The Prey of Gods

by Nicky Drayden

  Not a witch. Something more powerful. Something ancient.

  That gets Sydney’s attention. She pauses her movie and looks up at her meal, who’s getting bloodstains all over her ceiling now. Sydney makes a mental note to pick up some primer and white paint from the hardware store.

  It’d been all too easy to lure him here. She’d dressed as a prostitute, and a cheap one at that. Sydney had reached right into his head and had seen each and every time he’d been unfaithful to his wife—at least twice a week, every week, up until about two years ago. Then he’d stopped, cold turkey.

  But his aura was gray, a heavy fog she could hardly see through. That’s what had attracted her to him while she’d browsed the streets for a meal. With a single concentrated shot of vulnerability, anxiety, and helplessness she’d pushed old desires right into the primal area of his brain. His eyes latched onto her, watching. Weighing. She wasn’t his type, but she’d pushed so hard, it didn’t matter. He’d taken the bait, following behind her, the stench of sin rising off him so incredibly intoxicating.

  “Does your wife know what you’re up to this evening?” Sydney tosses back at him. She fans a handful of colorful bills, the 1,650 rand he’d offered her for sex, right before she’d lifted her index finger to make that first cut that severed the tendons in his legs. Combined with her tips today, that’ll put a nice dent in her overdue rent.

  I love my wife. I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t vexed me.

  “Is that so, Mr. Gnoto? So you claim that you’ve never had a pretty girl turn your head? Never found yourself in the company of a hooker? Perhaps a Ms. Mandy Ugunwa? You probably just knew her as Jessie.”

  His mind goes quiet for a long while.

  It was an accident.

  Sydney clucks her tongue in disgust. “You liked to treat them rough, didn’t you? Let me guess, to make up for feeling so emasculated by your wife? Mandy didn’t deserve what you did to her. She didn’t deserve to have her breath taken by your hands, no matter how trashy you thought she was. She was a person.”

  It was an accident . . .

  “Was it an accident what you did afterward? Dumped her body in a ditch, washed over by sewage and scavenged by vultures while her parents plastered missing posters all over the city. She was fourteen, you know. A runaway. You were her third john.”

  Have mercy on my soul.

  In that moment, Sydney feels something magnificent, a prick of light in that empty spot inside her. Basos, pure belief. It warms her from the inside out, radiating from her fingertips in faint blue-white ribbons. Muscles she hasn’t felt in decades spasm to life, sending her on the brink of ecstasy. Minutes pass before Sydney is able to speak again.

  She unsilences Mr. Gnoto with a flick of her hand. “What did you say?”

  “Have mercy on my soul. I didn’t mean to. She, she said I was hurting her, but I didn’t listen. I just kept—” Mr. Gnoto begins to weep, his tears plinking down on the coffee table’s base like acid rain.

  “You said you know what I am. How?”

  “I teach at NMMU, Zulu mythology. You’re an ancestor spirit, one that plagued the villages near Port Natal. I’ve seen that nail rack in photos in a private collection from the 1850s.”

  Sydney’s jaw drops as her mind sweeps back to a time when she’d wielded real power. She’d posed as a seer back then, helping to turn wars, and gaining favor among Zulu kings . . . until all that power went to her head and she got sloppy about hiding her true form. She was betrayed by a woman she’d dared call sister, accusing Sydney of witchery that had brought them famine and disease and death. The famine and disease—that was none of her doing, just a bad year for rain and a general lack of hygiene. The death . . . well, a girl’s got to eat.

  The village had torn her into so many pieces, it took nearly two decades for her to pull herself back together. But she’d gotten her rack back. Eventually. And her revenge on the woman who’d crossed her. Sydney’s never had any sort of tolerance for traitors. Or murderers. Or rapists. Or professors who toss teenaged girls away like last week’s rubbish.

  But Mr. Gnoto is different from the rest of her prey. He actually believes in her, and with that prize comes the strength that pulses through her being. It won’t last long, she knows. With the torture she’s put him through, Mr. Gnoto is not much more for this earth. Still, he’s given her something she’s been craving for ages, so she grants him mercy, lets him drop onto the bed of nails, his death quick and painless. Well, quick anyway. She absolves him of his sins and hopes when the time comes she’ll be granted the same mercy.

