The Power of Five Oblivion

anger.
    “Was that your ticket out of here?” he snarled. “Well, it looks as if it’s taken off without us. So what do we do now?”
    Somebody pushed them forward. By the time they reached the edge of the pit, the plane had already gone.

THIRTY-THREE
    Matt and Lohan spent the next week working in the gold mine of Serra Morte and by the end of that time they knew that if they didn’t escape soon they would die. Their strength was being sucked out of them … by the long hours, the gruelling labour, the lack of food and the constant presence of disease. And this was how it was for the thousands of people around them. It was as if they had been fed into some kind of hellish machine. Individually, they no longer mattered. They were being processed. Eventually they would die, just as others had died in front of them. And there were hundreds more arriving every day to fill the spaces that they would leave when they themselves had gone.
    The mornings began with a klaxon, sounding out across the empty pit, echoing in the darkness before the sun began to rise. It might have been five o’clock. It might have been six. Nobody had watches or clocks so what difference did it make? The slaves slept in a town that had been constructed about half a kilometre from the pit, a dark and festering sprawl of huts made from wood, plastic, corrugated iron and canvas, or a mixture of all four. Lanes ran between the huts, giving the impression of a community, but in fact the town was lifeless, with nowhere to go, nothing to do. There was no electricity, no running water, no sanitation. Hundreds of people were forced to share the same latrine, a foul trench dug in the jungle where they would queue in line, waiting to relieve themselves. There was no privacy. The stench was stomach churning and the air was thick with black, buzzing flies.
    Each building contained twenty or thirty people lying side by side on camp beds, so close that their shoulders touched. Old sheets and blankets hung uselessly over doorways in a vain attempt to keep the mosquitoes out, but all they did was keep the warm, sweat-filled air locked in. Evening meals were distributed in metal buckets and shared out, the men and women crowding round and filling their own tin cups. The food was always the same: a stew of beans with a few scraps of meat from an animal it was probably better not to identify. After they had eaten, they slept, knocked out by the fifteen hours’ non-stop work that were just behind them but which they knew waited for them again the next day. Mosquitoes droned endlessly throughout the night. There was no respite.
    Every morning began with a body count. There was a work detail – they were known as “ os coveiros ”, the gravediggers, and it was their job to drag out the dead and carry them on wagons to a clearing in the jungle. In fact, there were no graves. The bodies would be dumped here, and once a week, when the pile had grown high enough, they would be doused in petrol and set alight. No night ever passed without someone dying. Sometimes it would be from malaria or exhaustion. More often, it was the snakes. Matt would sometimes hear the scream as someone was bitten. It would be followed by raised voices and panic as the other men and women in the same hut tried to find the creature by candlelight before they were bitten themselves.
    The work was always the same.
    Every morning, in the pale glow of the dawn, the workers picked up a wooden bucket and a wooden spade and climbed down the ladders, all the way to the bottom. Even this could be dangerous. The ladders were slimy with dirt and sweat, and it was all too easy to slip. On their very first day, Matt and Lohan saw a man fall to his death. Perhaps he broke his neck. Perhaps he suffocated in the mud. Either way he didn’t get up again and the other workers simply curved around him, trying to pretend he wasn’t there. Matt and Lohan did the same. They had quickly learnt not to draw attention to themselves, not to do anything that would separate them from the crowd. They had only one plan. They had to live long enough to be there when the Legacy 600 returned.
    They dug, they filled their buckets, they climbed. It was dark at the bottom of the pit. The sky seemed miles away and the guards, standing on the edge or patrolling with their Alsatian dogs, were tiny. It was as much as Matt and Lohan could do to stay close to each other. Talking was forbidden, not that they would have had the