“Hello. I am Hannah Jacques. As we speak there are over two hundred thousand alternatively animated individuals in the city, and this is a conservative estimate. A small percentage are cared for by relatives but the vast majority are left wandering the streets, sequestered in prisons or special wards in the hospitals, sold into sexual slavery, used for sport or allowed to roam the bushes on the outskirts. These people are our husbands, our wives, our fathers, our mothers, our people. We cannot forget them. We cannot throw them away. The charity Not Gone works to find suitable accommodation and placements for people like this. We provide food and shelter and a loving environment, but we can always do more. Call the number below and donate freely. You never know what will happen by the next Opening.”
Alternatively animated? Is reanimate out of favour as a term? In some quarters Jack knows they are called undead, and in the most recent hate crime against them four teenagers had set one on fire, all the while singing the Fela Kuti song “Zombie.”
He calls Hannah.
“Darling?”
“How’s the day going?” she asks.
“Do not make me recount the horror. It’s going to get worse. I had to make a bargain with a witch, and not the good kind.”
“Poor baby. Have you eaten?”
“Yes.” Lie.
“Jack, I need to know if you have a plan for the welfare of the reanimates.”
“Not the alternatively animated?”
She sighs. “That stuff is scripted by Not Gone. I have to say what I’m told, you know that.”
“Who came up with it?”
“I don’t know, one of the Not Gone drones. Olu. I don’t know. So, do you have a plan?”
“Can this wait?”
“With the flooding and who knows what else? They are dying now.”
“They are already dead.”
Silence. This is a long-standing discussion in their marriage and the country at large, with no real consensus predominating.
Jack sighs. “I’m sorry. I know, I know, they draw breath. I get it. But you need to understand my position.”
“What is your position?”
“My first responsibility has to be to… the conventionally animated. Then I’ll get to the reanimates. Fair?”
“We will discuss this again, husband.”
I cannot catch a break with the women in my life today.
After the call he washes his hands. On this occasion he uses a cream heavy in lanolin but with no fragrance. He still instinctively puts his hands to his nose just afterwards. They shake. His reflection has a beard, but he does not have the time or inclination to shave. What started as artifice has taken root as necessity.
The developments bother him. He hadn’t expected the flood, even though after the fact it seems logical and the kind of thing he would do. The hole in the dome disturbs Jack the most. The alien is the largest part of his strategy. If the president has a weapon that can kill it, or harm it, then Rosewater might as well surrender. He starts to think of getting Hannah to safety, maybe send her to India or Dubai. The real problem is there’s no way to surprise the enemy. The defence army is not attacking Nigeria, it’s defending Rosewater, a reactive position, and in combat terms, weak. The alien would have kept the balance.
Jack hopes this Kaaro is as useful as Alaagomeji seems to think, but he now has to look at a situation where he depends exclusively on troops, drones and robots. Taiwo, the godfather, has been good to his word. He has complete control over the rest of the criminal class and is like a general in his own right. There have been ten murders attributable to criminals competing for control with Taiwo, according to Dahun. Not all villains take to organised crime, and will not obey anyone. They are accepting the military training, though.
“What are you going to do when the war is over and you have crooks with truncated special-forces training?” asks Dahun.
Jack has no answer. This is one of those situations where he will have to solve that problem at that time.
His phone reminds him to power-nap. He ignores it. He has the feeling everything is slipping from his control, and resists the urge to wash his hands again. Instead, he reads fragments of Suetonius and the writings of Cicero, which he contrives to paraphrase for a coming speech.
His office tells him someone is at the door, shows him it is Alaagomeji, and he permits the door to open. She is alone.
“Where is the man tasked with keeping an eye on you?” asks Jack.
“You keep forgetting who I am. The hunting dog does not teach the leopard how to catch prey. Let’s stop wasting time discussing amateurs. You need to send a team to blow up the dam, otherwise the flooding will continue.”
“I had thought of this.”
“I’ve listened to my messages. My… agent is caught in the flood. We need her for two reasons. One, she has something of value to the alien, and two, we’ll have some leverage over Kaaro.”
“Wait, doesn’t he work for you?”
“If he did, I’d simply order him to come here and not send murderers after him. Don’t be dim. How long do you plan to stay here?”
“‘Here’?”
“Surely you know this mansion will be a target for bombing?”
“It’s a siege situation,” says Jack. “This isn’t a shooting war.”
“Not yet,” says Alaagomeji. “Give it time.”
Excerpt from Kudi, a novel by Walter Tanmola
It was Sandrine, and even in the dim light Christopher could tell that her eyes were wide and there was a slight tremor in her hand.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He went out the window.”
“Let me… give me a minute.” Christopher dressed and followed her outside, into the hotel next door, and to the room where Sulaiman was supposed to be sequestered.
“He kept saying ‘ana araby, ana araby,’ over and over, and when he stopped I thought he had finally gone to sleep,” she said.
The curtains flapped in the night breeze, the glass of the window absent. Christopher checked the floor and looked out. No fragments. It looked like someone had installed a window frame, but no actual window.
The wall was warm on that side.
“It’s not my fault. Nobody said he was a flight risk.” She had the hint of a whine in her voice.
