by Nzondi
“Yes,” she said. “That was his name.”
“That’s how I finally met her because she said her friend knew someone in the government, and if I ever needed protection, he would be that guy. Major Grunt was the kind of person I should know.”
“What’s the girl’s name who told you all of this?” I asked.
Kenya’s lips trembled. She glanced down at the ground and took a deep breath. When she gazed back into my eyes, hers had a thin film of tears in them.
She said, “Jinni.”
“That’s preposterous,” Dad said. “That would mean that Major Grunt was—”
“Dating an under-aged girl,” I said.
Dad was in shock. “And the government official would be—”
“Kofi,” I said.
The entire holoroom shut down, and when the real-life holoroom materialized, Tanaka, Durga, and Shaw were at my feet, dead. Silver fluid drained from their ears, and their eyes were caught in an expression of disbelief. I spun, looking for Dad’s body, my heart pounding.
Kenya screamed from outside, and I hurried out of the holoroom in time to see Kofi dragging her through the tinted double doors to the Spa reception area. I ran down the corridor, and in my peripheral, saw that the people in the holorooms were sprawled on the floor, dead.
“Omigod,” I said, pushing myself to run faster.
Another series of screams came from Kenya, and I went through the door and ran back into the bar. What I saw hurt my heart. It was a wake-up call, a slap in the face that this was no longer a game I was playing but a real-life tragedy. The floor was a sea of death. Not one body stirred. All with the same symptoms of the retcon supervirus. Kenya was right. Frankie was there. She was on the ground, at my feet. She’d died with her eyes open just like her mother. Thomas would be devastated. He no longer had any family left.
My family made sure of that.
Kofi got to the front entrance and stopped. He had Kenya by the neck and his shoulder pressing against the front door, cracking it open.
“You had to call the damn GAF, Sis?” he asked.
The only thing that came out of my mouth was, “Why?”
“Grunt told his little girlfriend, Feeni. Told Jinni what we did. He left me no choice!”
I stood there, speechless.
“Don’t look at me like that!”
“Kof…I love you.”
“Then stop looking at me like that!”
“Let me go,” Kenya said, she wildly reached for a bottle on the bar counter, smashed it, and jabbed Kofi in the side with it.
For a long moment, he stared at Kenya with disbelief, and then he looked down at his wound, and his lips trembled watching his own blood drip onto the floor. He looked at me as if to say he was sorry. Kofi's eyes turned to fire and he yelled. He grabbed Kenya by the hair.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said, and ran back toward me, and grabbed Kenya’s neck tightly in a headlock.
“What are you going to do, Kofi? Hack into my brain. Kill me, too?”
He did something to me, and the pain struck me so bluntly, I dropped to my hands and knees. “Who’s next? The twins?”
“Shut up!” he said, and ran back into the Virtual Spa area.
I climbed to my feet, mad as hell at him. Angry that he was so pitiful. Pissed that I loved him. Enraged that I had to be the one to stop him. I screamed with every fiber of my being. “What are you going to do, big brother, huh? You gonna kill Auntie Yajna, next?”
“You come through that door, Feeni, and it’ll be you!”
“Oh yeah?” I said and picked myself up. Pushing through the door, I yelled, “You think you have the balls to kill me? You want to hack up my brains? Kill me, then, brother! I dare you!”
25
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I had Kofi cornered, he had nowhere left to go. With one arm around Kenya’s neck, his other hand stabbed the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle against her jugular vein. Blood trickled down his hostage’s neck from a razor-thin cut. They stood to the side of the reception desk. Kofi’s tattered tee shirt exposed that he was losing a lot of blood. The end was near.
“One more step,” Kofi said. “And I swear to my ancestors, cursing me from hell, that I’ll do it!”
“Kofi,” Kenya said, squirming. “No. Please. Don’t do this.”
I had my gun trained on the sick sonofabitch’s temple. With just a little more pressure on the trigger, I had the chance to hand deliver a bullet with his name on it. But I promised myself to take my brother in alive.
