“Never,” he said quietly, turning toward me again.

The remaining two-and-a-half-hour drive was met with silence. Thoughts circled my head and I tried so hard to imagine, to prepare myself for what I was about to witness but nothing could have readied me.

I smelled the burnt straw of the village homes before I actually saw them and it enveloped the cab, making me cough violently. Dingane threw a t-shirt at me to cover my face so I did. Finally, after rounding the bush that the little village must have tucked itself into in attempt to camouflage themselves, little piles of remaining flames flickered and twisted throughout the open field before us. I saw no one but heard faint screams and wails tear throughout the night. My gut tightened and my hands gripped the dash in front of me, my knuckles white with strain.

Dingane stopped the truck abruptly and ran into the center of the village. I jumped out and followed suit behind Charles and Solomon but stopped short at the terrifying sight before me.

Groups of small children sporadically spread throughout the camp, bent and weeping, cried into the night over the corpses of their burning parents. I immediately fell to my knees in want to vomit but could only dry heave at the sheer horror. The smell of burning flesh seared into my own and I had to cover my mouth in terror.

“Sophie!” someone screamed harshly beside me. I looked up toward the voice and Dingane stood above me. He grabbed my arms, picking me up and brought me close to his face. “Can you do this?” he asked but his eyes were sympathetic. He brushed a tear away with his thumb but one more fell in its place.

“Y-yes,” I sputtered, pushing all emotion away, thinking on Karina’s advice.

“Follow me,” he yelled over the blazing fires and bawling children.

“But they need help,” I hiccupped, pointing to the boys and girls sprawled in panic around us.

“And we will get to them, but we must tend to the hurt now. They’re priority.”

“Okay,” I told him, racing beside him toward what looked like a felled little girl around seven.

We passed Charles pumping a woman’s chest up and down to get her to breathe again and I quickly inhaled a sharp breath. Dingane and I both fell to our knees beside the little girl; her tunic was covered in splatters of blood across her chest.

Dingane pulled it back and exposed the wound. Small holes peppered her torso and they appeared to go deeper than anything considered superficial.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Please, tell me what to do.”

“We’ll bandage her tightly. Here, press this gauze here,” he told me and turned toward the kit I’d seen him carry earlier.

As he rummaged through it, I pressed the gauze tightly against her bleeding wounds and bent over her tiny head.

“It’ll be fine,” I soothed, knowing damn well it would never be for her again, even if she lived.

My free hand ran across her baby cheeks. Sticky tears mixed with red dirt stained that innocent part of her. Dingane added more gauze to the wound and I sat opposite him, trading the wrap and covering the girl’s torso carefully. I know we had hurt her every time we had to lift her small frame to allow the bandage to wrap around completely but not a single whimper was heard from her lips and all I wanted was to gather her in my arms because of it.

Dingane picked her up carefully and brought her to the back of the truck, laying her down across a blanket then covered her up with another. He spoke to her in Bantu and I guessed he’d assured her we’d return because she nodded once.

We ran back toward the village and found two more children in dire need of attention. We wrapped them, transported them to the truck and went back over and over. We’d tended to six wounded children within half an hour.

Dingane pointed toward a cluster of children nearest us and we ran toward them, calling them toward us and encouraging them to get into the truck quickly. Most obeyed save for one who refused to leave his father’s side. Dingane pulled the small child off his dead father and wrapped his arms around the young boy, speaking into his ear as tears streamed down his tiny face. I couldn’t help the tears that fell quickly on my own as we gathered more and more motherless children. I counted twenty-three orphans in all, not including the ones who had died during the ambush.

I looked around for the woman Charles had attempted to save, but she was nowhere in the truck and I filed that away under “never think about again.” Not a single adult had survived, the LRA had made sure of that.

“We have to leave!” Charles yelled over the crying children.

He and Solomon hopped onto the bumper of the truck and held on tightly.

“They won’t be able to hold on the entire two hours like that!” I yelled at Dingane.

His tired face found mine over the grouped children. “They will. We’ve done this before.”

And it hit me.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. These attacks happened frequently, always targeting innocent families, always leaving children in an already impoverished nation without anyone to care for them.

“Get in, Sophie!” he yelled and I obeyed. He laid a small boy in my lap and I cradled him as best I could, trying to decide which way would be best to hold him that would afford him the least amount of pain.

Dingane shoved two more dazed children between us and got in, starting his truck and tearing away from the scene with decided purpose.

“The LRA is coming back?” I asked.

“They usually do. They use the leftover children as bait. They know we come in search of them.”

I turned my head toward the window and let the tears fall freely, the most I’d ever allowed, and the absolutely only time I’d ever cried and had a genuine right to.

