Why You Were Taken

by JT Lawrence

  The man with the tooth necklace, possibly the leader, narrows his gaze at Seth. He takes a hunting knife out of its casing on his thigh and runs it along Seth’s face, his neck, then uses it to inspect his clothing.

  ‘I think we should skin him,’ says the aggro one, hopping on the spot. ‘Skin him and feed him to the fuckin’ hyenas.’

  The other one chips in, ‘They’re hungry. They didn’t get their chickens this week.’

  ‘You know what that means?’ he asks Kirsten, licking his lips, ‘It means they’ll eat your bones too. Crunch-crunch!’

  Kirsten glares at him.

  ‘And what’s in this pretty little box?’ the man who is gagging her asks, kicking the insulin across the room. The other man stops it with his foot as if it’s a soccer ball. Again she objects but she’s beginning to feel dizzy and the smell of the man’s hand right up against her nostrils is distorting her vision.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ says the mad one, lifting his foot. Seth tries to step forward but is thrown back against the wall. The man jumps on the bag with all his weight. ‘It’s broken!’ He laughs.

  A gushing of saliva in Kirsten’s mouth. She tries to warn him but it’s too late, and soon hot vomit is spraying through her guard’s fingers, through her nose, and she is doubled over.

  The man looks at her, horrified, and backs away.

  ‘You have the Bug.’

  ‘No, no,’ she says, shaking her head, ‘I don’t,’ and she retches again.

  The other men also take a quick step back.

  ‘You brought bad juju into this house,’ he says. The others look worried, their fingers dance on the triggers.

  Kirsten gets angry. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I brought bad juju into this house? Have you even looked in a mirror lately? You reek of death. You want to skin us but you say I brought bad juju into the house? Fuck you!’ Then she turns to the others, ‘and fuck you all too!’

  They look at her and each other, not certain of what to do. She swallows and looks down at the wet stain on the floor.

  ‘And I’m washing my hands now,’ she growls, moving towards the kitchen sink, ‘just try to stop me.’

  She finds a hard bar of soap with which to scrub her hands. The tap spits water at her and the pipes groan overhead. Once her hands are clean, she splashes water on her face and neck. When she walks the few steps back into the open-plan lounge no one has said a word. She collects the kit and stands away from the spill of puke on the thin, cigarette-burn-patterned carpet, hoping to not get sick again. The man washes his hands too.

  ‘Look,’ says Seth, ‘Rolo sent me. He said I should ask for Abejide.’

  ‘Rolo sent you?’ the leader asks.

  ‘It’s the first thing I would have told you if you hadn’t jumped us.’

  ‘Give me your phone,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t have a phone,’ says Seth. ‘I wear a patch.’

  ‘Smart man, hey? Then give me your tablet.’

  Seth hands over his Tile. He pushes a few buttons, checks his bump history for Rolo’s message thread, then gives it back to Seth, motioning for the others to lower their weapons, says something, perhaps in vernacular, that Seth doesn’t catch. The aggressive man looks annoyed, probably on behalf of the hungry hyenas.

  ‘I need bullets, and we need something for her, something easy to handle.’

  ‘We don’t sell lady-guns,’ he spits.

  ‘Good thing I’m not a lady, then,’ says Kirsten.

  He looks at her then laughs his strange, three-bar laugh again.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, and nods at the others. Seth expects them to print some guns in front of them, or have some printed already, but instead two of the men scrape the coffee table towards the side of the room and roll up the lounge carpet to reveal a huge trapdoor. It takes some effort to lift the piece of wood, and buried below it is a pile of all kinds of different guns in what appears to be no particular order.

  Less like a gun store, more like a wartime weapons cache, thinks Kirsten, an old uMkhonto Sizwe stash. She is half expecting the man’s arm to be blown off by a rogue landmine when he dips his hands in. He motions for Seth’s gun and it is thrown to him; he catches it with one hand and inspects it.

  ‘Z88?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ says Seth.

  The man locates the correct ammo and passes a few boxes up.

  ‘More,’ says Seth.

  He passes two more.

  ‘Another one.’

  The man shrugs and passes up another one. ‘You taking on an army?’ he asks, making the other guys chuckle.

