by Nzondi
Another pressure point!
I fell backward, assessing his style. He stepped forward. I kicked him in the chin. He countered with a strike, slapping the stick to my ankle before I could snap my leg back. I thought that for a second, he actually lit my ankle on fire, it burned with such intensity.
He brought a foot up and stepped on my thigh. He threw his other leg around my waist, climbed over and around my shoulder, and thrust his knee into my back. I grimaced and yelled. His elbow crushed into the nape of my neck.
While I saw stars, stumbling forward in pain, another strike hit me in the stomach. I fell onto one knee and was about to black out until an arm caught me, snatching me to my feet.
“Come on, sister,” Lamp said. “He can’t defeat us both!”
Lamp ran and slid in an attempt to leg sweep him, but Kofi leaped in the air. I ran and clotheslined his ankles mid-air, with a mighty blow from my forearm.
He flipped forward and landed on his feet like a cat. Lamp had gotten to her feet and struck Kofi hard in his left side with a decisive kidney blow. He bent over favoring that side. I leaped in the air and did a side somersault. When I landed to the right of him, I spun and did an axe kick to the side of his head.
It was a kick that normally knocked my opponent out, but Kofi hit the ground and bounced right back up. Lamp charged him and shot her boot so hard in his knee, she snapped it. Lamp brought her other foot up and snapped her heel into his jaw. Kofi’s teeth shattered, and he dropped like a brick. She knocked him out cold.
We both stood there, out of breath, and doubled over. Lamp had one hand on the wall and was half bent over, and I had an arm on my abs, feeling an excruciating burn in my ribs.
I plopped down in the chair, and it rolled back a little. “I thought this program was a simulation of reality.”
Lamp pushed off of the wall and stumbled toward me. “This pain feels real to me. It’s a good thing I’m an enhuman, now, or I wouldn’t have been any help.”
“When did he learn how to fight like that?” I asked.
“Who knows? Maybe he learned the same way you learned pathology or how I learned criminal justice.”
“Neural school,” we said, in chorus.
I stood up straight. “Well, guess we didn’t need Dad after all. Let’s end this holo-program and get Kofi processed.” Limping a little, I turned around to get Kofi. “I don’t know how to break this to Auntie…”
Lamp looked up. “What?”
“Where is he?”
That made us both stand up. We traded glances and then slowly looked at the door. I fully expected him to come walking through that door. Now that we were spent from one helluva fight, he would easily wipe the floor with our butts.
The lights in the library shut off. The moonlight easing in from the window wall provided a small semblance of lighting. A dark shape rose slowly from the floor like a disfigured warp cone being pushed from the underworld. The moon created a silhouette around it and the crinkled triangular shape rose higher and higher.
A witches hat?
It grew from the floor, forming elongated disfigured shapes of something that could have been human or beast. When it stood about my height, I stepped back. Things started scuffling on the blood-wine carpet. Ticking sounds like gravel being shifted in a tin pan filled the air with an ominous stirring of fear. The moonlight sprayed a cone across the floor in front of the figure cloaked in darkness.
Kofi!
He stepped forward into the cone of light.
“There’s not just one of him,” Lamp said.
“There’s two,” I said.
Two bodies melded together like warped melted plastic. I gasped, remembered that creepy painting called Sisters.
Had he hacked into my mind, tapped into my nightmares?
Kofi and his twin were dressed in identical pantsuits, reminding me of the twin girls in that ghoulish painting. A witches’ hat sat upon his head. Their skin was ashen like death. At their feet were thousands of cockroaches, running across his feet and up his body.
“Okay,” I said. “This is where I get off.”
Lamp said, “Old Man, now would be a good time to bail us out of here!”
Until that point, Kofi and his twin’s eyes were closed. Lightning struck outside and it began to rain hard, and when the skies flashed again, thunder boomed, shaking the entire library. Kofi and his Siamese twin opened his eyes. They were no longer pretty and green but amber like a wolf.
