Page 100 of Light Up The Night
Riley's face fills my mind. His pale blue eyes, his black hair.You've done all you can, baby girl,I hear him say.Time to come home. You dyin' in Sudan ain't the mission.
I sag, the fight going out of me. "Duwana…"
She sees my capitulation and guides me to the exit. A small, filthy white pickup truck is idling a few feet from the door, a driver with a scarf around his mouth and nose behind the wheel. Two armed men crouch in the truck bed, eyes scanning, scanning. My protectors climb in with them, and Duwana tosses my suitcase in after them. Fatima hustles me to the passenger side and into the seat. Someone shouts—a distant explosion sends vibrations through the ground.
Fatima unwinds the hijab from her own head, despite the presence of men, and puts it on me. "Keep your face hidden. Say nothing."
Another nurse drapes a bloodstained flat sheet over Fatima's head to preserve her honor even as she preserves mine.
Duwana reaches in through the open window and squeezes my hand. "May Allah carry you home, my sister."
I cannot see through the haze of tears. "Du—Duwana, wait, I—"
She presses a kiss to the back of my hand. "Go. Go." She says something to the driver in Juba Arabic, and the driver guns the throttle.
She clings to my hand until momentum tears us apart. I twist in the seat and watch, weeping, as the best friend I have ever had vanishes as we turn a corner.
"Down," the driver snaps at me in heavily accented English. "Down. Hide your face."
I wrap the hijab around my nose and mouth and tuck it so it stays in place, turning my face down and away.
It is a rough, jolting, too-fast drive through the city, then, and I do not dare look out the window. I hear shouts, screams. Weeping and wailing. Gunshots. Once, I hear a scream cut short in a wet thunk. Every few minutes the driver reminds me to hide my face, to keep down.
The truck slows and I feel the driver go tense. "Do not move. Do not speak. Head down."
I hear chatter in a local dialect—Dinka, I think. I do not know for sure. A pidgin of Dinka, English, and Juba Arabic, more likely.
A single gunshot cracks from the truck bed, jolting a scream out of me, and then there is shouting—I cannot stop my eyes from lifting, watching, seeing.
Men with covered faces dart this way and that, AK-47s pointing and firing at the men in the bed behind me, who fire back. A grunt, and a body topples out of the truck, but the attackers are all down. I look back, and Gorte is bleeding from a wound to his shoulder. Gorte had a wife who died a year ago; he was silent and huge and imposing; he once gave me the shirtoff his own back when my scrub top was too sodden in blood to wear.
"I have to help Gorte!” I say.
The driver ignores me, gunning the engine and driving over the enemy—thud-thud. He grabs the back of my head and shoves me down into the footwell; I am bent double, painfully.
Gunfire—loud, hot, and close—accompanies the tinkle of shells.
Then abrupt silence except for the roar of the engine and the crackle of dirt and rocks against the underside of the vehicle and the skid of tires as they weave this way and that.
I huddle in the footwell, fighting panic, for long minutes. Slowly, I hear the buzz of propellers, which grows steadily louder until it is right outside.
The door opens and a hand reaches in—I take it, and allow myself to be helped out to my feet on shaky, aching legs.
Someone tosses my suitcase into the waiting aircraft, and someone else pushes my purse at me, presses my passport into my hand.
Go with god, sister.
I'm buckled into a seat in a narrow metal tube, which is hot and dusty and smells of oil and fuel and cigarettes.
And then my stomach is in my feet as we lurch skyward.
At one point, we bank over the ruins of a small village and all I can see is patches of blood-stained sand and stacks of corpses.
I remember nothing else after that.
"…Captainspeaking...altitude of thirty thousand feet…"
"…She'sbeen just sitting there for four hours, staring at nothing. Won’t respond."
