Beneath the Shining Jewel

by Balogun Ojetade

  He clapped his hands together hard. Two of the constables jumped back. “Look, I forgot my colored chalks up there,” Mba lied.

  “Protocols say…” the tattooed constable started.

  “I’m Captain Mba Bongo,” Mba said, interrupting her. “I fought Bacillus back when you were still suckling at your mother’s teat. Captain Jima gave the building an all clear. I think I can handle resealing it. You enforce those protocols on the roads; at the docks.”

  “Tell us about the Namaqua and we’ll do just that,” one of the constables said, smiling.

  “What about them?” Mba sighed. He already knew what they would say. Everyone wanted to know the same thing. He said the words with him.

  “Why didn’t the Namaqua join in the fight against Bacillus? Why did they choose to train the Captains to handle it instead? How did they pick you?”

  That last question Mba did not expect. He shook his head.

  “The Namaqua deal with breaches of the Cleave; that’s it,” Mba replied. “It was never proven Bacillus is from the Cleave – and the Namaqua didn’t sense a breach. Those damned cats they ride didn’t either. Several of them believed the Cleave was the only place something so terrible; so evil could come from, so they trained people they could trust to destroy Bacillus and deal with the infected.”

  “People they could trust?” The tattooed constable said, scratching her head.

  “Their uninitiated children and grandchildren.” Mba said.

  The constables shot glances at each other. It was the first they ever heard such a thing.

  “Nabunya is my mother…Old Hunter is my grandfather,” Mba said with a shrug. He walked past the stunned constables and sauntered toward the building. His back nagged at him terribly, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t shake a depression that came from seeing Jima again. A drink would help.

  CHAPTER four

  Ebandela…Stop the Fear. Start Living. Be you!

  Mba laughed about that slogan back in the day. He, with his constables, all frogged down at the stationhouse, had a good belly laugh.

  Most of his squad was dead now, either killed by Gnaw Maws or, infected by Bacillus, they had become monsters themselves and had to be put down.

  It was rumored that Bacillus was some minuscule, malevolent creature from the Cleave. He didn’t doubt it. All manner of evil slithered, burrowed, swam and flew out of that dark place. Most were put down by the Namaqua – a breach of the Cleave, and the powerful Namaqua, riding in on their giant cats, would kill anything that came through and then seal the breach while their cats fed on the carcasses of the creature from the Cleave – none avoided detection by the Hunters, which made people doubt Bacillus was actually from the Cleave. But some said that it was an infected Namaqua who brought Bacillus to Sati-Baa; that the Namaqua did not sense it because the creature lay hidden in the bowels of one of their brethren.

  If he could ever get his back fixed, he’d like to travel to the Cleave, get frogged, go in and do some damage to the evil there.

  Bacillus had to be from the Cleave, originally, for all its horribleness. Once a person was infected, you didn’t know if the poor soul was just going to start washing his hands until all the soap was gone, or if you’d have to put an arrow in his eye when he tried to set you on fire.

  Ebandela was supposed to be the cure. Medicine priests from across Ki Khanga converged upon Sati-Baa in scores. They worked day and night for a full moon cycle, developing what they were sure would destroy Bacillus once and for all. Ebandela, they called it – the beginning.

  The beginning of our end, Mba thought.

  Ebandela was supposed to chemically, or magically – or maybe both, depending on which medicine priest you spoke to – modify areas of the brain responsible for fears; areas of the mind responsible for madness; and areas of the spirit, responsible for wickedness.

  And it worked…at first.

  Mba walked into the building. After a couple of steps his right heel started making a squishing, sticking noise like he had stepped in a puddle of syrup. He dug into his pocket for his wine and then took a swig. He walked to the room with the blood bird. The stain now had a waxy gleam where the light from the window caught the thick layer of oil that had been poured upon it.

  Thoughts of Ebandela returned to Mba. People, Mba included, had flocked to their medicine priests to take Ebandela, which was both cure and preventative. They found out, too late, that the human body could not filter Ebandela like coffee or wine. Some was expelled with human waste, but the majority of it was absorbed into human tissue, where it built up over time.

