Zulu by Caryl Ferey

Author:Caryl Ferey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2011-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

*

Dust whirled across the construction site. Neuman walked amid the rubble. The workers had gone home, there were only the kids attracted by the police cars and the noise of the wind in the skeleton of the gymnasium. A few empty cans lay here and there on the ground, some litter, pieces of scrap iron. Neuman recognized the concrete pipe down which Simon had escaped a few days earlier. A water pipe, according to the plans he had managed to get hold of.

Sanogo and his men stood in the shade, watching. Neuman crouched and put his head into the opening of the pipe. It was barely wide enough to get his shoulders in. The beam of his torch danced for a moment over the walls of concrete, before vanishing into the darkness. Contorting himself a good deal, Neuman squeezed inside the pipe.

There was a strong smell of piss. He could barely move his elbows, but after a while he managed to start crawling forward, with the torch between his teeth. The pipe seemed to run on into darkness. Whenever he raised his head, it would scrape the concrete. The farther he went along the pipe, the cooler it got. Neuman crawled for another ten yards or so, then stopped. The smell of urine had gone, but there was another smell now, strong and unpleasant—the smell of decomposition.

Simon was there, in the beam of his torch, rolled up in a dirty blanket that was falling to pieces. It took Neuman a while to recognize him. His face was livid, necrotized. Beneath the blanket, his stomach was partly eaten away by animals. Neuman directed the beam at the objects beside him. One of them was Josephina’s handbag. There was also a bottle of water, some burned-out candles, an empty cookie packet, and a photograph, spared by the rats and the damp, which the child was clutching in his hand. A photograph of his mother.

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