Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “Would you like to come to dinner? A . . . a late dinner?” Chris asked.

  “I would like that very much.”

  Chris cringed. Shit shit shit, he thought. Fred and Kola grinned widely at each other.

  Kola squealed with glee and exclaimed, “This is the happiest night of my life!”

  CHAPTER 36

  FACE ME, I FACE YOU

  The top right of Moziz’s “face me, I face you” apartment building was smoldering, and there was a group of people outside it who seemed to be having a very wild party. Why, even Mrs. Ogbu was there, waving a bottle of Guinness, laughing raucously, and making lewd gestures at the slowly perishing building. She’d lived there longer than anyone, having moved there when her husband, the mini­ster of education, left her and their two children for a young British white woman. Her two sons had since left, and she’d become an angry, hectoring fixture ever since. She was obsessed with the Lord Jesus Christ and believed everyone else should be too. She yelled at Moziz every time he left his apartment. When she wasn’t at one of Father Oke Ikwuemesibe’s services, she was outside her apartment, proving her devotion by bothering the other tenants.

  Now she was drunk and doing a vulgar, undulating and grinding dance to some music playing from an SUV as her home burned. Moziz’s home. Moziz’s life. His online scamming was over . . . at least for a little while. He could always just use a cyber café later. If any of them still remain after all this wahala don pass, he’d thought.

  But now Moziz was tired of thinking. Tolu, who was beside him in the passenger seat, said not a word. He just stared at the burning building. When Moziz looked in the rearview mirror, he met the eyes of the strange woman they’d saved. He looked away and met Philo’s twitching eyes. Philo was not only stupid but she was shit during a time of crisis. For the third time tonight, he noted to himself that he needed to dump her as soon as he got the chance. He could do so much better than her. He met Jacobs’s steady gaze. “Well?” he asked, again.

  Jacobs sighed. “My place. Mek we go my place.”

  * * * *

  They parked on the side of the road, got out, and stood staring at Jacobs’s apartment complex. It was five stories high and made of old concrete, but really, it wasn’t a bad place once you got inside. Yes, inside. How would they get in? Jacobs felt ill. Ordinarily, there were vines growing over the garbage pile behind the building—but they seemed to have grown over the entire complex since Jacobs had left that morning. In fact, he could see them growing as he stood there, watching. Vines wriggled and undulated across each other, leaves sprouting and growing unnaturally large before his eyes. They bloomed bulbous red flowers, and those flowers must have been what were giving off the sweet, roselike scent Jacobs smelled.

  “What de fuck . . . ?” Jacobs whispered.

  Tolu sneezed.

  “Na so you dey abuse my house, but see your place, na for bush you dey live,” Moziz said, laughing.

  “People dey there, sha,” Tolu said. “Look.”

  He was right. Even from here, Jacobs could see rooms with lights on and people moving around inside.

  Philo moaned and moved closer to Moziz, and he hissed and pushed her away. “No jam pack me,” he snapped.

  “I dey fear,” she said.

  “Wetin you want mek I do if you dey fear?” he said. “Nonsense.”

  “R . . . Rain,” Jacobs said to the woman. She was still sitting in the car, serenely watching the building. She’d told Jacobs to call her ‘‘Rain” because, she said, she liked how it sounded. After seeing that her face had re-formed and this woman alien was not angry with them, Jacobs and the others were glad to have her with them. She was someone who knew more about what was going on than they ever would. Jacobs pointed at the building. “Is dis . . . what is dat?”

  “I no sabi,” she said.

  “So dis no be de result of say una land here?”

  “Dose people look to you like say dem from another planet come?” the woman asked.

  “Dat no be wetin I mean,” Jacobs said, frustrated. He frowned. He needed to get in touch with Fisayo. She wasn’t answering her phone.

  They all jumped at the sound of a gunshot nearby.

  “Mek we go inside!” Philo said, grabbing Moziz’s arm and pulling him toward the building. Tolu followed.

  “You dey come?” Jacobs asked Rain.

