“You fucking shits, I’m going to kill you!” he yells, thrusting his hand forward. Gunshot fractures the air.
Sindi’s head snaps up. She sees the two boys running up the embankment, she sees the man with the gun. She stands, too quick, and sways as the man fires again. The boys bolt past her. They’re fourteen, maybe fifteen, about the same height as us; the one in the front wears a dark, oversized coat that flaps behind him. In the low light, Sindi might look the same to the gunman.
“Run, Sisi!” I yell, and she runs.
The boys are fast. They disappear over the top and we scramble after, not looking back to check if the man with the gun is following. As we crest the ridge, we see the boys pull back the KEEP OUT – GOVT. PROPERTY sign and slip through an open seam in the rusted car-yard fence. The fence rattles as the sign swings back, closing the gap behind them.
The fence stretches for a kilometre. We’ve walked it before, dragging a stick along the links until the guard dogs came, barking-barking, snapping and snarling. The man with the gun could pick off someone running along it, easy.
Sindi heaves back the sign and slips through the gap, but she doesn’t duck low enough and a wire snags in her hair. I bounce on my toes. The man is coming. Clambering over the barrier in the middle of the road, gun tight in his grip. Sindi twists and turns, trying to pull free, but the wire works deeper into the mat of her hair and won’t let go.
The gunman is coming.
She grabs her hair and rips it free, leaving a tuft for the wire as a toll. Grunting, she lurches into the scrap yard.
The ground swells around us in uneven mounds and slopes. The earth remembers the shape of the course, though the lawns are long dead and no one plays golf here any more. Ahead, a dark mountain of dumped petrol-cars rises into the deepening night, rusting and rotting, the biggest pile-up I’ve ever seen.
Sindi stumbles, already struggling for breath. Her skin, slick with sweat, looks plastic. The boys throw her a look and I wonder if they think she’s the man with the gun. Behind us, the fence rattles.
“I’m going to get you, hear? I’m going to fucking get you.”
I can feel the man’s fingers twisting around the gritty wire like they’re around my neck. Then, somewhere in the hollow space between the petrol-cars and the fence, the pack begins to bark.
The dogs are coming.
The boys run towards the car-mountain and veer left when they reach the tangle of slumped bumpers and gutted chassis. Sindi leans forward, trying to push herself, faster-faster, but her legs aren’t listening and her feet smack the dust slow-mo. We both scan over our shoulders, checking for dogs, checking for the man, and in that second the boys vanish, like they’re witchdoctors, spirit people, ghosts.
The pile-up stretches as far as I can see into the dusk. There’s no way over, and the way around, left or right, would leave us open to the gun or the dogs. But the boys went left, and they’re gone.
Sindi ducks left, hunching as she runs to look for the crawl-space, that magic door the boys have vanished through. The cars are jammed tight, some crushed flat as 2D by the tons of metal above. Each car is like a brick in a wall, the spaces between only big enough to stash a baby.
And the gunman is coming.
Frantic, Sindi starts pushing – pushing the bumpers, the squashed hoods, the doors of the side-on cars; running-running, pushing-pushing, looking for spaces, gaps, big or small, any place wide enough to crawl into and deep enough to hide in.
Because the dogs are coming.
I can hear them, snapping-snarling, and the man, swearing and rattling the fence. Sindi stops. Her breath heaves in, out. She stands, arms at her sides, fists clenched, and faces the wall of cars.
A third shot cracks. A dog yelps. Its life snaps away: in a finger-click it’s gone. I hear the brother-dogs, the sister-dogs, crying-crying. Then they’re on the move again, away from the fence and the man and the gun. And he’s climbing; his weight sends a reverb down the wire.
The gunman is coming.
Sindi looks around, wild; looks left, looks right, looks left, looks up. A shadow shifts. I narrow my eyes. There’s a dark gap, four or five metres above us, between a trailer and an old tanker, the round kind for transporting fuel or milk. The circular back-end of the tanker is facing us and juts out a little over the cars. The trailer is jammed into the pile just above, and the container it was carrying tilts at an angle, creating a triangular space: a narrow tunnel too small to stand in but big enough to crawl through on hands and knees. The boys must have gone in there. Maybe it leads all the way through to the other side.
Using bumpers and empty headlight sockets as steps and handholds, Sindi reaches the tanker quick-quick, coming up on its left-hand side. Up close I see it was once painted green, but the paint’s faded and the company logo’s covered in scabs of rust. On the right, the rungs of a ladder climb the flat back of the tanker. Sindi stretches for it, but it’s at least twice as far as she can reach. I scan the grounds. I can’t see the man but I feel his madness.
Sindi presses her body against the flat back of the tanker and edges along the bumper, arms stiff, fingers spread, desperate for something to grasp. Don’t look down, I think, but halfway across, she does. The world turns.
Sisi’s going to fall and the dogs are going to eat her.
A bead of sweat rolls down her face and plummets to the ground.
Sisi’s going to fall and the man is going to shoot her.
Sindi lunges for the ladder. For a split second the top half of her body seems to disconnect from her hips. Her fingers graze one rung, then another, and she lifts one foot to give herself the extra reach she needs. As her hand closes over the third rung, her other foot slides off the bumper. She pivots on her wrist and slams into the ladder, yelping like that dog she almost killed. The sound of impact echoes through the hollow length of the trailer. For a moment she hangs, frozen midair; then she twists to face the tanker, settles her feet on the ladder and begins to climb.
I taste my heart as I inch across the bumper, praying the gunman didn’t hear her cry out. We’re easy targets: Sindi stands out against the pale-green paint like a bird against the sun. I’m sure he’s going to pick her off, but she moves with surprising speed, wriggling into the tight space under the container before I reach the ladder. The hole swallows her.
By the time I stick my head into the space behind her, her feet have disappeared. The dark closes in, heavier than night-dark, than normal dark. It has a fatness, as if all the cars pressing down from above have squeezed it into something solid. We crawl into the car mountain like two blind mice. I can’t even see the soles of Sindi’s boots, though if I move too fast I bump against them. This is a place that has never known light.
The air is soupy with smells. Engine oil and the grit of rust are sharp in my throat. The stink of damp carpets, sun-perished seat leather and rotting foam rubber clots my nostrils like fungus spores. I can even taste the cigarette butts in the ashtrays. The space becomes tighter the further in we go. There are dents in the tanker and the unevenness makes the blackness shrink and swell. As we inch along, the tunnel pushes down, getting tighter and tighter until it scrapes against the top of my head. Soon, I’m forced to lie flat on my belly and pull myself along the porous metal, the skin of my palms hot with friction. I can’t hear the dogs barking or the man shouting any more. Nothing penetrates the dense air. Even Sindi’s breathing is thick, as if someone’s stuffed a wet cloth into her mouth.
My head bumps against the soles of her boots. I lie there, waiting for her to move, ears straining against the ink. For a long time, there is only silence. Then I hear scratching, small at first, but rapidly increasing into a frantic scrabbling, fingernails on rust, and the stink of Sindi’s panic closes around me and I know: the boys didn’t come this way.