Eye of Ra (16 page)

“You know you could warn a dude when you plan to grab the wheel!” He yelled.

“My apologies,” it answered back. “Mind reading is not one of my abilities. I did not know you would attempt something so reckless.”

He was about to say something to the effect of “Who do you think you’re talking to?” But stopped remembering how quickly it went into an obedient state when he jokingly reprimanded it. Seeing as how he was lacking in the friend department these days, he knew he didn’t need nor want a servant.

“Armor, retract faceplate,” he commanded his armor.

It obeyed, allowing his human eyes the chance to inspect his new environment. He did not recognize any of it.

“Where the hell are we?” Laurence looked around unfamiliar with the foliage.

“We are currently in the public state of Rwanda,” answered the familiar, “located approximately two hundred and seventeen kilometers or one hundred and thirty-five miles south of your planet’s equator. It is a sovereign state in central and east Africa and one of the smallest countries on the African mainland.”

Laurence shuddered as if to gag as an overpowering scent violated his nostrils.

“Yo! What the hell is that stench?” He choked.

The familiar extended its head from its position on his shoulder and began to rotate, executing a wide range scan of the area.

“I am detecting massive amounts of exposed plasma, red and white blood cells, as well as platelets,” indicated the familiar.

“Blood? You’re detecting blood?” Laurence swallowed.

“Human blood to be more precise,” confirmed the familiar. “I am also detecting a shallow heart beat.”

“Where?” He asked.

“Northwest at approximately one hundred thirty-two yards from our location,” it answered.

Laurence trotted on foot in the direction the familiar indicated. He ran even faster in his armor, and he reached his destination in a matter of seconds.

He slowed up as he slammed face first into a brick wall of the funk he smelled earlier. His stomach swirled with a horrible feeling as he covered his nose, timorously trudging toward the source of the smell.

Laurence recoiled, squealing at a horror that would haunt him till his end days.

He had stumbled onto a killing field.

Bodies by the thousands lay in a field soaked in blood.

Men, women, and children who had been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned and hacked to death.

“Oh god …oh god,” a doubled over Laurence trembled as he braced himself.

“The heart beat I detected has stopped,” indicated the familiar. “It is approximately twenty feet from our location.”

A traumatized Laurence willed himself to straighten and walk through the valley of the dead. He cringed at the sight of some of the victims who had been butchered beyond recognition. What horrified him most was how children and toddlers had been dealt the same monstrous fate as the adults.

He shook his head violently, praying he was in the middle of a nightmare. The overpowering scent of death was the smelling salt letting him know that not only was he wide awake, but what he was witnessing was his horrid reality.

As he reached his destination Laurence turned away with a scream as he placed a hand over his helm-covered head. The source of the deceased heart beat was a little girl no older than seven years old lying face down in the field with half her head violently bashed in.

“Subject appears to have succumbed to massive blunt force trauma,” indicated the familiar.

“Wha …what is this?” he whimpered. “What the
fuck
is going on?”

“It appears as if we have stumbled upon the event of a mass genocide,” answered the familiar.

“What genocide?” A disturbed Laurence yelled.

“Rwanda has been at civil war since 1990,” indicated the familiar. “At 2:30 pm on the 1
^st
of October 1990, fifty Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels deserted their Ugandan army posts and crossed …”

“I don’t give a shit about what happened in 1990!” Laurence roared close to tears. “What’s going on now?! The short version!”

“On April 6, 1994, an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali. There were no survivors reported,” stated the familiar. “The investigation is currently ongoing as to how and who brought the plane down, but the deaths of the two Hutu presidents are believed to have served as the catalyst for this genocide. Currently the tribe known as the Hutu have been hunting and exterminating the tribe known as the Tutsi and any of their sympathizers. Deaths are currently estimated to be five hundred thousand and rising.”

“These are …women …children … babies,” Laurence’s lips trembled. “Someone is coming to stop this …right? Someone is coming.”

“Negative,” it answered. “United Nations forces have only been deployed to ensure the safety and evacuation of non-Rwandan residents. No aid has been deployed to assist in quelling this situation.”

He stood mortified as his mind processed the fact that the rest of the world was standing by and watching as the genocidal slaughter of innocent people was taking place. As he forced himself to look at the sea of slaughter all around him, it sunk in that it was not hard to believe.

No one was coming to stop dark-skinned people from killing each other. 

Screams erupted into the speakers within his helm, causing him to leap out of his skin.

“That …sounded like children. Where? Where?”

“Detecting a Hutu party of forty-five males attacking a school containing twenty-eight Tutsi children and the teacher,” informed the familiar. “They have already killed six including …”

“Where?” He howled. “Show me!”

Laurence’s familiar brought his helm’s faceplate down as it plotted a visual course for him. His engine was fired up as gasoline rage coursed through his veins. He became a wild animal on the hunt as he charged across the field into the jungle. 

˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜

Almost a mile and a half away, children huddled screaming and bawling, gripped by terror after witnessing several of their classmates raped, butchered, or both by the crowd of gun-toting, machete-wielding men who had done the same to their teacher and forced them out of their school to succumb to the same fate.

They had been hiding there since the genocide had begun with the doors barricaded. Eventually a murderous Hutu mob making the rounds to ensure they missed no one finally came upon the school.

The leader of the blood-frenzied horde, decked out in a sweat drenched blue tank top, military fatigue pants and combat boots, wore his hair in a short afro with a serious receding hairline. Savagely he kicked away the body of a five-year-old boy he had just hacked to bits as if it was trash.