Promises, promises.
“Kofi,” I said, trying to talk myself out of killing this murderous maniac. “Let’s end this before anyone else gets hurt.”
Kofi’s eyes blinked hard, while the blood-drenched more and more into his clothes. He pressed the glass deeper into Kenya’s neck, making her shriek, and released his choke hold.
“Make a wrong move, Kenya, and I’ll be forced to kill you,” he said.
Kofi typed something onto the virtual keyboard of the holographic programmer.
“We’ll get you some help,” I said. “This doesn’t have to end badly.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Kofi said. “I still have one more hack up my sleeve.”
He shoved Kenya toward me. I raised my gun toward the ceiling so as not to accidentally fire the gun at Kenya. She fell into my embrace, and the force of the impact threw me into a backward stumble. When I recovered my balance, the double glass doors to the Virtual Spa shut.
I bolted through the doors, spotting Kofi just as he entered into one of the holorooms.
“It’s over!” I said. “The room takes up to a minute to materialize. You’re out of options.”
I was a few steps away from apprehending this monster, but when I went through the door, was hundreds of meters above ground, freefalling out of a plane toward a snowy mountain. Somehow, he had overridden the safety precaution and had us skysurfing within seconds of entering the holoroom.
“You still underestimate my hacking abilities,” he said, twirling with his arms outward like two leaves attached to a twig, falling from heaven.
With the initial shock of stumbling out of a plane, I dropped my gun and cursed while it spiraled down toward the arctic landscape. God, he was amazing. Gliding through the skies with the board on his feet made him look like he was surfing on air. He brought his arms close to his body and began spinning, cutting through the winds like a knife.
I bent my knees and brought them up to my chest and threw my arms out like a bird. We soared down toward the top of the mountain. Kofi put his head down and extended his legs upward to the sky. I did the same thing, trying to increase the speed of my fall-rate. It was working, but Kofi didn’t care. With his body diving head first, he bent his legs and grabbed his ankles, and twisted his body so that he started twirling in a flawless aerial.
That allowed me to catch up to him, and I reached for his legs. Managing to grab his board, I pulled myself closer to him and got a hand on his ankle before he smacked me in the side of my helmet, making me release him. The hit made me see stars among the blue skies for several seconds.
When I could see straight again, I ducked my head and dived toward Kofi. Like a graceful ice skater, he did a flawless layback spin.
“You think this is a joke!” I said, yelling.
“No, it’s freedom! And it feels freakishly amazing!”
“There’s nowhere you can escape!”
“The difference between you and me, Feeni Xo, is I embrace life…I’m not trying to escape life, but you are!”
He laughed like a child feeling the wind in his face, enjoying his first encounter on a swing set. The holomatter system provided diving equipment for us both, and like Kofi, I had a surf cutaway system built into a backpack on my back. He deployed his first chute, and after freefalling a little more, released the second one.
I deployed the main parachute from the harness-container case, allowing the chute t
o jettison out, and like him, dropped more before releasing the reserve. Kofi hit the packed powdered mountain with a yell, released the harness and skied downhill. Snow kicked up in his wake. He sped down and was several meters ahead of me by the time I hit the piste.
Dad called me on my temporal transmitter, and I answered, “Dad! You're alive!”
“Of course, I am.”
“I have some hacking tricks myself. Made myself invisible in the program. Kofi couldn’t find me.”
“Tell me you can override the program.”
“I’m working on it,” he said. “It’s important that you realize that you, too, can control what happens in this game.”
Kofi picked up speed and was distancing himself from me.
“What do you mean?”
“You have the House of Oware game in your neural implant. With the upgrade I designed, you have the ability to manipulate the program as much as he does.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“You’re the know-it-all, I figured you knew, smart ass.”
“I’d rather be a smart ass—”
“Than a dumb ass,” Kofi said, finishing my statement. “Make me proud, sister!”
