by Nzondi
Lamp came up to Grunt and said, “Major?”
“Hold-a-sec,” he said to her.
“Sir, you really need to see this,” she said.
“Lamp!” I said. “Lamp, what is this?”
Grunt pointed to the military vehicle. “Get in there, Feeni.” He turned around and spoke to his men. “Okay, the army boys of the GAF have been given orders to eradicate the entire village of the virus.”
“Who would give such an order?” Lamp asked.
Grunt said, “Does it matter?” We have to clear out before they come.”
Another one of his men shouted to him that they were already moving into the territory. I slipped the gas mask on and ran around the back of one of the CDC vans.
“Feeni!” Grunt called out.
I was not getting in that military jeep. There were too many questions, and no one seemed to have the authority to answer them. Peeking around the rear of the van, I saw Grunt scanning the area. His face showed obvious displeasure.
He’ll get over it, I thought, and took off.
When he called out to me, again, I ran even faster, leaping over a victim who was squirming on the ground. Like all the others, the woman convulsed and held her head, yelling in agony. I stopped, knelt beside her and placed my hand over her forehead. Her head was burning up. She had a fever, and pus oozed out of her ears, telling me that her eardrums had ruptured.
Maybe someone had detonated some type of infrasound or ultrasonic acoustic weapon that blew out the eardrum.
I knew that the GAF had used infrasound for riot control once, but it didn’t go well for them and they got a lot of backlash from the Inspector General. I doubt that they had used it that morning, but it was possible.
Perhaps the food did run out and things got out of hand.
“Just hold on, lady,” I said. “Help is already here. Someone will be able to…”
Her head fell to the side and she stopped breathing.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, yelling in frustration.
I stood up and rubbed my forehead, one hand was on my hip. Two girls ran by me, one of them bumping into my arm. The girl didn’t even know she’d bumped into me. I sighed and tried calling Kofi again. No answer.
“Dammit, Kofi!” I said, and looked back over my shoulder to make sure Grunt hadn’t spotted me.
I ran up the street and came to a full halt.
“Oh, no!”
I saw a tattered coloring book under a toppled table and ran over to investigate. It was an Anansi the Spider coloring book. I’d hope not to see a child there. My head swiveled left, and then right, for any sign of a child in distress. A helicopter approached up above, and I looked up. There were two copters circling the area. On the sides of the copters, the GAF logo glimmered from the sunlight. One of the helicopters hovered above my head for a brief moment, before zipping away.
I glanced over my shoulder and scanned the area to see if I was still in the clear. I bolted toward a building and ran into the alleyway, placing my back against the wall. Fewer people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Most of them had fallen dead. Lamp was on the other side of the street, rounding people up like they were cattle. Her rifle did most of the talking and the people listened with god-fearing obedience.
Close by, maybe the next street over, one of Ghana’s armed force officers spoke through a vehicle bullhorn: “Remain calm. Please walk. Do not run. I repeat. Stay calm. If you are in a safe environment, lock your doors until we clear the area and give you further instructions.”
It was working. Even on the street I was on, things became less frantic. The area was cordoned off while GAF soldiers passed out gas masks to everyone, guiding them into specific areas.
The EIS officers in the blue protective suits walked around placing white sheets over the bodies that littered the roads with death. Someone moaned and stole my attention. About ten meters away me was a lean-to. A piece of metal from the structure was on the ground, a pale foot in a fluffy pink house slipper extended from it.
I lifted it and found, “Meredith?”
“Have you seen, Frankie? I can’t…find her. Thomas told me not to go out, but she’s my baby. My…baby.”
Her shirt had been tattered and was soaking wet. She had lost a lot of blood and wasn’t going to survive much longer without medical attention. Meredith’s body trembled. Tears streamed down her face and she closed her eyes. One of her hands clenched over her head.
“Don’t hurt Frankie.” Meredith opened her eyes, slowly. “She’s all I got,” she said, and fell unconscious.
