TWENTY SEVEN: Survival has no conscious

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“No, no, no… this cannot be happening.”

Yolanda muttered under her breath, desperately clutching her hair as she paced her hospital room.

Then — sirens.

She ran to the window. Two police vehicles and a civilian car had pulled up below. The officers jumped out and moved with purpose toward the hospital entrance.

Out of the civilian vehicle stepped the Chomba siblings,  moving with urgency.

“Oh, shit.”

She grabbed her bag and phone and bolted.

She ran down the corridor bumping into people, knocking shoulders, ignoring the protests behind her. She headed for the elevators — then stopped. The stairs and elevators were no good. Too exposed. Too obvious.

She changed direction.

She ducked into one of the wards. It was visiting hours — nobody paid her much attention. But the TV mounted on the wall stopped her cold.

Her own face stared back at her.

A news anchor’s voice filled the room as the clip played on loop — her social media photos, her wedding announcement, her glamorous life — all reframed now as the backdrop to a murder investigation. Yolanda was a social media personality. She lived a life most people could only dream of — and that was precisely why the story had legs. It wasn’t just the crime that captivated people.

It was the fall. Her fans, her haters, and complete strangers all feasted on it with equal relish.

She tore her eyes away and ran to the bathroom.

She peered out of the window.

Third storey.

She muttered a string of curses. Below, the ground was littered with officers.

‘What to do. What to do.’ 

Footsteps in the corridor — urgent, commanding.

She panicked and ducked into the nearest open room.

The smell hit her immediately — strong, lawful, clinical. Disinfectant and something worse underneath it. She realised too late: it was the sluice room. Heaps of coloured bags lined the walls, each stamped with hazardous waste warnings. Soiled linen. Clinical waste. Things nobody wanted to look at too closely.

A janitor leaned against the far wall, mop at her side, watching a viral news clip on her phone. She glanced up — barely registering the intruder — then looked back down.

Yolanda pressed herself against the wall, chest heaving, heart pounding in her ears.

Then the janitor looked up again. Slowly. Recognition dawning.

“I know you… you’re —”

She opened her mouth.

Yolanda was faster. She shoved a bag into the woman’s chest.

“Help me get out of here. There’s ten thousand in there. It’s all yours. Please.”

Who turns down easy money?

Certainly not an overworked, underpaid government worker.

The janitor grabbed the bag and peeked inside. Then smiled.

“Okay.”

Commanding voices echoed from the corridor — getting closer.

Yolanda was almost breaking down. So was the janitor.

Then the janitor’s eyes fell on the sluice bags.

Yolanda stared at her in horror. “No…”

“Like you have a choice.”

The janitor grabbed an empty yellow bag — the kind used for clinical waste — and held it open. Yolanda stared at it. At the soiled bandages. The catheters. The things she couldn’t name.

The janitor shoved a face mask at her.

Yolanda climbed in.

Another bag of used hospital materials was pulled over her just as the officers burst through the door. The janitor didn’t flinch — she was busy tying off a red hazardous waste bag, moving with the slow, practiced efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times.

The officers could barely stand the stench. They swept the room with their eyes — quickly — then hurried out.

The janitor casually moved the sluice bags along as the search continued through the wards.

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“Hey, Juno. What’s up.”

A tall, stout man ambled over to where Juno the janitor leaned against the wall near the hospital’s dump site.

“Heard you had a fight with your uncle-in-law. Now you’re being charged with assault.”

Juno shrugged. “Stuff happens.”

“You didn’t call me here just to poke at my misery.”

“No.” She paused. “How would you like to make an easy ten thousand?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Easy ten thousand? Come on — there’s no free lunch in this world.”

“Of course not.”

“So?”

Juno pulled back a linen sheet — revealing Yolanda, barely holding herself together.

“Get her out of here,” Juno said simply. “And the money is yours.”

He looked at Yolanda. Then back at Juno.

“Sure.”

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It was late afternoon when the rickety old dump truck rumbled out of the hospital grounds and moved slowly through the city streets toward the dumpsite. By the time it arrived, evening had already settled over the city.