  She’s a kid in a candy store, a bright shiny rand in her hand. It won’t buy much, but mulling all the options is half the fun of it. She could use the spark to perform some miracles, gain some believers, reinvest. But that’s a long process, and she’s already started to detect the presence of another, the one Mr. Tau will be sending to replace her. Sydney may be an old battery, but she’s still got a charge. What she needs is a plan, something impressive and unprecedented to get the masses behind her. These humans, they don’t believe in anything anymore, besides capitalism, of course. Times are good, people are thriving, sickness has been eradicated, and machines do all the menial work. There hasn’t been a real war in decades, and the only place oppression and injustice are found is in the dictionary.

  It’s merely a façade, sweet delusions of happiness despite their mediocrity. How can they know true pleasure without pain? Happiness without suffering? Basos and ire, each incomplete without the other. She will show them the truth, and in return, she’ll be exalted once again, able to crush Mr. Tau’s new protégée before she learns to spread her wings. Sydney closes her eyes, concentrates on the spark within her, and coddles it like a smoldering ember trying to become a campfire. It grows, and her mind spreads out infinitely into a state of transcendence, omniscient for the briefest of moments, seeing each and every person’s actions, thoughts, desires. As her mind whips through a set of infinite futures, something odd catches her eye: a crab and a dolphin stretched upon human forms. Had it been one or the other, she might have just dismissed the vision, but both together could mean only one thing. She pulls the vision thread tight and braces against the current of possibilities to home directly onto this one. There’s a peacock now. And a stealthy rat, too. Haw, she laughs to herself. It’s been a while, but every hundred years or so, she witnesses hallucinations like this. Someone’s scammed the afterlife again and brought back its bounties, opening those simple human minds up to the true potential trapped inside them, if only for a fleeting moment. A spark. But a spark is nothing without proper kindling.

  Now humankind is finally coming into its own, bending and stretching genes in the manner of gods. It was only a matter of time before they muddled their way into bending the exact right genes to reveal that they were gods. Those genes, gone dry and brittle from lack of use, are just begging for an open flame.

  Sydney claws forward in time, desperate to see more. It’s not so difficult looking into the future. It’s the looking away that’s the real bitch. She’s only seen a couple weeks out, when the emptiness snaps her back with a vengeance. The spark is gone, and she wails out in agony, collapsing to the floor tacky with Mr. Gnoto’s blood.

  Through the pain, she smiles. Her vision has equipped her with enough knowledge to plunge South Africa into a darkness not seen since the days of apartheid. If that’s what it’ll take to get these humans to believe in something, it’s what she’ll have to do.

  And best of all, she can do it without even being late to work.

  Sydney doesn’t need her powers to convince Isaac Haskins to swap janitorial overseer duties with her, just a chocolate bar, a pack of smokes, and a suggestive smile. He swipes her into the third floor of ZenGen Industries—not one of the sublevel genetic engineering labs where security’s so tight that even low-level overseer jobs require rigorous, demeaning background checks—but there’s enough surveillance here that she’ll need to watch her step.
It’s here, on the third floor, that Sydney sees the Coloured woman from her vision: Asemahle Wells. She’s on the other side of a thick sheet of glass, tending to six dik-diks, busy meandering and scratching up the walls of their enclosure with their tiny horns, oddly disinterested in one another. Asemahle’s in an environmental suit, taking blood samples when she gets the call. Sydney can’t hear the conversation, but she already knows what they’re saying. The man on the other end is telling Asemahle that Councilman Stoker has given him permission to look into a viral sterilization project and asks her to send all the data she’s gathered so far. She tells him the transmission phase of the test has gone well, and all six dik-diks are infected. Sydney feels their anxiety, knowing they’ve gone behind Stoker’s back, but he’ll never need to know. Come Monday, the six dik-diks will have been euthanized, and the real trials can be started, including the one that will test for dik-dik-to-human transmission. The possibility is negligible, at least it was when administered to the deer population in the States. And in fact, Sydney knows those tests will all come out negative for interspecies transference, no detectable sign of infection in humans.

