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KIVU PROVINCE,

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Eve Mapendo sees the figure lit by moonlight.

It has the body of a muscular man stripped to the waist and the head of a kudu, a dark antelope head with two heavy horns spiralling out of it like madness.

The creature stands in an opening in the forest on the hillside above her, at the front of a file of soldiers. They wear black cloth hoods over their heads with ragged holes cut for eyes and mouths. They stand in complete silence; the silver light frosts the surface of every leaf around them.

The horned head turns in her direction, the large eyes darkened by the shadow of its heavy brows.

Her pupils dilate wide as the adrenaline hits them. She clenches her throat muscles and painfully chokes off a scream. It cannot see her in the shadows of the doorway of her shack but she feels its gaze bear down on her like a hard hand gripping her shoulder, pushing her until she crouches on the ground.

The creature unslings the assault rifle from its shoulder, cocks the weapon and gestures to the soldiers to fan out and move down the hill towards the refugee camp. They disappear into the trees.

A whimper of fear escapes her and the baby stirs inside the shack.

She knows what the creature is and she knows what it wants.

Joseph bares his teeth and screams at his enemy.

It’s his first proper firefight and he wants to prove to his platoon leader, Lieutenant Karuta, that he can fight. He’s fourteen or fifteen, maybe sixteen – he doesn’t know. He was born in a refugee camp during a war and he never knew his parents.

He sees the enemy soldiers darting in and out of the trees across the small valley, a hundred metres from him now, firing wild bursts from their AK-47s and shouting insults. They are wearing a ragtag of green uniforms and coloured tee shirts. The bushes next to him twitch and shudder with the impact of their bullets, cut branches and leaves tumble down around him. The men in his platoon fire back with a cacophony of gunfire.

He glances across at Lieutenant Karuta who is yelling away and firing his rifle in long bursts, spraying bullets. Joseph brings his AK up to his shoulder and squints through the circular sight on the muzzle. The rifle is old and heavy, its metal parts scratched and its wooden stock stained a dark brown by the sweat of many tense hands that have clutched it during the decades of Congo’s wars. He’s often cursed its weight as the platoon trudged up and down the countless hills in the bush, but now it feels light and vital in his hands, an extension of himself growing out of his shoulder.

He pulls the trigger and the gun chatters, slamming back hard into his collarbone. It clicks empty and he quickly ducks down, presses the magazine release, yanks it out, flips it over and shoves the spare one, strapped to it with duct tape, into the port. This is his first big firefight but he’s practised these moves over and over again.

He doesn’t know who the enemy are: one of the poisonous alphabet soup of groups in Kivu – PARECO, AFL-NALU, FJPC, one of the government FARDC brigades, even a rival FDLR battalion or one of the many mai-mai militias from the different tribal groups: Lendu, Hema, Nandi, Tutsi. No one knows what the hell is going on out in the bush.

This lot look like a local mai-mai militia. Joseph’s platoon of soldiers are from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, more commonly known by their French acronym, the FDLR. They bumped into the mai-mai by accident as they were coming down the valley side into the village and the fighting broke out in a confused way.

An RPG whooshes off near him, the white fire of the propellant shoots across the valley and the rocket explodes against a tree. The enemy gunfire slackens and they begin to withdraw. This is subsistence warfare and no one actually wants to get killed – what’s the point? You can’t steal, eat or rape if you’re dead.

The FDLR soldiers that he is with start yelling and cheering. Lieutenant Karuta is next to him and Joseph looks at his excited face, eyes filled with laughter. The lieutenant is his father figure. His own father was an FDLR soldier killed when he was a baby, somewhere in the middle of the big Congo war. No one knows where or when – over five million people died so it’s not like anyone paid much attention to him.

Lieutenant Karuta is forty and a génocidaire from the old days in Rwanda. He is a big man in green army fatigues with a wispy beard patched with white that he grows to distinguish himself from the young men under his command.

He waves his rifle joyfully in the air and Joseph joins in. The village is theirs; they must get there before the peasants run off.

They charge down the valley side, jumping over tangles of vines and bursting through bamboo thickets. The ragged line of cheering fighters rushes out of the shade of the trees and into the sunshine. They hold their rifles over their heads as they bound through the waist-high grass towards the collection of round mud huts with thatched conical roofs on the flat land at the bottom of the valley. Villagers burst out of the huts and start running around screaming in panic. Women try to grab their kids, old men stumble and fall, chickens fly up, goats run around bleating. Joseph is laughing with excitement. He’s hungry after weeks in the deep bush living on pineapples and snails.

