Black Asphyxia

By Daniel Guy

The sun comes up over the Indian Ocean and within a few hours it’s already 35 degrees along the East African coast.  A local lad, Ibrahim, is cleaning the private beach in front of a grand colonial house, owned by Oliver Matuo, a close friend of the country’s president. 

There are plenty of discarded black plastic bags, torn to shreds among piles of trash  washed up onto the white sands by the sea every day.  At times the tide will throw ashore the strangest things, discarded in a plastic sack. Ibrahim would tell you, if you asked him.

Today, as he rakes the garbage into a large clear plastic sack, he is thinking to himself how strange it is that man has found a thousand things to with plastic bags, and now it seems they too will soon be banned.  

Most days he is there, keeping the stretch of sand belonging to Mr Matuo clean and raked. He rarely sees anyone from the house coming down to use the beach. Just Asha, Oliver Matua’s only daughter. She is nineteen, smart and confident, slim and beautiful. Her afro hair is cut short and her huge brown eyes beguile everyone she meets. 

Up at the mansion, Asha lies in her huge white four poster bed and will remain there till midday, as she does most days. Sometimes she takes a swim in the late afternoon, when the sun is about to set, casting an amber glow over the sea and the sand and the palm trees behind the house. In the evenings she lies in a hammock under a huge acacia tree in the garden, snoozing and flicking through social media.

At night she’ll stand on the balcony of her bedroom, smoking a cigarette, and looking out at a night sky, glittering with stars and beneath it the ocean, shimmering in moonlight.  

Asha has been well-educated in private schools, and had hoped to go and continue her studies abroad, but her father has other ideas. He wants her to stay with him, not follow her friends to Western universities, but instead remain at the family home where she can lead a moral life. She’s always adored her father, so this decision is a hard one to accept. 

Asha wishes her mother was there to help persuade him to change his mind, but she moved to Bahrain two years ago and has not been back since. 

Oliver Matuo, a tall, lean man, well known in the area, who has become rich thanks to his links with the ruthless President Baptiste Matumba. Like the president, Oliver Matuo is a formidable man to cross with, and when he makes a decision, even the strong minded Asha, whom he adores, must abide by it. But behind the mask, he is a kind and gentle father. Asha knows he likes to be with her when he’s home.  It usually takes him a day or so to relax and then they get on well. They swim in the sea together and make fires on the beach, like they did when she was very young. When groups of men come to the house for meetings, Asha knows she must remain upstairs and out of the way.  But in the evenings they cook together and talk, or watch a film together. Tonight she is alone and bored in this isolated old stone house. Tonight she is missing him. 

These days he’s away often, and she has no one but the servants and ground staff to talk to. Each time he returns he lavishes gifts on Asha as proof of his love. Last time he was back he took her by helicopter to Zanzibar for a weekend so she could enjoy the nightclubs, spending time with old school friends and other people her own age. 

Her father has been gone for a while.  Three weeks ago several groups of armed military men began arriving.  Asha is used to that now.  She would feel the tension in the house, and watch the men standing around the yard at the back, deep in serious conversation, making plans, packing supplies into trucks. And then one night her father came and found her in her room. She knew from the look that he was saying goodbye again, and was off on another mission. Each time he kisses her gently on the forehead when he says goodbye, but he always lies about where he is going, and when he will return. 

The thing is that Asha has discovered the truth about her father.  When she was young, she was told that he ran a very successful transport business, used by all the ministries of government. Now she knows this isn’t true. For months she has watched, and listened, and overheard stories at night told by the armed private guards patrolling the house, and now she has a pretty good idea about what really goes on at the mysterious warehouse her father owns out in the bush, in an old abandoned military airbase, an hour’s drive from the house. A year before she’d watched a video clip on the tv news of a man being arrested by the police for murdering a politician. She recognised one of the bodyguards who was also arrested. He worked for her father. She remembered him. He used to be her private chauffeur for a while. And then the next day she heard her father on the phone in his office, talking about the arrest. He’d left the office door open. She stood behind and listened to it all.  That’s when she began to snoop, listen in, gather clues from conversations with the staff her father employed. Now she knows her father does the president’s dirty work.  Yet what she discovered hasn’t shocked her. It’s excited and intrigued her and she wants to know more. 

Tonight she sits on the wall of her balcony.  Above her hangs a full moon. A group of men gather down by a stone wall by the beach. She watches the shadowy figures, and the occasional flashes of light from their phones.  She knows these men work for her father. She can faintly hear them speaking, soft male voices catching in the ocean breeze. She’s bored, and she’s run out of hashish, so she decides to go down to join them. On the way out of the house, she slips into her father’s room and takes out a bottle of vodka. 