“More! Bring more!” He bellowed while pointing his blood soaked machete. “Bring me that Tutsi bitch over there!”

At his command, two younger men grabbed the girl he requested as others pulled more from the terrified flock to begin the slaughter again. As they handed her over to him, he backhanded her into the dirt before bringing his boot down on top of her back to pin her down. In her daze she watched as similar or worse was done to other classmates that had been pulled out for execution.

“Please …” she whimpered, “Do not do this …please …”

“Shut the fuck up you little Tutsi whore!” He spat on her. “I would not even soil my dick in your filthy pussy! We are here to do the work! So all you can do for me is fucking die!”

With no hesitation he raised his machete to bring it down on top of her.

It would not touch her skin as a stone the size of a shot-put moving with the velocity of a sniper’s bullet hit him dead center in the chest. The sheer force of the impact hurled him several yards away, never to rise again.

The fearsome attack stayed the hand of every man who witnessed it as they turned to see the direction from whence the unconventional assault had come.

The shaking ground as he charged made him appear all the more frightening to them. The yells and screams that filled the air were no longer of children but full grown men as they came face to face with a furious god.

For the petrified men, there was no time for words, only fight or flight. Either run or shoot.

On instinct, Laurence slid to a halt and covered up as the bullets from various handguns, rifles, and AK-47’s pelted him. It was a natural instinct after remembering what guns were capable of.

“Your armor is impervious to conventional human armament without the aid of Awakening energy,” informed his familiar.

The familiar’s response stoked the rage back into him.

“Then let’s show these bitchasses some superior firepower.”

“Reach for me, point and aim,” it ordered him. “I shall do the rest.”

Without thought he reached for the familiar, pulling it from its holding. Once free, it converted into its full staff mode with eyes and parts of its crystalline structure blazing with the unbridled power that had given birth to the universe.

Laurence had never killed anyone, and he thought himself incapable of taking a life under any circumstance. Beholding the mutilated bodies of innocent men, women and children, remembering the bloodcurdling screams of the children the men before him had been about to butcher like sheep, shut off something within him. He had not hesitated when he gunned down the leader of the mob with a rock, nor did he flinch when he aimed his staff-converted familiar and unleashed a volley of cosmic energy with the combined look of electricity and fire that tore through the air, taking out five men at once. His world was drenched in red fury as he waded through thinning gunfire, unloading Earth-shaking volley after volley, decimating the mob, breaking their will, and branding a memory of unadulterated fear in the forefront of the minds of the survivors to remember until their end days.

Finally reaching the middle of the mob, Laurence resorted to melee tactics, swinging the staff like a baseball bat as he clobbered those who had not gotten the hint that this battle was over after the first shot.

His rage and strength were so savage that one of his line drive swings smacked a full-grown man off his feet. The force of the superhuman blow slammed him back first into one of the mob’s Jeeps, totaling and flipping over the vehicle on impact. It was enough to take the remaining fight out of the horrified horde as they turned on their heels to run for their lives.

Laurence, believing the fight was over, began to calm down a bit until a bullet ricocheted off the side of his helm.

He spun around with his charged-up staff, prepared to blow a sizable hole through the assailant foolish enough to still challenge him.

“Hold! Power down!”

His familiar did as he commanded.

The kid had to be no older than ten or eleven. His rifle was almost as tall as him, and he fumbled to put another round in the chamber. The gold and silver warrior stomped over to him, making him weak in the knees. Before he could raise the rifle again, Laurence snatched it out of his small hands and crushed into two pieces within his grip.

Tossing the broken weapon away, a furious Laurence grabbed the boy by his shirt lifting him to eye level. The child finally squealed, overcome with fright as he came face to face with what he could only perceive to be a deity.

“You think this is a game?” Laurence’s voice boomed through the helm’s audio system. “You think this is a joke?”

The boy could not answer him as he shook and wailed in a near-catatonic state.

“Go home!” He roared. “And never do anything like this again! Go!”

As he lowered him back to the ground releasing him, the Hutu boy ran wailing hysterically for his life from whence he came.

“Aside from us and the survivors, the area is clear for a two-mile radius,” informed the familiar. “That may change if the remaining assailants that fled connect with a larger force and return to possibly retaliate.”

“They wouldn’t be that stupid,” Laurence snarled.

“Your species has been recorded doing many ‘stupid’ things,” indicated the familiar, “Especially when they have been utterly defeated and humiliated.”

“Noted,” he huffed.

Laurence slowly turned to the traumatized school children still huddled together. The horrors that they had just witnessed would never be washed from their minds, especially with the bloodied, butchered bodies of some of their classmates lying several feet away.

He did not have a clue where to begin as the adrenaline left him. He started with the young girl still on the ground who would have been the next victim of the mob’s leader.

She continued to tremble like a leaf as he knelt down in front of her. She coiled back screaming as Laurence set down his familiar, which transformed into its serpent mode. Commanding the faceplate to his helm to retract, he picked her up, gently holding her as he searched for the words to calm her down.

“It’s okay … it’s okay,” his own voice displayed a hint of trauma while attempting to be soothing. “You’re safe …you are all safe.”

Realizing that she was looking into the face of a human being with a skin tone slightly lighter than her own dark skin calmed her down a bit, his compassionate eyes which were close to tears also helped.