Day Twenty-Five: Winner Takes All

They have gone to bed early. It had begun to rain. At midnight, there is a scuffling at the tent and she whispers, “Who’s there?” A man’s voice. “Get up. Get into the truck. They’re coming. Now!” She grabs her rucksack, crawls out into the pouring rain, rips the drenched tent from the ground and throws it into the back of the pick-up. The ratatat of an automatic. Pause. Guns closing in. The vehicle is moving already, wheels slipping in the mud, people crouching in the back. She opens the passenger door. A crowd of four already. She slams it and heads for the second truck. She doesn’t know the driver of this one but leaps in without looking and he floors the pedal, clank of metal against the undercarriage as he hits a cooking stove, “Where’s Lope?” She’s turned to the driver, a Kikuyu in a UNHCR T-shirt spattered with mud and rain. “I don’t know. I’m new here.” “Take a left. Head for Lodwar.” “Thanks.” Through the beams of the headlight, they can see people, appearing and disappearing, and hear the shrieks of whistles, the bleating of goats, shouts, roars of cattle and camel. Knives and spears, whoops and screams, women with children on their backs, mouths open in Os of horror, and then the empty black of the road stretching straight for miles into the dark.