When she walks over to the men, they stop talking. They are all afraid of her because she  is the daughter of the boss, Mister Oliver. She says hello, and they exchange small talk. She can smell hashish and tells them she wants to have a smoke with them. Her presence makes them uncomfortable but they agree, especially when she passes round the vodka. 

Asha notices in the group a face of a youth she does not recognise. She asks him what he’s doing here and discovers he’s a local lad called Kwame. Kwame has a shaved head and a scar across his cheek. His face is attractive and unfamiliar.  When the men decide to leave, she persuades Kwame to stay a while. He is nervous at first but both are aware of  the sexual energy between them. 

They sit and smoke some more and soon he relaxes and opens up a bit. She finds out that he too works at her father’s warehouse, but when she asks him what he does exactly, he hesitates and then tries to lie and bluff. She puts her hand gently on his arm. 

‘Listen, Kwame. There is no need to lie to me. I know what really goes on in there. My father manages a small private army, to dispose of people that our beloved President Matumba thinks are dangerous to him. Matumba makes speeches every week, promising that the ‘unknown suspects’  who are currently murdering journalists and opposition members will be brought to justice, but in truth it it him who pays my father thousands of dollars to dispose of these people. The warehouse is really a prison where the victims were taken to and killed, isn’t it.’

Kwame looks at her. She smiles. She goes on. 

‘Tell me exactly what happens at the warehouse. It is where these men are killed, right?’ Kwame is now very stoned and sees no reason not to tell her the truth. 

He tells her that most of the time the men are killed, usually within a week of being there. 

Not all the men are killed. Occasionally when an abduction of a dissident or journalist raises too much international protest, the government backs down and the missing person is freed. Kwame lights another joint, inhales long and slow, then passes it slowly to Asha. 

He glances at her, then offers her a dopey grin. She grins back. They start to giggle. 

They are both very stoned, unable to take the subject very seriously. She carries on. 

‘So how are they killed. Are they suffocated with plastic bags?’

Kwame nods. He admits that he has often watched them doing it. He tells her the procedure is bloodless and relatively quick, as if he knows a thing or two about killing.  Asha wants to know all the details. She is starting to feel pleasantly aroused. She pulls off the tee-shirt she is wearing. As she takes off her shorts, she carefully presses the record button on her phone, tucked into the back pocket, before dropping the shorts on the sand a few feet away. She watches Kwame’s reaction to the sight of her breasts, and It doesn’t take long before he starts to pull down his shorts too and they start to have sex. 

It will be the first time for Asha. Tonight she has a mind to lose her virginity. 

She is stoned and has drunk half a bottle of vodka.  She lets him stroke her, and she in turn begins to caress his cock. Kwame is unaware of her innocence.  A while later, as he is fucking her she starts to cry out, 

‘No.. stop!’

Her body is in confusion, torn between suffering extreme pain and pleasure at the same time. Luckily Kwame’s cock is not large. Her cries get louder and Kwame gets nervous.

Anxious not to attract attention from the house, he whispers,

‘Asha. Shhh.. Keep your voice down, miss. No one must hear us.’ 

Afterwards she lies there in the sand, looking up at the mass of bright stars a million miles overhead. Kwame gets dressed discretely. He didn’t manage to reach orgasm and neither say a word about that. She persuades him to stay for another joint. She tells Kwame she wants to visit the warehouse. She wants to watch one of these men being killed. Kwame shakes his head, and warns her that the men working there would certainly shoot her. 

‘They wouldn’t shoot me. I am the daughter of Oliver Matuo!’

‘You will be caught. They will call your father at once. He would not want you there. It would cause serious problems.’

‘Then video the next killing on your phone, and send it to me’ she says. He shakes his head again. 

‘Too dangerous, miss.’ he says, ‘Dangerous people.’ 

The young man talks like he’s been shocked many times by the things he has seen, and perhaps too, the things he’s done.  Asha lets the subject drop, but doesn’t really stop thinking about it. A little while later, after exchanging numbers they offer each other a brief goodnight kiss, before Asha gets dressed and walks back up to the house. 

Kwame isn’t seen around the mansion for a month.  Asha asks her driver next time she takes a trip into the town to shop, to give Kwame a message. 

‘Just remind him there’s a full moon in three days.’

The following day she receives two short video files on her phone. 

