Time doesn’t slow down or stop or do anything particularly exotic, and Daniel certainly doesn’t think anything brave. His mind is still wallowing in disbelief, encumbered by some Western sense that certain things are not allowed to happen and other things certainly can’t happen to him, when the gunfire crashes through the heavy midday air. It is only then that he realizes one of the other fighters must have grabbed the barrel of the gun and jerked it upward, because they’re wrestling for the gun now and otherwise the inconceivable would already have happened: he would now be doubled over in the backseat with his chest cavity impossibly opened up and the darkness rushing in on him like some final eclipse of the sun.
Daniel watches it all numbly and without much fear, a few stumbling thoughts about whether this is going to hurt and what his family will think. Andre is curled up in the front seat with his hands up, palms outward, while the kid frantically starts explaining something and the rest of the fighters start racking their guns. Several of them seem to be arguing with each other. The kid who did the shooting is now at the windshield screaming. The commander is silent. It goes on for a while, the argument rising and falling until at times it seems like they might start shooting each other. Then their attention turns back to the car and things slide again toward the unthinkable.
Daniel sits in the backseat wondering dully if diving out of the car at the last moment would save him—no thought of Andre or the driver here, only raw survival—when he catches the commander’s eye. The commander seems to have reached some decision. He shakes his head and raises his pistol and steps up to the kid in the driver’s seat, who is still pleading his case. The kid is still talking when the commander puts the pistol to his head and the kid is still talking when the commander cocks the hammer back and the kid is still talking and not daring to look when the commander tells him to shut the fuck up and then in midsentence he shoots the kid in the head just like that.
The execution is oddly undramatic: the kid stops talking and falls over. The commander laughs, and the other fighters start laughing. The laughter is almost worse than the murder itself, and all Daniel can think is that the amount of blood coming out of the kid is unbelievable. It’s everywhere, rivering between the seats and puddling beneath his shoes and covering all of them and everything, even the fighters on the far side of the truck. There’s so much blood on Daniel that in his dull confusion he wonders if maybe he hasn’t been shot as well. He’s not dying, though, and Andre’s not dying—everything is the same except that the kid is hanging strangely in his seat and the entire world seems to be made of his blood.
“Jesus,” Andre finally says. “He didn’t have to do that.”
They almost have to kill us now, Daniel thinks. That line has been crossed, and it’s easier to kill us than not to. The fighters glance at one another, and then one of them steps backwards. Another one backs up, and then a third, a widening circle studded with black little holes. This isn’t happening. Daniel feels his body go to wood.
“Just a minute,” Andre says loudly, no shake to his voice at all.
The fighters exchange looks. Daniel is too numb to be interested in what Andre is going to say. His tongue feels thick as a piece of wood and his vision has started to go dark around the edges. He watches Andre’s hands find refuge around his camera, automatic reflexes that he probably isn’t even aware of. His thumb flips the advance lever while the other hand cups the focus ring.
“That’s right,” Andre says. “Don’t move an inch.”
Andre has his camera up, and Daniel can hear the whir of the motor drive. The fighters are too puzzled to do anything, even kill him. Andre is shooting and opening the car door and shooting some more, on his feet now and moving from angle to angle, talking as he always does to his subjects, though the fighters can’t understand a word. One of them finally glances to either side and then presents his gun self-consciously across his chest in an exaggerated Rambo pose. One by one, the others reposition their guns—across the chest, cocked in the elbow, straight up into the air—until they look like a caricature of the nightmare that they are.
The commander walks over and takes his position out front. Andre runs out of film and keeps talking while his hands unload the roll, pocket it, dig for a new one in his vest, and load it into the camera. The fighters start to jostle one another, trying to get in front. One of them laughs. Another one says something and shoves his friend out of the way. They’re teenagers, Daniel thinks. They’ve probably never had their pictures taken before.
“You’re going to be famous, mates,” Andre says from behind his camera. “You’re all going to be fucking movie stars.”
Daniel hasn’t moved from the back of the truck. The kid, absurdly, is wearing his seatbelt and hangs patiently from it, ignored and irrelevant. The world has already moved on. Daniel pulls a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lights it and sits in the blood and the heat, smoking and watching Andre talk to the fighters. Andre says something funny in Krio, and for a moment the commander’s face opens up like a child’s, laughing, and the next instant he’s a killer again. All of them shift back and forth from men to boys and back to men again before Daniel’s eyes. If we hadn’t come out here, this kid wouldn’t be dead, Daniel thinks. If Andre hadn’t done something, all three of us would be dead.
Daniel tries to picture it. The killers would move on up the road toward the rest of their brutal little lives while the three of them stayed where they were, unrecognizable in their last agony, forever unconcerned with the affairs of men. The shadows would lengthen and it wouldn’t matter and the sun would set and it wouldn’t matter and finally dusk would creep in—the birdcalls, the sudden agitation of the forest—and still it wouldn’t matter. None of it would ever matter again, and it occurs to Daniel, drawing down the last of his cigarette, that no one can really say for sure who actually escaped from whom.
About the Author
Sebastian Junger is the author of the bestsellers
Read more of Sebastian Junger’s stories at Byliner.com
Photograph by Tim Hetherington
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