  Ebandela – feeding the Bacillus that lived within everyone; strengthening it – brought on a wide range of effects that were impossible to predict. Some were fatal; others radically altered perception, thus thought, thus impulse, thus behavior.

  After eight years of use and hundreds of monstrous transformations, attacks and deaths by the citizens of Sati-Baa, the Elder Merchants banned the sale of Ebandela. Now, however, with citizens forced to go cold turkey off of Ebandela, the withdrawal began. Suicides, murders and other violent crimes increased ten-fold. Ebandela mutated Bacillus, making it now transmittable through body fluids, water and the air.

  If not for the Captains charged with fighting this plague, Sati-Baa – and perhaps even all of Ki Khanga – would have been finished.

  Though heavy prices were paid, Bacillus was destroyed. But now, it appeared, the plague was back.

  Mba took another swig of wine. But why am I?

  CHAPTER five

  Jima shouted from his litter, ordering his elephant driver to go faster, but traffic had frozen around them.

  Jima peered out of the silk curtains. Horses, carriages and other elephants were gridlocked on the red clay road. The combined smell of dung, urine, sweat and the pungent salve that covered his raw flesh assaulted him, making him nauseous.

  He just wanted to get back to his room at the convalescent home, close the curtains, latch the door – they would not allow him to lock it – and play himself in a game of kigogo. Before his injuries, Jima was considered the best kigogo player in Sati-Baa and in his youth had even represented Sati-Baa at the world competition held in Fez, where they called the game Mankala. Now, he played alone.

  Jima spent most of the year in isolation. His condition left him prone to infection and alienation. He was on permanent suicide watch. While ending his two decades of suffering had crossed his mind, he refused to give up on life. He swore an oath with other survivors long ago that he would not. Even when most of the other oath takers ran themselves through with their swords, he wouldn’t do it. His word was all the Gnaw Maws left him.

  Gnaw Maws! That damned pack had pinned him to the floor. The Alpha Gnaw Maw then broke the surface of his skin with its incisors and canines, ripping up an edge it could set its molars in before using all its strength to tear off the skin in strips.

  It was Mba’s fault. Being the grandsons of Old Hunter, he and Mba were the first to be recruited into the Bacillus Squads at the inception. Mba was a hard drinker back on the squad. Jima was, too, but never on the job. Jima understood the constables needing to frog up to fight people who wanted to eat their skins, but they needed Captains for leadership. Someone had to stay sharp taking 20 frogged men and women into danger. Frogging stoked bravado and numbed the conscience. Constables had to beat down grandpas and little girls turned into monsters by Bacillus. Frogging was also rumored to guard against Bacillus, so it was tolerated.

  Gnaw Maws were just one form of Bacillus manifestation. Others acted on impulses that ramped up paranoia to murderous extremes or threw people into repetitive frenzies of behavior that ended in heart attack or stroke. It was fear personified.

  Jima suffered anxiety attacks, set off by his damaged and exposed nerves, which registered phantom pains and sensations. At such times his throat closed, his heart pounded and he was crippled by an overwhelming urge to seek cover – to hide. The attacks were a manifestation of his
damaged condition and awareness that he was a skinless freak that should be dead. It wasn’t the Bacillus; it was perfectly natural terror. His career ended. The scarring left his legs atrophied, forcing him into a wheelchair and allowing only brief forays upright with the rings he wore around his legs.

  Jima didn’t debate early retirement. His peers suspected that the Gnaw Maws had infected him; thought Bacillus was lurking and would someday turn him. When Gnaw Maw victims turned it happened quickly, often during skinning. His coworkers knew that. It didn’t matter that two decades had passed since the attack. They feared him because he was ugly. Probably drew straws to drive him where he needed to go. The Gnaw Maws had taken most of Jima’s skin and its removal was anything but surgical and neat. The ripping action took connective tissue and muscle too. Jima’s lips, eyelids and scrotum had gone in the bargain. In many places they had stripped him to the hypodermis. He should have died. The cultured sheets of dermis the medicine priests covered him in did well enough for patching things in broad sections, but it hardened and cracked at the joints, leaving him prone to infection. The areas around his back, buttocks, thighs and torso were a patchwork of partially failed skin grafts. Eventually, Jima took himself off the waiting list for a face transplant.

