After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “Drive, Max! Drive!”

  Max reversed when the first shots sprayed around them. The bullets cracked the front windshield. He hit the brakes and swung the car around. Now the kids were firing into the back window. Max plunged down an alley. But the way was blocked by a cowherd, who had coaxed his animals inside to protect them for the night. Max honked madly, but the cows just stared back at them.

  He reversed out of the alley as the cowherd berated them. When the car came out into the main street again, Bracket could see that the two children were locked in a gunfight with the police officers. Max accelerated down the main strip, then turned onto the highway leading out of town.

  When they arrived at the spaceport, guards were already positioned in the towers, manning the machine guns, as Max slowed the car to a stop outside the gate.

  “Aren’t you coming with me, Max? It’s safe in here.”

  “I have to go to my family.”

  Bracket knew not to argue with him anymore about family. “Go get them, then. Go get them and bring them back here. I’ll make sure they let you in.”

  Max shook his head. “It’s okay, oyibo. Pay me for the ride. I’ll see you again.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ll see you again. I’ll fix things for you.”

  Bracket transferred the cowries, adding in extra for the damage to the pickup truck, and Max drove away into the night. He finally caught his breath now that he was inside the base. He hadn’t expected children to dress and behave like soldiers. The Jarumi were waging a war against a defenseless population, and the attack had happened so fast that he hadn’t had the time to contemplate what it really meant. Nothing had touched him. There were no bruises on his body, only a fragmenting in the recesses of his mind that he would have to reckon with later.

  He dialed Seeta as soon as he returned to his quarters. When she picked up, he could hear the wind howling around her, wherever it was.

  “Hey, Kwesi.”

  “Wale with you?”

  “Yeah. Can you turn off that stupid identity? I want to see your face.”

  He tried to switch it off, but Ini had apparently locked it in place. “The Jarumi are attacking Kano,” he said.

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  In the background he heard: “Language, young lady!”

  “Where are you, Seeta? Are you safe?”

  “We’re out by the tracking station.”

  “You’ve got to get out of there! I talked to Detective Idriss about that albino video. He said that it was faked.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Kwesi. We’re so close to finding the Nok. The pattern recognition program came back with a range of frequencies, and we think we’ve found a positive correlation with the musical notation. We’re testing them now. We found another shard, so we think the entrance must be around here.”

  “No, you don’t understand, Seeta. The other videos were real—”

  “Look!” he heard Wale shout. “I found another one!”

  “I’ve got to go, Kwesi.” She disconnected.

  A bloody moon was perched in the evening sky as Bracket pedaled on his bike out to the tracking station. The color was rich and fulsome—there was no hint of orange in it. Dust seeded the atmosphere, scattering the light. Even as a scientist he felt the moon’s power and what it portended: a reckoning—someone would die tonight. There was death in the sky.

  Seeta and Wale weren’t at the station when he arrived, and he couldn’t see more than a hundred paces in the dust. In the distance, towering thunderheads of clouds touched the top of the sky. He started circling around the tracking station, keeping it always on his left, and calling out for the two scientists. He made one rotation, didn’t find them, and widened it. The wind was rising steadily.

  He heard them before he could see them: a high-pitched tone, followed by another lower tone, and another. The sound pierced through the wind and the noise. He moved toward the source, squinting his eyes against the rush of sand. There, he could make out Seeta crouching behind one of the mounds of earth. Wale was hunched over the ground, and his bodyguard stood anxiously between them.

  “Hey!” Bracket yelled.

  As he got closer, he could see Clarence pushing forward the ground-penetrating radar machine, and Seeta was scribbling something in a notebook. She had wrapped a shawl around her head so that you could barely see her brown-green eyes. Wale, by contrast, stood totally erect, leaning on his cane as if impervious to the storm raging around them.

  “Two meters forward,” Seeta was saying. “I’ll try two-twenty-one.”

  “We just tried that!” Wale said.

  “Two meters forward!”

  “Dr. Olufunmi, we should get going,” Clarence said.

  “We’re not going anywhere. We’re too close.”

  “It’s a dust storm, boss. We should get you safe and under cover.”

  “Nothing’s stopping you from going back to the building, Clarence.”

  “There’s more slag here,” Seeta said.

  “As I said there would be,” Wale boasted.

  “There must be tons of it. Let’s fire the GPR again.”

  “It may be magnetite,” Wale guessed. “I can’t be sure. It’s not unusual for it to be mixed in with iron deposits, but not at such a high concentration.”

  “If that’s true,” Seeta agreed, “that would explain why the instruments haven’t been working properly. All this iron and magnetite would have skewed the readings. NASA must not have realized they were right on top of a thousand tons of iron slag. That may be why they had to close the tracking station.”

  Wale turned excitedly to Bracket, who was growing increasingly frustrated that they seemed to be deliberately ignoring him. “You’re looking at the remains of a major Iron Age civilization here. There’s enough slag to suggest dozens of smelting furnaces. The slag wasn’t inside the mounds but buried deep beneath the surface. Fire the GPR, Clarence.”