I absently dropped the coloring book and fell to my knees.
“Meredith!” Something caught my eye. “What in the world?”
There was a metallic liquid leaking from her ears.
Is she a clone? She can’t be! I thought the technology hasn’t been perfected yet to download consciousness onto a dormant-clone! Obviously, I’m wrong.
Meredith’s hand slid off of her body and plopped on top of the image of Anansi the Spider on the coloring book. Her eyes were open.
“May the great Mawu grant you residency over the trees, streams, and mountains,” I said, reached down and closed his eyelids.
Springing to my feet, I shot down an alleyway to a parallel street but had forgotten which street we hid the motorcycles. A child broke into a scream, and I turned toward the source. It was a yell so terrifying, my flesh crawled like maggots were moving under it. The GAF officer driving the personnel carrier with the bullhorn warnings had lost control and ran into a short obese woman. Two children, no more than six years old, stood a few meters away, bawling their eyes out. Feedback screeched through the GAF’s vehicle bullhorn. One of the children, the boy, tried to pull his dead mother out from under the tires by her hands.
The armored car had smashed through the wall of a bright green building. Shards of glass from the windshields were everywhere. Half of the driver’s motionless torso extended out of the front windshield. A thick cranberry fluid spilled from his ears. His eyes were open, locked in a timeless stare. He had a gas mask on but somehow had still contracted the virus.
Three teenage girls ran right toward the huge hole the GAF vehicle caused and one of them grabbed the children by the hands and tugged them farther into the building. Soon as they were out of sight, a tube from the fluorescent lights inside the building, swung from the ceiling and fell, making a popping sound when it shattered on the floor. I cringed and my jaws tightened.
At first, I thought I was having hunger pangs. Sickness swirled in my stomach. A lightheaded sensation made the ground seem to spin in a slow counter-clockwise movement. My shirt was drenched. The air was thin, and my breathing became labored. The sun scorched down on our community, but the fear of the twins being hurt was unbearable.
I called out in desperation. “Help!”
My fingertips were suddenly washed with a wintry chill. Voices crowded my head, but not voices of any particular language; a jumble of whispers. Better yet, not whispers, but more like a presence of a quiet rush of silent breezes brushing against my ear lobes.
What’s happening? Is my mind being controlled? Is someone hacking my neural implant?
A young couple knocked into me. The man looked back and apologized just as his woman tugged him along. The pain grew inside of my head.
I have to keep trying to reach Kofi!
There were more and more voices chattering gibberish in my head, and that confused me. It was like a party line of monstrous voices. The sounds were like a chorus of demons dragging their voices at an inaudible slow speed. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t tap into my temporal transmitter.
Oh no! This is the second time, today!
My entire body jerked like an invisible giant slapped me in the back. I stumbled forward in slow motion like I’d been drugged, stumbling over bodies, and bumping into frenzied people as they ran through the alley by me. Something was about to erupt inside of me.
I need my meds quick.
Even though I hadn’t had regular panic attacks in almost a year, I still carried a small Ziploc bag of anxiety pills in my pocket. I slipped the plastic bag out of my pocket, ready to dry-swallow a couple of them. I lifted the pills to my mouth, and someone bumped into me and knocked them out of my hands.
“No!”
The person kept running and disappeared around the corner.
God, I have to find my meds!
I stumbled over a broken clay jar, looking for the pills, and didn’t see them. Colors started to melt around me. Everyone became a blur. I turned and the building behind me became a giant red blob.
My head rolled toward the heavens. The sky morphed into an endless abyss of tar. My head swam with dizziness, and my body felt heavy, useless. Things, perhaps cars, perhaps other people, knocked into my body. I couldn’t tell. The world around me started growing darker and darker as I felt myself losing consciousness.
This mysterious sickness has now overtaken me too!