I ended the transmission and smiled, then focused on making the holoroom create an environment I was more comfortable with: the GAF headquarters. The celestial snow mountains faded away, and we were back on solid ground. The streets of Accra. Kofi tripped over a curb and fell hard onto the ground. I, of course, was pursuing him on an Uno motorcycle. I raced toward him, jumped off, and tumbled into him. The bike ran into the side of a faded pink abandoned building.
Kofi elbowed me, and my head snapped back.
He rolled away from me and ran toward the entrance of the GAF headquarters.
Kofi said, “I see you have some tricks up your sleeve, too. But you’re no match for me, Feeni!”
That’s what he thinks.
I stood up, and looked down, and saw that I’d had long curved kukri knives holstered in scabbards on each side of my waist. The diving gear was gone. I now had on a black tank, black leather pants, and knee-high boots. A revolver was resting impatiently in a thigh holster on my left leg, and my devilish little Chucky sat in a back holster.
“Come and get me, bitch,” he said, yelling from inside.
“Not a problem,” I said, and dashed inside of the building.
Inside, it had already changed from something I imagined, into something Kofi hacked up. There were hundreds of dog kennels on the first floor. The stench of animal hair and waste was strong. The cages were all opened, and empty.
I hope Dad hurries up and finds a way to end this. I’m not in the mood for another dog fight.
I saw Kofi’s head bobbing as he ran up a wide stairwell, and I followed him up two flights. Candle sconces illuminated grandiose baroque paintings that were twice my size and hung high in the corners of the stairwells. My kukri knives tapped against my thighs as I took two steps-at-a-time and reached the next floor. It was a dimly lit area, and like a scene from a British thriller, fog drifted down the hallway cloaking what nightmares Kofi orchestrated, down the long hallway. The floors were dark like ripe wine, and Elizabethan furniture cradled the walls while eighteenth-century mirrors carved in an oak frame, displayed winged gargoyles in ornate wall hangings.
Footsteps echoed from the stairwell. It sounded like an army of students rushing up steps to see a well-advertised fight. They weren’t stealth-like like ninjas, that’s for sure. Kofi meant for the growing noise to intimidate me. It worked. Just a little.
They were now only a stairwell below me, whomever or whatever they were, moving at a steady pace to meet their end. I didn’t care if they outnumbered me, I had already made up my mind that only I was to leave that building with Kofi, by any means necessary. I stood in a kata stance, awaiting their death with utmost confidence.
That was before I finally saw one.
I hadn’t expected fear to creep under my focus and unnerve me. However frightening their appearance seemed to be, I thought that the holoroom would not allow the hosts to die, so that imagining alone, gave me the courage to face the demons that Kofi summoned from the depths of the darkness within him.
The first of the horde reached the top of the stairs and spotted me, I bounced back on both feet like a boxer avoiding a jab. They were Maasai warriors, but their skin was translucent, and their eyes were jaundiced. The first one that made it to the top of the stairs had eyelids that were burned with a sickness like a child dying from Ebola. Beneath that invisible skin, blood spewed through his body. His purplish spidery veins made a network all throughout his skeletal frame, up and around his crooked teeth. His over-sized skull could not hide beneath the semi-transparent skin over his bald head.
The warrior’s body was bulging with sinewy grayish muscles, but bare of clothes besides an oxblood kilt he wore that was made with leather strips. In his hand was a small lotus stick.
At first glance, I determined that they had Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, but that was my pathologic mind, the one that had empathy. There was no room for that nonsense.
Just from pure instincts and adrenaline, my feet started moving toward the African warrior. I ran toward him and did a one-handed cartwheel kick, bringing my heel down into the top of his cranium. Beast or not, he could be knocked unconscious. He fell toward the ground in silence.
Just as my feet hit the ground, two more came up the steps. I unsheathed my kukri knives and was about to slice into their necks when Lamp came up beside me.
Paow! Paow!
