Margaret screamed again and again, howling in hoarse panic as she turned and ran. She plunged headlong into the darkness of the jungle, with thorns tearing at her bare arms and sharp limbs whipping across her face as she fled blindly through the morass of shadows. She could hardly breathe now, and her heart was thumping with terrible violence from the exertion and terror.
It was then that the gorilla burst out from behind a tree. She shrieked and spun about on her heels to flee, but the creature was on her before she could take even one step. With a heavy arm it yanked her legs out from under her, and then the last thing she saw was the gorilla’s fist speeding toward her face before a blinding light and a flashing, percussive crash thundered through her skull and rocketed her into unconsciousness.
***
‘Rape’ was the first word that crossed her mind when she awoke. An incisive headache throbbed behind her eyes and a dull pain simmered in the marrow of her jaw, but aside from that she felt fine. However, she had seen enough of this war to know what would be coming; rape was used as a weapon here, as it had been throughout all wars in all nations, spanning the entirety of human history, and no female, whether prepubescent girl, toothless crone or anyone in between was safe from its scourge. Indeed, Margaret had lost count of how many rape-related injuries she had had to treat over the course of her three-month stint here.
Despite the anxiety about it that lurked incessantly at the back of her mind, however, she had never really thought that it would happen to her; it was always something that happened to those people. Those alien beings who could not speak English, whose speech was a stuttering and unintelligible jabbering, whose lean, malnourished black bodies with their fear-and-trauma-wide eyes were a glaring contrast to the broad, doughy whiteness of her first-world form. These quiet, hushed beings who drank from and bathed in muddy streams, who subsisted on a bland diet of okra, maize meal, bananas, yams and chicken, who had never had sushi prepared by a master from Japan, had never experienced the gastronomic joy of North Atlantic cod cooked in white wine sauce, nor feasted on free-range, grass-fed lamb braised in—
‘Hey you, the General is coming to see you.’
The barked command from the teenage soldier, who was all spindly limbs and bloodshot eyes, snapped Margaret out of her half-daze.
RAPE.
The word flashed again across her vision, howling out its warning in blazing red neon against the blackness of the night. She was sitting propped up against a rough-barked tree in a clearing in the jungle, with her hands bound behind her back. She could remember vivid flashes of the hallucination-like, surreal battle from which she had fled before … before what? How had she arrived here? What was going on? She recalled things that could not possibly have happened. When she closed her eyes she saw scenes of wild animals of all shapes and sizes running amok, attacking and tearing apart the UN troops.
A nightmare. It had to have been … it could only have been.
She desperately wished she could check her pulse, check her pupil dilation, anything, anything to try to make sense of what had happened and what was going on. These soldiers must have drugged her; it was the only plausible explanation for the bizarreness of these visions that seemed so frighteningly real in her mind. Or perhaps the battle had been so traumatic that her brain had created these unsettling visuals in an attempt to cope with the overwhelmingness of the experience. Such things were not unheard of.
She leaned back, trying to catch a glimpse of her arms to search for needle marks and bruising; these thugs would surely not have had the medical knowledge to correctly insert a hypodermic needle. There she would find the evidence of this drug-induced madness, there on this starkly pale skin.
‘Doctor, I bid you welcome to my camp.’
Margaret looked up as this new, sonorous voice interrupted her thoughts. With her eyes wide and bright with panic, she looked up and saw, peering down at her a tall, wirily muscled and almost gaunt man, dressed in grimy camouflage fatigues. He sported a dense but well-groomed beard, and his head was entirely bald, with the patches of light that gleamed here and there on his smooth skin giving his skull the appearance of lovingly polished mahogany. Large, intense eyes burned in deep sockets beneath eyebrows that were straight and thick, set at an attractive distance apart upon his long, strong-featured face. For a while, his eyes held Margaret’s attention as forcefully as if those twin orbs had grown invisible arms and gripped her face with iron-strong fingers, preventing her from looking away. There was an undeniable wisdom in them, an intelligence that was almost savagely ferocious in its awesome magnitude; she felt as if she were looking into the eyes of some grandmaster chess prodigy, or a Leonardo da Vinci-type savant. Between his beguiling eyes a broad, flat nose sat low above his wide, down-turned mouth, with its