It was as if explosives erupted in my head, a mind bomb, creating fire and razor-sharp debris to shred into my brain tissue. Screaming, I tried to reach for my head but had no control of my arms, my legs, my breath. Everything spun, twirling, flailing. My head burned like molten lava had poured into it from my earlobes. All the sounds around me muffled into one confusing jumble of noise. My knees weakened and the ground rose up to me with unapologetic speed.
Smack!
Hands that didn’t even seem like they belonged to me, slapped against the cool pavement, propelling me into a world filled with bright white stars. Blood trickled from my flaring nostrils, joining the saliva which oozed from my lips.
“What’s happening?” I mouthed silently, closing my eyes.
My mouth opened again, spilling shaky breaths over trembling lips. The tears that ran down my cheeks like drips of red paint, tried to speak for me―tried to express that I was in too much pain to do anything but hurt. Thinking was like reaching into a cloud to grasp a breeze. Impossible.
I saw the pills, hiding under an empty carton that once contained a blood snack.
There! There they are!
I reached for them just as a pair of faded gray Converses stomped over the pills and crushed them.
“Shit!”
Exasperated, I rolled over to my bag and retrieved the plastic bag from my pocket to see if there were any more. Usually, I carried four tablets with me. Nothing was in the bag. I berated myself for not putting enough in the Ziploc bag. A thought hit me, and I patted my front pocket.
“Yes!”
The other two pills had somehow slipped out of the Ziploc bag and were in my front pocket. I struggled with everything I had to gain control of my motor functions and with great effort, reached into my jeans pocket and found them. I popped those sonsofbitches into my mouth the second I tugged them out, grimacing at the thought of dry-swallowing them and retched twice before they went down my throat.
It took a few minutes to take effect. Legs ran around me in blurred colors, and it was my luck that only one person stepped on me. With each second, the excruciating pain in my head subsided, and my muscles became less tense. After another minute or so, I wriggled my fingers with ease and sat up, relieved. With the back of my hand, I wiped tears off my cheek.
That was intense. What I just went through wasn’t a panic attack. That was something else.
The streets started to thin out a little, but now there were more bodies on the ground, some wriggling, others still. It was a literal war zone. We had been attacked, but by what or whom, I didn’t know. What kind of pathogen could do what it just did to me, and why wasn’t I still affected?
Or maybe I still am. At any rate, I was a helluva lot better like a fireball had been extinguished in my brain.
I managed to pick myself up when I received an incoming neural alert and recognized my auntie’s ID number flashing in my corneal streamer.
Trying to control my breathing, I answered my temporal transmitter, “Auntie Yajna.”
I wandered absently toward the side of the building next to a food rationing station. Our neural implants made it easy to hear m-phone conversations, even though our environment was noisy.
“Child,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Auntie Yajna, I don’t know how to say this. I—I messed up bad! I left the twins with Kofi.”
“You didn’t mess up, baby. The twins are here with me.”
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked.
“Not really. A terrorist attack on our town, perhaps. The Inspector General is getting briefed on the situation and will update everyone on the details soon. I got that from the horse’s mouth.”
“How did the children get there? You’re two tro-tros stops away.”
“Kofi used a military vehicle and dropped them off. Honey, you need to get out of there, and I mean, now!”
“All right. All right, Auntie. I’ll come out there to you.”
“Well, how are you going to do that?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Feeni?”
“I’ll find a way, Auntie. Trust me. I gotta go.”
“You just better—”
“Bye,” I said, jumping on top of her words.
“Okay, baby. bye bye, sweetie. I love you,” she said, and ended the transmission.
Had it not been so much going on around me, I might have noticed that she said goodbye to me, for like the first time, ever.
A sound, like someone had popped bubbled plastic wrap, exploded through the air. I took cover beside a building. Five military jeeps rolled toward us, screeching over the curb flanked on each side of the point car like birds in a V-flight. A grenade launcher sat on the top bar of each vehicle unmanned. GAF officers, all donning purple gas masks and wearing black fatigues, started firing their assault rifles at people in the streets.
“Hey!” I said. “Hey, Assholes! Hold your fire!”
