The radio stopped playing.

  The low boil of the red sauce simmering on the kitchen stove bubbled over and sizzled down the sides of the large pot.

  The apartment windows, half-open to let in the wisp of a summer breeze, slammed shut, shutting out any air from outside.

  Thin flames emerged from a long row of votive candles that lined the window sills, countertops and mantels throughout the rooms, releasing a platoon of sinister shadows over every wall.

  The Strega pulled her hands out of the water, leaned across the table and locked them around Maltano’s wrist, her iron grip not giving way, even as he made a vain attempt to struggle free. She opened her eyes, lowered her head and stared hard at Maltano, yanking the stronger man closer to her.

  “It is time for you to hear the words that need to be spoken,” she said, her voice taking a harsher tone. “And to know the name of the foe who means you the most harm. Your very life will turn on it.”

  Maltano’s face shone with cool lines of sweat, his black hair as damp and matted as if he had just stepped out of a shower, his concrete veneer chipped and cracked. “I’m listening,” he said, his voice taking a few steps back from hard-edged.

  “Close your eyes,” the Strega ordered, “and let the words paint their picture.” Maltano took one quick look around the room, gave a flick of the tongue across his dry lips and did as instructed. The Strega felt the tension in his upper body and shoulders and the trembling of his legs and knew that the weight of power had shifted dramatically to her end of the table.

  “Hear me,” the Strega said, the words spoken in a near whisper, “and see the faces of your past and let your journey to hell begin.” The Strega stood, kicked her chair away, hovered over Maltano and told her story. “She was a bride of less than a year, married to a good man with a weak heart. He was sick but there was no money for doctors and the medicine they bring. She needed to do what she could to save the one man, the only man, she would ever love. The knowing fingers of the neighborhood pointed in your direction, told her you were one who could help, the one with power and money who would look her way if she came and asked. You were much younger then but your grip on the neighborhood was already strong. A meeting was arranged and she came to see you, sat across from your desk in an office you keep to this very day and poured out the wounds in her heart. She was young and naive and trusted in you, believed in the words you tossed in her direction. You told her you would take care of her husband and take care of her. That their worries would soon be at an end. Do you remember? Do you see it?”

  Maltano managed a slow nod, shirt drenched, body starting to do a slow sag. “Yes,” he said.

  “And you did help,” the Strega said, “but it was done in your own evil way and it came with a price. In return for bringing strength to her husband’s body, paying for medical attention he so desperately needed, you demanded your way with her body, finding hours of pleasure wrapped around the warmth of another’s wife. That was a crime in itself, but it wasn’t enough for you to end there. You made sure the husband knew of the devil’s deal his young wife had made, that he knew while he lay sick in one bed, his bride was naked in another. Then, when you tired of having your way with her, your roving eyes ready to pounce on your next victim, you turned the young bride out and sold her on a nightly basis to whoever would pay. And you let it continue until death reached out and placed a hand on two tortured and tired souls, freeing them from the shackles of your domain.”

  “He died,” Maltano said, “the husband. His heart gave out. But the girl, she could have lived. She wasn’t sick. It was her that ended it. Not me.”

  “The husband’s heart was weak but it wasn’t broken until you ventured near,” the Strega said. “It was your doing that stole his last breath. But you’re right about the girl. She didn’t have to die. She wanted to die. It was her only way to escape from your clutches and that of all the men you sent her way. She buried her husband and then went home, put on the long white dress she wore the day she married, walked quietly up the creaky stairs to the roof of her building and jumped to her death. She landed face up in an alley, her thin and broken body resting across a line of garbage cans, a black pair of rosary beads clutched in her right hand.”

  The Strega pulled one hand away from Maltano’s wrist and reached into the short pocket of her blue house dress. She came out holding a long string of black rosary beads. She folded the beads and pressed them across Maltano’s forehead. The beads burned and sizzled their way through his wet and clammy skin. “These beads,” the Strega hissed. “Held in her hands and now burning through to touch your empty soul.”

  Maltano’s body shook with violent tremors, smoke filtering off his head, the stench of burnt flesh filling the stifling room. “Enough,” he pleaded in a mere wisp of a voice. “Please, I’ve had enough.”

