fisher could not see the man's hands in the dark.

Fisher said, "Who?" and regretted it as soon as he spoke.

"Night crawlers."

The words gave him a sight of fat-faced beasts sliding toward him on smears of body slime. He knew exactly what he wanted: a hook to reach him and get him out of here and swing him to safety, and a jet-rotor with blasters and howlers, to strafe and plummet and hover.

He was looking up, searching the sky for the rescue party, when the attack came. Nothing happened, and then everything happened.

His first feeling was that they had come to save him. He wanted to see Hooper, but instead it was a pack of Diggers. It was such a nightmare of assault that he could not grasp the whole of it. He was pushed back into his dream again, and struggling to wake up from the fright of those hairy faces and the tumult and the thudding of their feet and their yells. It was so much worse in the dark, that motion and sound, and only the smallest glimpse of the attackers.

They had sneaked up behind the northern side of the ridge and overwhelmed the sleepers while the sentries' backs were turned — looking down as the Diggers dropped onto them from a higher ledge. Who would have expected them to scale the far side of that sheer cliff? Fisher watched from between his pair of boulders as Mr. Blue and Echols threw themselves at the Diggers and flung their nets high, trying to snare them. It was confusion: they were hardly visible, a jumble of bodies and ropes. And then there were gasping cries.

"Where is he?"

"Grab him!"

But who was shouting and who did they want? Soon no answer was necessary, because there were no more cries. There were grunts. There were terrible noises — the sickening chop of bone hit by a rock or a club, the odd pulping noise of ax blades on flesh, and startled gasps of either the attackers or their victims. That was the pity of it — there were no demons in the darkness, they were all blundering animals, fighting an animal fight, using their claws and fists to bruise each other's flesh.

"Lift the nets!"

But apparently the nets were no good — it was too dark, the attackers too agile.

"Don't shoot — take him alive," a grunting man said— surely a Digger?

"Push them back," Mr. Blue said. "Get them at the edge."

This had all taken moments — ten seconds, no more. It was all fury. The fighting in the darkness was still strangely dreamlike and primitive, like people struggling against drowning in a dark sea. Fisher stuck his weapon out of the boulders, and then was shoved to the ground.

"Stay down," someone hissed at him, and swung him aside. That was Echols — that whisper, that smell.

Fisher thought he was lost, then realized he was safely back between his boulders.

"Take the beam," he said, and held it out until it was snatched from his hand.

It was a simple weapon, the thickness of a baton, the length of a cane, a funnel on its muzzle, its works in a small box. But as soon as he had surrendered it Fisher became hysterical and began screaming.

"Nuke them! Nuke them! Nuke them!"

There was a flash — not the beam itself but the man it hit as he died in a flare of light. It struck and spread, and in that fire he saw a man melt so fast he could not tell whether it was a Digger or not. The particle beam itself was noiseless, innocent-seeming even; yet its victim hissed and crackled in a lumpy corpse of blackening fat.

In the light of the burning man were upraised arms, and twenty startled faces. The beam had frightened everyone, because no one knew for sure who had fired it and who had died. That puzzlement produced an odd chastened pause, and a greater darkness, and then an explosion of leaping light, the meteorite of a Digger's tracer misfiring in a soundless streak over their heads.

Fisher had put on his helmet and gloves and buried himself in the boulders' crack. Looking out, he could see in the bright silence of another tracer Echols holding the particle beam, and the Diggers backing up, and several bodies twisted on the ground.

He did not recognize any of the Diggers, He guessed from their irons that they were troopers or warriors of some kind, but their clumsy irons were no match for the particle beam. One Digger was burned in the act of raising his flare to aim, and another went up like a torch exploding into flame. Both burning Diggers became simpler silhouettes of themselves, smoldering black and falling. And soon the attack collapsed. The next moment Fisher heard the fading sounds of the Diggers scrambling away and jumping from the ridge. They leapt into the darkness and disappeared.

"They got Martlet," someone said.

"Give me a light," someone else said. "I think they got Tinia, too."

"Broke open her head."

In the ensuing silence, Fisher realized that he had not been harmed, and hyperventilating, he began gasping, "We nuked them with my beam!"

"If it hadn't been for you we wouldn't have needed the beam."

He could have killed Gumbie for saying that, and yet he knew he had been responsible. The Diggers had come for him, and three had been burned and the rest driven away. But was he really to blame?

"It's your fault," he said, and then screamed, "You stole me!"

Seeing their faces near him, angry, and with the gleam of the fighting still on them, he became alarmed.

"You saved me," he said.

That night gave Fisher the soundest sleep he had had since being abducted. It was more than the satisfaction that he had an efficient weapon. It was the sense that, faced with the chance of getting rid of him, they had fought for him and protected him. Martlet had hated him, but Martlet was dead. That was another cause for relief. He had been afraid of the black man, his mockery, his cruelty. He thought: That alien wanted me to die.

He woke up and wanted to thank them. He did not know the words for his feelings of gratitude. He felt the desire to speak this foreign language, but he was tongue-tied — simply making mewing noises.

Hearing him, someone struck open a light, and the glare obliterated every face. But the blaze remained like an unanswered question.

Fisher said, "I'm glad you saved me."

He spoke into the blinding light. He tried again.

"I'm glad I'm alive."

It was the nearest he had ever come to saying thank you.

Mr. Blue's voice became audible behind the light.

"We don't care about you. We fought for our own sake. This is our own land."

In Fisher's mind this statement was proof that, no matter how they seemed in their actions, underneath it all they were savages.

They buried Martlet and Tinia the following day. Most of the others had spent half the night digging — the savages used axes for that, too. There were no coffins, no shrouds, no coverings. The corpses were stripped and the clothes and weapons — and the few possessions — of the dead people were distributed equally by Mr. B among the remaining members of the group. Fisher watched without sharing.

In New York he had seen cremations and funerals on television — the death of old grandfather Allbright had been a spectacular ritual of pompous mourning, one of Fisher's earliest memories. He still laughed when he remembered Hardy's and Hooper's superstitious stage-managing of the occasion. They had hired buglers and black rotors and they had spent millions to ensure that the ashes could not be stolen from the vault.

This burial at dawn on the hillside in the alien quarter of O-Zone was almost perfunctory. But this was more like it: naked corpses, no worshiping, no tears. All life was gone from the bodies, all hope: no promises, no blessings, nothing false was said. It was not a celebration of any kind but rather a ceremony of concealment, but a plain one, like a form of planting.