Lamp, not being one for patience, pulled out her Glocks and started firing. She lit Kofi’s ass up and was charging at him with full speed. She rammed her shoulder into him and sent him flying across the room. The Glocks went flying out of her hands in different directions and she fell on her back hard, hitting her head. I didn’t have the chance to see if she was unconscious or not.
It seemed like Kofi had summoned every cockroach that ever existed and sent them motherbuggers right at me. My breath was labored. I was tired as hell and had a kick-ass pain in my ribs that was probably broken, but there was no way in hell I was going to win any battle with cockroaches.
“Shoot at the window, Lamp!” I said, and started shooting at the glass. “Trust me, we can escape this way!”
Lamp got the idea and started blasting at the window, too. She got up and ran toward the window. I awkwardly skipped and hopped over those damned bugs like I was barefoot, running over hot lava coals. The glass finally shattered and both of us leaped toward the window.
“Well if we’re going to do this, Lamp, we may as well do it with a bang,” I said, crashing through the window.
26
01010100 01100001 01110100 01110101
Rain greeted me, soaking my clothes immediately. I let out a hearty yell, soaring midair while shards of glass spun around me, shooting piercing twinklings of moonlight reflections in a blinding strobe-light fashion. The wind grabbed my hair and tugged it back toward the building like a savage Neanderthal. My heart shot up to my throat like a lump of hot coals, and my stomach was drowned in a concoction of panic and adrenaline. Not even the rain cooled the blood boiling throughout my veins.
Because the side of the building was at a seventy-degree incline, within what seemed like an eternity but was only a matter of three-to-four seconds, my boots clinked into the glass and slipped on the wet surface. My butt smacked on the outside of the building’s window hard, and down I descended. It was like sliding down one of those amusement park waterslides, except I was sure that our deaths were inevitable at the bottom of our ride.
The pain in my ribs pretty much guaranteed that whatever I initially thought about not being able to die in this virtual reality-holomatter construct, was absolutely grade-A wrong. It took a few seconds for my equilibrium to balance my bearings.
Lamp had managed with extraordinary flexibility to turn onto her side. She was below me, sliding headfirst toward the ground.
I’d put Lamp through so much in the past twenty-four hours, I didn’t want her death to be on me, as well.
What is she doing?
The rain flushed into my eyes, making it hard to see, but that didn’t stop me from seeing that she had her guns in her hand, and was pointing them at me. I was convinced that she had declared herself a death doctor and was aiming to end my life with some semblance of honorable revenge.
Lamp fired her gun, and my reflexes autonomously made me blink, thinking I was in for a painful jolt. The velocity of sliding down the slippery side of the building continued to increase.
Between the wind and the rain, my eyes fluttered madly. The hyper-draft from our fall roared in my ears, but it was not enough to stifle the sound of the Masaai terror who was, unbeknownst to me until I glanced up, right above.
Many of the warriors had followed suit and were slipping, sauntering and veering uncontrollably down the side of the glass, their faces determined, sans fear.
Lamp managed to hit the big guy in the face.
The ground was approaching at a rate that I calculated woul
d consummate our impact within the next thirty seconds.
The big guy was gaining on me. He was trying to scissor my neck with his legs, and when I slapped them away, it sent my body spinning so that I was now falling head-first, too.
I could’ve taken that opportunity to lose my shit altogether, but instead, I started shooting at the translucent-skinned warrior.
Trust me, it wasn’t intentional, but my first shot went right into the groin. The second caught the bottom of his foot. The third, yes, that was the kicker; hit that bastard right in his chin, and then another caught him in the head.
I didn’t stop there, either. By the time I emptied both mags, they were all dead, and just when I wondered how much longer it would before my cranium was split open from the impact of hitting the ground, I heard Lamp crash into something that sounded more like she fell into a table of poker chips.
Three seconds later, my head caved into a mountain that stood nearly three stories high; a mound of skeletal remains. I burrowed at least two meters deep into the mountain of bones before stopping, pieces of osseous matter punctured my shoulder, arms and side. It hurt to bloody hell.
