by Dave Mckay
But poor Dinah! And how many others had they treated in the same way?
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Chapter 25. Another Disaster
Over the next few weeks, Moses found that, despite all of his previous successes in filtering out the negatives, what Jiddy had done to Dinah rarely left his mind. He knew that his friend was just one of millions who had let themselves become corrupted by whatever was happening to the world; but living with Jiddy and doing business with him day after day was a constant reminder of where the world was heading. He was repulsed by this young man who had always been his best friend; but at the same time, he could not express his true feelings to Jiddy or to anyone else, because Jiddy knew things about him that could get him killed.
People were now reporting anyone whom they suspected of being sympathetic with the aliens. For Moses, of course, the aliens and Josephat were virtually the same, and so he was innocent of feeling sympathy for them. But he had a sister and an elderly friend who were still almost certainly implicated in the movement.
The issue of Rosy's involvement had been raised in an angry crowd scene that erupted when Moses went to pick up his mail at the post office a few months earlier. He had not yet turned 22. Jiddy had been with him at the time, and had assured people that Moses had never had any contact with Rosy, from the day that she and the others had disappeared. "And Stump doesn't want to have any contact with her, either!" he had shouted.
That wasn't true at all, but it had been necessary for Jiddy to put it that way in order to save Moses' neck.
Others had been taken to Kakamega on as little evidence, and executed by guillotine at the soccer field there. Moses did not regard these deaths in the same way that he did Dinah's, because these people were more than likely guilty. A few were borderline, like himself if he ever got caught, but it was all part of global peacekeeping, and he supported the belief that the occasional innocent victim was a necessary inconvenience for the overall security of the system.
Another unimaginable disaster occurred shortly after the Friday night incident with Jiddy, which temporarily distracted Moses from the depressing thoughts he had been having about the world situation. The disaster changed the thinking of many others as well.
The two aliens were reportedly angry that their followers were being executed, and so they had predicted various plagues. News reports said that all their predictions had failed, and there was no reason for anyone in Shinyalu to believe otherwise. Except for one thing: The aliens apparently continued to roam free, untouched by the authorities. Surely they must have had paranormal powers to have avoided capture for so long!
Five days before it hit, news broke that the aliens had predicted a collision between Earth and an asteroid. Scientists confirmed that there was an asteroid due to pass within millions of miles of Earth, but that the chances of it actually hitting were infinitely small.
Millions did like Moses and checked the aliens' web site 'just to be sure'. According to the aliens, their other predictions had, in fact, occurred, but there was no way for Shinyalu residents to confirm that one way or another. When the first meteorite shower actually did strike, it was just as the aliens had said it would be.
The whole top half of Africa, much of Europe, and all of the Middle East were affected by the cloud of meteors that preceded the big one. There were craters everywhere, forest fires all over Kenya and neighbouring countries, and something in the meteorites that made the water, including Lake Victoria and the Nile, highly radioactive. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, both through the fires and through the massive hail storms that followed the widespread burning.
But the greatest loss of life came when the asteroid itself hit somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. It caused a shock that could be felt around the world. Huge tsunamis wiped out whole cities along the coasts of West Africa, Western Europe, and the East Coast of North and South America. All life on many islands in the Carribean was totally destroyed.
Then there was a second wave of meteorites which showered on much of Russia and Asia, with a similar loss of lives.
Several meteorites landed in maize fields and vineyards around Shinyalu, but damage was greater in the Kakamega forest, where fires spread through the vegetation, leaving a blackened scar. Giant hailstones some of them weighing up to a kilogram each resulted from the intense heat forcing them high up into the atmosphere. They killed hundreds of people in the area between Shinyalu and Kakamega alone when they finally fell. In major cities, the loss of lives was far greater.
"They've got to be stopped. Why doesn't Dangchao do something about it?" Moses complained as he and Jiddy surveyed the damage to their new house. The roof was totally destroyed, and even one wall had been knocked over from the force of the storm.
Normally Jiddy would have cautioned him about his disloyalty, but this time even Jiddy was feeling less than thrilled with how Dangchao had dealt with the aliens.
But when Dangchao did increase his efforts to stop the aliens, Moses and Jiddy were amongst those who started wishing that he had not. In the months following the asteroid, when the world should have been pouring all of its efforts into rebuilding, on a par with the unity they had shown in response to the fall of America, Dangchao was, instead, ordering all available government personnel to increase the executions, even torturing people, in an effort to get them to provide names of others who were involved in the alien movement.
The population was becoming increasingly aware that innocent people were being killed now, to appease Dangchao's rage, and to compensate for the death and destruction which had cast a pall over the whole earth. Morale which had been riding so high just a few months earlier was now at an all time low.
Both of the vehicles that Moses had been using for his matatu runs had been badly damaged, although they were still driveable. He could hardly charge top fares for the service he was providing now. The road, too, had been badly damaged by the storm. Most people had little money for luxuries anymore anyway, as crops had been ruined, buildings had been destroyed, and workers who had not been killed by the hail were now in danger of being executed as traitors, whether they really were traitors or not.
