Free The Three by Sarah Lotz

me, I do not know. There were so many other people who needed help. He led me towards his ambulance and I sat in the front seat while he got on his radio. Within minutes, a Red Cross kombi arrived, and the driver motioned me to squeeze inside. Like me, the people inside it were all filthy, covered in ash; most wore the expressions of the deeply traumatised. A woman at the back stared silently out of the window, a sleeping child in her arms. The old man next to me shook silently; there were tear tracks on his dirty cheeks. ‘
Molweni
,’ I whispered to him, ‘
kuzolunga
.’ I was telling him that everything would be all right, but I didn’t believe it myself. All I could do was pray, making deals with God in my head so that Susan and Busi would be spared.
    We passed by the tent filled with the dead. I tried not to look at it. I could see people hefting the bodies–more of those shapes covered in blue plastic–inside it. And I prayed even harder that they did not contain the bodies of Busi or Susan.
    We were driven to the Mew Way community hall. I was supposed to sign my name at the entrance, but I just pushed past the officials and ran for the doors.
    Even from outside, I could hear the sound of crying. It was chaos inside there. The centre was full of people huddled in groups, covered in soot and bandages. Some were crying, others looked deeply shocked, staring ahead sightlessly, like the people in the kombi. I began to push my way through the crowd. How would I ever find Busi and Susan in this mass? I saw Noliswa, one of my neighbours, who sometimes looked after Susan. Her face was thick with blood and black dirt. She was rocking back and forth and when I tried to ask her about Busi and Susan she just looked blank; the light had gone out of her eyes. Later, I found out that two of her grandchildren had been at the crèche when the plane had crashed into it.
    And then I heard a voice saying, ‘Angie?’
    I turned around slowly. And saw Busi standing with Susan in her arms.
    I screamed, ‘
Niphilile
! You are alive!’ over and over again.
    We stood and held each other–Susan wriggling, I was squeezing her too tight–for the longest time. I hadn’t given up hope, but the relief that they were okay… I will never feel anything that powerful again in my lifetime. When we both stopped crying, Busi told me what had happened. She said she had collected Susan from crèche early, and instead of going straight home, had decided to walk to the spaza for sugar. She said the sound of the impact was incredible–they thought at first it must be a bomb. She said she just grabbed Susan and ran as fast as she could away from that sound and away from the explosions. If she had gone home, they would have been killed.
    Because our home was gone. Everything we owned had been incinerated.
    We stayed in the hall while we waited to be allocated to a shelter. Some of us put up partitions, hanging sheets and blankets from the roof to make makeshift rooms. So many people had lost their homes, but it was the children I felt for the most. The ones who had lost their parents or grandparents. There were so many of them, many of them
amagweja
[refugee children] who had already suffered during the xenophobic attacks four years ago. They had already seen too much.
    One boy sticks in my mind. On that first night, I couldn’t sleep. The adrenaline still hadn’t left my body and I suppose I was still dealing with the after-effects of what I had seen that day. I stood up to stretch and I felt the weight of someone staring at me. On a blanket next to where Busi, Susan and I were lying sat a boy. I’d barely noticed him before–I was too caught up in caring for Susan and queuing for food and water. Even in the dark I could see the pain and loneliness shining in his eyes. He was alone on his blanket; I could see no sign of a parent or a grandparent. I wondered why the welfare people had not taken him to the un accompanied children’s section.
    I