  “You came here seeking answers,” the Strega said. “Those I can give you. But now you ask for mercy and this is not a place where you will find that. In here, only vengeance is allowed to live.”

  Maltano struggled to speak, blood running down the front of his head, the rosary beads resting on the table, curled like a silent snake. “This is not the deal we made! I came in asking about my enemies … I never asked for this! Not one inch of this shit … .”

  The Strega released her grip on Maltano, took several steps away from the table, her eyes never off the gangster and smiled. “I have told you not only who your enemy is, but also the reasons why you are a target,” she said. “And the price that enemy seeks.”

  “Who?” Maltano said, spreading out his arms, regaining some of the swagger. “You told me about two people I crossed tracks with a lot of years ago. What happened back then doesn’t have dick to do with what’s going on in the here and now.”

  “You listened but you did not hear,” the Strega said. “The bride is your biggest enemy. She is the one who will not rest until your heart is as still as that of her husband.”

  “And what the fuck can a sack of dust and bones do to me now?” Maltano said, wiping the blood away from his eyes. “She couldn’t hurt me when she was alive, much less now when she’s been long ago dead and buried.”

  The Strega lowered her head and a white glow filled the room, its force strong enough to send Maltano off his feet, slamming his back and legs to the wall. He fell to the ground and looked up at the Strega, through the haze of dust and smoke and light. What he saw brought his heart to a cold stop.

  The Strega was gone.

  In her place, stood a young woman dressed in a bridal gown.

  “I thought you should see me as you once knew me,” the young woman said, her voice still that of the Strega. “My name is Angela Sandrini. I am here to claim what belongs to me.”

  “W-Where’s the old woman?” Maltano shouted, eyes wide. “How does she pull this kind of shit? Either way, I’m not buyin’ into it, you hear? You’re dead. I know it and what’s dead can’t hurt me in any fuckin’ way.”

  “I am the old woman. I am the Strega. I waited for you a long time, watched as your power grew, as you ruined and destroyed one life after another. But I knew I needed to be patient, knew my moment would one day come if only I had the strength to wait.”

  “So that’s what this is about?” Maltano said, breaths shorter, labored. “Y-You you want to make a grab for my turf, my action? I build it … and you take it! That’s what you think belongs to you, all because of what was done to you?”

  “I have no use for money, and your power is built on fear,” Sandrini said, “and that will disappear like a sand castle washed by a wave. Soon, no one will remember you ever existed.”

  “So, then what the fuck do you want?” Maltano said. “What the fuck is so special that you waited all these years to get your hands on it?”

  Sandrini walked around the table and toward Maltano. “I came for your soul,” she said. “To own you, possess you, and make you feel the pangs of pain I once felt and can never erase from memory. The pain none of us can ever forget.”

  Maltano looked at Sandrini and shrank from her gaze. He closed his eyes, hoping the vision would dissipate, that it would prove to be a bad dream or a well-played hoax, and if it was a hoax, the hoaxer was going to get a beating that would be legendary in the neighborhood. When he opened his eyes the room was full of familiar faces. He looked from one to another and saw the men, women and children he had harmed and damaged in all his years as boss. He shrank from their touch, his fingers cutting at the wood floor, his hands soon drenched in their own blood. The tortured faces quietly moved in closer, led by Sandrini, until they swallowed up the body of Bruno Maltano.

  “I don’t want to die,” he whimpered as the Strega reached out a hand for him to take. “Not like this. A man like me can’t die this way.”

  “And you won’t,” the Strega said. “You have my blood promise. You won’t ever die. You are destined to live forever. With us.”

  Bruno Maltano let out a scream loud enough to shatter glass, but it was heard by no one. He was now in a place where only silence and pain and suffering reigned. It was a place of his own making and one which would be his home for eternity.

  Outside, the summer heat wave was broken by a heavy rain, cooling the streets for the first time in weeks, and bringing a burst of fresh air to the neighborhood, for the first time in years.

  The windows of Angela Sandrini’s apartment were opened wide now, heat giving way to a comfortable evening breeze.

