The Crisis Read Online Free Page A

two other boys slide on the sand that coats the jolting bed. A brown she-goat with a red ribbon plaited around her throat pants at their feet, blood pumping from a slit that looks like another ribbon. Her frantic eyes search theirs. The oldest boy swings himself out of the gate. He hits the sand running, but another truck swerves instantly to smash him down.
    Rocks fly out of wheel wells, dust boils, shots crack in the adobe murk. The men shout and gesture to one another as they drive. They’re stringy, dark, with white cloths wrapping skulls shaped like ax heads and burning black eyes that turn now and again to look back at their captives like the hungry eyes of locusts.
    The goat kicks, the blood pumps. Then it slackens. The animal relaxes. Her gaze goes polishless and fixed, filming with the dust that throngs the dry wind.
    Ghedi screams without words, looking back into the boil that writhes and tumbles in their wake, blotting out everything behind them. The road, the clotted multitudes of refugees. Who’d scattered, screaming, clutching their pitiful belongings, their children, their feeble elders, as the trucks first circled, then, seeing no one armed, screeched around to plow into the crowd.
    Right into where he’d left his brother and sister. “Let me go,” he’d screamed, struggling with the man who’d hauled him up by one arm kicking and struggling into the bed of the truck, like a fish suddenly jerked into a fine thin element where breath itself could not be had.
    Now that man smiles, showing yellow fangs like a hyena’s. His fingers dig in like the cold claws of a rooster. He leans till his lips brush the boy’s ear. His breath smells rank, meaty, like old blood.
    â€œYou do not jump off, like that fool. You look like a wise, brave boy. Yes? We will see how clever you are. And how brave.”
    They ride locked gaze to gaze, Ghedi looking back into those eyes as if reading that which is written and must come to pass. His gaze slides down long bare forearms, scarred and puckered with old burns, to dusty, mahogany-toned hands.
    To the weapon they grip, its blued steel worn to silver. The stock scarred where something very hard and moving very fast tore through the fibers of heavy-grained wood. The doubled jut of the barrel. The black curve of the magazine.
    The man pulls a fold of fabric up over the lower part of his face, and shoves Ghedi down into the rusty bed.
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    THE camp’s a rock-walled ravine only partially sheltered from the rising wind. Heat radiates from it as from a burnt-over field. As the trucks halt beneath an overhang the bandits leap out, carrying the weapons they’ve picked up from the floorboards. Some pull drab tarps from behind the seats. Others cradle rifles as the boys climb slowly down. They huddle coated with dust like tan flour, sticklike arms and legs quivering, hugging themselves as they wait for what comes next. Ghedi glances at the sun, figuring the direction back to his brother and sister. But surrounded, boxed by steep stone, he doesn’t dare make a break.
    The fighters’ voices are loud. Their dialect’s different from that of his village, but he understands them. They pour water into radiators from goatskin bags, pry rocks out of knobby-treaded tires with knives, refuelfrom battered orange metal cans stacked in the shade. The odor of gasoline tinctures the wind.
    Presently, when the trucks are cared for and covered, the tarps pulled tight and then carefully disarranged so no straight lines are left, their attention turns past the captives, to where woodsmoke blows from, and merry voices and music.
    And presently, the scent of roasting meat.
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    THE boys wipe their lips with their hands, leaving smudges across their faces. They stand where the smoke blows. They’ve stood so long their legs shake, their heads spin with thirst and hunger and fear. Two younger fighters, one in a white robe like the drivers, the other in