... a noise which was quiet at first but increasing in volume as it drew closer. We all heard it, everybody at the same time and we all had the same reaction; we stood stock still like the proverbial pillars of salt, not sure what to expect. The sound, a persistent whirring, intensified. It seemed familiar though I couldn’t place it straight away; but it made me feel uneasy and sort of queasy in my gut as if something bad was going to happen.

It did. A helicopter emerged, rising up from behind the hills we’d just been discussing, and it was heading straight for us. It looked sinister, lumbering towards us like a big black cockroach, and straight away I got the feeling that we were in trouble. It’s the helicopter! One fellow cried and then he began to shout, and wave, to attract attention even though it didn’t make sense to since surely he wouldn’t have wanted to go back to prison. The rest of us stood there waiting, in shock, speechless, struggling to understand what was going on, watching the copter coming. It passed over us, and in that instance I grasped the situation; a hail of bullets descended upon us like an unexpected spring shower and our leader, who was standing next to me, fell down. I looked at him and knew that he was dead; he had a hole in his forehead the size of a golf ball. I don’t know what happened after that because the guy I was chained to took off, dragging me with him. We ran, me and the grinner, ran like mad, dodging the bullets, running for our lives until the grinner was shot in the leg and fell and dragged me down with him, and I stayed on the ground and played dead.

What followed was plain slaughter. The copter kept coming back and forth, shooting at anything that moved; I heard someone moaning quite close to me but I didn’t dare look or move. I didn’t know how many people were dead; I just prayed it wasn’t my turn next. It seemed like an eternity but eventually the copter went away after circling above us a while, shooting randomly here and there. Then everything went quiet and I must have fainted because when I came to, it was night and the stars and the moon were out, bathing the desert in a silvery light. The grinner was sitting next to me, bandaging his leg with a sleeve he’d torn off his shirt. He noticed I came to and grinned at me.

‘It’s only a graze, thank God,’ he said. ‘I’ll be able to move.’

I felt relieved ‘cause we would have been in a pretty pickle had he been shot right through.

‘Are you hurt?’ the grinner asked me.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good. We need to get a move on,’ he said. ‘We can’t be here at sunrise.’

He got up and I had no choice but to follow him; not that I didn’t want to leave. It was obvious that we couldn’t stay here. What if they came back to finish us off? The grinner didn’t say it out loud but I knew that’s what he was thinking. But before we left I wanted to find out if there were other survivors so I suggested that we go see who else was around and regroup.

The man grinned at me funny. ‘There is no-one left,’ he said. ‘We’re the last ones here. See for yourself if you don’t believe me.’

He started to holler out loud, calling people’s names, the ones he knew, but there was no reply from anywhere. ‘See? I told you,’ he grinned again. ‘There’s no-one alive here but us.’

We set off, not knowing where we were going, just to be gone from this place.