  Seeta’s headphones were draped around her neck, and Bracket saw they had rigged up a sort of cage for the meteorite, so that Seeta could dangle it from a string.

  “Hold on a moment,” Bracket said, holding up his hands. “This can wait. I’m as curious as you are about all this, but now is not the time.”

  “If we’re going to be killed by bandits,” Wale said, “then I want to gaze upon the cradle of the Nok civilization before I die. I’ve waited years for this. Now if you would please step back, Mr. Bracket, I would like to do some proper scientific work.”

  “No, I need you to listen to me. That albino video was faked.”

  “You told us already,” Seeta said.

  “But the other videos were real. There’s still no explanation for them. That creature may still be out here! It’s dangerous. I want to find out about this as much as you do, but we should come back with more security. And wait for the storm to pass.”

  “Clarence is our security,” Wale insisted.

  “Boss, I agree with Mr. Bracket that you should leave the spaceport before the Jarumi attack.”

  “In this storm?” Wale asked.

  “We need to get you safe, Doctor.”

  “How is flying into a dust storm considered safe in any way, shape, or form, Clarence?”

  “Please,” Seeta chimed in. “This is happening. This may be the biggest breakthrough in vibroacoustics in a hundred years.”

  Wale bent forward to look at her instruments. “I told you, it’s thirty-four. You made a mistake, young lady.”

  “Quit calling me that.”

  “You must be more methodical.”

  “And you need to get off my back, Wale! All right, I’ll try thirty-four. Move the GPR two meters forward.”

  Bracket could see a black cloud surging toward them, the lightning flaring within it. Soon they would be buried in dust. He realized he had a fear of being buried alive that he hadn’t quite articulated until this very moment.

  “Let’s wait it out at the tracking station,” he tried t
o compromise.

  “I agree, boss.”

  “These storms are all bluster,” Wale said. “It’ll be over in a minute.”

  “I don’t know, boss. It looks quite bad.”

  “Ready!” Wale shouted.

  “Thirty-four. Go!”

  The sound started first as a low pitch. Then the meteorite began vibrating, and Bracket could see color in the inky black: gray peeking through the void, becoming blue. The sound—repeating quickly like the trills of some bird in estrus, the flitting tongue trapped in sedge, now the high screech of a grackle, the machine pushing it through the frequencies, and Bracket could feel weight on his chest, the old ghost come to claim him.

  “It’s hot!” Seeta said.

  “Don’t drop it!”

  “Turn it off!” Bracket found himself shouting. “Turn it off!”

  The bodyguard was pulling at the scientist, who was in turn hitting him with his cane. And Seeta had closed her eyes, her arms spread out like a yogi, embracing the sound.

  The pressure on his chest. The noise in his ears. Then slipping, sliding into the earth around him, toward the center, his hair wispy in the static of the dust storm. He was falling, and there was no bottom, and it all seemed wrong. Now the sky was closed. Now the red moon was smoking as the ground pulled him in. The sand, it was filling his nostrils: Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!

  CHAPTER 24

  The window, Bracket thought. Open it. There’s no air in this place. He was slowly suffocating and there was a wetness on his skin. He couldn’t see anything; he could feel only the coldness of some dank, interstitial space. His arm touched flesh.

  “Seeta?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You all right?” He felt around in the dark for her, followed her arm up to the soft folds under her neck. He raised her head gently in his arms.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see anything.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  Only now did he discern the sound, an endless repeating of voices, an incessant play of pressure in his eardrums.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Someone’s singing. Is Wale here?”

  “I don’t see him. Wait here. I’ll see if I can find him.”

  He got up painfully from the ground. He thought he could make out something in the distance, a soft blue flame glowing like a pilot light. He took a step forward.

  “Shit!”

  “What? What happened, Kwesi?”

  “It stung me!”

  “What stung you?”

  “The light. I touched it and it…damn!”

  “I don’t see anything.” He could hear her trying to get up from the ground, her clothes scratching against the earth.

  “Careful, Seeta, or—”

  “Ow! Bloody hell!”

  “I told you. Did you see it?”

  “Yeah, it’s like a sheet of plastic. It’s an electric fence or something.”

  “Let me try my Geckofone.”

  He saw her face illuminated by the LED light as he turned the device on, how dust had coated her disheveled locks. Behind her he could see piles of rocks that sloped toward them, reaching to the top of the narrow space. The ceiling was rock too, and there was no natural light. The walls were lined with crude stone shelves, and on each shelf was a little mound. He scratched away some of the dirt and saw a bleached-white bone. It looked like a finger. On the next shelf he found two dark leather slippers half hidden in the dirt, leaning in closer to discover they weren’t slippers at all.

  They were dried human skin.

  He found a flat rock to begin scooping away the dirt. As he dug, more of the grotesque thing began to take form. It was a body. Or the shell of a body, nothing but flattened skin and hair. He felt a stench rear up as he uncovered it, but the flesh had been squeezed of any blood. The person’s face had been flattened to maybe four centimeters wide and the nose was matted into the cheeks. The eye sockets too were gone. A strip of cotton cloth was matted to the flesh, the same dark green color the workers wore around the site. Every feature was stretched and elongated like a fun-house mirror, the remaining splintered teeth mashed into where the neck should be. He reached over to touch the flesh. It felt like tanned leather, like a chrysalis abandoned for some new phase of life. Skin should never feel like that. No one should ever look like that.