  The rooms were clean and neat and well-lit.

  The stove top was bare, nothing on the burners.

  In the living room, the framed photo still hung above the mantle. Only now, the handsome young man gazing out at the mountains and the lakes was no longer there alone.

  There was a beautiful young woman by his side, smiling at him, her right hand resting under his left arm.

  It was his wife, Angela.

  AVATAR

  by CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERS

  Horses froth at their bits and nostrils. Filigreed spurs dig into haunches and draw blood. The riders refuse to surrender the pace to their cohorts driving modified pickup trucks and Land Rovers. V-8 engines groan and sputter as these vehicles fan out behind the galloping, wheezing animals. Soon the mounted marauders unsling their AK-47s. A few riders, preferring the old way of killing, coax curved swords from leather scabbards. On the trucks, gloved hands feed magazines into the machine guns bolted onto chassis or swiveling from roofs. Young brown and black men with heads wrapped in turbans or burnooses jam the cabs and truckbeds. Among them are sprinkled young men of lighter complexions who cannot even understand the language of the brown and black men, yet fight alongside them to cleanse the Janub Darfur of those who are darker, who do not pray to Allah in the prescribed manner, who invite the Crusader so-called relief agencies, and all Islam knows these “aid workers” and “UN Refugee observers” are CIA and Mossad spies!

  So the hunt begins.

  The prey lie in patchwork tents and hovels of sticks, mud and corrugated tin. Brittle bones, stinging chancres and buzzing flies thieve many occupants of sleep. There are always a few who fear sleep, as they might not wake from it. There are always a few who pray for sleep for the same reason. And there are a few who now who gather their meager belongings amid frantic whispers and exhortations in the dark … .

  The western sky is black above the tents and hovels. Red inklings of dawn tinge the east. The sandstone of the goz and the dirt of the wadi remain scorched despite the long night’s reprieve from a sledgehammer sun. And yet in the time it takes for a lion’s fangs to crush a doe’s throat, the black in the west and the red to the east evaporate. The sky’s stippled with hot pink tracer rounds and explodes in yellow missile tracks. Bursts of white light and orange flames follow. Then the smoke plumes rise—ugly and garish after eating, digesting and defecating all of these colors.

  Down in the wadi, survivors huddle in the shadows as rounds pop and warheads blast. Down in the wadi, survivors moan and whimper. Down in the wadi, survivors suffer the screams of those they left behind in the camp.

  Death hovers and banks and circles and drones overhead: attack helicopters and huge Antonov turboprop bombers. They have come with the riders and the trucks and Land Rovers. They come in the name of peace, they say. They come to “police” these men on horseback and trucks, who call themselves Janjaweed.

  They come not to rescue, but to slaughter.

  They ensure that hunter’s quarry does not escape into the Jebel Murra where the SPLA fighters lurk. Where lambs learn how to use RPGs against the wolves’ Land Rovers …

  … and down in the wadi, a little boy traces the form of an Antonov perfectly in the sand. Then he draws a horse and rider and an AK-47, as any child in safer places might sketch a family car or favorite doll. The child’s grandmother, skin wrinkled as purplish leather, pulls the boy to her side. More tracer rounds fly. The flares will fall next, and all will be seen, if not by the riders, then by those who claim not to be there, up in their planes and helicopters that see in the dark anyway.

  Two crouching figures do not moan or whimper, nor do they pray to Jesus, Allah or the spirits of the earth and sky. One is as almost as black as the people jumbled about the dusty cut and boulders. He wears the camouflage uniform of the Ghanaian Army and the stripes of a sergeant. He’s armed only with a 9-mm pistol. One clip. The other is a brown-skinned woman with hair as dark as the western sky before the bullets came and as long as the tail of a Janjaweed mount. This hair is matted to her sweating forehead. Her cargo trousers are steeped in the blood of those she tries to sew up even as they lie in the wadi. Her tanktop is ripped and one of her pendulous breasts sways loose, yet she isn’t demure. Now she clamps her hand across the mouth of a woman to stifle cries spawned by shrapnel. The wounded woman is already suffering an infection. The bare-breasted woman in trousers injects her with an ampule of morphine from her cargo pocket. She then shoves a pill through her fingers into the woman’s mouth. It seemed pointless to administer an antibiotic, as everyone hiding in that indentation of rock can smell the pus seeping from the wounded woman’s vagina. Better to let her die now, before the Janjaweed close in. She’d been raped a month before and one man used a knife pommel to open her wider. Her daughter squats beside her, staring blankly. The girl’s belly is swollen, and it isn’t from hunger … .