The first clip is of a man tied to a steel chair in a large empty industrial space. Several men in khaki uniform stand around him. One slips a black plastic bag over his head. Another seals it tight with a rubber tie strapped around his neck. And then they just watch as the man struggles and squirms. He shakes his head violently. The clip ends abruptly. In the second clip, the man is lifeless, his plastic covered head hanging down onto his chest. 

Asha is aware that there is something about watching a man suffocate that arouses her. Is it the sight of the plastic sucked tight against the victim’s face, or the ten minutes of frantic struggle, or the gradual weakening of resistance until that final moment when the body stops moving, the bag expands once final time and the body sags into a final stillness? She’s not sure. It just makes her wet and horny and she can’t get the images out of her mind. All she knows is that she wants to be there next time it happens. 

Two nights later, it’s another hot, humid night. The moon is full and Asha is standing out on her balcony, waiting. She sees a shadow of a man approaching. He walks over to the beach and sits crosslegged on a sandbank, looking out at the sea. She knows it’s Kwame so she slips on her long simple black cotton dress and sandals, picks up her shoulder bag and leaves the house quietly. 

On the beach Kwame has a joint ready made. He lights it, hands it over, and as she starts to smoke, he starts to kiss her on the cheek. Now, he’s a bit more confident of himself. 

She too wants to make love again. They slide each others clothes off one by one. 

His phone rings. He stops. Asha pulls back, watches his face as he holds the phone to his ear. He stands up. He’s naked now, and Asha admires his beautiful black skin lit by the silvery moonlight. His replies are short. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. OK.’ He hangs up and turns to her.

‘I have to go.’ 

‘Where?’

‘Back to the warehouse.’

 ‘At this late hour?’ she asks.

‘I have to drive with Timu to the beach.’ 

Asha is certain she knows why. She tries to hide her excitement, and sound as casual as she can.

‘So someone will be killed tonight?’

‘No. Three. Three of the prisoners will be killed tonight and then their bodies have to be taken to a beach up the coast, where a fishing boat is waiting. At four am when there’s a high tide, the bodies will be taken out to sea and dumped.’ 

She is thinking, working out the sequence of her plan, daring herself, and maybe being slightly aroused now, makes her more decisive. She starts to dress quickly.

‘Take me to the warehouse with you. Tonight.’ 

Kwame looks over and shakes his head, fear in his eyes. 

‘No, miss. No. I cannot take you.’

She decides that this is the moment. She takes out her phone and plays a short edited clip she’s made of the sounds of them making love. Kwame starts to listen and then freezes in the act of buttoning his shirt. The clip makes it sound like he is forcing himself on her. It is clearly his voice. No doubt about it. 

‘Listen to me Kwame. If you want, I can play it to my father and claim I was raped by you…’

Kwame looks at her in shock, too naive to imagine this woman would be so calculating. He has no choice, and shortly after they leave together. 

They reach Kwame’s beaten up old red car. Already Asha is dizzy with an adrenalin rush she has never felt before. Finally the bird has left the nest. For the first time in her life she has actually done something she dared herself to do. She sits in the car, restless, excited, and afraid. She flips opens the glove compartment and finds a hand gun, half wrapped in a dirty grey cotton cloth. 

‘Leave it, miss.’ 

Asha ignores Kwame and takes it out, studies it carefully, feels the weight of it, enjoys the feel of it in her hands. She wonders how many have been killed by it. 

‘Please..’ says Kwame. 

She puts it back carefully. They drive on through the night, the headlights lighting up the long empty, pot-holed road ahead. Ten minutes later they turn down a dirt-track, through a forest and then out onto a dusty desert plain. In the distance they see floodlights around a set of buildings surrounded by wire fences. Asha climbs into the back and hides under a blanket.  She finds herself sitting on a pile of black plastic garbage sacks, stacked behind the drivers seat. She makes herself as comfortable as she can. Kwame pulls up at a barrier at the entrance to military airfield site and chats to the guard for several moments. Asha can hear them talking about a football match on the TV tonight.  Then Kwame drives on, up to a large crumbling industrial warehouse and parks around the side, next to a steel door. 

Asha peers out from beneath the blanket and looks around. Floodlights illuminate the outside of the warehouse. The building is in a bad state, the paint is cracked, windows are boarded up wood and thick metal grills, and in the shadows all around there are the twisted wrecks of a dozen lorries and military vehicles. Kwame sits looking out through his windscreen, unhappy about Asha being there and sensing trouble ahead. 

‘Now you have seen it, miss. Please. I drive you home.’