A woman in a red and blue wrap bursts up from a clump of grass to his right, squawking like a parrot, flapping one arm and dragging a goat on a string with the other. Lieutenant Karuta is onto her, changing direction and chasing fast as she flees down a path into a field of head-high maize. Joseph stumbles, recovers and follows him.

He rushes down the narrow path, the tall green stems blurring past him on either side. Lieutenant Karuta catches up with the woman quickly, kicks the goat out of the way and shoves her in the back so she goes sprawling. The goat runs on over her and the lieutenant has a moment of indecision – do I grab the goat or her?

But her shrieks excite him and he looks down at her on the ground in front of him. ‘Get the goat!’ he shouts to Joseph who squeezes past him and races down the path. The screaming starts.

Weird high-pitched animal shrieks come out of the night from all around the refugee camp. It turns her blood to cold liquid fear in her veins.

Eve crouches inside her shack clutching her baby, thinking, ‘No human being can make that sound.’

She is nineteen, with a broad face, oval eyes, a blunt nose and smooth brown skin. Short and stocky, she wears a patterned pagne wrapped around her body and a plastic cross on a string round her neck. Her free hand clutches it involuntarily.

She and her nine-month-old daughter, Marie, are alone in a shelter at the edge of the camp. She has blown out her tiny candle and crouches in terror in the darkness at the back of the hut. It is ten feet long by four feet high; the walls are made of palm leaves woven onto sticks that are fixed to a frame of branches and she can hear everything outside. A piece of blue and white UNHCR plastic sheeting completes the curved roof. Her boyfriend, Gabriel, proudly made a door for her out of a corrugated iron sheet tied onto the branch frame with some electrical flex he found. He showed her how to tie it shut before he left – ‘That will keep you safe!’

The camp mongrels started barking at the attackers as they came near but this turns to frightened whimpering once the screaming starts. She can hear the soldiers shouting now in Swahili, ‘Over there! Look in that one over there!’ ‘Open up! Open the door!’

Screams of fear come from her neighbours in return.

‘Open the door, or I’ll kill you!’

Some confused banging and shouting.

‘Where is it? Where is the albino?’

More sobbing and crying and then the dull sound of blows and screaming.

Her blood pounds so loud in her ears, she is sure they can hear it. She tries to still her heart – if she can make herself very quiet and very small she might escape. They want her baby but she can’t give it up. Marie starts crying and she forces her hand over her mouth, pressing her face into her breast and smelling her milky baby smell one last time.

The shouting nearby has gone quiet. She hears footsteps approaching the hut. The thin corrugated iron sheet is all there is between her and them. A hand grabs the edge of it and tries to open the door but the flex holds it fast to the branch frame. There is a grunt of anger and then the iron bangs loudly as a machete hacks at the flex. Heaving, banging, tearing, they pull the door off its flimsy hinges and throw it to one side.

The demonic figure silhouetted in the moonlight is half man and half animal. The kudu head and horns look huge. It is stripped to the waist and muscular and in the flat silver light she can see the artery in its neck, beating fast just under the rim of the headdress. It is breathing hard and beads of sweat roll down its chest. The smell of the forest pours into the hut, musty and damp.

Eve cowers on the floor and looks up, wide-eyed in terror. Her hand moves to hold the baby tighter and Marie lets out a loud wail.

The creature holds its Kalashnikov in its right hand and stretches out its left to her. Eve makes a noise of denial, just a whimper. The Kudu is enraged and bellows at her before ducking its long horns under the roof and grabbing her arm. Its fingers are like steel, biting deep into her flesh, dragging her out of the doorway, clutching the baby in one arm. She is screaming now with fear, ‘No! No! No!’

As soon as she is out in the open, a soldier in a black cloth hood shouts excitedly at the sight of the pale baby and hits her in the back with the butt of his rifle. A rib cracks and she makes an oof sound as the air is forced out of her.

She loses her grip on the child and the Kudu grabs it by one arm and lifts it up in the air. It throws back its horned head and howls in triumph. The other members of the gang all join in howling and firing their rifles in the air.

Eve lies winded on the ground until they finish celebrating. The baby is taken away and then they look down at her. Rough hands grab her under her arms and throw her on her back and tear off her pagne. As the first man presses his heavy weight on her stomach, something inside her says, ‘This isn’t happening.’

But the tearing and jabbing continues and she thinks, ‘Why are you doing this to me, God? Why have you made this terrible country?’