Because I wasn’t crying for myself. I was crying for the innocents.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The gates opened as if in anticipation of our arrival around four forty-five in the morning, the sun had yet to rise and I found myself begging its return. The night I once found unbelievably peaceful and beautiful now felt unbearably dark, as if a decided lack of hope had enveloped us. As we passed, Kate and Mercy were on the other side, closing us in and running our direction. Dingane tore through and stopped abruptly, close to the schoolhouse, his headlights lighting up the baobab tree as we passed.

He ran to my side and took the little boy from my arms, running him inside. I gathered one of the girls, who’d grown unconscious during the ride back to Masego, and carried her behind him. He passed me again after dropping off the boy and gathered the remaining girl in the front.

Charles and Solomon were carrying those who could not walk on their own and within a minute we were all inside, hovering over children.

“Sophie, grab that bag for me!” Karina ordered, pointing to a bag on the creaky wood floor.

I brought it to her and opened it up. She was working on the first girl Dingane and I had helped, the one riddled with holes in the chest. She was unconscious. Karina stood quickly and ran to a drawer of a metal cabinet she had rolled into the room. Makeshift cots dotted the entire room and each bed was filled with a bleeding child.

She returned, ripping open a paper and plastic envelope carrying an IV.

“I’ll need your help removing the shrapnel,” Karina said dryly.

I looked behind me to see who she was talking to but there was no one there, everyone else was busy over the beds of one of the children. I looked back and saw her eyes trained on me.

“I can’t,” I told her.

“Wash your hands with Hibiclens. There’s a station set up there,” she said, gesturing to a corner of the room.

The room was awash in candlelight since there wasn’t any electricity and I could barely see a thing. They need a generator for these situations!

“Shouldn’t Charles help you with this? He’s trained!” I was panicking.

“He’s with another child, Sophie. It will be fine. Trust me. She’s bleeding out as we speak though.”

I ran to the corner and washed my hands, one of the older orphans there stood next to me, ready to rinse for me into the awaiting bowl. She handed me a box of older-looking latex gloves and I took two, putting them on as I walked back to Karina’s side.

“What do I do?”

“Spread this wound open for me. I can’t seem to reach the metal inside.”

Oh my God. Oh my God.

I leaned over the girl and reluctantly pulled the wound as wide as I could. Karina’s tweezers were ready and dove in without hesitation, digging back and forth, making me cringe. She pulled out a large piece of sharp metal and it clinked into a porcelain bowl on a small table beside the bed. One by one she removed the metal embedded in the girl’s tiny chest.

“There’s one more.” She pointed to another deep wound near the heart.

“What if it’s too deep?”

“Spread the wound.”

I obeyed and almost had to avert my eyes at the blood gushing but held my ground. After what seemed like forever, Karina fished out a small but substantial piece of metal and it clinked audibly next to the other shrapnel.

Karina worked steadily, stitching each wound, as I cut strips of clean gauze and readied the iodine solution. She poured the solution over the stitches, covered them all with an antibacterial ointment and we placed the gauze over each one, finally wrapping the girl’s frame similarly to how Dingane and I had at the village.

When we were done, Karina gave her a renewed dose of sleeping meds through her IV and I stood, removed my bloody gloves, tossed them in a bin and walked into the night air. The sun wouldn’t show its face for at least another hour. I begged for it to rise, to renew the day, to erase the night. The screams would live in my subconscious for the rest of my life.

Sweat poured from my face and neck and drenched my shirt; it clung to my body. The panicked adrenaline was leaving in droves and my hands were shaking with the release.

I heard footsteps on the wood creak behind me. I turned to find Dingane, his white linen shirt had three buttons unbuttoned near his collar instead of his standard two and his usual carefully rolled sleeves were in disarray.

“How is she?” he asked about our little girl.

“She’s fine.” I paused. “I don’t really know. I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know.”

Dingane leaned against one of the wood posts holding up the aluminum awning and nodded.

“How often does this happen?” I asked him, staring at the dark outline of the baobab tree.

“Too often.”

“Why can they not be stopped?”

“They are illusive and they get protection from Northern Sudan.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. They’re evil?”

“Without a doubt.” I looked behind me into the schoolhouse. “How are the others?”

“I believe there will be no more death tonight,” he said solemnly.

I exhaled the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and quiet tears began to fall. “I’m so sorry for them.”

Before the last word had even escaped my lips, the orphans in their beds above the kitchen, the original fifty-nine, began chanting their beautiful traditional songs and this made the tears fall even harder. I had no idea what they were singing, but their innocent voices rang throughout the camp and I couldn’t help but take solace in them. I listened for quite some time while the tears streamed.