‘No. Not yet. Where does that door lead?’

Kwame looks over to the steel door Asha is pointing at.

‘It’s takes you through to where the prisoners are kept. The guards are in the offices upstairs when they’re not on patrol. There’s a football match tonight, so they’ll all be up there watching it on TV.  But if they find you…’

‘So what? They know who I am. They will tell my father. That’s all, and I am not afraid of him. I want to look around inside. That’s all. Stay here and wait for me.’

‘No, miss,’ says Kwame, ‘I have to go in. Tell the others I am here. I drive the truck with Timu tonight.’

‘OK. Then leave the keys in the car.’

Kwame looks round and stares at her, afraid. 

She smiles at him and waves her phone in his face, playfully. 

He closes his eyes for a moment, sighs and then a nod of resignation. 

They leave the car quietly. Kwame walks round to the front. 

Asha watches him leave and then steps gingerly towards the steel door. 

Once inside she finds her way to a dimly lit corridor which she discovers runs along the side of a large industrial space with huge steels doors at one end. Through a window she sees there is one spotlight illuminating the centre of the room and in the spotlight she can see a black transit van with its rear doors open. She moves slowly along the corridor to another window so she can get a better view.

Behind the transit van she sees three large rusty iron chairs set in a row. She recognises the chairs from the videos Kwame sent her. On two of the chairs she sees two male bodies slumped. Each is tied with cable ties around their wrists and ankles and their upper bodies covered with shiny black plastic garbage bags. Black rubber belts have been tied tight around their necks.  These two men look to be dead. Their inflated plastic shiny heads hang to the side. Next to them two guards are sitting at a table playing cards and smoking. 

A third man enters. He’s older and overweight. He’s wearing military gear and carries an automatic weapon. Asha recognises him. Everyone calls him Timu. She often sees him at the house when her father is home and now it’s clear to her that he’s the man in charge here. He talks to the men playing cards. Asha can hear he’s clearly annoyed. She can only just about hear what they are saying but finds out that Timu has been told a third prisoner must be killed and dumped tonight, but he doesn’t know which one, and he cannot get through to her father. 

Moments later another guard comes down the staircase from the second floor. 

He tells the men that the football starts in five minutes, and there’s a case of beer arriving with pizza too. 

Suddenly there’s a scream along a nearby corridor and moments later a set of double doors open. Two guards appear, dragging a tall white man with blond hair, who breaks into hysteria the moment he enters the room.

’What are you doing! Where am I going! You cannot keep me here! This is against the law! I am a journalist! I have rights! I have committed no crime! Please leave me alone!’ 

He’s young and Asha guesses from his accent that he is English. He’s dressed in a dirty, torn and bloodied white linen suit. His face is swollen and cut.  His cracked silver rim glasses hang on his nose at an angle. His hands are tied behind his back with a thick black cable tie, and another cable tie is tight around his ankles.  As he is being dragged around to the back of the van, he sees the suffocated men sitting lifelessly on the chairs, and the third chair vacant.  Asha can see the terror in his eyes as he stands frozen, staring at them, while the guards debate his death. 

The young journalist is George Sand, a twenty-six year old from London, who had been working in the country as a freelance journalist, until his capture two weeks ago. He’d been in the country for a month, researching an article on the effect of plastic pollution on East African coastal communities. He had been loving his stay, his first visit to Africa, charmed by the welcome and the kindness of everyone he came across.

Not long after he arrived, George was walking a friend’s dog early one morning along the city public beach, near to where he was living, and he noticed a crowd ahead. He strolled up to them to discover that they were gathered around the body of a naked African man, washed up on the beach, his hands bound behind his back, a black plastic bag tied over his head. George immediately started to take photos of the body. Determined to make a story of this, he began to question contacts he had with the local police. He spent months putting together an article.  He interviewed local fisherman who have been complaining about the bodies they found in this nets. A few days after his article was published in a newspaper in London, George was on the terrace of his apartment with a couple of friends, drinking beers and cooking some meat on the fire when three masked men burst in to this apartment and abducted him, dragging him at gunpoint to the waiting car and driving off speedily. 

Since then he has been sitting on the floor of a dark concrete cell, with no idea where he had been taken. He was beaten with clubs for several hours when he first arrived and then left in the cell with half a dozen other men, his wrists cuffed and a gash across his cheek, congealed with blood. Every day of his confinement he convinced himself that he too would soon be discovered dead, washed up on a beach. He had tried stay calm, thinking of his family back home, imagining them mourning him, a hero, fighting injustice till the end. Now he stands, facing his own death, as one of the guards begins to cut his clothes off his body, with a large knife. His white suit drops to the floor in shreds. He’s forced to step out of his sandals. His mouth is dry, his heart pounds quickly in his chest. 