Good business sense, picked up from Amy seven or eight years earlier, pulled Moses through once again. He still had all the funds that he had saved up for the planned Nairobi run, and he could use them to find a way around the situation now. The answer came in undercutting his opposition. More people were returning to using boda-bodas, and that was forcing other matatu drivers out of work; but Moses had enough money to hold out even if he had to run at a loss for a year or more. He had been the first to raise fares and now he was the first to drop them, forcing other matatu drivers to give up and leave their customers to him.
There was suffering everywhere, and so many deaths that it was difficult for the survivors to keep up with burying them. But through it all, Moses still had enough income to take care of himself, which was the bottom line in his philosophy about life.
He lost contact with Kyme, maybe because Kyme had closed his phone account, but he still shared his thoughts with Ray, in London. Ray helped him to maintain a positive focus by urging him to count his blessings, and look on the bright side. Ray talked about God too, but it was easy for Moses to just substitute his own strong will where Ray mentioned God, and the advice still worked. The human spirit could be so amazingly resilient!
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Chapter 26. Survival
Inside the cave, Amy and her family had been safe from the hailstones. But one of the first meteorites struck the side of the hill in which they lived, and caused a cave-in near the opening of the tunnel. There was still room for air to get through, but the family laboured for three days to shift enough rock to make room for them to exit the tunnel one at a time. They left most of the debris there, seeing it as yet another deterrent to intruders. The path in and out involved a bit of climbing over smaller rocks and weaving around so
me of the larger ones, but everyone soon learned to negotiate this course easily in the dark. Amy had the most difficulty because of her age, but she preferred the discomfort, if it made their location more secure.
The forest itself was a mess, with fallen trees everywhere, and most of the vegetation burned away, so that people moving on the road through the forest could be just made out from the hill as they walked along it. Fortunately tourism was virtually non-existent now, and the only people coming to the forest were poor villagers in search of firewood. But the family still had to stay inside the cave much of the time, and do their harvesting under cover of darkness until the trees grew new leaves.
Much of the animal life in the forest had been killed, and that included leopards. But the danger of attack at night was still very real, and they prayed constantly when gathering food. It seemed that they had miraculous protection, because in all of their time in the forest, both before and after the fires, no one was attacked.
* * *
Meanwhile, Moses was fighting his own battle for survival. "I have no 1 2 talk 2," he wrote in a text to Ray. "Amy + Rosy r gone, + now I can't even talk 2 GD." Ray knew about Jiddy's disgusting addiction to violence. Moses felt safe opening up and expressing his anger about the sacrifices to Ray without fear of being betrayed. Maybe it was the distance between them geographically, but it seemed like Ray shared his feeling, even he was more careful about expressing it. "It's not EZ, I no," Ray wrote back. "But friendships r like that. No 1 can b there all the time. Sooner or later, every 1 will let u down." Was Ray admitting that he didn't care either? Moses knew that if Amy had been there, she would have at least given him a hug, and a hug was what he needed at the moment. Even Kyme would have known that, but Kyme was gone too now. "U need inner strength, Mo," Ray continued. "Something 2 carry u thru when others fail. Do you pray?" Moses ignored the question when he replied: "I'm getting stronger. What doesn't kill me will make me stronger, right?" And he added a winking smiley at the end of the message before typing in, "Gotta go." In his heart, however, he felt that he had done his best to send out a plea to Ray for help, and the plea had gone unnoticed.
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Chapter 27. Despair
About a year after the asteroid hit, something happened to Moses. There did not seem to be a single incident that triggered it; but the sum total of all that he was going through reached a point which finally overcame his almost superhuman ability to shut out the negatives. On his run from Shinyalu to Kakamega, he had always made a point of avoiding the soccer field where the guillotine entertained the masses in the larger city. After the horror Jiddy related about Dinah, he never returned to the theaters in the village, and he took a loss in revenue by paying another driver to do the Friday night run, so that he could avoided the markets entirely during the sacrifices. He rarely even talked to Jiddy now, and he had withdrawn into himself, even when around his customers.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it had been his ability to maintain positive relationships with others, most notably Jiddy, that had kept him positive about so much in the past. He certainly was finding less and less reason to be positive now, and his feelings toward himself as well as his fellow citizens was one of growing revulsion.
In relation to those around him, Moses was reasonably successful. Corruption had returned with a vengeance, and the police were back extorting money from matatu drivers, but Moses was still able to use his fame as the ID Mark poster boy to call the bluff of those who tried to extort from him. It is doubtful that he really had much pull with those in power, but corrupt constables were not prepared to take such a risk when they had so many other easy pickings from which to choose.
Nevertheless, the despair and horror continued to build up inside of Moses until he had to act on thoughts which had been wafting through his mind for several weeks. It was on a Tuesday afternoon, when he knew Mr. Barasa would be busy at the bank. Moses dropped his last passengers off in Kakamega, and then drove over to Barasa's house. He walked straight around to the back porch, and lifted a long crate off the single barrelled shotgun that he knew was hidden there.