Sulaiman used to be a slave. He was liberated, unlike most of the modern slaves who benefited from the mass-manumissions of 2032. He was set to give evidence and they were babysitting him. Nigeria loved to house at-risk individuals in Rosewater because it was not a legal entity, and therefore the usual human rights opposition to torture could be… overlooked while any damage done could be healed in an Opening. They like to use local talent, which is how Christopher came to be part of the detail. Emeka had called him a traitor.
Christopher’s watch had been uneventful and Sandrine had yawned and barely listened to the report.
“Do you know that language?” asked Sandrine.
“It’s Arabic,” said Christopher. “I quit.”
He dropped his ID and backed out of the room.
“Wait.” Sandrine had both hands on the door frame. “What was he saying? What does it mean?”
“It means ‘I am an Arab.’” But if the Arabs found Sulaiman or if they were the ones who took him, they would flay him alive.
Christopher lit a cigarette and sought out Kudi. Her bright coloured hair and her loud personality would make her easier to find. There would be crowds to fight through, but he could do that. Where Kudi was, Emeka would be.
And it was Emeka he wanted.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Anthony
The plant creature is still alive and ignores all of Anthony’s blows to its head and chest area. The fall damaged them both, but not enough. Two of the six wings are off, scattered inside the dome. Anthony bit a further one off and has torn his mouth on the spines. His teeth are exposed to the air and flaps of flesh dangle. His knuckles are exposed and bloody from punching, but that doesn’t sto
p him. He directs pulses of dopamine to surge with every hit and endorphins to dull the pain. Adrenaline to keep him awake.
The head is a pulpy green mass, but it still moves energetically. Where the creature lies on the mossy ground it causes lesions. The leaves sink into Wormwood’s flesh. Anthony calls on the electric elementals, and they come, flowing down the dome, along the ground and into the leaf-creature, electrocuting it. Anthony suffers too, but it doesn’t matter. He fights, as his body breaks down. The creature does not stop, continues to sink, takes Anthony with it. As they descend, it becomes impossible to get leverage to strike. Anthony feels something rise psychically, and Wormwood responds with a mental scream that sonically ruptures eardrums and mentally drives everything sentient insane with pain. Anthony adjusts, repairs what he can of his eyes and sees that the plant is unaffected. The pit goes deeper still, and Anthony fears they will reach critical parts of Wormwood without stopping the plant angel.
He changes the composition of his gastric acid and stomach lining, then he belches it on to the creature. The corrosive works, and defoliates the creature, which unravels and rots. The acid burns Anthony from the inside and his heart stops, followed by his brain seconds later.
In that place where Anthony dwells before a new body is ready.
Longer here this time, longer than he has ever spent. This gives him time to examine where he is. He thinks it might be the original Anthony’s body, still in the core, in the centre of Wormwood, which might account for the low perception.
He can feel Wormwood.
Rather, he can feel a delirious, suffering presence, no coherent thoughts, wounded, mentations spiralling off into the incomprehensible. Is Wormwood dying?
Are we dying?
He gets no answer from Wormwood. He has no impression that his new body has even progressed beyond the ten-cell stage. There is some access to the xenosphere and he finds that some of the people within the dome are dead, some from the initial impact scattering toxic spores, others by electrocution, a few from brain overload when Wormwood screamed. There is no healing just yet. Wormwood’s functions all appear to have shut down and the people are panicked.
ARE WE DYING?
[faint response, unclear]
HOW CAN I LOOK AFTER YOU?
[not words, concepts, ideas, remove body of leaf-creature, purging spores already, kill weed/strain/antagonist, in sorrow, in agony]
Build me a body, brother. I know what to do.
[expletive equivalent]
That’s the spirit.
The clean-up is sombre, and Wormwood completely vents the air and creates a new atmosphere within the dome. The healing is slow, and the barrier is weaker than it has ever been. The pit does not heal, and it looks like a cauterised gunshot injury. The people are uncertain, their worldview shaken, looking to Anthony for cues. For his part he knows that the weed has to be destroyed. Strain-516 has to be completely eradicated. It is time to involve the humans.
He will walk among them again.
As for the host, he cannot see that as a priority at this time. Survival first. The Homian transfer protocol will have to wait.
He enters the xenosphere fully. The dark patches are more pervasive and cohesive, while the xenosphere is more broken up, almost as if Strain-516 is absorbing or taking territory. Stupid to include this in the make-up of footholders, poor design. Or perhaps there is something about Earth’s environment that promotes 516’s growth. None of this is helped by it bonding with a complete lunatic who seems filled with hate. The humans in the xenosphere are unaware and simply absorbed into the blackness. From their perspective, there is no difference except in the quality of their occasional nightmares.
Molara is waiting for him.
“Ready to talk?” she asks. This time she is a giant butterfly with no humanoid characteristics.
“That is not what I had in mind, but I’m listening.”
“Your footholder is done, mortally wounded. I can activate one of the others and commence transfer on another tectonic plate.”
“If you could do that, you would have already.”
She bats the wings faster. “Respect for you.”
“Don’t patronise me, Molara.”
