The Walking Dead

He peeled off the elastic band, and the spine of the notebook cracked as he opened it. He saw handwriting, barely legible, on the cover's inside…Gad, but he did have to shift himself…and he read aloud but softly so that only his mother shared with him: 'To Whom it may Concern: In the event of my death or incapacity will the finder of this Diary please facilitate its safe delivery to my sister, Miss Enid Darke, 40 Victoria Street, Bermondsey, London, England. Many thanks. Signed: Cecil Darke.' There was a date on the facing page, then close-set writing. It would take his full concentration to decipher it. He snapped the notebook shut, twisted the elastic band back over it and dropped it into his pocket.

'Got to dash. Good to see you, Mum, and you look after yourself.'

'Thanks for coming. You will read it, won't you? I suppose it's part of us.'

'I will, when I've time.'

He pecked her cheek and was gone. He ran through the thin rain across the car park, and the notebook bounced in his pocket lightly against his hip. Later, when he was working his shift, a Glock 9mm pistol, with a loaded magazine of eleven bullets, would — should he run — be flapping against that hip.

Chapter 2

Thursday, Day 1

When he saw them loaded into the two pickups, Ibrahim felt a sense of loss. He had been with them since the previous evening. He did not know their names, where they had come from, what they would be leaving behind them, but in those few hours of chaotic trauma — for all of them — they had been his brothers.

New masters had selected them and now determined into which of the pickups they should climb. The fighting men, those who had made the choices and had seemed to weigh their value, barked instructions and gestured them forward. None was helped over the tail gates: they were left to struggle up. When they were all on board, crouched and half hidden by the sides of the vehicles, Ibrahim fought the stiffness in the joints of his legs and stood. The engines had started, and he heard the clatter of the mounted machine-guns being armed — an alien sound — and he wondered if he should wave in farewell to them.

Their laughter came to him over the gravel roar of the straining engines, as if now they were old friends, but distanced from him who would not travel with them.

None looked at him, none noticed him, so he did not wave.

The farewell that was seared in his mind was in front of him. The fighting men left the engines running and the machine-guns armed, and walked briskly to the man Ibrahim thought of as the Leader, his leader. Each in turn hugged him and their lips brushed the cheeks obscured by the balaclava. Those men had no joy, no happiness, and the kisses were perfunctory, without cheer or laughter. He sensed the difference between the fighting men, and his new-found leader, and the brothers crushed close in the pickups. They broke away, but each held the Leader's hand tight for a moment longer than was necessary, as if that farewell was more meaningful, as if a little of the danger and threat, risk and uncertainty was communicated between them. The pickups edged away across the sand, like the dhows going from the harbour at the end of the Corniche. Then, as the dhows did when they were outside the harbour wall, they increased speed, and the engines throbbed with power.

He watched them go.

For a few seconds the vehicles were lost behind the walls of the building. When he saw them again they were moving fast. He saw them bounce across the raised heap of sand where the single strand of barbed-wire was buried. To the right and to the left, the wire was raised and hung from rusted posts of iron, but at the point Of the track it had been lowered. The wire was the frontier. He did not know, when they were taken into Iraq, why he had been left behind. He watched the two billowing clouds of sand thrown up by the back wheels of the pickups for as long as he was able, long after his eyes failed to find them, and long after the sound of the engines had dispersed in the quiet of the desert.

He felt the chill of the coming evening. He had not noticed it the previous night because then the bodies of his brothers had been pressed close to him.

The Leader was a remote figure, pacing in the sand and staring back often into the last of the light from the sun's setting. Often, he peered in the gloom at the watch on his wrist, then looked up to scan the far horizon where a quarter of the sun's circle, blood red, teetered on the desert's limit. Ibrahim did not dare to interrupt him.

Instead he thought of his home and his family.