Norman Rush - Mortals

Something was bothering him.

It was the crank. The crank would make him look like an organ grinder. That would be the first impression. He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him.

He had to get rid of the crank. When he appeared he would just hold his fist in a significant way at the side of the bundle and that would do it. It would have to.

He brought the rifle up onto the step he was standing on and got it between his left leg and the casing, holding it there by pressing his weight against it. With his right hand free, he pulled at the crank. It was difficult. He had done an excellent job of jamming it in among the tapework.

A wavering shadow fell over him as he struggled. He looked up.

It was too literary, or did he mean Gothic? There seemed to be a bird of prey, a vulture, clutching the rim of the opening at the top of the staircase, looking down at him, raising and lowering its wings, shivering them. It was small. Vultures were bigger. It must be a buzzard.

He wasn’t afraid. Everything was extreme. He was out of his element.

Because of the brightness he was staring up into he was getting more an impression of the beast than a clear image of it. A string of liquid dripped down from the bird, narrowly missing him. It was vile, whatever it was.

The crank he had been worrying and tugging at came free just then and he flung it underhand as hard as he could, blindly, in the direction of the bird. He hit the thing. It made a feminine-sounding utterance and jerked away and was gone.

Ray continued climbing. He felt urgency. He wanted Quartus. He wanted to bet someone that Quartus was there for him, on the roof.

He crawled out onto the roof. He had his rifle with him. He had dragged it up subtly behind him and now it was with him. The sky was very bright. The roof was a burning plain of white pebbles enclosed by a low ornamental parapet with regularly spaced embrasures, like the roofline of a medieval castle. The parapet was seamless along the edge of the roof.

He looked around as well as he could, keeping flat.

There were veins of smoke in the sky. Before, there had been streams of smoke, sheets of it.

He could see something of where he was and he was in luck. This sector of the roof, at the midpoint of the long transverse connecting the outward wings, was in the hands of the witdoeke. That much he could tell. He was in the midst of a group of witdoeke-wearing fighters, for which he thanked God. He was among them but to the rear of their main position. He counted about a dozen, exactly a dozen, fighters.

The pebbles were burning hot. He needed gloves. He needed water, also.

The fighters were disposed in an arc to his left, west-facing. They were utilizing everything available to them for cover while they fired. The shooting was sporadic but too loud when it came, too loud for him. These were his friends, shooting.

The core of the position was a complex of low-built galvanized iron utility sheds and a pair of absurdly large wooden water tanks set on a raised concrete foundation. No one was paying the least attention to him. The position they were defending was highly improvised. Men were dodging around, firing or just aiming, from beside the service sheds, from behind piled-up sacks of gypsum, if he was reading the lettering on one of the sacks correctly. One of the three sheds had been half kicked down and its siding appropriated and jammed in among the struts supporting the water tanks, augmenting the cover provided by the waist-high concrete base under the tanks. It was all very motley and ragged and people would have to be careful when they shot past their own forward positions.

He had to see more. He stood up. This was the obvious choice for a defensive position. The rooftop ran away blankly, featurelessly, on either hand all the way to the ends of the wings, so far as he could tell.

He wanted to see who was here. He wanted to shake people by the hand and tell them they were doing well, putting up a good fight, which seemed to be the case. He needed to introduce himself.

Standing, he could see where the villains were. They were around the elbow of the building and out at the end of the western wing, collected together there behind their own improvised barricade of ammunition lockers. He thought he saw Nemesis, but he couldn’t be sure because of the distance, which had to be at least a hundred yards, and because of the heat-shimmer rising from the roof. He thought he could see some heavy weapons, tripod-mounted machine guns. They were more exposed than the witdoeke, but the range of their weapons was superior. He realized that having to fire at an angle toward the center disadvantaged the villains because they had to thread their fire through the crenellated parapet at two points.

Someone was yelling at him. He couldn’t tell who.

He decided to kneel. That would be nonthreatening. The roof surface was littered with spent shells. The witdoeke were miscellaneously armed. Some had hunting rifles but most were using assault rifles, the ones with the curved magazines whose name escaped him. He wondered where the witdoeke had gotten them. He had paid poor attention during firearms training at the agency and now he regretted it, but not much. He didn’t know if people were shouting at him, to him, he meant, or about him, to one another. There was a lot of shouting.

Someone was gesturing violently at him from beside one of the sheds. He raised his hands over his head. He hoped that was what they wanted.

He had a theory of what had happened with the villains. They were stuck. His theory was that originally they had gone up and installed themselves on that part of the roof in order to rain fire on attackers coming from the direction of the pan. And that would have been an ideal site for an emplacement. But then somehow Kerekang had gotten a team into the building and up onto the roof by stealth. And now the villains had their backs to the pan, from which some light gunfire was still proceeding. And something was keeping them from rappeling down the building, which surely they were equipped to do, although possibly not. But of course that would mean abandoning equipment they couldn’t let fall into Ichokela’s hands, Kerekang’s people’s hands. And then likeliest of all was that Kerekang had shooters on the ground close enough to make rappeling unthinkable. That was his theory of the situation.

He thought he should push his rifle farther away from him. He leaned toward it, reaching, which led to actual screaming from some of the witdoeke. He was being misunderstood. He had wanted to give a reassuring sign.

“Dumela,” he shouted.

He pointed at his forehead. “Witdoek, ke witdoek,” he shouted.

Someone came up behind him and pressed a gun barrel into his back.

Impulsively, he stood up and turned around.

A young man, a boy, really, was pointing a pump-action shotgun at him. He was in a state of alarm and confusion. He was retreating a few steps. Ray realized he knew the boy, from the university. He was wearing bush shorts, and a tee shirt from the main craft shop in the capital. It was a sky-blue tee shirt and bore the legend Keep Botswana Tidy. Iris had bought three of those shirts to give as presents. The young man was wearing his witdoek, like his comrades. I would like to have comrades, Ray thought.

Ray said, “Dumela, rra. I believe I know you from university. I am a teacher, rra. I am from St. James’s. Ke mang St. James’s.”

The boy was thin. The combat boots he was wearing belonged on sturdier legs than his. It was wrong for this boy to be here. It was altogether wrong. He had to do something. The boy was moving further back. He slid the pump action forward and back. Obviously it was the bundle on Ray’s chest. It had to be that.

Ray slapped the bundle, prompting the young man to drop to a crouch, a firing stance.