Skissh! Slossh! Twack! Frummp!
The lifeless bodies of the Maasai warriors smashed into the mound around me.
Lamp punched her hand through the pile of bones and clutched my arm, snatching me out.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Not at all,” I said.
We both tumbled over and fell to the ground. It reminded me of the time I was playing tag on the hill behind one of my foster parent’s house in Accra with one of my cousins. We had both tripped and rolled some nine-odd meters to the bottom. Even with all the scrapes and bruises we accumulated, we laughed until we both wet our shorts.
This is no laughing matter.
A nauseating smell lingered in the air. The ground was prickly. We both knew what layered the earth.
Human skeletons!
Lamp and I were on the ground moaning, trying to absorb our wounds.
She said, “There is no way we survive this.”
I sat up. Behind the building, there were dozens of mounds. Skeletal remains of thousands of people. My heart was still racing from the fall, but this, this was something that the human mind could not ever be prepared for; the residue of carnage.
She and I picked ourselves up and stood there observing the corpses of the warriors we’d terminated.
I couldn’t believe the decimation that surrounded us. Even though the world had a history of wars, some religious, most political, all brutal, there was nothing like standing in a cesspool of death. There was nothing that hurt my heart more than knowing that every one of these people had mothers, or fathers, wives, husbands, someone who loved them. Even though it was just a hologram, the subconscious mind did not discern between reality and fantasy. I was a pathologist and had done many autopsies, albeit, in the House of Oware game, but still, it was a bit overwhelming.
To our left were three rows of rusted rundown cars, ten, maybe twelve vehicles. In front of those, old motorcycles stood on their kickstands. There were two gas pumps and a small mechanic shop in front of the motorcycles. Not even a hundred meters from the edge of the building stood part of a man-made lake that wrapped around the front of the building.
Behind us were more kennels. All of the gates had holes in them large enough for a healthy German Shepherd to come through. There were skeletons inside some of the kennels that looked canine.
A breeze did us the honor of sweeping that vile, decayed smell under our noses. It was one that I’d grown to know over the past few days. I didn’t have to warn Lamp. She knew when we heard the growling.
I let out a hard sigh, and said, “I hate these bitches.”
“Now what?” Lamp said, and turned.
I shook my head, and withdrew my machetes. “You have to ask?” I said, and turned around.
There were several dozen dholes facing us, each snarling, all drooling with hunger. Most of them had misshapen heads. A couple of them had deformed torsos, and one had a tumorous neck.
I backed away slowly, and then I yelled, “RUN!”
Hoping that one of those police vehicles were opened, I dashed for the car door, hearing the pitter-pattering of a mob of wet paws giving chase. The dholes barked with an angry hunger that autonomously made me run faster than I ever thought my feet could go. And Lamp, hell, she passed right by me like the hare racing the tortoise. She leaped over one of the vehicles and her butt slid across the hood.
I tried the driver’s door to the first vehicle I got to, and sonofabitch if the damn thing wasn’t locked. I turned just as a dhole leaped in the air for my throat.
I ducked and elbowed the driver’s window.
The dog went flying on top of the wet roof, his feet clumsily skidded over toward Lamp.
Two other wild dogs leaped at me, and I shifted out of the way just in time for them to soar through the broken window into the car. One of them yelped, as I imagined its ribs snagged into a broken shard of glass jutting from the broken window.
I withdrew the 9mm from the front of my drenched holster. And fired at a few of the dogs approaching while I kept moving toward the row of motorcycles.
They fell and slid in the wet earth. One dhole tripped over an injured dhole, but the others leaped over the dead dogs, while most of them ran around the fallen. Glass broke and I figured either Lamp got into a vehicle or shoved a dhole so hard it smashed into the window.
Gunshots came from Lamp’s direction, as well as yelps from injured wild canines. I made it to a bike and saw that most of them had keys in them.
“Lamp, the bikes have keys!” I said, running for it, the rain slapping me hard in my face. “Get to the bikes!”
“Got it!”
