than zip.
He turned the device on, on low power in case any of the more recent devices that smelled mine detector power-up were present, and swept it left and right. Nothing. He flicked it up to full power and swept again. A small stray air-dropped anti-personnel device at the north-west end of the street, but otherwise nothing.
“You see that house over there, Emily?” he said, pointing across the road. The girl nodded. “Well, you’re not to go in there. There is an explosive device in there. A big one. It’ll kill you.”
Emily shook her head firmly. “It isn’t nearly as big as the one that took Claude.”
Mativi nodded. “But you say the device is still there.”
“Has been since I was very little. Everyone knows it’s there. The grown-ups know it’s there. They used it when the slim hit, to get rid of the bodies, so we wouldn’t get sick. Sometimes,” she said, “before the bodies were entirely dead.”
“You can’t get slim from a dead body,” said Mativi.
“That’s what you say,” said Emily. And he knew she was right. So many generously altered genomes had been flying around Africa in warheads fifteen years ago that someone could have altered HIV and turned it into an airborne, rather than blood-borne, virus - like the rickettsial haemorrhagic fever that had wiped out all of Johannesburg’s blood banks in a single day and made social pariahs of blacks all over Europe and America overnight.
The sun dropped below the horizon like a guillotine blade, and it was suddenly night, as if someone had flicked a switch in Heaven. Mativi had gotten too used to life off the equator, had been working on the basis that night would steal up slowly as it had in Quebec and Patagonia. But the busy equatorial night had no time for twilight. He hadn’t brought night vision goggles. Had he brought a torch?
As they walked up the street, a wind gathered, as if the landscape sensed his unease.
“You have to be careful,” said the girl, “tread only where I tread. And you have to bend down.” She nodded at Mativi’s Kinshasa Rolex. “You have to leave your watch outside.”
Why? So one of your bacheque boyfriends can steal it while I’m in there? To satisfy the girl’s insistence, he slid the watch off his wrist and set it on a brick, but picked it up again when she wasn’t looking and dropped it into his pocket.
“Where are we going?” he said.
“In there.” She pointed. Half-buried in the rubble was a concrete lintel, one end of a substantial buried structure, through which the wind was whistling.
No. Correction. Out of which the wind was whistling.
She slipped under the lintel, on which was fixed a sign saying warning! extreme personal danger! The room beyond had once had skylights. Now, it had ruined holes in the roof, into which the geostationary UNPEFORCONG security moon poured prisms of reflected sunlight. 35,900 kilometres above Mativi’s head, he and five million other Kinshasans were being watched with five thousand cameras. This had at first seemed an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, until he’d realized that he’d have to commit a thousand murders before any of the cameras was likely to catch him in the act.
“Don’t step any closer,” said the girl. “It will take you.”
The entrance had promised an interior like any other minor military strongpoint - only just large enough to contain a couple of hammocks and a machine gun, maybe. But inside, after only a few steps down, the room was huge, the size of a factory floor. They had entered via an engineer’s inspection catwalk close to the roof. He was not sure how far down the floor was.
The wind in here was deafening. The girl had to shout. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IN HERE. THEY LIVE IN THE MACHINES. THE GOVERNMENT MADE THE MACHINES, BUT NOT WITH TECHNICIANS AND ELECTRICIANS. WITH SOrcery.”
The machines did not look made by sorcery. They were entirely silent, looking like rows of gigantic, rusted steel chess pawns twice the height of a man, with no pipes or wires entering or leaving them, apparently sitting here unused for any purpose. Mativi felt an urgent, entirely rational need to be in another line of employment.
“HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT THE MACHINES WERE BUILT FOR?” said Mativi, who had.
The girl nodded. “THE DEMONS ARE IN THE MACHINES,” she said. “THE MACHINES WERE BUILT AS CAGES. THE MILLTARY MEN WHO MADE THIS PLACE WARNED ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN OUR DISTRICT OF THIS. THEY WARNED MY FATHER. THEY TOLD HIM NEVER TO BREAK ANY OF THE MACHINES OPEN. BUT OVER TIME, THEY LEAK, AND THE DEMONS CAN GET OUT. THE FIRST TWO MACHINES ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE WE THOUGHT THE THIRD ONE WAS SAFE TOO, AND IT TOOK CLAUDE.”
