We live in this world, not the old one. Ayaan tells us that all the time. One of the younger girls (only two years older than me) and I were given the task of sanitizing our dead. We did it with bayonets. The girl I did for had a blue tattoo on her cheek, three little skulls in a row, one for each confirmed kill. I did a good job on her, Daddy, you would have been proud.
Nobody complained about the work. We didn’t want to even think about what came next. With the truck compromised (one axle snapped, the wheel rolling off into the dust) we were alone and on foot and twenty kilometers from the nearest hardened encampment. There was nothing, truly nothing in sight from horizon to horizon: this was thedhaaqsin, great pasturage but to us it was just flat land covered in yellow grass and the occasional dead evergreen. There was nothing for it but to march to Oduur and hope to find a building we could harden for the night.
We stretched our water and kept moving, with six hours before nightfall we stood an actual chance. That’s what Ayaan said, anyway. When we first caught sight of the city, just shacks on the outskirts, we let up a warbling howl of gratitude to Mama Halima for our deliverance. We picked an old post office the Italians had built fifty years ago. Nice thick concrete walls and a flat roof, perfect for establishing kill zones. We hunkered down and shared out the last of the bread and waited for the dead to come.
It didn’t take long. I could tell you what happened that evening and night, Daddy, but I saw so little of it. They came in packs, as they sometimes do. I was kept busy carrying bags of ammunition up and down the stairs. I was so tired, my arms hurt and I wanted to go to bed but I never complained, I promise.
In the morning we went out to mop up. Ayaan kept her with me. She calls me “little good luck”. There were bodies everywhere, some of them heaped up near the doors of the Post Office, some a hundred meters away. We moved in teams of three and one of us would approach a body and then kick its foot and jump back. Kick a foot and jump back, over and over. Sometimes they can be hurt pretty bad but not be really gone and you can’t take chances, Ayaan says. I kicked some of the feet. One of the dead people twitched. It was probably nothing but Fathia fired half a clip into its head. The noise broke open the morning silence (we hunt without speaking, so they don’t hear us) and suddenly everyone was yelling and everything just felt different, like the air had changed. Like the sky had changed color. And then we heard something else.
“Sarah, if you can hear me come here!”
In English, even. Nobody here speaks English any more, Daddy.
Everybody moved so fast, all the soldiers converging on our location like they’d been trained and they shoved me to the back even if the voice was speaking to me. Ayaan knows English, too, so she can’t pretend she didn’t understand. The soldiers crowded in so I couldn’t see but Ayaan told me it was just a dead man. Dead men don’t talk, of course, but she had told me stories about Gary and the mummy that talked to you, Daddy. One of the soldiers said she held down the dead man’s body with her boot, that he was pretty well cut up with bullets already and couldn’t move much (I didn’t see this but they told me later). All I could hear was his voice.
“I’ve been searching for you for years, Sarah. Tell them to step back. I have a message for you. My name is Jack and-”
There was a gunshot and then Fathia grabbed my wrist and pulled me away so I couldn’t see. It was silly, she said, some kind of trick. She knew Jack, she said. She had met him and worked beside him and he had been a white man, even though the talking corpse was an Ethiopian. A refugee. It was all some kind of trap.
I was confused and a little angry. I wanted to hear more and I also wanted not to think about it. I knew what Ayaan would recommend.