Dust Devils by Roger Smith

that snaked away from a rusted red gas cylinder and applied the blue flame to the head, until the wool burned away and the eyes popped and bubbled.
    Inja sat on an old car seat, drinking a brandy and Coke, letting the smell of burning flesh fill his nostrils. He was in the shackland that spread like a disease beside the freeway between Cape Town and the airport. Sitting in the yard of a house thrown together from pieces of rusted corrugated iron and bits of wood. A one room hovel identical to the others that sprawled out into the darkness.
    The yard was lit by the cooking fires and the electric bulb that drew pirate power from a cable patched into the nearby utility pole. A shiny new TV sat on top of a ten gallon drum, blaring out a soccer match. Drunken men crowded around it, hurling abuse at another bad South African team performance.
    Inja watched as a crone slid the sheep's head from the fence pole and threw it onto an open fire. She stabbed another head, already cooked, with a sharpened spike and lifted it out of the flames. Split it down the middle with an axe. She dumped one half of the head onto a tin plate and brought it across to Inja. He gave her money, which she tucked into her bra and went back to the fires.
    Now that Inja had the food before him, his appetite evaporated and he felt nausea grip his innards and squeeze them hard. He put the plate down beside him and forced back the scalding bile that filled his mouth. Washed it down with a slug of his drink. It was back again, the thing in his blood that wanted to kill him.
    It had started when he was shot three months before. One of his rivals had ambushed Inja's car on the winding pass down to Bhambatha's Rock. Thrown a tree trunk across the road and riddled the car with AK-47 fire when Inja's driver slowed. The driver died, his brains flung onto the windshield, and Inja had been shot in the leg.
    The man with the AK-47 had fled. But not before Inja saw his face. After he was discharged from hospital Inja went to his enemy's house with an axe and took his head, like one of these sheep. Stuck it on a pole in the village and posted armed guards under it. Forced the people in the village to watch as the birds picked out the eyes and tongue and the flesh rotted and blackened over the next week. A message.
    When Inja returned to the hospital to have the sutures removed from his leg, a young white doctor came to speak to him. A woman with yellow hair and a foreign voice that he struggled to understand. The doctor told him it was routine to test the blood of people admitted to the hospital for HIV, here where the incidence was the highest in the world. Told Inja that the virus was eating him, that he had what was called full-blown AIDS . That he needed to go on medication called antiretrovirals. Inja had refused and left the hospital.
    He didn't believe in this white man's nonsense and he was in good company. A previous president of South Africa hadn't believed HIV caused AIDS. The health minister had said you could cure it by eating beetroot and garlic. The new president, a Zulu, said you didn't need to wear a plastic when you fucked, all you needed to do was shower afterwards.
    And the men in Inja's area said if you got this thing it was easy to cure if you had sex with a virgin girl. The only way to be sure of their maidenhood was to get them very young. Inja had abducted a toddler child playing in the dirt near a hut of one of his enemies. Raped it and killed it and shoved it halfway down a pit latrine. Waited to be cured.
    But he had still felt the weakness. So he had gone to his traditional doctor, his sangoma, told him what he had done. The witch doctor said he had brought disgrace upon his ancestors by raping and murdering a child. That the only way he could properly purge himself of this curse was to marry a virgin in the traditional way.
    Inja had known immediately who to choose to save his life, and now he had the proof that she was intact. Come the weekend,