“WHAT DID IT DO TO CLAUDE, WHEN IT TOOK HIM?” said Mativi. He could not see any damage to the walls around the third machine beyond, perhaps, a certain swept-clean quality of the dust on the floor around it.
“IT TOOK HIM,” said the girl. “IT MADE HIM SMALL. IT SUCKED HIM UP.”
“THE MACHINES,” said Mativi in broken lingala. “THEY ARE COVERED WITH…WITH THINGS.”
The heads of the chess-pawns, under the light of Mativi’s torch, were surrealistically coiffured with assorted objects - spanners, wire, door furniture, and, worryingly, a single fragmentation grenade. Many, perhaps more than half of the things were ferrous metal. But some looked like aluminium. Some were even bits of wood or plaster.
Not just magnetism, then.
He fished the fake Rolex out of his pocket, waved it in the direction of the machines, and felt a strong tug on it as he held it in his hand. But he also felt a strong tug on the sleeve of his shirt, and on his arm itself.
He realized with growing unease that the wind was not blowing out of the chamber, but into it, pushing him from behind. It also appeared to be blowing in through the skylights in the roof above. It did not seem to be blowing out anywhere.
The girl gasped. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT! NOW YOUR WATCH WILL NOT KEEP GOOD TIME.”
“IS THAT HOW THE MACHINE SUCKED CLAUDE UP?”
“NO. ALL THE MACHINES DRAW THINGS IN, BUT YOU CAN PULL YOURSELF LOOSE FROM MOST OF THEM. BUT THE ONES THE DEMONS LIVE IN WILL SUCK YOU RIGHT INSIDE WHERE THE DEMON LIVES, AND NOT LEAVE A HAIR BEHIND.”
“WHOLE PEOPLE?”
“PEOPLE, METAL, ANYTHING.”
“STONES?” Mativi picked up a fragment of loose plaster from the floor.
“YES. BUT YOU SHOULD NOT THROW THINGS.”
He threw it. The girl winced. He saw the plaster travel halfway across the floor until it passed the second machine. Then it jerked sideways in mid-air, as if attached to invisible strings, puffed into a long cone of powder, and vanished.
The girl was angry. “YOU MUST DO WHAT I SAY! THE MILITARY MEN SAID WE SHOULD NOT THROW THINGS INTO THE BAD MACHINES. THEY SAID IT MADE THE DEMONS STRONGER.”
“YES,” said Mativi. “AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. NOT MUCH STRONGER, BUT IF ENOUGH PEOPLE THREW IN ENOUGH UNCHARGED MATERIAL OVER ENOUGH TIME…”
“I DON’I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY UNCHARGED MATERIAL.”
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN BY ‘EVERYONE WOULD DIE’?”
The girl nodded. “WE SHOULD NOT STAY TOO LONG IN HERE. PEOPLE WHO STAY TOO LONG IN HERE GET SICK. THE DEMONS MAKE THEM SICK.”
Mativi nodded. “AND I SUPPOSE THIS SICKNESS TAKES THE FORM OF HAIR LOSS, SHORTNESS OF BREATH, EXTREME PALENESS OF THE SKIN?”
“YES,” said the girl. “THE VICTIMS DISPLAY THE CLASSIC SYMPTOMS OF RADIATION ALOPECIA AND STEM CELL DEATH.”
Well, I’ll be damned. But after all, she has lived through a nuclear war. She’s been living among radiation victims her entire life. Probably taught herself to read using red cross posters.
“WELL, THE SAME DEMONS THAT WERE USED IN THE RADIATION BOMBS ARE IN HERE. SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, BECAUSE THESE ARE A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WEAPON. BUT THE SAME DEMONS.”
The girl nodded. “BUT THESE ARE NOT RADIATION BOMBS,” she said. “THIS MEANS YOU HAVE TO PAY ME DOUBLE.” She held out her hand.