  She stood up and nodded. Jacobs smiled. “Good.” But then he frowned. His third-floor apartment was clean, and he had plenty of beer and Fanta to offer them. His television was small, but it was high definition. But did he have his dresses laid out on his bed? He couldn’t remember. The last twelve hours had been a blur, and it had started with his meeting with Seven and Rome. And before he’d gone, he’d spent two hours picking out just the right outfit . . . which meant he’d brought out his very best, tried them all on. Left them lying out. Shit, he thought as he and Rain joined Tolu, Moziz, and Philo.

  They stood a few feet from the apartment entrance, which was draped with thick vines.

  “Dem get poison?” Tolu asked.

  “My brother, anything dey possible tonight,” Moziz said. “But . . .” He looked at Rain and then looked away. None of them would talk to her. Only Jacobs. “I no tink so. No be as tings dey go.”

  “What of dat ting on de road?” Philo asked. “Dat one no dangerous? Why dis one no go dey poisonous?”

  “No be you wan go inside?” Moziz snapped.

  “I just dey talk . . .”

  “Why you no jus close your mouth?” Moziz said.

  “Oh my God, mek two of una stop am now,” Jacobs groaned.

  Tolu laughed and shook his head.

  Rain stepped forward and pushed the vines aside. Jacobs held his breath. They all did. She turned to them. “I don die yet?” she asked sarcastically.

  “Una people fit die, sef ?” Philo spat, looking her up and down.

  Philo was rude, but Jacobs was thinking along the same lines. The alien woman had reached out and touched the vines and the vines didn’t hurt her, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hurt the rest of them. Did these aliens even die? Still, up close, the vines looked harmless enough. Jacobs opened the door with his key, and they all went inside.

  The concrete steps to the third floor were uneven, and there was no light. Jacobs couldn’t help smiling to himself as he heard one of the others stumble and curse. Philo lost her shoe when she misstepped on the stairs. “Wait, o,” she said as she groped for it.

  Jacobs turned and saw Rain was right behind him. He could barely see her in the darkness. He couldn’t see any of the others at all.

  “E dey for you back,” Rain said.

  “You dey see for darkness?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why light no dey dis place?”

  Jacobs shrugged. He’d never wondered why the stairwell had no light; it just didn’t. As he unlocked the door, he began to sweat. He was suddenly sure that he’d left a pile of dresses on the chair. They all knew he didn’t have a girlfriend. What the fuck was he going to say?

  “Hurry up, my guy,” Moziz said. “I wan piss.”

  “Bathroom dey down dat way,” Jacobs said, pointing. “De next door for your right.” He heard Moziz jog off as he opened his door. He stepped inside, purposely not turning on the lights.

  “Mek I find light,” he said as the others stumbled about. He took his time, wishing his eyes would adjust so he could see what he’d left out. But before he could do anything, the lights came on. Tolu had found a switch. And there, draped over his sofa, were the dresses.

  Philo. The idiot empty-headed girl walked right to them. She had a big grin on her face. She looked back at Tolu as she picked up one of the dresses and held it to herself. It was bright green and silky with a drooping neckline. He didn’t much like this dress because of its ugly color. Plus, he didn’t have any shoes to m
atch it. But he loved how it fell over his body, like a cascade of cool water. On hot nights, when he wasn’t going anywhere, he’d slip this dress on, turn on a fan, open the window, and sit on the sill with the lights off.

  “Na who get dis?” Philo asked, a knowing grin. She didn’t wait for Jacobs to answer. She looked at Tolu. “See, wetin I dey tell you since? Jacobs get bottom power.”

  Tolu looked at Jacobs with openmouthed disgust.

  “I no be gay,” Jacobs said, his entire body going cold. How had Philo suspected? He’d always thought she was too stupid to notice anything. Stupid olofofo poke-nose woman, he thought. “I jus like to wear woman cloth.”

  “My God,” Philo laughed. “E no even deny am!”

  “Allah forbid!” Tolu shouted. “Kai! Whoo!”

  Moziz walked through the open door and stumbled to a halt. Jacobs could hardly look at him. Moziz was glaring at Jacobs with real anger.