She blew holes in their heads. Dead center. They tumbled backward into a few others that marched up the steps, sending a domino effect of several of them toppling downstairs.
I turned to her, not knowing what to say. Like me, she was dressed in black with knives on her hips, but she had a pair of guns on each thigh holster, and a sword in a back scabbard.
She said, “I guess this means I forgive you.”
With a smirk, I said, “You wanna wait for me to be out the way before you shoot, next time?”
“Affirmative,” Lamp said, and holstered her guns. “Is this better?”
Shinnnt! Shiiinck!
She unsheathed her machetes, and I nodded.
“Hells, yeah,” I said. “It’s slasher time!”
I spun just as three Maasai warriors met me at the top of the steps. I side-kicked into one, sending him down the steps, shot an uppercut with the palm of my hand to one on my left, and grabbed the arm of the other, and slung him over my back.
Lamp stabbed her machete into the head of the one I slammed into the ground.
“Move out of the way, Examiner!” she said, “Why fight with blades when you have bullets?”
Lamp sheathed her machetes and took out her Glock 17’s. I ducked and rolled over on the floor, and ended up by her side, while she let it rain bullets in the stairwell. After seventeen rounds in each mag, they were still coming.
While she reloaded, I clutched her arm and pulled her down the foggy hallway, into a two-floor library. I’d never seen one before, equipped with real hardcover books. Lamp closed the door behind us, and we moved toward the center of the room. High above us, hung a sparkling crystal chandelier. On each side of us, stood massive dragon-head statues with necks that stretched down from the second floor. The horrific beasts faced each other baring marble teeth the size of elephant tusks.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said, sheathing my knives. “We need to find Kofi. Forget about these creatures.”
“Can’t we just wish them away and replace them with something harmless like aye-ayes?”
“I’ve been trying,” and pulled the gun from my back holster. “Kofi must have written a code that won’t allow me to change it.”
“There’s always a cheat,” she said, shoving the second mag into her gun. “Maybe we can find a backdoor in.”
We were now on the twelfth floor of the building. Kofi had full con
trol to do whatever he wanted and there was nothing I could do about it. Window walls encased the massive area, revealing that the moon fought its way in the room and past the dozen rows of book stacks and shelves. Outside, heavy storm clouds hung over the night sky. The vantage point from being that high gave us a depressing 360-degree view of an abandoned metropolis. In the distance, I thought I saw a pack of dholes dash behind a dilapidated shack, disappearing out of sight.
I sent a neural text to Kofi to give himself up just as two translucent-skinned warriors crashed through the double doors of the library, smashing them into pieces.
“They seem a little pissed,” I said.
Both of them were carrying lotus sticks. I ran up the stairs to my left and Lamp took the opposite side. We opened fire on them. The two coming after me got too close for comfort until I blasted them in the face point-blank range, and both plunged over the top railing.
“I don’t care what you see again and again in movies, hitting a moving target is a bitch!” I said.
“Will you shut up, and shoot?”
Lamp shot one, hitting it in the shoulder, but the warrior kept coming. I blasted half of his ear off, and he tumbled into one of the book stacks, knocking down several hardcover books. No more came through the door. We’d defeated them all.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“There is nothing I can’t do in this program!” Kofi said, coming up my rear.
I turned, prepared to block a punch if he threw one. Kofi stepped from behind the book stack and stood at the end, releasing a wicked grin. He had on a white martial arts gi. His feet were bare, but his face was covered in yellow warpaint. Beneath each eye were four scarred lines like crooked carvings on a wooden prison bedpost. He held a lotus stick in each hand.
I chuckled. “You don’t think that you’re a match for me, do you?”
He swung at me, I blocked his punch and he struck me in my wrist with the lotus stick. I cried out in agony.
That was my ulnar nerve pressure point!
He followed that with a quick strike with his other hand, smacking the wooden rod to my brachial plexus, a network of nerves near my neck and shoulder.