Timo approaches and take a photo of George’s face. Once his eyes have recovered from the flash, George looks around and sees in the gloomy shadows at the edge of the room, the face of a young woman looking at him through a window. He stares at her, and a glimmer of hope lifts his spirits. Maybe something unexpected is going to happen. 

Timu continues to debate with the other guards about whether they should wait. 

The guards holding George don’t know what to do with him, so they dump him onto the third chair. His broken glasses are pulled off his face and thrown across the room. Other guards step over to the two bodies slouched on the chairs beside him. Two stained white sheets are opened out on the floor and the bodies are tipped off the chairs, wrapped up and then carried into the back of the van. 

George sees a guard picking up a fresh folded black plastic garbage bag and opening it out. He knows exactly what will happen next. He looks back towards the girl looking through the window, and moments later the shiny black plastic sack is pulled over his head and he can see nothing. He feels the rubber belt being wound loosely around his neck. 

He waits for it to be tightened. He doesn’t know if he will be suffocated or strangled, or maybe both. He tries to control his breathing. He wants to scream but it feels like it’s now too late for that. The plastic crackles gently around his ear and he cannot hear what is being said around him. 

But Asha can. She stares at his smooth pale white naked skin, his slender hairless legs. 

She glances over at Timu, staring at his phone, waiting for a message to confirm this is the man they should kill. Another guard comes down the stairs, reminding them about the football. The pizzas have arrived. She stares back at the white man in the chair.  One of the other guards now stands behind the chair. He pulls the rubber strap tight and George begins to suffocate. Timu looks over. He’s annoyed.        

‘No. Momo. Not yet. Wait till we get confirmation from Oliver. We do it after the match. There’s plenty of time.’ 

The guard shrugs his shoulders  and then starts to untie the belt around George’s neck, so he’s able to breathe. Timu and the others all leave, one by one, stomping noisily up the stairs in turn with their black leather boots. A door closes upstairs, the sounds of the television and the men talking drops to nothing, and the vast space falls quiet.

Asha moves to a door and opens it silently. She moves into the hall and towards the spotlight. George hears footsteps approaching.  He holds his breath. His face drips with sweat from the heat inside the plastic sack. 

‘What the fuck is going on?’ he says, petrified, voice timid and shaking. 

‘Shhh,’ she whispers. 

She looks down at his huge cock, stiff, erect and quivering. She had heard things about Englishmen, but this she thought was surely unusual.

‘Please, whoever you are. Don’t kill me. Let me go.’ 

She lifts her dress above her thighs and sits down on his lap. His cock is inches from her cunt. She reaches up for the long rubber tie around his neck. She wraps it round and pulls it tight, and then watches with fascination the black plastic sack around his head begins to expand and contract with his breathing. He tries to wriggle, she feels his legs twisting between her thighs.. 

‘Fuck me and I will set you free,’ she whispers, close to his ear, through the plastic sack. Her cunt is wet. She lifts herself slowly moves in closer, pushes his cock inside her, 

gathers the plastic tight behind his head so it presses hard against his face. 

It takes a moment before she is able to enjoy the sensation of a cock so huge inside her. It seems to fill her up completely. She is overwhelmed, instantly rushing towards ecstasy. They both begin to moan, suppressing their cries of pleasure as best they can. And then he comes. She feels his spunk inside her. She’s close to orgasm herself but doesn’t quite make it. 

She unties the rubber belt. Opens up the plastic sack to let him breathe. 

‘Fuck…’ he mumbles… 

She feels his cock inside now softer. Both are breathing heavily, sweat pouring from their bodies. Finally he whispers,

‘Please, let me go. I’ll leave the country. I promise…’

She is tempted to lift the sack off and see his face again. But then she remembers what it looked like when she pulled the plastic tight over it, how the contours were smoothed out and shiny, like a mask, how much the sight of it aroused her. So she starts to gather the plastic tight around the back of his head again, slowly twisting it round in her hands till the plastic clings tight once more to his face. She watches him struggle to breathe. His perfectly shaped mouth wide open, and the plastic airtight against it. She wants to fuck him again. 

‘One more time….’  she says to him softly.  

