Hostile Territory (A Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free PDF Page B

afraid of anything. They made me the leader of one of their units and we went out on raids every night. We burned many villages and killed many, many people. Sometimes we drank their blood.’
    ‘Why did you do that?’ asked Shepherd.
    ‘We were told it would make us even stronger. Sometimes we ate their hearts too. Killing became as easy to me as breathing - I felt no sympathy, no pity for anyone. We captured boys and young girls who were hiding from us in the huts and made them carry the things we stole back to our base and we shot them if they tried to run away.
    ‘When we were not fighting, we smoked marijuana and snorted brown-brown.’
    Shepherd looked at Laurence. ‘Brown-brown?’
    ‘It’s cocaine mixed with gunpowder,’ she said. ‘The rebels think that it has mystical properties but really it is just another way of maintaining control over the children.’
    ‘There was always brown-brown on a table inside the hut where we kept the guns and ammunition,’ the boy continued. ‘I took it every day. I didn’t sleep for days on end. I became so crazed that I think even the leaders were frightened of me.  Eventually I went to my hut and fell asleep. Even then I dreamed that I was killing enemies. The noise of firing was deafening. When I opened my eyes, I found that it was no dream. I was on my feet, my rifle in my hands, and I had emptied the magazine into the hut. My friends Buzita and Musa were lying there, covered in blood.’ Tears were trickling down his cheeks as he spoke, and Laurence put an arm around him. ‘I dropped my rifle,’ he said. ‘I ran out of the hut and just kept running and running. The others fired at me, I think, but they did not hit me. I ran for hours until I could run no more and then I collapsed. I don’t remember anything else until I came round here.’ He turned and buried his face in Laurence’s chest. She rubbed his back, between the shoulders.
     ‘He was close to death when he was brought to us,’ Laurence said. ‘He was malnourished and severely dehydrated and already suffering severe withdrawal symptoms from the drugs, but we nursed him back to health and he helps us now. When other boy soldiers are brought in, they often don’t trust us. For understandable reasons, they regard all adults with suspicion, but Abiola can talk to them in their own language, tell them about his own experiences and win their confidence. It’s a very long process to help them recover from what they’ve been through. The children are so indoctrinated that they even talk like soldiers. I’ve heard boys as young as eight talking about “rations” rather than food, and if they feel happy - and that doesn’t happen very often - they talk about having “good morale”. They die on the battlefield in droves of course but the survivors are told that the others died because they had bad thoughts or had done bad deeds.’
    She thanked Abiola and sent him back to his work, then turned to face Shepherd. ‘It’s great that you want to help Baraka and the other children at Biramayo, and we’ll do what we can, but to be honest, even when there was peace here, we were already almost overwhelmed. Sleeping sickness, river blindness and malaria are endemic, and the tsetse flies and mosquitoes kill as many people as the rebels’ She sighed mournfully.  ‘A third of the entire population is displaced. The number of people missing at least one limb runs into tens of thousands. An entire generation has been robbed of their childhood and left with physical and psychological scars that will never entirely heal.’ She placed her hand on Shepherd’s arm. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say this because I’ve always thought of myself as a pacifist, but the greatest service you could do for Baraka and Abiola, and all the other boys and girls here would be to wipe out the men who are brutalising, raping and killing them.’
     ‘And I never thought I’d hear a charity worker and someone from