“All right, what comes up in the meetings with the Chief Scientist on Home is for us to allow you to fail, so we can know what does not work. When we shift focus to the next largest footholder, which is embedded on the Pacific Plate under Samoa, we’ll not make the same mistakes.”
“I see.”
“You don’t agree.”
“Nothing wrong with the African Plate.”
“This has nothing to do with plate tectonics.”
“Then what? Yes, I need help. If we all put our heads together we could stop this strain. It’s probably in the other footholders, dormant until you activate them. Besides, Wormwood still—”
“You’re still using the name the humans gave it?”
“Just shut up and watch me fail, then,” says Anthony. “You can chronicle my mistakes.”
“You’re angry. I’m surprised, little human avatar, because this is your function: to die for the greater good of Homians. This is your function and mine. Your footholder must have kept a lot more of the human in you than usual, which makes sense because they fuck everything up.”
“You—”
“You shut up. My job will be over when the last Homian has transferred, then what do you think will happen? We are constructs, biological and psychic constructs, engineered to a purpose, after which we are deactivated. This is as it should be. Stop whining and set to.”
“And the host?”
“The host is considered contaminated, lost. We’ll start the process anew in the Pacific. Allow this… drama to play out, make sure all the information makes it to the engineers on the server farm moon, then shut everything down. And don’t be a fucking baby about it.”
She wafts off on the psychic thermals of broken relationships, flooding fallout and impending chemotherapy.
Anthony hates her, but what he hates most is that she’s right. If he must fail, however, he will fail brightly, a supernova. But first, contact humans for help. He knows just the one.
He starts looking for Kaaro.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kaaro
Kaaro spoons the bespoke dog food from the saucepan into Yaro’s bowl. The dog starts eating even before the first lumps stop moving.
“Slow down! Savour the taste, you ingrate. I spent hours on that.”
Yaro continues to scoff down the food, eyes occasionally flicking up to his master, but generally looking at the food. Kaaro places the saucepan in the sink and runs some water into it, after which he squirts some washing-up liquid and stirs. He opens the fridge, selects a beer and closes the door.
“Penultimate bottle,” says the fridge.
“Fuck you,” says Kaaro. “I know. I can count to two.”
When Yaro finishes the meal he laps from his water bowl, then pads over to Kaaro’s feet and sits down, crossed paws, like he’s waiting for instructions.
“Don’t fart. I swear to God, I’ll turn you into a rug.”
His phone rings. Japhet Eurohen, his old new boss. This is his third call, so it must be important. Good. Ignoring it is so much more satisfying.
He scratches Yaro’s back. The dog twists his neck and licks Kaaro’s fingers. Sleep will follow and Kaaro will have to creep out of the kitchen.
Kaaro’s forearm beeps and a voice screeches through.
“Kaaro, ah-ah, ore wa! Why don’t you want to speak to me, now?” Eurohen. How the hell?
“How are you—”
“Overrides, Kaaro. You’d be surprised what we can do these days. Stop trying to hang up, it won’t work.”
“I wasn’t trying to hang up.” Kaaro tries to hang up. “What do you want?”
“I’m calling on behalf of the president.”
“Get to the point, Japhet, what do you want?”
“The presiden
t wants to know if you will do your duty in the coming troubles between Nigeria and Rosewater.”
“There is no duty. I don’t work for S45 any more, Japhet. You know that.”
“Your duty as a Nigerian, Kaaro.”
“Hmmm. I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, was I really a Nigerian to start with? Just because I happened to be born within the arbitrary boundaries that the British set up, I’m supposed to take on a citizenship? That’s just an accident of biology. Being here, in Rosewater, now, that’s an accident as well.”
“So you won’t answer when your country calls?”
“Have you not been listening? I’m saying Rosewater’s my country now.”
There is the sound of swallowing on the other side. Kaaro tries every combination of buttons to shut the call down.
“We will remember, Kaaro.”
“Yes, yes, whatever. Can you hang up or tell me how to hang up? It’s my nap time and my dog needs his beauty sleep.”
Eventually, after huffing and puffing, Eurohen disconnects. Kaaro sends a text to Bad Fish asking for a fortification to stop this kind of intrusion. He gets no response. Yaro is asleep on the kitchen floor. Kaaro steps off the stool and makes his way to the bathroom. When he comes out, Oyin Da is in the hallway. He hasn’t seen the Bicycle Girl—fugitive, supposed terrorist, dome-dweller—in over a year and she looks harried, except for her eyes, which are calculating as usual.
“Kaaro, there are people coming for you. Run.”
With that she disappears.
He whistles for Yaro, and opens a hidey-hole he had dug into the foundations of the property. Yaro squirrels away inside, and Kaaro closes the latch.
“Windows, one-inch gap,” he tells the room. He waits for ten seconds, as the xenoforms infiltrate the filtered air of his flat, then he enters the xenosphere.
There are two of them, armed, a few yards away from the front door, wearing suits. Kaaro doesn’t know who they are, but doesn’t care. He locks every neural pathway in both of their brains in the on position. They drop to the ground and start convulsing. One of them yelps with each muscle contraction and the other wets his pants.
The Rosewater Insurrection Page 19