Free Blood Is Dirt by Robert Wilson Page A

to what we could now see was a construction machine with a hydraulic shovel at the front end and an excavating arm crooked at the back.
    Another engine started up and headlights flared across the road, lighting up the bush and attracting a whirl of insects. It blew out the last of the dusk and darkness floated down, black and velvety, with just a hole slashed by the truck’s lights. A transmission growled. Air brakes hissed. Universal joints shrieked. The slash of light arced across the forest and pointed down the graded road. The driver stirred the pudding and found another gear with a gnashing of teeth and shredded metal. The truck pushed forward. We sank back into the trees. The huge exhaust baffled past, the lights blinding us, the cargo invisible.
    Torches floated like fireflies in the night. A single voice shouted orders. Then silence and the insect metropolis moved in.
    â€˜Are they building?’ asked Bagado. ‘Out here?’
    â€˜If they’re excavating why truck the stuff away?’
    â€˜At night?’
    Bagado gripped my arm as if he’d had some premonition at what was about to come screeching out of the forest.
    A terrible scream, a horrific mortal howl ripped open the night, the noise so loud and piercing that life paused for a moment before rumbling on. We stiffened as if shivved in the back. A cold steel bowl of fear grew in my stomach and pressed on my guts. Another scream. The trees crouched. Voices panicked in the dark. The start of the third scream shredded the man’s voice box and the rest came out like fingernails tearing down a granite rock face.
    Another engine started and simultaneously a blue flash of light exploded through the trees. The clearing had become a dome of light, a circle watched over by the ferocity of a dozen halogen lamps. We jogged, keeping low, and crashed into the trees just in front of the arena under whose brilliant whiteness all colour was drained from the scene.
    The strangeness of it, like black-and-white, incomplete stop-frame animation of life. The sweat steeled cold on my face. A group of men were huddled, just away from a body lying on the ground, their hands on their knees as if completely out of breath. Squares of halogen light stared out unflinching all around. Two other men converged in such a way that I knew they didn’t want to but they were drawn. The body, my Christ, the body was smoking. Smoking thin trails of God knows what into a light so brutal it prickled the vision to graininess. Ten feet beyond the men, stacked up into the darkness more than twelve foot high, higher than the light dome, were hundreds of drums, some dull and plastic, others with the sheen of metal, some whole, some split. A gap in the edifice showed where a single drum had fallen from. The drum, capless and split, lay some feet from the body. The cap, stuck upright in some sludge, was at the foot of the drums. A slicked track from the open drum showed where the man had tried to crawl out of himself.
    Details crashed into my mind, some magnified by horror. The man’s skull was visible, his ribcage too. Rubber gloves and boots on his hands and feet twitched. Two men stood up from the huddle and vomited black. Four armed men appeared from the circling darkness. Their rifles were pointed at the group. The two men converging finally arrived. One of them said the single word.
    â€˜Acid.’
    The armed men put their hands up to cover their noses and mouths. One of them peeled off and went to talk to the man in the digger. The digger started up, moved to the edge of the lights and planted its feet. The driver manipulated the levers and the elbow straightened at the back. He scooped out a deep trench in the earth. The soldiers herded the group of men away from the body, their rifles pointing at the ground. The digger lifted its feet and reversed in a wide arc and dropped the hydraulic shovel. The shovel tilted. The machine moved forward and consumed the top six