ISSN 1758-6488
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Sudan Fiction |
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He ran back to the truck. He needed to run, needed to feel that rush of blood in his legs, his heart beating like a steam-engine. When Johnny saw him, he threw his cigarette out the window and started the truck.
“What’s the matter, Mister?”
“Let’s go,” Brady said.
“Someone out there?”
“No,” he said as he opened the truck door. “No. Let’s just go.”
“You had me scared there a minute.” He laughed. “Almost pissed my pants.”
Using duct tape, Brady fastened the roll of film up in the electrical wire underneath the dashboard. They could have the other rolls, but he wasn’t about to lose this one.
“You worry too much,” Johnny said.
The sun was orange and broke apart in ribbons as it touched the horizon. Brady imagined it dropping into the Red Sea, spitting steam as it extinguished in the deep. Then that settling darkness fell once again, a darkness he could feel in the muscles of his body, in his blood, like it was being poured into his ear. Things were catching up to him, he could really feel it.
To the west a fire burned, not the release fires of the derricks, but a glowing inferno that pumped orange out on the desert floor. Above were blinking beacons doing circles in the sky—helicopters, probably.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Johnny looked towards the flames. “SPLA got a rig, looks like.”
Brady watched the fire; it throbbed and burst, simmered and burst again. From here the explosions were silent and the burning rig danced across the sky with the dip and rise of the road. He was tired, tired beyond speed.
“What the fuck’s wrong with people?” he heard himself ask Johnny.
Johnny lit a cigarette, his face briefly illuminated in the flame.
He laughed. “Good question,” he said. “A damn good question.”
When they reached the roadblock, the soldiers didn’t bother with a search. The man with the passport handed it to Brady. Brady thought he smelled a whiff of aftershave on the soldier.
“See, Mister,” Johnny said. “Not so dangerous as it seems.”
In Khartoum, Brady sent the pictures off immediately. He picked up a bottle of Canadian Club in the hotel lobby and drank it in his room while he watched his air-conditioner window unit drip water onto the floor. At midnight he called Samantha. The phone rang four times before the machine answered.
5