  Not six hours ago the brown-skinned woman and the sergeant relaxed in the African Union-UNHCR compound at Nyala. The woman was teaching the sergeant Texas Hold’em, while both bopped to vintage Biggie Smalls on the iPod ear buds she shared. The sergeant got her a Coca-Cola and a fat, tightly-rolled joint and promised that his men would put down the porn DVDs and the beer and their own cannabis to patrol the Nyala-Al Jur Sureaf Road before sunset. Then they went their separate ways—she to the Doctors for Peace dormitory hut, he to his tent barracks.

  They woke simultaneously, hours later.

  Their chests heaved and their skulls wrung from a voice that said go to the Al Jur Sureaf refugee camp. Find a nameless sick, starving girl with jaundiced eyes who is heavy with child. Find her mother and her brother and others in her clan among the hundreds of hovels dug into the goz, among the thousands of people who answered to that description. Take them out of the camp, it said. Everyone else at Al Jur Sureaf will die or be enslaved. The voice spoke to the brown-skinned woman in the Hindi she barely understood as a child herself when her parents left Mumbai for Canada. It spoke to the sergeant in Ashanti. But the words the sergeant heard ended with the same phrase as this woman heard in her own dream. It was like Hindi, only much older. Kalki av atar.

  A flare pops overhead and floats gently down under its tiny parachute. All eyes follow its glowing, dainty descent. All eyes see their own death. The helicopter will swoop down and reconnoiter with its night vision. Then the Antonovs will drop napalm or fire rockets. The vehicles will zigzag out of the ruins of the camp and the riders will follow, wielding their swords … .

  A helicopter indeed arcs a wide, almost lackadaisical turn toward the wadi’s rim. Easy meat, down there.

  But the strafing run doesn’t come. The helicopter veers right, over the Nyala-Al Jur Sureaf Road. The crew has spotted a man in the goggles that magnify ambient light.

  The doctor and the sergeant see him too—silhouetted against flashes and fire. More flares and they see him whole. He stands alone. A turban wraps his head and swaddles his shoulders. It’s tied as a woman would tie her cover, and is a woman’s color—bright azure, the color of the sky when there is no smoke and no helicopters raining fire. As the flares die there is a fleeting moment of dim dawn light, and in that light they see his face is painted blue. His wrists and feet are bound with what look like bandages. Bloody ones. He carries a broom. They’ve seen that kind of broom before. Rushes and acacia wood, carried only by young girls and old hags. Used to beat away the locusts that devour the crops, and the vultures who devour the people when the crops are gone. This broom he now raises with one arm high above his swathed head. His other arm waves now, the hand is extended, palm open. And the helicopter thunders straight for him …

  … and no more can the survivors hear the screams from Al Jur Sureaf above the gunfire and whirring rockets. Now they hear a guttural cry from one man. The helicopter’s engines sputter, seize. The machine drops out of the sky and slides into cliff. As it explodes, another cry breaks the sunrise. Another engine whines to halt and dies, avionics and instrument panels flicker and wink-out. Thusly crippled, a turboprop Antonov inverts and crashes.

  The man, broom in hand, takes a running leap across the full gulf of the wadi, headlong toward the Janjaweed. Land Rover and truck engines instantly die; radios and bootleg cellphones are useless.

  Horses buck and whinny in fear. The Janjaweed attack with swords and bullets, but this man darts among the shadows cast by the sandstone ledges of the goz. Rifles fire blindly, then jam. Necks are broken and teeth shatter with blows from a frail, crooked broom handle. Nerves short-circuit and thus muscles seize as surely as vehicle and aircraft engines. Hearts burst beneath ribs as the impulses that drive them surge wildly.