Insomnia

17: Sanoja

North Kivu, January 2125

I was the first to wake up.

Not that it made much of a difference. The room before me was as dark as the lids of my eyes, and showed no more signs of life.

"Hello?" There was no reply.

The room felt empty. As the silence grew suffocating, I began to wonder if I was unconscious, or trapped in some sort of coma. The thought terrified me. Could this be death? My mind raced to remember how I had got here, but it was all a blur. Something about wine...

"Can anyone hear me? Hello?" I called more loudly this time, fighting back the rising panic.

"Over here."

My uncle was the second to wake, reaching over from my left. I had never been so glad to hear his voice.

"We were poisoned. The food..."

"The drink," I told him. "I don't remember much else."

"Neither do I. That woman... why would she do this? Have you seen the others?"

I hadn't seen anything. Together, we felt our way around the dark room, crawling over a cold stone floor. At times I could feel things moving, or crushed beneath my hands, and fought to stay calm. They're only insects. We had bigger reasons to fear.

Finally, a clammy arm brushed against my own, and I followed it to a body. From my uncle's shouts, I heard that he had done the same. I shook my aunt Kanti until she woke, gasping for air, whilst he roused my father.  They were the third and fourth to return.

Mira was the fifth. She was also the last.

I found the door whilst the others reached her, knocking my head into the wall and then feeling my way around. To my surprise, it swung open with almost no force. Whoever had stored us here must not have counted upon our revival.

As the light from the next room flooded in, though, I learnt its limits. Not all of us had come back.

Mira was sluggishly regaining her voice, but my cousin and grandmother lay still, no matter how the others shook and pleaded to them. I walked carefully back across the room, noticing in the dim light just how disgusting it was. The stone writhed with lice and flies, and even small frogs who fed on them. I tried not to imagine what the flies fed on, but I could guess. We were not the first to be lain here.

I held my sister's head to my chest as her weary eyes opened, careful she didn't see the creatures as they swarmed under her feet, and over the bodies of her loved ones. Uncle Asim continued to rock his motionless son for almost half an hour, but it was clear that even he had given up hope. My father silently put an arm around his back; the two brothers were united in loss.

We carried out our dead. I was almost numb to the grief by this stage, but I couldn't stand the idea of leaving them to be food for the plague of lice. They deserved a proper burial. I certainly didn't want to leave their bodies to the mercy of their killer, and tried not to think about what she would have had planned. Much as I tried to force it out of my head, though, I couldn't erase the image of that fat woman smiling, a thick steak in her hands.

The outer room was also full of meat, salted and skinned. Pork, I thought at first, naïve to these things, but the shape was too distinctive to ignore. Human. When the village stores had been emptied, the woman had preyed upon its people. She wanted to eat us. Again, I covered Mira's eyes.

"Our predecessors," I told the others. "We should bury them too."

"There's no time," aunt Kanti replied. "It's not safe here; she could be back any minute. We should leave."

"Let her come." My uncle's eyes were dark with rage. He wanted justice, and I couldn't blame him.

"If she was going to come back, she would have returned before we woke up. Something must have gone wrong. She may already be dead." I directed that at Asim, but he didn't seem convinced.

Unless this is part of her plan. I didn't say it aloud, but none of us felt easy as we climbed from the cellar, back into the big house.  Why were we still alive? If the woman had poisoned us, why not finish the act?

I asked the last question out loud.

"If we were food to her, she would have wanted to keep us edible. The poison was only to make us vulnerable, and would be passed through our system in time, so as to not ruin... to not ruin the meat." Aunt Kanti's voice began to shake, but she fought to finish. "Having stored us, she would have returned later with a knife."

The cellar had been hidden beneath an old carpet. Had we not just crawled up through the hatch in the floor, we might never have found it. I wondered if the woman was similarly hidden, just waiting for us to pass by. She would have returned later. Had she simply forgotten, or misjudged the timings? Having passed the other meat in the cellar, I found that hard to believe.

Either she was waiting for us elsewhere, ready to finish us off, or somebody had found her first. If the latter was true, we might have a new threat to fear. In neither case were we safe.

We barely spoke again until we were clear of the house, every step taken feeling like it might be our last. The town was just as deserted as we'd found it. After we'd carried the bodies as far as we could, we found a soft plot of earth in which to bury them. As I helped lay them to rest, I felt how light and frail their bodies were, and felt a sudden bolt of anger. Sachin had been so innocent, and my grandmother had offered nothing but love.

After a short service, we left the town which had once brought such promise, and continued our journey south. As we left, though, I found myself disappointed the woman hadn't appeared. This world had taken too much from us, and she was a symbol of every pain we'd endured. Like uncle Asim, I grew hungry for justice. I had wept at the first deaths, but they had come from nature, and been beyond my control. This time was different, and any grief I might have felt had been replaced with the flames of rage.

The next person to harm my family, I swore, would feel that fire. If I don't punish them, nobody will. I had lost all faith in karma, in divine retribution. We had suffered over and over again, more than we could ever deserve, and been handed nothing in return. From that, the truth was clear.

If I wanted justice, I would have to take it for myself.