  Detectable being the key word.

  Asemahle turns and catches Sydney staring through the glass. Sydney immediately drops her eyes and corrals the industrial delta bot emptying trash bins. She’s got a long shift in front of her and can’t afford to linger. Before Sydney presses on, she gives the slightest flick of her index finger, willing a slit into the fabric of Asemahle’s environmental suit. It’s a small slit, right under the arm and along the seam so that there’s minimal chance it’ll be noticed by human eyes. But it’s like a twelve-lane expressway for an errant dik-dik virus.

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Muzi

  Muzi watches the festivities from a plastic lawn chair, an ice pack pressed snugly against his crotch and a comforting blanket draped over his shoulders. Papa Fuzz carves up a side of goat, expertly hacking meat from bone, not a bit bothered that it was once a living thing. Muzi’s little cousins, four girls, run around shrilling with streamers in the color of Papa Fuzz’s clan. His mother and aunts catch up over wine, except Aunt Lindi who’s still nursing Brandon, though he’s nearly two years old. Her husband didn’t care a lick about Xhosa traditions, and so Brandon had been spared the first name long enough to choke an elephant and lost his foreskin under the supervision of a real doctor.

  Muzi grimaces. He shouldn’t think like that. Yeah, he’s still a little bitter, but Mr. Sohobese was swift and accurate, and twice he was kind enough to bury his attention into cleaning his spear while Muzi battled back the tears—of fear and uncertainty beforehand, and a dizzying mix of pride and pain afterward.

  Muzi’s become a man. Twice over today, in fact. He keeps scanning the crowd for Elkin, in the off chance that he decides to show up. Holy hell, he’s whipped already, worse than a ditzy girl. It takes everything he’s got not to call Elkin right now. That’s probably a good thing, hopped up on pain meds like he is. He’d probably say something stupid, something desperate, something about how he’d never felt so alive as with the bulk of Elkin’s arms wrapped around him. Ow ow ow. Muzi glances over at his great-grandma McCarthy as she takes out her partials to grub down on some corn on the cob. He imagines her naked, breasts sagging to her navel, skin wrinkled and translucent like that fetal pig they’d dissected in Biology. She masticates like a cow chewing cud . . . yeah, this is working. This is no time for him to be getting jags.

  “Muzi! My Xhosa prince!” says his sister, Asemahle, as she slams her car door. She scampers across the front lawn, leaving her husband, Ben, to fend for himself with Mom’s million and one questions, most of which revolve around when they were going to bless her with a grandchild already. Asemahle bends down, pecks Muzi on the lips, then continues to smother him with kisses all over. “Oh, I’m so sorry we missed it! I got held up late at work, then Ben nipped a damned dik-dik on the way over here, speeding of course! Poor thing was okay, just a little stunned. Oh, honey. Enough about me. How are you feeling?”

  “Like someone just nipped my damned dick-dick.” He tries smiling, but his pain receptors don’t agree with it. He winces instead.

  “Shame, you poor thing.” She laughs and kneels down beside him and puts a hand on his bare chest. The white mud paste used by a quarter of his ancestors barely shows up against his pale skin. “You’re so brave to go through this, Muzi, but you know Papa Fuzz will still love you even if you say no to him sometimes.”

  “Ja, I know,” Muzi says. But it pains him horribly every time he sees disappointment in Papa Fuzz’s eyes. And when he makes him proud, the man can hardly keep his heart in his chest, telling anybody who’ll listen about his grandson. He loves his Papa Fuzz, so much to go as far as sacrificing a bit of his own flesh under the knife of a complete stranger who’d needed a shot of gin to steady his hand. Muzi figures he can bank tonight for all the disappointments he’s destined to cause in the future.

  “Oh, before I forget, a little present to celebrate your manhood.” Asemahle pulls an envelope from her purse and pushes it toward Muzi.

  He winces. “It kind of hurts when I move. When I breathe. When I think.”