  ‘Could be,’ replies Seth, serious.

  ‘And for you?’ he says, looking up at Kirsten.

  ‘Do you have a compact semi-automatic?’ asks Seth, ‘like a CS45 or something like that?’ The man shakes his head. He starts sorting through the pile to look for something suitable.

  ‘Give her an AK,’ says the one, and the others cackle again.

  ‘What about this one? You like this one?’ he asks, showing her a big silver revolver: a Ruger. She frowns at it.

  ‘Does it work?’ she asks.

  ‘It works,’ he says.

  ‘Then I like it.’

  ‘We only sell guns that work,’ he says, passing her bullets. ‘We like—what is it called?—return customers.’

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ mumbles Seth.

  ‘Abejide is very good with faces,’ says one of the men. Kirsten thinks this is his way of saying their next purchase will run more smoothly, but then he adds a sinister, ‘Never forgets a face,’ and it sounds more like a threat than anything else.

  ‘What are those things?’ She points towards what looks like second-hand lipsticks.

  ‘You won’t like those,’ he says, ‘they for ladies.’ He picks one up, twists the cap off, and pretends to apply lipstick in a wide circle around his mouth. Pouts and bats his eyelashes. Snickering in the background.

  ‘They are magic wands,’ he says. ‘You didn’t know we could do magic here?’

  ‘How does it work?’ she asks.

  ‘Come with me,’ the leader says, ‘I’ll show you.’

  She’s sorry she asked, doesn’t want to go with him, doesn’t want to know.

  ‘Come,’ he commands, and she follows, Seth right behind her. They walk down a passage and into another room with a crumbling back door. He opens it and they see reflective eyes looking back at them (Glowing Green). The outside light comes on automatically and there is loud laughing and yipping. Five, six, seven beasts trawling around in the patchy grass, scratching and sniffing, pink tongues lolling.

  ‘Holy Hades,’ says Seth. ‘They weren’t kidding about the hyenas.’

  Yip, yip, yip, the animals say. Abejide calls one of them by name: an older female who has the lope and old eyes of a war vet. He whistles: six high-pitched calling sounds, and she comes forward, ribs patterning her side: perhaps hoping to be fed. Kirsten’s stomach seizes.

  Abejide points the magic wand at the animal and presses a button, sending a long blue thread of electric current into her body, whipping her up into the air with a surprised yelp then dropping her, in slow motion, onto the sandy ground, where she lies motionless. The other hyenas panic and try to run, but they are ringed in and bounce off the garden fence, shrieking all the while. The man laughs, and Kirsten feels ill again.

  ‘See?’ he says, ‘I told you it works.’

  The animal lies twitching on the ground.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ she asks, ‘is she dead?’

  ‘Na,’ he says, ‘she is a tough one. Survivor. Like you.’

  They take the guns, the ammo and the lipstick-taser, pay cash: a fat roll of R500 notes. It’s all the cash Seth has, and it’s triple the amount the weapons are worth. They go through Kirsten’s slimpurse and take all her money too. No one says thank you. After all, it is more like a hijacking than a business transaction.

  They’ve only been inside the house f
or an hour but it feels like days when they exit the front door. Dodging the rabid monkey, running down the steps, they both breathe the polluted air deep into their lungs. It’s warm, and Kirsten gives Seth his hooded jacket back, bunches her new gun and taser into her bag. Her arm jars, but the adrenaline in her system dulls the pain.

  The streets are quieter on their way back; most of the market stalls have been packed up and moved to another location, as if they never existed. It takes them a while to find the car and they both think the worst until they see it, abandoned-looking, on a road in which they don’t remember parking.

  They do a quick inspection: all four tyres are still attached, the engine and battery seem to be in place, and there is no pool of brake fluid under the car. Kirsten opens the crushed kit and finds one vial of insulin that survived the attack. She shows it to Seth, kisses it, then eases it carefully back into its pouch.

  One, we’ve got one, Kirsten thinks.

  One is all she needs, thinks Seth.

  Kirsten sees a bump from Marko to check her chatmail.

  HBG> Hey, hve something 4 u.

