It was not a black sky over Nairobi; it was bruised, a nauseating violet and charcoal when the lungs of the city finally failed. The van throbbed with such violence, that it seemed going to rattle out the bolts of the frame. We were no longer driving used to it, we were fleeing a funeral pyre.
"Don't look back!" The voice of Craig was a rough rasp, his hands were welded on the steering wheel.
I couldn't help it. I caught a glimpse, through the broken rear-window, of an old world skyscraper, one of the shiny monuments, and that tilted with a horrible, slow majesty and fell in a curtain of dust. A shadow was going behind the debris. The Rose Spider, a giant of rose and black, dashed down the roof of a bank, the bulk of which broke through the asphalt we had just passed some few minutes before.
"John, hold him!" From the middle seat sarah screamed.
I turned back to the cabin. It was a wagonway of slaughter. Marco was stretched out on the bench and his cheeks turned as white as wood ash. His jacket sleeve had been a wet, dark dragging thing where his arm had been. We were a group of scars and scraped-up parts, and were bound together by nothing more than bare, maniacal adrenaline.
The overhead power lines showered small spiders, the size of dinner plates, against the roof, with the sound of hailstones. Their legs scraped the metal--scritch, scritch, scritch--to get in.
"Teresa!" I yelled.
Teresa didn't answer. She sat still with stare on the disorder without. She felt her fingers twitch as a web of spiders blocked the windshield. Through the jagged openings in the dashboard and the flooring, thick and thorny vines were sticking out. They did not only increase, they pounded and used their hands and broke the glass in order to drag the predators away. She was our mysterious, frightening protector, and employed a force with which no one cared to deal.
The van shook in response to Craig swerving around a stack of corpse-fulled eggs that barred road on the borders of the city. With a shriek in the suspension, we crashed up against the curb and, almost instantly, we started to squeeze in between the concrete canyons.
The buildings lost their heaviness. The tyrannical shade of the hive fell.
I have the road," gasped Craig, one hand clutched to the wheel with a grease-stained map. "We head for the highlands. We don't stop for anything."
The skull and bones of the Nairobi outskirts began to decay out of the rearview mirror, and heavy, hollow silence fell on the van. Millions of tombs of the city was a glow of fire on the horizon.
John, over here, Selma said, pointing to a dented metal box that was lodged under the backbench.
A first aid kit. This was a little miracle in a world of tragedies. I persisted to move to the side of Marco and with a shaking hand nearly impossible to open the latch. Sarah and Selma bent in, and all their expressions were fixed to scowl with concentration. We had been loading the ragged cut on the shoulder of Marco in the flickering but dim light of the cabin, stuffing the gauze with blood which burst red almost as we applied it. He did not scream he was so far gone. He only looked into the ceiling, his chest swelling and falling in a gulping hopeless gasp.
Zak in the very back would haunt. He was wrapped in a fine mat, and we had lain his corpse on his back. He was the strongest thing we knew and yet he was a riding lesson to our trauma and he was ignorant of the fact that we had just witnessed the end of the world.
The road we were going to follow was a line of black, leading away into a wasteland, of which we had no knowledge. I stared at my hands which were covered with blood, and then at the rest of my friends who were exhausted. We had survived.