This time she has to hold on tight, for he starts to wriggle violently beneath her, struggling to stop her keeping the sack tight against his face. All she feels is his cock inside her, growing stiff again. She starts to ride it up and down. She rides him for several minutes, pushing hard down against his cock each time, gasping louder. 

A door opens upstairs, but she is too close to orgasm to hear it. Footsteps on the staircase. Military boots. She doesn’t hear anything. It’s Kwame. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and the sight of Asha having sex with one of the prisoners shocks him. 

‘Ohh, noo.’ he mumbles to himself in complete dismay. Despite his horror he continues to watch, frozen, confused, unable to take his eyes away. 

George is weakening now, despite being more desperate than ever for air. His head stops twisting quite so violently. Then just before he loses consciousness, his muscles tense for one last gasp, one last attempt to break the plastic seal around his face and suck in air. 

Then the bag fills out a little and all the muscles release their tension. As his body starts to sag, she rides him faster now than ever, breathless and determined, pushing down hard on his cock. She feels herself coming, an experience she has never felt before, and already it is infinitely more intense and mind-blowing than she ever imagined. Finally when she comes her squeals echo around the vast room. 

It takes a while for her to regain composure, slip back to some kind of reality. She opens her eyes and sees the plastic face, frozen in front of her. She tears the sack from his head and then collapses onto his chest, her arms around his naked sweating body. 

George recovers consciousness. Breathless, he pleads with her. 

‘Now, will you get me out of here?’

Asha looks up. She thinks for a moment, smiles and says,

‘Yessss.’

She looks around, sees the knife the guard used, lying on the table. She gets up, collects the knife, cuts him free from the cable ties. 

‘You know a way out?’

She nods. She sees a folded sheet on the table too, grabs it, tosses it over to George.

‘This was meant for you. I think you should at least cover yourself with it.’ 

Kwame remains standing in the shadows at the bottom of the steps, watching as Asha leads the prisoner out of the warehouse.  

‘Oooo.’ he says to himself once more, more anxious than ever before, and walks silently back up the stairs. When Asha gets back to Kwame’s car she instructs George to get down on the floor of the back seat and lie under the sheet.  George climbs in. He rests his head on the pile of plastic sacks and covers his naked body with the blanket. Asha starts the engine, turns the car round and drives back slowly towards the gate. 

The barrier is down. A guard gets up from his wooden crate under the floodlit tree and steps forward as the car slows to a halt. Asha leans out of the window. 

‘I am Asha, Oliver Matuo’s daughter. Open the barrier.’

The guard is confused. Why is this woman driving Kwame’s car out of the airfield? 

Asha manages to reach into her bag on the passenger seat and fetch out Kwame’s gun, without taking her eyes off the guard. He tells her he needs to call the boss. He reaches for the phone in his pocket. She takes the gun and points it at him. 

‘Let me through. Do what I tell you, you insolent fool. Or I shall tell my father and you will be fired!.’ 

The guard stares at the gun, afraid for his life and then scampers over to the barrier and opens it up. Asha jams the car into gear and passes though as fast as she can, sending thick clouds of dust into the night air.  She gathers speed quickly. Her father taught her to drive when she was young, but she rarely gets the chance to drive fast, and at night too. The thrill is just adding to the adrenalin already pumping around her body. She calls to George, who is still lying under the blanket in the back.

‘OK. You can come out now.’

The thin, petrified young Englishman sits up, looks around. He can’t quite believe he didn’t die and that he’s free.

‘Where do you want to go?’ she asks. 

George thinks for a moment. 

‘Please, just get me out of the country.’

‘OK.’ 

It takes four hours but they manage to make it, stopping en route to pick up some clothes, and for George to make some calls to his colleagues.  Dawn breaks. and as they head round a hillside, they see the border post in the distance. Asha pulls over, stops the car, switches off the engine. The road is deserted. She sits quietly, staring out, thinking. She reaches into her bag for a cigarette. George sits beside her now, not saying a word.  They sit in silence but for the occasional tweet of early birds, and a distant call to prayer from a village far away. He turns to gaze at her, to admire her guile, her courage and her beauty. 

‘Asha. Come with me.’ he says, softly. 

‘I can’t go back.’

‘Fine. Then come with me.’

She thinks a while longer, smokes her cigarette. 

Then finally she says,

‘OK.’

She looks out at the empty road ahead, towards the border, the bright red glow on the horizon and the dawn of a new, beautiful day. Slowly she reaches down to the the pile of trash bags behind her seat. She turns to him and smiles.

‘But, before we go….’ she adds. 

George hears the soft crackling sound of plastic…

Daniel Guy.