  Chapter 30

  Capital Fucking F

  Johannesburg, 2021

  KK>> Sorry only replying now, we were held up.

  HBG> Ws worried.

  KK>> What do you have?

  HBG> Sending u a pic.

  An image pops up on her screen: a picture of three young students sitting on a grassy knoll. They look like students in every way: casual, hippie-style clothes, relaxed faces, a slight air of the arrogance of youth. Two leggy white men in stovepipe trousers, one in thick black-rimmed glasses, and a young dark-skinned woman gazing distantly at the camera. In the background, some kind of university insignia. A badge. They look vaguely familiar—has she seen this before?—but Kirsten can’t place their faces at all.

  KK>> Got it. University students, circa 1970s?

  HBG> Yebo. Thr is a spec search u can do 2 look esp 4 files and images / hve bn deleted ovr & ovr again over time. This pic has been deleted ovr 6K times. Some1 doesn’t want it on Net.

  KK> Relevance?

  HBG>> Kex didn’t give me much 2 go on. I ws searching 4biddn files / ‘Trinity’. These 3 known as The Trinity when they studied together. WITS. Tag keeps comng up.

  KK> Trinity? As in Trinity Clinic?

  HBG>> Looks like it. Then superglass & Fontus unrelated on paper apart from / obvious business relat, but dig deeper & c they r both subsids along / 100s other companies under holding company GeniX, trading as GNX Enterprises.

  KK> All owned by the same creep?

  HBG>> Same creeps. 3 creeps.

  KK> Trinity.

  HBG>> Registerd GeniX when thy wre still / varsity.

  KK> What’s / connection 2 Keke?

  HBG>> You.

  KK> ??

  HBG>> Kex starts digging / keywords / threaten the company. My guess / thy hve hackbots automonitoring 4 anything like that, & find source & quash it.

  KK> But Keke didn’t have any of this info, only the list of barcodes.

  HBG>> Et voila.

  KK> So the barcodes threaten them. The list of abducted kids threaten them.

  HBG>> Yebo, hence your hitlist, + any1 else who gets in / way.

  KK>> We wouldn’t have known there was a connection if they didn’t react to Keke.

  HBG>> Thy were too careful.

  KK> Who R people in the photo / Trinity?

  HBG>> I’m running thr faces / my FusiformG now. Will have a match in hour/so.

  KK> An HOUR? Keke’s SugarApp says only 5 hours left.

  HBG>> It’s going as fast as it can.

  KK> Can we come over?

  HBG>> Who is ‘we’?

  KK> Seth (no.5) and I?

  HBG>> I dn’t allow visitors. Esp 1s assoc / kidnapping & grim reaper.

  KK> We hve nowhere else 2 go.

  HBG>> Police?

  KK> No police.

  HBG>> Cape Town Republic? Mexico? Bali?

  He is quiet for a while.

  KK> Just till we can work out who the Trinity are / how 2 find Keke.

  HBG>> U being follwed?

  KK> Don’t think so.

  HBG>> Dn’t think so? Tht’s reassuring.

  Kirsten logs out and gets Marko’s GPS co-ordinates; directs Seth out of Little Lagos in between telling him about GeniX. When she tells him about Fontus, he hits the top of the steering wheel.

  ‘Shut the front door,’ he says. He has the face of someone who has just won the Lotto. Or found Jesus. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘You knew that the creeps responsible for abducting us are the same creeps you were grinding for?’

  ‘No. I just knew they were dirty. I knew that they were fuckers. Fucking fuckers. Capital fucking F.’

  ‘Look, that sentence didn’t even make sense.’

  ‘Fucking Fontus.’ He exhales, shaking his head.

  ‘Do you still think that the Genesis Project is a myth?’

  Seth’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t answer. He takes his bottle of pills out of his pocket, is about to take one, then throws them out of the car window.

  Marko is drumming his fingers on his knees, then his desk, then his knees again. Hundreds of thousands of faces are flying through his FusiformG software, trying to recognise a pattern. He can’t sit still. He stuffs a doughnut past his lips, but his mouth is so dry he chokes. He looks around his room, picks up a vinyl toy and pretends to shoot another toy with it. He makes laser sound effects then kicks the other toy over. In his head, crowds cheer.

