The gunfire grew closer, screams drowned in its echo. It came at times in a rapid back-and-forth. Sometimes there were only single shots, or a parade of single shots, short silences between them.
The sounds continued into the night. Then in the earliest morning hours came a brief pause. And in that silence Dana, exhausted and delirious with fear, slept.
Sarat remained by her sister’s side. In the blackness the twins were only the hushed sigh of their breathing, the rise and fall of their chests. Outside, the sound of gunfire had faded but there were still other sounds.
Sarat listened: boots against dirt; a militiaman asking something unintelligible and his superior responding: you know exactly what to do; the sounds of pleading, of cursing; a line of feet shuffling in unison, drawn closer, closer, ordered to kneel; more pleading, a man saying: I’m not with them, I swear, I swear. His voice coming through the walls of the building in which Sarat hid, clear as though he were pressed against it. Then nothing. Then a line of single gunshots, one after the other. Then nothing.
The shots were closer than any that had come before, and for a moment Sarat believed the men had entered the building.
If it’s going to happen, then let it happen, she thought, but I won’t die crouching.
She eased quietly away from her sleeping sister. She pulled her folding knife from her pocket and stood up. She eased the office door open just enough to slide through, then she closed it behind her.
The corridor that led from the office to the stairs was dark and the walk seemed endless. As she approached the door, she tried to imagine what the killers looked like. She pictured them as the Northerners she’d seen on television, who always appeared tall and muscular, their complexions ghostly. In her mind they were of a different breed, a different species.
She climbed the stairs to the building’s side door and she put her ear to the door and listened. There was no sound. She opened the door and peered outside.
For a moment she believed she’d mistimed the day. She had thought it was two or three in the morning, the slaughter closing in on its twenty-fourth hour. But the sky above was midday bright.
Then the light began to fade, quickly, giving way to a black sky. It stayed dark until, from somewhere far to the north, she heard the whistling arc of another flare, and soon the fraudulent daytime illuminated the camp once more.
Sarat walked slowly, keeping near the wall. There were sounds of men cursing in the distance to the southeast and southwest, in Georgia and South Carolina. There were sounds of chaos too: of tents being torn apart, of women muffled mid-scream. Sounds of gunfire, but not as rapid or sustained as it was a day earlier.
A great fire burned in the gut of the Alabama slice. The flames curled around plumes of black smoke. There were men in the distance, burning bodies. They brought kindling in the form of tent covers and clothes and mattresses. The fire skipped and cracked and traced higher and higher into the sky.
Sarat turned the corner to find a line of bound corpses near the wall. They were men, young and old. They’d been lined up against the wall on their knees, and where the bullets had gone through them there were splatters of dull red on the wall.
Sarat stood frozen. She looked at the bodies. Most lay flat on their fronts or on their sides facing away from her, but those she could see had grotesque, unrecognizable faces, cracked open at the forehead, contorted in silent agony.
The bodies made damp pools in the dusty ground. There was a heat to them. Sarat felt it against her skin, damp and real as steam from a boiling pot. She knew what it was. It was the heat of life extinguished. The heat of something leaving.
In the mass of crumpled bodies she saw a face she recognized. It was Eli, the Virginia Cavalier she’d seen when she went to talk to her brother. Quickly, the faces surrounding him began to register in her memory: they were rebels from her brother’s clan.
Suddenly all her courage disappeared. She stood paralyzed with terror, incapable of unseeing the pile of corpses at her feet, among whom she was now certain her dead brother lay. The sounds of burning and of screaming and of killing continued relentless around her, the sky overhead beating dark and light like God’s great heart itself.
The sound of men approaching from behind the far corner of the wall shook her from her paralysis. She knew from the soft thud of their boots and from their voices that they were militiamen. She heard one of them say: “They said there’s no rules before sunrise. It’s all ours till then.”
She knew that when they turned the corner they’d see her. Without thinking, she fell to the ground. She wriggled into the mass of dead men, camouflaged herself within it. The heat that had touched her body now wrapped itself around her, sunk into her pores. She lay among the blood and sweat and shit and piss of the murdered. She thought nothing of the fluid that seeped into her clothes, or of the odor or of anything except her small desperate prayer: Please God, don’t let them see me. Don’t let them kill me.
She held her breath. The boot steps grew nearer.
She waited, unmoving as the dead that surrounded her. The men passed.
In the stillness that followed she heard another sound, close by in the tents across the road. It was the sound of guttural heaving, the crack of bone on bone. When that sound subsided there was another scream cut in half.
From a sliver of sight between the limbs of the dead, Sarat saw a man leave the tent across the road. He wore black jeans and a black shirt untucked. His balaclava hung limp from his pants pocket.
She saw his face. He looked no different than the men who lived in the camp. He looked no different than anyone Sarat had ever seen. He was of the same species, the same breed.
She lay frozen in place and watched the man walk in the direction of Georgia, where there was now another pyre aflame. When he was gone and she heard no more boot steps, Sarat rose and ran in the direction of the tent from which the man had just emerged.
Inside she saw a woman named Sabrina, a refugee from Mississippi, a survivor of the firebombing of Hopewell. She recognized her despite the bloody, swollen pulp of her face. The woman’s jaw had been shifted violently to the right, the skin around her eyes made puffy and purple. She lay on the floor of her tent with her skirt hiked high and her stomach butterflied open. Her chest moved.
When the woman caught sight of Sarat she raised her hand and beckoned her to come close. Sarat took the woman’s hand and sat beside her. The canvas beneath her was soaked. The woman moaned and said a word Sarat could not understand. She took it as a pleading for comfort and, not knowing what else to do, Sarat reached for a nearby charity blanket and covered the woman’s gaping stomach. The woman muttered the same word a few more times and then fell silent.
Sarat remained inside the tent. She held the woman’s hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they’d first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.
When the boot steps had passed and there was only the distant crackling of fires, Sarat peered out the tent’s front door. She saw the wall where the pile of bodies lay.
Then came a straggler, a young militiaman with his rifle slung loose over his shoulder. As he passed the dead men he stopped and faced the wall and unzipped his pants and began to urinate.