staring upward, eyes wide with fear.
She tracked her own gaze in the direction they were looking and saw the plane at once, a black, slow-moving fleck against the starlit sky. For a second, she allowed herself to believe it was just a transport plane-a small Cessna ferrying aid workers back to Abeche, perhaps. Or a medical-supply flight making the daily run to Al-Geneina. Even as she considered these possibilities, though, she could hear-and sense-the panic rising around her.
The refugees had no room in their psyches for denial. It had been scoured from their inner landscapes by hard experience, leaving them with a keen, stark acceptance of reality. They knew what kind of plane this was. More to the point, they knew what was coming, and they had reacted with incredible speed. Hundreds were pouring out of their makeshift shelters, and some were already running toward the rear of the camp, their children and a few meager possessions caught up in their arms.
Frozen with dread and horror, Lily saw Beckett, the camp’s doctor, stumble out of the building, a backpack slung over his right shoulder. As he looked up at the plane circling overhead, he did a slow, strange kind of pirouette, his mouth agape. Then his eyes came back to ground level, and he looked around wildly. For a second Lily didn’t understand what he was doing. Then, as she looked on in sheer disbelief, he took off running, sprinting ahead of the steady stream of people running for the back side of the camp. The two nurses were just a few steps behind him.
“Hey!” she screamed, fighting to be heard over the general panic. “Hey, where are you going?”
She chased after the three fleeing aid workers, but there were too many people moving in the same direction, and she couldn’t break through the crowd. The screams were deafening: parents shouting for their children to hurry, children howling for parents they had lost in the crowd, and Lily’s own cries of outrage, all directed at the fleeing Americans. “Where are you going?” she shouted again. “Where are you…What are you doing? Come back!”
But she was wasting her breath-they had already moved out of earshot. Lily swore in an undertone, then turned and started toward the hospital, dodging the few people in her way. No one was moving in this direction. She could not believe what she had just seen. Beckett and the two nurses had abandoned their patients without a moment’s hesitation. The full measure of their cowardice was staggering, but the worst part was that they knew the consequences of their actions. By running, they were leaving the refugees behind to be slaughtered.
The first bomb hit when she was 10 feet from the building’s entrance. Even though she had been waiting for it, the impact still came as a shock and nearly threw her off her feet. A cloud of flames erupted somewhere off to her left, and she turned in time to see a pair of bodies hurled into the air. The sound came a split second later, a hollow boom that reverberated in her chest, and she heard the screams rise into the smoke-filled air as she sprinted the last few feet, flinging herself through the open door and into the hospital.
Once inside, she steadied herself and looked around desperately, trying to impose a measure of sense on the chaotic scene. Some of the patients had tried to flee, but most did not have the strength. The moment they’d climbed out of bed, they had collapsed to the floor…and that was where they were lying now. A number of them were completely motionless, while others were writhing around and crying out for help.
She went to the nearest, an elderly Fur man trying to claw his way free of the mosquito netting wrapped round his body. She quickly pulled it away from his flailing limbs, murmuring words of reassurance the whole time. Then she lifted him off the floor, shocked as always by how easy it was. All skin and bones, he couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds.
Gently getting him onto the empty bed, Lily moved on to the next person. As she attended to each patient, she was all too aware of the terrible, earsplitting sounds outside-the crump of the falling bombs was loud enough to cover the screams of the wounded, but she could still hear their cries in the short, ominous gaps between concussive blasts. And despite the horror of the aerial assault, she knew that the worst was yet to come. When the bombs stopped falling, the Janjaweed would move in, burning everything in their path, killing anyone left alive.
Part of her knew that her efforts were futile-that everything she was doing to help these people would be wasted in the end. But even as these thoughts entered her mind, she kept working steadily. She didn’t know for how long. Five minutes, ten, time was a measureless thing for her, distilled to a charged, frantic now.