  Jacobs just stood there, in the pool of light from his favorite lamp. The power in his apartment went out constantly. NEPA took the lights like God took human lives. Yet, now, during this terrible moment, the damn lights didn’t so much as flicker.

  “E just be like to fuck dog,” Moziz said as he walked in. “You no like pussy? You prefer animal?”

  “No be animal,” Jacobs found himself saying. “I no even . . .”

  Moziz turned to Tolu and Philo as he snatched up Jacobs’s green dress and threw it to the floor. He wiped his hand on his jeans as if he’d just touched a sick man’s shit. “Kai! So na sis man I don dey hang around since? A beg mek I ask, o. You dey worship deity too? You dey do juju?”

  Jacobs glanced at Rain, who was watching quietly.

  “You, you, you, dem suppose to stone you to death,” Moziz said, stammering with rage. Sweat was beading on his forehead.

  Tolu nodded vigorously. “How you jus fall our hand like dis, eh?” Tolu added.

  Jacobs had known Moziz forever. They’d played together as babies and lived practically as brothers. Jacobs and Moziz were very different, but Jacobs had always been able to intuit Moziz’s thoughts and reactions. Until now. He’d never have expected Moziz to do what Moziz did next.

  BAM!

  Philo screamed and ran behind Rain, burying her face in Rain’s back.

  “FUCK!” Tolu screamed.

  Jacobs stumbled back. He blinked. Then he dropped to one knee. All his life, since his memories began, he had known Moziz. Their parents had lived in the same apartment building. Their fathers hated each other, and their mothers had been miserable together. What had happened? What had happened? Jacobs had never felt such pain in his twenty-three years of life. The left side of his chest simultaneously burned and felt drenched in water. Earlier today, as they’d driven to the woman’s house to kidnap the alien, life had seemed so rosy. There was potential for such positive change. Now . . . now he didn’t know what he felt. He coughed and tasted blood. He coughed again, suddenly unable to breathe.

  Moziz blinked, the reality of his actions dawning on him. He looked down at Jacobs, his oldest friend, who was more brother than friend. He’d never known him. How long had he been dressing like a woman? Moziz couldn’t believe it. Something had to give. Someone had to do something. His thoughts were cloudy when he looked up and met Rain’s eyes. He raised the gun that he’d pulled from his jeans, that he’d shot his oldest friend with, that was still in his hand.

  Paff!

  Then Moziz felt no more.

  Philo, who’d been standing beside Moziz, was looking at Rain just before it happened. Rain’s face had twisted into an angry snarl, then it had shifted, and for a moment it wasn’t even a face. There was a black hole where her head should have been—terrifying, bottom­less, empty. Then her features re-formed, and she focused hard on Moziz.

  The red dry blast hit Philo so hard that it blew off her dangling earrings. She had been to Germany once to visit her brother. She’d hated it and returned home a week early. No one could convince her to leave Nigeria again. What she’d hated most about Germany was the snow. On the day she’d arrived, there had been a snowstorm. The first time she breathed German air, it was accompanied by a blast of fresh snow. It had been cold and eventually wet.

  What Moziz exploded into was not cold or wet, but it reminded her of that snow, the way the air whipped against her face. There was red and, for a moment, she couldn’t see. She shrieked over and over. She couldn’t stop. The shock was just too much.

  Tolu ran out of the apartment, tears streaming from his eyes. He tore down the dark stairs, not missing a step. He burst through the door and into the night, not caring that he had to rip through a curtain of alien vines to get outside. He ran onto the street and then he just kept running. Cars passed him as he ran, and, once, he fell into a large deep pothole that he hadn’t seen in the darkness. He got up and kept right on running.

  Finally he stopped. He stood on the side of the road, grasping his hair. Then he started sobbing, his face turned to the sky, hot tears stinging his eyes. “Na God dey punish me,” he moaned. “He dey punish we all!”

  CHAPTER 37

  THE BOY ON THE ROAD

  Adaora, Agu, Anthony, and Ayodele were in Chris’s black BMW on their way to the airport. Agu grasped the wheel and squeezed. The traffic hadn’t moved an inch in over two hours.

