Sudan: A Novel by Ninie Hammon

down as they frantically scrambled to get away from the death bearing down on them. Some raced for the trees, but the distance was too great, the marksmen too accurate. Bullets found their marks with sickening, thunk, thunk sounds, and one after another the villagers went down.
    A young mother sprinting for the woods was struck in the back and collapsed, dropping the baby in her arms to be trampled to death by the fleeing villagers behind her…
    A little boy was shot in the leg; his father turned to help him and took a bullet in the face…
    An old man, a teenage girl, a pregnant woman, in rapid succession they collapsed in mangled heaps on the blood-soaked grass.
    Rat-tat-tat-tat. Thunk. Thunk-thunk. Thunk. Agonizing, screaming death was everywhere.
    Some never made it away from the pallets. Like the young man with the powdered face, they slumped over the feed sacks, their blood soaking into the grain flowing out of the sliced bags.
    The Fedayeen continued to fire until the charging horsemen overran the fleeing villagers. Unable to use their guns in such close quarters, they pulled curved, long-handled blades from scabbards at their sides and began to hack the villagers to death. With blow after blow, they severed heads, cut off limbs, sliced children in two.
    Though it was a difficult command to follow in the pandemonium of the slaughter, the Arab hunters had been ordered to concentrate on executing the adult males. Later, they would round up the women and children for the slave traders. But there would be no virgins to be sold from this lot of prisoners. The raiders’ bloodlust could not be turned off like a spigot after they had reveled in the adrenaline rush of killing. The captives—all of them—would be stripped and raped by one Arab after another all night long.
    The old man did not respond in any way to the gunshots that suddenly rang out on the other side of the meadow. His grandson jumped at the sound, his eyes wide with surprise that quickly downshifted into terror. As the massacre rumbled across the field toward them like a blind, rogue elephant, the old man thoughtfully processed his options. It didn’t take long because there weren’t any. If he and his grandson tried to run, the soldiers would spot them and cut them down. Right now, no one knew they were there. Their only hope was to keep it that way. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, pushed him down into the high grass and covered him with a large piece of brush and an acacia limb. Moving into a hollow tree several yards away, the old man blended into the shadows and vanished.
    As quickly as the massacre had started, it was over. The bodies of slaughtered villagers littered the field. The agonized cries of the wounded were systematically silenced, one gunshot at a time until there was no sound but the frightened weeping of women and children, and the rough voices of raiders, barking orders in a language only they understood.
    The horsemen herded their captives to the center of the field. Using raw hemp ropes, a half dozen Fedayeen roughly banded the very young children, all the males and the older women together for what would be a quick, forced march to a rendezvous point where they would be herded into canvas-covered trucks for transport to the slave auctions. All the other females—women, teenagers and young girls—would be left behind; the ones who survived the night would be marched out in the morning.
    Other raiders went from pallet to pallet setting fires. Soon, every bundle was blazing, filling the air with smoke and the sickly stench of burning flesh. Then the Fedayeen marched their captives out of the meadow into the woods and were gone.
    Crouched in the darkness, the boy had listened in terror to the sounds of the butchery—gunshots, screams, crying, moaning, soldiers shouting. Now it was quiet, and somehow the silence was even more frightening. Suddenly, a bony hand reached through the brush and seized his arm. He was so terrified