Lost as she was in what she was doing, it took Lily a while to realize that something had changed. She stopped and looked up, listening hard. A quiet, quavering voice to her left startled her back to an awareness of her situation, and she turned to the person who’d spoken the words.
Limya Sanoasi was sitting upright in her bed, her small hands folded in her lap. Her broken left leg, one of the many injuries she’d sustained in the recent raid on her village, was hidden beneath a threadbare blanket. The blanket was still smooth and tucked in at the corners. Lily was struck by the fact that she hadn’t even tried to run.
“It’s the bombs,” Limya repeated in English. Her solemn face was unnaturally calm; only her voice hinted at the true level of fear she was feeling. “That is what you are listening for.”
“They’ve stopped,” Lily whispered.
“Yes. The plane is gone, but the men will follow. You must go now.”
Lily stared back at the girl for a long moment, intensely aware of the sounds outside the building. She could hear the militiamen’s laughter and occasional bursts of gunfire mingled with the blood-curdling screams of the refugees who hadn’t escaped in time.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she finally said. She did her best to sound calm and assured, but her eyes slipped away when she spoke again. “Al-Bashir is afraid of my country, Limya. He is afraid of our army. They won’t hurt you if I stand in their way, I promise. They wouldn’t dare to-”
“You’re wrong,” the girl said. Her voice was quiet but certain, and Lily felt a sudden tremor of doubt. “They will kill you. They will kill everyone, and there is nothing more you can do. You should leave now.”
Lily didn’t shift her gaze from the girl, but her eyes glazed over as she struggled to take sane, logical stock of her choices-or some approximation of it amid the fundamentally insane circumstances confronting her. On one level, she felt a primitive, almost overpowering urge to run, and she hated herself for it. At the same time, what more could she do?
Fair enough question, she thought. She had stayed behind at this crucial moment, stayed true to her principles, and she had tried to help them. Wasn’t that enough? Could she really stop what was going to happen here? Even delay it? Or would she just be another lamb to the slaughter?
Limya seemed to sense what was running through her head. “Go,” she repeated. Her voice was little more than a whisper, her brown eyes damp, wide, and imploring. “Please.”
Lily Durant cast one last desperate glance at the door, but she had already made her decision.
“I can’t,” she said quietly. She locked eyes with the girl again, and this time her gaze was steady. “I won’t leave you.”
A look of profound sadness crossed the teenager’s face. She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and murmured a few words in Zaghawa. At that moment the first of several figures appeared in the door, blocking the last remaining route of escape. When she heard them enter, Lily took a deep breath, stood, and turned to face them. She had just set her feet when the first one reached her on the run.
She didn’t see the punch coming. It simply arrived, landing high on her right cheek, splitting the skin to the bone. Stunned by the sheer force of the blow, she stumbled back and raised her hands in self-defense. But it was no use; they were just too strong.
The beating that followed was both methodical and completely merciless. They slapped her face, pulled her hair, and tore the clothes from her body. She felt a pair of hands groping her bare breasts and pried them loose with all her strength, or tried getting them off her, crying out in rage and revulsion. Then they wrestled her to the floor- five of them, six, maybe more than that crowding over and around her, mobbing her, too many of them to fight. Somewhere in the distance she could hear Limya and a few others begging them to stop, but the assault continued, their fists raining down from above, their boots pounding relentlessly into her ribs. Even as the world seemed to fade around her, she forced herself to stay conscious. For what, she didn’t know. But some stubborn inner voice told her to keep fighting.
She turned onto her right side and tightened into a ball, trying to make herself a smaller target. That only seemed to enrage them further. A particularly vicious kick to the base of her spine caused her back to arch, and her arms and legs sprung open, as if of their own accord. Her assailants were quick to take advantage. One man dropped down on top of her, pinning her splayed arms and legs to the floor, and the others moved in on either side to await their turn.
At that moment a single shot penetrated the chaos. The hands moved away, and the men holding her down