  A fresh rage shot through him. He curled his skinless hands in knotted scars. This was Mba’s fault. The drunk, his cousin, got him skinned and the bastard kept him alive after it.

  CHAPTER six

  Mba tore his eyes away from the blood bird. The effects of the wine hit him like the kick of a mule. He took two staggering steps into the hallway. His thoughts rode, on a river of wine, to his past:

  Once the effects of Bacillus presented, there was no turning back; the infected had to die.

  I clubbed an old woman in the face. Mba took another swig of wine. I slit a child’s throat with my knife. He staggered into a wall. I set a man on fire. He took another drink.

  “Gnaw Maws are the worst of all of Bacillus’ creations,” he had told many young constables. “They’re always in competition with each other. They have to work fast to reach Alpha status before their injuries kill them.”

  Gnaw Maw competition included ripping scarlet slashes across each other’s faces and skinning their naked chests and bodies.

  “Not a fun sport at all,” he told the slack-jawed constables.

  It was awful what they did to each other. Often, the squad found the creatures enjoying a meal of their own flesh. That’s why the squad got frogged.

  Mba sipped the wine and walked along the hallway.

  “You have to kill everything that comes your way,” he told the curious new constables who wanted to know just what they were getting themselves into. “Out of throwing clubs? Use your short bow. No more arrows? Use your sword. No sword? Throw them down and use your boot heels. Just kill them! Kill them.”

  But all of that was just empty talk when your own squad got skinned; when constables you got frogged with turned and you had to put them down.

  Mba first signed up for the special Bacillus Squads because he was up to his neck in debt and they paid well – his mother constantly pressuring him to be the first to volunteer, to make her and his grandfather proud, had a lot to do with it, too. He had refused initiation as a Namaqua – life as a fisherman pleased him, even though he was not very good at it – so he agreed to undergo the grueling, brutal year of training. The squads dealt with anything from obsessed hand washers to madmen yanking the hair out of their scalps to people setting buildings on fire to nervous youth nibbling their fingers from tip to first knuckle. Most died off early; a kill-on-sight rule was adopted for violent infected and pyromaniacs.

  In time the squads rated the Bacillus based on a scale of destruction: Nibblers had a compulsion to eat their own hangnails, scabs and dead skin to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. Many Nibblers mutated into Gnaw Maws, who were further divided into three categories:

  Martys self-ritualized, gnawing and picking their own extremities to the bone, or at least until blood loss killed them. They were only dangerous if you tried to stop them. The treatment for Martyrs was a sympathetic decapitation.

  Regular, garden variety Gnaw Maws were ugly, monstrous things and were killed on site. They were semiconscious, with ape intelligence – a terrified creature that could only relieve its anxiety by eating other people’s skin. They traveled in hunting packs, working together, seeking out relief for their discomfort as a group. They communicated with gestures and body language, and by the varied vocal expression of their single obsession: to eat. “Eat” – they hissed it, barked it, and howled it, depending on mood, need, or deed. “Eat” kept the pack together on the hunt. “Eat” focused them on their prey.

  Close proximity to other Gnaw Maws led to violent interaction. Flesh fights. They settled scores and worked out the pack hierarchy by getting into each other’s faces. There was an Alpha – a male or female leader.

  Since eating flesh both caused and cured their problems, competitive flesh fights left them ragged and raw from the bellybutton up. Some were so degraded by competition and interaction that they were stripped to the muscle. No lips, ears or eyelids – monsters. They didn’t live long; but they lived long enough. The treatment: kill on sight.

  The third kind, Poachers, was possibly the most dangerous of Gnaw Maws. They looked and behaved like normal people. The Bacillus in them was more subtle…and extreme. They retained their character and humanity and rationalized their obsession. The relief of their stress, their ritual, was always performed upon victims in secret, in hidden places; sometimes in the privacy of their own homes. The treatment: Kill them, if you could find them.