  “It’s Abdul Haruna,” he said.

  Seeta took one look at the shelf and turned away. “How horrible.”

  “He didn’t arrive here like this. Someone moved him here.”

  He began scooping some soil back over the mangled corpse to try to mask the stench, which was making the space feel even more nauseating.

  “They’re here,” Seeta whispered, looking down the tunnel.

  “Who?”

  “Can’t you see them?”

  “I don’t see anything. It’s like the air stops.”

  “No, in between, I can see their faces, beyond it.”

  “Beyond what?”

  Bracket saw what looked like an aura, a mottled shifting presence. It reminded him of when he’d once had migraine headaches in his youth, a black-and-blue orb that seemed to move in and out of his sight. The image was not so much before him spatially as inside his eyelids.

  “I’m going to try something, Kwesi.”

  “You think you can find a way out?”

  “Maybe. Don’t say anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “Keep your mouth shut. I’m going to try to talk to them.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Quiet.”

  Seeta was fiddling with her measurement instrument. “Dammit, I can’t see enough. I’ll have to eyeball it.”

  “You need help?”

  “What did I tell you? Keep your bloody mouth shut. I think they can hear us.” She began muttering to herself. “The sound is coming in at forty-six cycles. I’m going to roll a sine wave on top.” She pressed a button on her machine. The blue aura closed in on them like a shroud.

  “No, Seeta! Turn it off! What did you do?”

  “Hold on! That was the wrong one!”

  “I can’t breathe!”

  He felt the weight of it, crushing in on him, that awful pressure on his chest, the strength of a constrictor compressing his lungs. “Quick, Seeta…please.”

  “One second, almost…there!”

  He heard four discordant notes and immediately felt a loosening in his chest. The air rushed in around them, and he sucked it into his lungs gratefully. It was still damp, but there was oxygen in it this time.

  “Oh my god,” Seeta said.

  He turned around. Before them he could see several enormous beings. Each stood about seven feet tall. But like the aura he’d seen earlier, they seemed to shift and stutter in place, their outlines becoming hazy as they moved. There were three of the creatures. Two of them had a silken blue shape to them, while the other one seemed to be made from the earth itself, a looming entity with electric skin.

  “That’s the one who attacked us,” he whispered. That’s the one he had touched, and he remembered the strange longing from its quarters, the static feel of the body on his fingertips.

  “We mean you no harm,” Seeta announced.

  The creatures turned toward one another. He could see no means for them to speak, since their mouths were merely placeholders for orifices, their entire faces like ceremonial masks, when he could perceive faces at all. They stared back without a hint of emotion.

  “What did you do with our friend?” Bracket tried. As soon as he said this, he saw one of the creatures shift, and the undulating field wrapped around him like a net. The air was pressed out of his chest again.

  “No, wait!” Seeta said.

  This time it was constricting much harder, pulling at his ribs. He thought they would crack, that his heart would explode out of his chest. He heard a voice too, a strident chant that rang through his ears that
was at once familiar and terrifying. And with each cycle of the chant more breath was drained from his body.

  Now it stopped again, almost as swiftly as it had started.

  “Don’t do that to him again,” Seeta warned, holding up her recording instrument.

  “What did you do?” he gasped.

  “They’re using music.”

  Now another one of the creatures lurched for Seeta, and the field that had entrapped him flew out in her direction. Seeta was quicker. She sent out a blast of notes that seemed to weaken the field, until the creature retracted it back to surround itself.

  “I saw someone,” Bracket said, crawling back behind Seeta. “While it was coming toward you. There was someone there. A woman, I think. A girl.”

  “Human?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean controlling these things?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t be sure…watch out!”

  Seeta fingered her instrument but it was too late. Two of the other creatures crossed the distance between them in long strides. Seeta and Bracket tried to run but were trapped by the rubble behind them.

  “Get back!” Bracket threw himself over Seeta, preparing to take the blow. They would hack him next, he thought. Or crush his skull. He cowered over her, protecting her from the attack even if he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  He could hear them hovering nearby, the eerie sounds of their soft music moving among them. It was like a hundred melodies clashing against one another in a cacophony. But the blow never came.

  “What are they doing?” Seeta said.

  “I don’t know. Don’t move.”

  “Don’t touch that!” she said. “You can’t have it! No, don’t!”

  The creatures dragged her measurement instruments away.

  “He touch you?” a voice said.

  “Who said that?”

  The aura re-formed around the group, preventing Bracket from seeing anything.

  “He touch you?”

  “Did who touch who?”

  One of the aurae moved over in Bracket’s direction, prodding him with what felt like a cattle rod. “Ow!”

  “Him? You mean Kwesi? No, no, he didn’t touch me. We’re friends.”