Tying a knot of any sort with just one hand and a stump was a difficult feat, but Moses had prepared the string at home, when he had time to labour over it. (He did not want to lose time now, and risk being discovered.) There was a loop on one end, which he placed over the trigger and then pulled it tight. He propped the butt of the gun on the soft earth close to the edge of the porch, and sat in front of it, with the gun aimed toward his head.
He looped the string around his big toe and held the loose end in his left hand.
There was no one to write a note to. The only people who mattered, Rosy and Amy, had been taken away from him by Josephat. But he allowed himself a few brief moments to reflect on his own life before pulling the trigger. Even in the depths of despar there was a touch of positive thinking in this young man. It had not been a totally bad life, he thought. He had gone through things that others in Kenya could hardly imagine. He had lived a full life, experienced success when others were struggling just to stay alive. The tragedy was just that he had never understood where it was all leading.
The present state of the world suggested that maybe Amy was right about a curse being on all those who had followed his lead in support of the banks, the government, and the whole greedy rat race. If it was true that God was going to destroy those who had destroyed the earth, then he too deserved to be destroyed. He had continued to ignore the waste that went on during those glorious days of decadent debauchery, and when the dream had ended, he was amongst those who continued to waste far more than his share of the resources, in order to look out for himself... number one, as he used to say it. Surely, what had once been seen as only an American sin was now present in his own heart and in the hearts of others in his village.
Death by shotgun blast to the head was almost too good an end to a life that had only taken from others and rarely given anything in return. Others might not have been so harsh in their thoughts about him; Moses knew that many people liked him. Nevertheless, in his heart he knew that even his good nature was always carefully calculated to secure favours for himself... never too obvious in his manipulations of others, always maintaining that air of humility and good nature that worked so well to win friends and influence people.
He remembered a night when he had told Rosy that being nice to people was a way to get others to be nice to you. In her innocence, she had asked, "But what about God? Don't you try to be nice to people for him?"
How can I do something for someone I've never met?
Moses thought once again, as tears of self-pity flowed.
With that final thought in mind, he pushed his left big toe slowly away from his body. As he did, the string on the trigger moved, ever so slowly, sliding down toward the end of the curved trigger. Just as the gun erupted, he had seen it slip entirely off the trigger. A sudden movement to stop it from slipping was too late; but the gun exploded anyway, not hitting him full in the face as he had intended, but taking off the top of his head nevertheless.
Everything turned black, and stayed that way for a very long time. He was conscious of the blackness, but that was all. He was falling through it, bracing for an impact that never came. There was no way of telling how long the falling sensation lasted, or what brought it to an end, but at some stage, he found himself walking through a blackened, burned out forest, ovewhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness. All around him was a sense of death, like he was surrounded by the spirits of others who had, like him, died without hope, in the depths of despair.
Out of the smoke that hovered over the scene came an image of a face so ugly, and so evil that it sent shivers down his spine. If this was death, then death had definitely not proven to be the escape that he had longed for. He felt trapped in an eternity of hopeless depression, so intense that he could only groan pitifully. His groan was met by the groans of others out there in the darkness
of the forest, others who appeared to also be trapped in this same horrible place.
His groans turned into a prayer, as he begged for release. He hated himself for never having broken down like this while still alive. He had never been desperate enough to even try talking to the God he did not know. It had been too easy to just brush such thoughts aside. And now it was too late. Surely, this was hell, and he was going to be trapped here forever, regretting the spiritual indifference that had characterised so much of the life he had once known.
But then Moses heard other voices. The voices of people talking to one another. He was in the air now, looking down on a group of people in green robes gathered around a table. The darkness receded, and he was able to see clearly the features of someone lying face-up on the table. It was himself. These were doctors, and they were fitting a metal plate to his head. There was a gaping hole where his forehead should have been. The front of his brain was missing. The metal plate was being riveted to those edges of his skull that had survived the shotgun blast.
He prayed more fervently than ever now, begging God to give him another chance, to let him live, to show him what he must do, to make his life count for something more than selfish success.
And then all was darkness once again.
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Chapter 28. An Invitation
Mr. Barasa had rushed home to retrieve a forgotten briefcase, and was just pulling into the driveway when the gun went off. All of Moses' forehead was missing, and bits of his brain were splattered against the back wall of the house. The situation looked hopeless; but there was very little bleeding. Barasa gathered the young man in his arms, placed him in the back of the four-wheel-drive, and sped off to the local hospital.
Normally, the staff would not have even bothered to treat such an obviously fatal wound. But they recognised Moses as the face of the new economic system, and so, after putting him on a drip and giving him two liters of blood, they sent staff to accompany him on a one and a half hour ride to the Aga Khan Hospital, in Kisumu, on the shores of LakeVictoria. Shortly before the ambulance reached the hospital, Moses went into cardiac arrest. A doctor travelling in the back of the vehicle administered CPR until the hospital was able to get his heart started again through electro-convulsive shock.