The spray of gunfire drowned my voice out. Pandemonium broke out. Even the EIS officers ran for cover but it was of no use. Most of them were dead in seconds, the HAZMAT suits riddled with bullet holes. Major Grunt’s battalion retaliated. It was a standoff until one of Grunt’s men was hit and spun to the ground. Another few shots ended the man’s life. Grunt blasted the driver of the soldiers in black. The guy had positioned himself behind the vehicle but as soon as his ammo was out, Grunt fired through the front windshield and managed to hit his target right between the eyes.
Another one of their soldiers shot at Grunt and braised his shoulder. Grunt let out a guttural yell and ran toward their vehicle. Lamp covered him, shooting a rain of bullets at those soldiers.
“Shit,” I said, realizing what was going on.
The government sent those soldiers to eradicate everyone in the area!
I watched in shocking horror how one-by-one the EIS officers and other CDC health workers were taken out. It was obvious that I didn’t have much choice. I had to run for cover in the midst of the rain of gunfire or get torn to shreds like so many others who were in the streets. I was vulnerable where I was out in the wide open. I took a deep breath and sprinted for the building that had a huge hole from that armored car ramming into the wall.
Shwip―shwip!
Bullets barely missed my head. I ducked, covering my head with my arms, with the thought that one more inch and my brains would’ve been splattered all over the dirt road.
I kept moving but glanced over my shoulder quick enough to spot Lamp chasing after me. Her eyebrows were fueled with a ton of aggression, but her body language showed the type of awkwardness that reminded me of a marionette being manipulated by a puppet master. She pointed her gun at me and fired. I leaped over the lip from the hole in the wall and slid in front of the olive-green vehicle. The front end of it had limited damage, but after bullets painted the metal with multiple indentations and cracked the passenger side window.
“Lamp! Snap out of it,” I said. “It’s
me, Xo!”
She was about fifteen meters away, bolting toward the vehicle. I climbed inside the military personnel carrier from the driver’s side. I only had a few seconds.
One. Two. Three!
I threw the passenger-side door open. Gunshots tattered into it.
Shit.
She anticipated my moves and positioned herself to kill me, waiting like a panther about to pounce her prey. Using my momentum, I rolled onto the ground. Bullets riveted into the asphalt around me, spraying bits of cement into my face. I sprung to my feet. Lamp’s gun met the center of my forehead.
“Nothing personal,” she said, her eyes wide. “But all infected have to die.”
Her fingernail began to flush red.
She’s pressing the trigger!
Grabbing Lamp’s arm, I grappled her wrist, spun away from the muzzle of the gun and twisted backward into her body. I threw an elbow into her jaw before she even knew what happened. She dropped the gun, probably surprised I could take her like that. It really wasn’t a fair fight. She was human. I was an enhuman. The advantage was mine on strength, alone.
I back-kicked her in the shin with the heel of my shoe. She doubled over, released a low grunt, and just when I bent down to grab the gun she dropped, she knifed my arm.
Where the fuck did that come from?
I stumbled to the ground, grunting in pain, and clambered to the opposite side of the crashed car. Trying to get as far away from the scene as I could, I continued to move until the pain was unbearable, and I collapsed on my stomach. There were more gunshots fired, and Lamp was hit. She spun and fell to the ground.
“Gotta keep going,” I said, under my breath. Reaching for the pain, I took in the damage.
There was a deep gash in my upper arm, and I was bleeding out pretty bad.
That’s going to feel like crap unless I feed on blood soon.”
Rising to my feet, I held my shoulder and winced. It burned like crazy, but I knew I could get it to heal if I fed to speed up the process. Just the idea of what crossed my mind was an abomination, but if I wanted to survive, it was something I was prepared to live with, as long as no one knew what I’d done. Lamp lifted her arm and started reloading her sidearm. That little distraction was all I needed. I ran toward her, leaped in the air and slid on my knees across the hood of the military vehicle. She stood and shot at me. The bullet whizzed past my ear like an angry wasp.