  The computer chirrups: it has matched one of the three faces. Marko looks at the screen and drops the rest of the doughnut.

  ‘Go home FusiformG,’ he says, ‘you’re drunk.’

  Marko’s place is more of a bunker than a house. Fort Knox would have been more welcoming. Kirsten studies the giant gate and 8m walls frosted with the glitter of electrified barbed wire. The kinesecurity cameras follow their movements to the gate. She buzzes the intercom but there is no answer. She buzzes again.

  ‘You think he changed his mind?’ she asks Seth. ‘He really didn’t want us to come.’

  Seth is inspecting the gate. He pushes on it, as if to test the lock, and it swings open. Kirsten’s glad—now they can get in!—but then her heart sinks. Oh. Oh, this is bad.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ she says. ‘It’s impossible that they found him. That they got here before us. I was online with him fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘You sure it was him?’

  They look around, notice some broken glass on the driveway, some damaged plants. Seth heads back to the car, unlocks it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she says.

  ‘Getting the hell out of here.’

  ‘We have to go inside,’ she says, ‘it’s the only way.’

  ‘It’s a bad idea,’ he says, but closes the car door anyway. Once they step inside the property and are halfway to the house, the gate swings closed, and the lock mechanism clicks into place. The electric wire that circles the property like a malevolent halo begins to hum. They hear vicious dogs barking, but there is nowhere to run.

  ‘It’s a trap.’

  Chapter 31

  The Unholy Trinity

  Johannesburg, 2021

  The dogs’ barking is deafening now, but there’s not a dog in sight. White spikes etch into Kirsten’s vision and she has to close her eyes.

  ‘It was him online, I was sure!’

  ‘Maybe it was him, but with a gun to his head.’

  Seth realises that the sound is a recording, playing on loop. There must be speakers hidden in the unkempt garden. The front door opens, the security gate is unlocked in three different places, and out walks a chubby young cappuccino-skinned man with tinted spectacles. He pushes them up on his nose and squints at his guests. He’s carrying a game console that he touches, and the barking stops. Another button turns on calming white noise: a waterfall, birds, a rumble of thunder.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘sorry ab
out the dogs, and the gate. I programmed it myself and I’m still ironing out some of the kinks. Or, I was. I’m a procrastinator. A paranoid procrastinator.’ When they still don’t move or talk, he comes out further along the driveway, looking left to right as if to cross the road. His hands remain on the console.

  ‘I’m Marko,’ he says to Kirsten, then blushes. ‘Obviously.’

  He’s wearing a Talking Tee shirt a size too small that stretches over his doughy belly. It has a simple animation of a panting Chihuahua and says: ‘My favourite frequency is 50,000 Hz’. When he turns around to lead them inside the back of the shirt says: ‘You’ve probably never heard it before.’

  ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  His room—the basement—is wall-to-wall glass screens, blinking projector lights, drives, processors, constant white noise, and the smell of powdered sugar. The walls are papered with posters of T-Rex jokes, incomprehensible maths formulae, and one with a picture of a pretty planet. It says: ‘God created Saturn and he liked it, so he put a ring on it.’

  Nerdgasm, thinks Kirsten, nudging Seth.

  ‘Your kind of guy.’

  He makes a ha-ha face. She spots a brooding woman on the wall, black and white, thinks she kind of recognises her.

  ‘Vintage movie star?’ she asks Marko. He momentarily stops smashing his keyboard with his stubby fingers.

  ‘That,’ he says, ‘is Hedy Lemarr.’

  Her face is blank.

  ‘Lemarr was a remarkable woman and I will love her forever.’

  Okay, that’s not weird.

  ‘She was the most beautiful woman in Europe in the forties, starred in thirty-five films, one of which was the first portrayal of a female orgasm ever, and a math genius. She invented frequency hopping spread!’

  ‘That’s Wi-Fi,’ says Seth. ‘Wireless internet.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Kirsten says, but is impressed nonetheless, specifically at the intensity of his geekdom. She is surprised he doesn’t have a neckbeard, or giant gaming thumbs.