  “Oh, forgive me, hon.” She opens up the envelope then pulls out a pair of tickets, keeping them pressed against her chest. “I know these have been sold out for weeks, but Ben knows someone who knows someone. Anyway, I thought maybe you and a date would enjoy seeing Riya Natrajan when her tour comes through Port Elizabeth.”

  “This is so boss. Did I ever tell you you’re the best sister ever?” Muzi says calmly, though he wishes he could scream and jump up and down. Asemahle really is the best sister ever. He can talk to her about anything, and even though she’s way older than him, she never flaunts her seniority. They might as well be twins who just happen to be separated by eleven years.

  “And you’re the best brother a girl could have.” She rakes her fingers through his reddish-brown curls. “Now is there anything I can get you? A cool drink? Another ice pack?”

  “Just sit with me awhile,” Muzi says.

  She slips the tickets into a compartment on Muzi’s alphie, then pulls up a lawn chair. “So howzit, bru? Word on the street is that Vayassi girl has the hots for you. Reba’s her name?”

  “Renée,” Muzi corrects. “So you’ve been talking to Papa, I see.”

  “Which one is she?”

  Muzi nods over at a picnic table at the girl cutting daintily at a piece of meat. He has to admit, she is beautiful, wavy brown hair down to the middle of her back, skin caramel from a medley of ancestors of all sorts of race and creed. She’s totally overdressed in a silver blouse and a long skirt reminiscent of fish scales. She looks up and catches Muzi staring, then blushes before taking a sip from her pop.

  “Wow, Muzi. Papa wasn’t kidding about her. So are you thinking of asking her to the concert?”

  “I kind of had somebody else in mind,” Muzi says. The next words he has to say are clogged up in the back of his throat. But if anyone would understand, it’s his sister. “There’s someone. We’re kind of seeing each other. Well, I guess we are. Sort of. It’s complicated.” Muzi feels himself flush. The pit of his stomach rides up into his chest.

  “Well . . .” Asemahle says, bubbling up and leaning in closer, eyebrows bobbing wildly. “Do I know her?”

  Muzi sort of nods. “Him.” He’s not comfortable enough to say Elkin’s name, not yet, even to her. But as he locks eyes with his sister, and as it starts to sink in, he knows it’ll only be a matter of time before she puts it all together.

  “Oh. Oh! Oh, honey.” She wraps her arms around him and squeezes tight.

  “Eina!” Muzi groans with pain.

  “Sorry! It’s just that . . . I’m happy for you. You’re happy, right?”

  “Ja, I guess. It’s just that I worry about Papa Fuzz.”

  “What? Papa Fuzz has gay friends. You remember Mr. Ezekiel who used to come over to our family braais
all the time? He’d bring those fat veggie skewers you liked.”

  “But that’s different. Mr. Ezekiel wasn’t his grandson.”

  “Muzi, honey, remember what I just said? Not everything you do is going to please Papa. He’s his own person, living his own life, making his own decisions. You’ve got to do the same, and look out for your own happiness. You’ve got this little spark inside, the spark that makes you Muzikayise McCarthy and not Papa and not Mum or Dad, and not anyone else on this planet. And you’ve got to tend to that spark because it’s the most precious thing you’ve got. Love who you want to love, live how you want to live, but promise me, Muzi, that you will not let anyone extinguish what makes you you.”

  Muzi nods. “Got it, sis. But if you ever call me Muzikayise again, I’m going to have to disown you.”

  Asemahle laughs, kisses him on the forehead, then steps just out of Muzi’s reach. “I’d better go save Ben from Mom’s inquisition, or you won’t be the only one disowning me. We’ll chat more later, okay? Love you.”

  And then Muzi is alone except for his faithful alphie, always at his side. He calls it, and it nuzzles closer.

  “Encrypted journal entry, security level three,” he commands. For his eyes only. The red recording indicator blinks a few times, then goes solid when it starts recording. “Saturday, the twelfth of June, 2064. Well, the deed is done. I’m a man, I guess. It’s a lot more complicated than I imagined, but I can’t exactly go back now. Don’t know if I’d want to if I could.”