Blood Mine

Chapter Forty Three

How do I tell them this? Zanele faced the gang of survivors, who raised a ruckus with their expectant shuffling, visible in the light of a flashlight someone had hung on a stake as a makeshift lamp. Zanele felt a hundred eyes fixed on her, waiting for her to give them the news. Adwoa, that coward, had scampered off into the crowd, leaving Zanele to make the announcement on her own.

She remembered the deal well enough. She had spent the first half expecting to be shot by one of the fifty or so warriors who was glaring death at her. Then she spent the second half gawking at the sabers' leader and her retinue, who looked more like a metal band than an elite guard. Sometime in the middle, she had agreed to some nebulous alliance that they hadn't even written down, then done a baffling ritual with a knife and a bundle of feathers. And now she was supposed to pass that off to her fellow survivors as legitimate.

She sighed. The gods aren't going to say it for me.

"Alright," she began, in her biggest voice. "We've got a plan. We leave in one hour." She pointed off to the left. "We're going around east, which is that way, and we're attacking at the one orchard where we'll have cover as soon as we're through no-man's-land. We'll enter the farm, kill all the guards, find a supply dump that should be out in the open on Third Street and steal it. If they have any vehicles, we'll commandeer them and take them as far as the jungle, then we'll have to leave them. When we're done, we won't come back here. We'll settle in a new place. I've sent the coordinates to all your projectors. Understand?"

Encouragement answered her, overlapped and echoing in dozens of voices.

Now came the hard part. Zanele breathed, wondering how long she could put it off. Tell them, you coward! "And we have allies," she added.

The crowd turned to stone.

"We've made an alliance with the Sabertooth clan."

The flood came. It wasn't as loud or as vitriolic as Zanele had been expecting, but it still had teeth.

"We can't trust them!" came the cry. "They're monsters!"

"They killed my sister!"

"And now they know we're here!"

"They are enemies of Allah! You had no right!"

Zanele put up her palms defensively. "Listen, listen. You don't trust the sabers. Nor do I. In fact, they can all die in a meat grinder. But we've set up a battle plan that will keep us kilometers apart. Our attacks will divide the enemy's security, so if the Sabers deviate from the plan and come to us, they'll miss a golden opportunity to loot the CSF. They know we don't have anything worth stealing. So for now, yes, we can count on them. Maybe we'll never work with them again."

The rage cooled down, then people started arguing among themselves, turning the heat of their glares away from Zanele.

Thank the gods. Zanele let them simmer for a while, then raised her voice and said, "That's enough. Soldiers, get your gear together. In one hour, we march."

She sat down, her face steady but trembling underneath. Through the shaky beams of flashlights, Zanele could see her raiders preparing themselves. First, they said goodbye to their loved ones-- Zanele envied them-- then they gathered their things. Soon, every raider's face hid behind a pair of night-vision goggles. Every gun that had survived the invasion was loaded. Replacement magazines were a thing of myth; each woman had the twenty-five bullets in her magazine and nothing else. There could be no shooting just to keep the enemy down-- suppression fire, as Tongana had called it.

Zanele liked the discipline she saw. No one played with their guns, no one tried to make rallying cries like it was a football game, and no one quoted action movies. On each woman's face, there was a cocktail of fear, determination and a spark of hate, exactly what Zanele had wanted to see.