A few of the dholes must’ve had the same idea. They flanked around and were at the bikes before I got there. One nipped at my ankle and down I went in pain. A few bones on the ground pierced my side.
Two of the dholes tore into my arms and legs. I fought them as best as I could, screaming bloody murder, never having had experienced that insane amount of agony before.
Suddenly, they stopped biting.
For a few seconds, I was too busy grimacing with excruciating pain to realize that all of the dholes had stopped barking, too. I sat up, rain sending my blood to the earth laden with human skeletons. My jaw fell agape.
Lamp stood on top of one of the police cars with her arms spread wide, her palms up like a teenager in love with the joy of a downpour of rain. Her eyes were closed, and there were two dholes at each side of her feet. Her own blood spilled from both hands onto the dholes. But that wasn’t the shocking part.
Every single dhole stood still like obedient trained dogs waiting for a command from their master. Their heads were up, facing Lamp. Their eyes were blue, glowing. None of them moved, the rain pelting their fur. The rain tapped against the hoods and ceilings of the police vehicles like rhythmic drumming of a tribe summoning the spirits.
“Xo,” she said. “Find Kofi, and make sure he never takes another life again.”
Standing up, I yelled, “You choose the worst times to say goodbye!”
Ffffffffwhapppp!
The loud startling noise came from where we first landed, and by the time I turned, several Maasai warriors had landed onto the ground.
Kofi and his Siamese twin, stood in front of them all, grimacing like a bully on the school playground. I glanced up and saw more than twenty of them sliding ferociously down toward us.
Great!
To be honest, there was no way in hell I was in any condition to fight any more African masters of martial arts.
Lamp screamed and I turned. She jumped down from the roof of the police vehicle and stood in the midst of all those dholes. Kofi disabled her control over the dholes, and they started after her. She leaped over the hood of the vehicle and took off. They gave chase. Lamp hopped onto another vehicle and started hopping from the hood of
car-to-car. The wild dogs gave chase but kept clumsily sliding off of the wet cars. t.
Kofi and his ghouls charged toward me.
I let out a war cry and withdrew my guns, blasting at them. “Let's do this, boneheads!”
A bolt of lightning struck the ground between Kofi and me, a black wisp of smoke rose from the ground and the rain stopped. Another bolt of lightning struck the ground near Lamp and hundreds of tiny webs of electricity zapped the dholes to ashes.
Something stirred in the lake behind us like a tsunami was about to rise.
A giant arm the size of a tros-tros bus emerged from the lake and stretched out toward us like an elastic band. It grabbed Kofi and lifted him up in the air.
As if our bodies were metallic, and the body of water was the magnet, we started sliding toward the lake. Lamp went for her guns, but dropped them as soon as she touched them.
“Hey, they just burned my hands,” she said, and shook her hands in pain.
I went for my machetes. “Christ!” I said, and dropped the scorching weapons. I placed my hand on my 9mm and snatched them away when the kukri knives singed my hands.
Our bodies were being pulled toward the lake.
“What’s happening?” Lamp said, trying to ground her feet.
“I don’t know how he’s doing that.”
Both Lamp and I tried grabbing hold of one of the police vehicles, but they were too slippery. Our bodies slithered to the ground. We squirmed, and fought, and even tried to grab the earth, coming up with a handful of skeletal remains but some invisible force continued pulling us toward the body of water.
“Let go of me!” Kofi yelled.
“Stop this!” I said. Our bodies were pulled into the lake. My legs delved deeper into the frigid water. I tried to swim, but it was like being sucked into a whirlpool. My efforts were useless.
Lamp went under and struggled to get to the surface.
When I heard her cough one last time and didn’t see her, I screamed, “Lamp!”
Water flushed into my lungs, and I coughed. My eyes stung as my head bobbed under the water. I lifted my head to the sky. Buildings seemed to bounce before my eyes. And like some surreal dream, the buildings melted away, and only the sky was left. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. It was beautiful, like a vast flower garden. There were so many rich hues and luminous shades of blue.