The Walking Dead

'Because you have been chosen from many, you are privileged. Ibrahim, you walk at the front of our struggle, God's struggle. The British are a people of corrupt unbelievers and you will teach them a lesson that will be long spoken of among the faithful followers of God. For what you will do, you will be taken to the table of God. Already there are the men who were your brothers on earth, with whom you were before I chose you. They are at the table, they keep a place for you and their welcome awaits you. You will have their respect for what you will have done and where you will have been. And I believe that young women of great beauty, in the gardens of Paradise, also await your coming. There you will be honoured — and you will be honoured on earth, wherever the Faith exists. Your name will be sung, your photograph will be shown, and your name and your photograph will fortify the courage of so many…Ibrahim, to sit at God's table and to lie in the gardens of Paradise is only for the strongest. Are you among them?'

'I hope to be.' Emotion, sincerity, played on the boy's face.

The agenda of revenge of Muhammad Ajaq had little to do with a table set with fruits and a fable of women who fucked endlessly behind shrubs in gardens. Because of the blood in his veins, and the lightness of his skin's texture, he had answered the call and had journeyed to the heartland of an enemy. He was the product of the seed of his father, that blood and that skin pallor. His father — he knew it now but had not known it for the many years of his childhood — was William Jennings, from Yorkshire in northern England, an engineer who had worked on the building of modern sewage plants in Jordan thirty years before. His father, the bastard Jennings, had seduced his mother, who was a secretary at the ministry in Amman that oversaw the modernization of Jordan's infrastructure. His father, Jennings, had been repatriated before his mother could no longer hide her pregnancy. She had gone back to her home — in the north of Jordan, near to the town of Irbid — with her disgrace and her shame, had borne the boy-child and suckled him, had left him in her room and gone. On a winter's morning, his mother had walked out into the desert sands, had stripped off her clothes and lain down naked so that hypothermia would claim her life quickly. She had died there and her skeleton — stripped of flesh by scavenging foxes — had not been found until the spring came. He had been brought up through childhood by his grandparents, his mother's family. On his nineteenth birthday, in the hour before he left home in Irbid by bus for the paratroops' training depot in the south, he had been told of his father's flight and his mother's death…and at that moment his character had been fashioned. Hatred ruled him, not God and not Faith.

'You have to stay strong, Ibrahim, to justify the trust placed in you., 'I will.'

He believed him. He did not think it would be necessary to use the hoax, with honeyed words, of a 'delayed time switch'. Some of the volunteers, so others told him, would buckle as they approached the day when they would walk or drive to their target. Those who showed weakness were given the he by the Engineer that they should reach the target, then dump a bag or park a car, and press the switch: they had a minute, or five minutes, to run before the explosion. There was, of course, no 'delayed time switch', and it was an unsatisfactory procedure. He believed the boy sought martyrdom and, without deception, would achieve it.

He ran his fingers through the boy's hair, left him and returned quietly to his room.

* * *

Left alone, Ibrahim listened to the stirring sounds of the building beyond the door, the street beyond the window and the yard's walls. He still sat on the floor.

A harsh noise, new, filled his ears and eddied in the darkness around him.

Ibrahim fought the noise, tried to rid himself of it. He held the palms of his hands over his ears. He thought of the table and his brothers, of the empty chair and the place set for him, but he could not lose the noise.

It disgusted him.

It was above him.