  Gnaw Maws were most destructive, and so the Cleansing protocol: bash, bag and burn – destroy the creatures you could find; secure the building; contain the Bacillus in fire.

  Mba slammed a fist into the wall. His shoulders slumped and heaved in rhythm with his sobs. He killed friends. Nothing else mattered. Not the torn skin on his knuckles. Not the nearby rustle of leather pushed aside by a breeze or movement.

  “They knew the risks, damn it!” He croaked. “They could have quit!”

  He ground his teeth with an audible, grating sound.

  “I’d do it again,” he said.

  Heart throbbing like a dying thing, he lurched into motion, stumbling down the hall past abandoned offices and boarded windows. Grunting, he fell, knees cracking against the floor. It didn’t hurt. He was too drunk; too lost in self-loathing, to feel anything. Before he could weep or curse, a sound drew his head up.

  There, right in front of him. Its body shape told him it was female.

  Jima was wrong. There was a Gnaw Maw in the building.

  CHAPTER seven

  The elephant had moved another half block and Jima’s stomach continued to churn. Confronting Mba and the past was useless, and he paid for such futile introspection with anxiety. To escape his discomfort, he willed his thoughts back to the game of kigogo. In the game there was no Mba. In the game he won.

  But today, no matter how he tried to focus on kigogo, thoughts of that day two decades ago crept back into his head.

  Mba’s squad had contacted Jima through the squad’s telepath – every squad had at least one – when they were already on the move. A concentration of Gnaw Maw attacks had left twenty dead and dozens missing in buildings and areas adjacent to an old section of Mohan University slated for renovation.

  Mba had his epiphany while chewing iboga on the way back to the stationhouse after a call about a pyromaniac turned out to be a false alarm. One of the constables was bragging about sneaking off with a girl to old tunnels under the university when he was a student there. The university used the maze of tunnels and rooms for storage and maintenance access, nothing more. Mba got the notion that Alpha Gnaw Maws could hide their packs down there. That location would give them access to the whole city through underground ventilation shafts, sewers and maintenance ways.

  Jima told Mba to wait
for him. The tunnels could hide a big hunting pack. But Mba and the squad were frogged up on iboga and wine. They armed themselves and went in while Jima and his squad were still two miles away.

  Jima’s elephant had come to a halt outside the university just as the screaming started. Mba’s squad had been scattered, his telepath told him. They were being massacred.

  Jima left half of his crew with the elephants, ordering them to wait for back up. They were to take reinforcements, hunt down all access points and close off the tunnels; kill anything coming out that couldn’t identify itself. Jima and ten constables went in, scanning the darkness with their lamps. They got turned around quickly in the tunnels, following the echoes of Mba’s dying squad.

  Finally, they came upon a group of Gnaw Maws skinning half of Mba’s men and women. The creatures were in a Bacillus-fueled frenzy, unable to fear or feel anything past their need for flesh.

  Jima’s squad charged, swords and shortbows at the ready.

  The din of their pounding footsteps and their battle roar deafened Jima’s squad to a pack of Gnaw Maws coming in through connecting tunnels.

  Scores of the creatures came at them with teeth snapping. All of them screaming the act of their desire: “Eat!” The word echoed all around, sprayed from lipless mouths. “EAT!”

  An Alpha, six males and three females performed the ritual on him. Calling it Ritual was Mba’s thing; somehow, it became popular among the squads and stuck. Ritual relieved the Gnaw Maws’ anxiety.

  Horrific screams exploded from Jima’s chest. His body flailed as fluids sprayed. Bare muscle and finger bones gripped his arms and legs, held him as the Alpha worked the edges free. Pain dazzled Jima as long strips of skin were pulled from his abdomen, chest and legs. Blood soon covered his eyes in place of lids. Huddled, glistening shapes darted out of Jima’s dying vision. Bundles of his skin were carried away into the darkness. His final vision before he passed out was a pair of big males who stretched his scalp and face between them like a mask of Kongo rubber.