  Ahmadu Bello Way is the best road in Lagos. With its thick smooth asphalt, it is nothing like the deathtrap known as the Lagos–Benin Expressway. If that highway is full of ghosts (as Adaora’s mother believed), then Bello Way is full of angels. At least on a normal day. Today, however, was anything but normal. Never had the road been so full of cars and people. On the left, just beyond a few buildings, was Lagos’s lagoon, and on the right were the well-maintained buildings of the city’s affluent Victoria Island community. This was supposed to be a beautiful place.

  “We should just leave your car,” Agu said. A boy was running through the traffic. He leaped onto the hood as he ran by, laughing. A girl carrying a tray of peeled oranges was going from car to car. Adaora glared at her. Stupid girl, she thought. Or desperate. The girl wasn’t the only hawker trying to make some money from the chaos. Women and girls had emerged selling all sorts of foodstuffs, capitalizing on the chaos. But even that wasn’t going well. As Adaora watched, two young men knocked over a girl who was selling boiled eggs. They ran off with her money and handfuls of her eggs.

  Some people were indeed leaving their cars. They’d inch to the side of the road, get out, and walk away. Or run. Fights were breaking out all over, between and sometimes on top of the gridlocked cars.

  “We leave the car, then it’ll take us forever to get to the airport,” she said. “And we’re running out of time. It’s already past three.”

  “Maybe. It can’t be more than fifteen miles.”

  “We should stay with the car,” Anthony said. He nodded toward the chaos outside. “Who knows what we’ll end up doing if we go out there. It might go badly.”

  A woman selling bags of cashews was arguing with a driver. He got out of the car and knocked her tray of nuts to the ground. A truck driver leaped out of his car just as the first man slapped the woman.

  “This is terrible,” Adaora said, appalled. Another man and two women ran over and joined the truck driver in beating the man who’d attacked the cashew-selling woman. Another woman took the cashew-woman’s tray and beat the man over the head with it.

  “It’s getting worse. Get out of the car!” Agu said, turning off the engine.

  The four of them got out. Anthony took Ayodele’s hand and Adaora ran around the car and grabbed Agu’s hand, and they scrambled away from the fight.

  Adaora felt it. A sort of swell in the air.

  Pressure.

  “That one! See?” a man who’d been staring at one of the fights shouted, pointing in their direction. “See him? That boy!”

&
nbsp; Boy? Adaora wondered, meeting Agu’s eyes. Then Agu was looking past her, in the direction the man was pointing. Adaora turned to look too.

  The little boy stood nearby in a sea of people—men, women, children, everyone moving everywhere all at once. But he wasn’t moving, and no one leaned toward him or reached for him or even brushed close enough to touch him. And in the vehicle headlights, he seemed detached. Not quite there.

  He wore brown trousers and a dirty dress shirt.

  Why is that little boy all alone? Adaora wondered.

  “He is one of them!” a woman cried. She wore jeans and a red blouse. Her short hair stood on end, she had no shoes, and she was wearing a sign around her neck that said REPENT. LAGOS WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED!

  * * * *

  Fisayo was sure of what she was seeing. She had already seen plenty of them. He stood out as Satan would stand out in a sea of angels. He’d been there when the three people were snatched by the sea, just last night. The first victims. She had a good memory for faces.

  Lagos was flooded with evil; the end of days was here. Her throat was sore, her voice raspy from telling the News to all who would listen. There were fights going on all around her—people overtaken by devilry. But she focused on the boy and only the boy. The child-witch of Satan. The worst of them all. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight. Not again. He would not escape. When she’d seen him on Bar Beach, she had instantly disliked him. He’d been clinging to a man, like a dog. Now only he stood still in the sea of chaos. She raised her gun. She pulled the trigger.

  * * * *

  Agu saw it about to happen. He turned and started running.

  * * * *

  The bullet smashed into the mute boy’s left eye. He stumbled to the side and then sat down hard. He lay back. Comfortable now. His mind focused for the first time in his life. If he had had anything to say, he could have said it.