Yolanda had never been so grateful for fresh air. She bent over, hands on her knees, taking in huge mouthfuls of it — eyes closed — trying not to think about what she had just spent the last few hours buried in.

“So you’re that lady.”

Zebron — the dumpsite driver — spoke without looking at her, his voice casual, almost conversational.

Yolanda straightened slowly. She looked around. The place was packed — scavengers, garbage men, the general chaos of end-of-day operations. Even if she wanted to run, she had no idea where she was.

“They’re offering fifty thousand kwacha,” Zebron continued, “for any information leading to your capture.”

“We had an agreement,” she hissed.

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Suddenly your measly three thousand doesn’t sound so attractive.”

She glared at him. “What do you want?”

He turned to face her — a crooked, yellow-toothed smile spreading slowly across his face. “Match it up.”

“You’re mad.”

“Or,” he said pleasantly, “I could just call the police and turn you in.”

Yolanda’s chest heaved.

“Fine.”

“Also…” His eyes moved over her slowly — heavy with something ugly. His voice dropped. “You’re easy on the eyes. How about you spend the night with me?”

Yolanda sneered. “Go look in a mirror first and see if you’re worth it.”

Zebron covered the distance between them in two steps and grabbed her firmly — making her whimper in pain.

“Girl,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t asking.”

And so that night, in the cabin of the dump truck, Yolanda spent her first night as a fugitive — pinned beneath Zebron’s sweaty, heaving weight.

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The next morning, Zebron got her a room at a seedy motel where he made his regular garbage collections. Nobody there cared who she was — or pretended not to. She spent her days cooped up in the tiny, dirty room — and every night, Zebron came by, only leaving in the early hours of the morning. All the bills, of course, came out of her pocket.

For an outgoing social butterfly accustomed to the finest things in life, being trapped in a filthy motel room at the mercy of a man like Zebron was its own kind of torture. But it was better than the alternative.

She tried reaching her old friends. The moment they heard her voice, they hung up.

A couple of weeks passed.

Then — in the dead of night — a commotion erupted outside, waking the entire motel.

A large group of women had gathered outside Room 47.

*Her* room.

Yolanda and Zebron found themselves surrounded — his wife had found them. Both of them were already covered in bruises from the initial confrontation before Yolanda even registered what was happening.

“*Hule! Hule!*” the women shouted.

Then someone in the crowd recognized her.

The mood shifted instantly.

The crowd surged forward each person wanting to be the one to turn her in and claim the reward. A scuffle broke out. Blows and kicks were exchanged. In the chaos, two large, mean-looking men emerged victorious — grabbing Yolanda by the arms.

She fought with everything she had. But she was no match for them.

She was shoved into a Toyota Corolla. The car sped off toward the police station. She was wedged between two men in the back seat. Two more sat in front. Behind them, two other cars gave chase — nobody wanted to miss out on the money.

What nobody noticed — in the chaos of the scuffle — was the glinting object in Yolanda’s hand.

She had grabbed a steak knife during the struggle.

As the car turned onto the road leading to the police station, she acted.

She elbowed both men beside her , hard — and lunged forward with everything she had, driving the knife into the driver’s neck in one swift, desperate motion.

Survival, she was learning, had no conscious.

The car lost control instantly.

It swerved then slammed into a tree.

The unbuckled front passenger was thrown through the windshield. The driver’s head hit the steering wheel. A blaring, relentless horn filled the night.

The two cars giving chase skidded to a halt then turned back. Nobody wanted to be found near a scene like this.

Yolanda ,disoriented, bleeding, barely upright , kicked the door open.

And disappeared into the night.

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© Ponda

VOCAB 

Sluice room – a hospital utility room used for disposing of clinical and hazardous waste; typically foul-smelling and restricted to staff.

Hazardous waste bags— colour-coded bags used in hospitals to separate clinical waste; yellow for infectious materials, red for anatomical waste.

Hule — Zambian slang; derogatory term for a promiscuous woman or prostitute. Used here as a public shaming cry.