The Prey Read Free Page A

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    ‘As a company, safety is our number one priority and I can assure you that Global Resources works tirelessly to educate our workforce and to continually review our operations in order to improve this part of our business and ensure our people go home from work at the end of each shift as fit and well as they started.’
    Kylie was impressed by Musa’s performance, but as the corporate PR man, this was his bread and butter. She had paid careful attention to the way he had steered the interview away from the trainer’s inflammatory line of questioning and back to the company’s key messages. She looked over to her CEO, Jan Stein, and saw that he was grinning broadly.
    ‘Well, I think we’re done here,’ said the trainer.
    Musa unclipped his microphone and stood up. Jan, the naturalised Australian from South Africa, started to applaud. Jeff and Kylie joined in. It was all bullshit, Kylie thought, but it was damn good bullshit. Musa winked at her as he took his seat beside her.

3
    ‘Z
ama zama
’ said Barrica, as his headlamp played over the body at his feet. Themba was dry-retching, having just thrown up his breakfast.
    Chris held his hand over his mouth and played his lamp across the dead man. Decomposition accelerated underground, aided as it was by the heat. The corpse was so swollen that the dead man’s tattered and threadbare overalls had started to split. His mouth was stretched in an obscene grin and his fingers were like plump black sausages.
    Chris composed himself, then looked over to Barrica. ‘
Ja
. But odd they didn’t leave him somewhere easier for us to find him like they usually do. They couldn’t have known we’d be inspecting this site any time soon.’
    Themba looked up. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
    Chris explained that the
zama zamas
, the pirate miners who worked the
madala
side as industriously – sometimes more so – than Global Resources’ legitimate employees, often suffered workplace fatalities, but usually the bodies were dragged to a working part of the mine, or even as far as the main shaft, so they could be found by the next GR shift and returned to the surface. No one wanted towork around decomposing corpses a kilometre and a half underground. Not even illegal miners.
    ‘What do they die of?’
    Chris shrugged. ‘Everything. Accidents, exposure to harmful chemicals such as mercury in the extraction process, heat exhaustion, AIDS – and lately cholera and carbon monoxide poisoning. These guys live underground for weeks or even months at a time – many don’t survive.’
    ‘We need to get back and report this,
baas
,’ Barrica said, yet even as he spoke the words he was stepping around the body and heading deeper into the darkness.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    Barrica held up a hand to silence Chris. He glanced back and put a finger on his lips and switched off his lamp. Chris immediately did the same, then reached out to Themba and switched his off too. ‘Shush,’ he said to the young man, and dragged him to the side wall of the tunnel and down to his knees.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Themba whispered.
    ‘Quiet.’ Chris felt the fear rising in him. Now their lamps were extinguished he could see a pale flicker of light further down the tunnel. It wasn’t as dark as it had seemed. There was someone down there. ‘Stay here,’ he whispered to Themba, and crawled towards Barrica.
    He groped ahead of him and felt the big security guard start as his hand found his body. ‘You said it yourself, we need to get out of here,’ Chris whispered.
    ‘They are close,’ Barrica growled. ‘Listen.’
    Chris heard the voices now, speaking in Portuguese. Mozambicans. In recent years the South African government and the unions had insisted that seventy per cent of a mine’s workers had to be South African citizens, and over time this had meant that many Mozambicans had lost their jobs and turned to illegal mining. Sometimes they returned as
zama zamas
to the same mines