Oware Mosaic Page 13

  Click!…Click!

  She was all out of bullets.

  “You want some of this?” I said, and banged the hilt of the kukri knife on the table. “Come and get it, bitches!”

  They all scattered backward a few meters and turned to me. Behind me was the kitchen. A marble countertop counter separated the living room from the small kitchen. I leaped over the counter, my butt sliding over the smooth marble, and landed on the other side of the counter, knocking an eighteen-piece knife set on the floor. Their paws clattered against the floor as they pursued me.

  Lamp had run into a bedroom opposite the kitchen.

  “Stop with the heroics, dipshit, and get in here,” she said.

  I scrambled to my feet, bouncing against the oven, took two steps, leaped and somersaulting into the bedroom. Lamp slammed the door behind me, just as the wild dogs reached it. With her back to the door, she slid down it. Gasping for breath, her body shook against the door while it vibrated from the dholes trying to get in.

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  “Where’s the Old Man?” Lamp asked.

  “He’s in the other room. I heard him close the door behind him.”

  “What is this place?”

  “And I would know that, why?”

  I caught a glare from Lamp, but ignored her, busy scouting the room like a student moving into her boarding school dormitory room for the first time. The floors were hardwood and carried the scent that told me they had just been stained.

  “Dad!” I said, calling out to him. “Dad, are you okay?”

  “He hit his head pretty bad,” Lamp said. “He’s probably out cold. This must be his cabin.”

  “Actually, I remember him saying that this was a safe house.”

  “A safe house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For who?”

  The most frightening thought came across my mind.

  What if Dad was the one responsible for the virus? What is this was what he used to traffic girls?

  Two twin-sized beds had white sheets neatly folded back from the top and tucked with meticulous precision like they were made by a disciplined overzealous cadet in the military academy. A white pillow and rust blanket sat opposite of each other, on each bed.

  “You don’t think he’s involved in—”

  Lamp didn’t let me get the question out. “Of course not!”

  I didn’t know if it was the fact that I’d been fighting off a pack of dholes or if it because I’d just fed off of Lamp’s blood and it had an ergogenic effect on me, but I seemed more hypersensitive than normal. My olfactory senses were in overdrive. Even her heartbeat seemed louder, and her movements, slower like my corneal streaming turned down my sight sensory down to a half-speed slower. I came to the conclusion that all of my senses were more acute.

  “I’m calling my aunt to make sure she and the twins are okay.”

  “What about Kofi?”

  “He hasn’t been answering my calls. Have you tried your parents?”

  “They’re not answering either. I just tried them.”

  “You think the reception is bad because we’re up here in the mountains?”

  Lamp didn’t answer that, instead, her face turned sour and she snapped at me.

  “So what are you, some kind of cannibal? Your family are cannibals?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Is that what your people really are?”

  “What?”

  “Obviously, you’re not a vampire, I’ve seen you out in the sun, before, and it doesn’t feel like it, but you sure as hell don’t have any fangs—”

  “There’s no such thing as vampires, idiot,” I said, jumping over her words.

  “Then your people are cannibals, and you eat each other? You consume flesh to live?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? This is not the cerebral Lamp I’ve played—I mean known, for so many years. You could’ve killed me with that thrust to my neck, you know?”

  “Karma is a bitch, huh? I didn’t do anything that you didn’t do to me.”

  “Heifer, you were trying to kill me! Wait-a-minute, I thought you couldn’t remember what happened at Liati Wote.”

  “Most of it is still hazy, but I remember fighting you. So I finally meet you in person, after all these years. So, where’d you get the upgrade in your neural implant to give you access to the game?”

  I didn’t have time for such frivolous small talk. “Who sent you to kill all those people in the village? Grunt?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Was Kofi also ordered to kill innocent people.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I don’t care what you think. All I know is that one minute we were on our way to the bikes, and the next your teeth were planted into my neck!”

  I pointed at her. “You’re lying. Who do you work for? Some kind of uprising resistance? A terrorist group? You seem to know a lot about hacking. Maybe you had something to do with Frankie and her tirade against the week. Why suddenly show up, today?”

  I regretted those words, as soon as they left my mouth.

  Her face twisted in such a way, I thought she was having a stroke. “Did you kill my sister?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me! There’s something fishy going on between you and your brother and Grunt. Now Grunt’s dead!”

  “What—what are you saying?” I asked and took a step back.

  “I’m saying that I saw the glances you all traded whenever I mentioned my sister. You think I’m stupid? I know that you’re hiding something.”

  “No, no. I’m not.”

  She pushed me against the wall. “You’re lying!”

  There’s something about guilt and shame that can turn the strongest denial into a weak confession.

  Lamp slammed her fist against the wall. “Tell me! Did you kill my sister, dammit?”

  She started shaking me. “Did you? Huh? Did you?”

  “All right!” I said, tearing up. “At first, I thought I did.”

  She recoiled from me. “What did you say?”

  “I—I thought I did.”

  “You thought you did what?”

  “It was raining, and I’d been drinking. I knew that I shouldn’t drink and drive, but I always had control of it before.”

  “You were driving drunk.”

  “No, I mean, yes. I was driving Kofi’s car, and I don’t know, I got distracted. The next thing I know, I hit something. When I got out of the car, I saw that it was a girl—”

  Lamp gasped and fell back onto the bed. She sat there in shock, looking at me with disbelief.

  I had to make her understand. “But I didn’t know it was Jinni. I think Kofi knew.”

  “He was in the car with you?”

  “No, I called him and told him what happened. He was in the area and came to me pretty, quickly. He called Grunt and the two of them figured it best not to say anything.”

  She stood up. “They what?”

  “Grunt said it would ruin my family, and my future would be destroyed.”

  She walked up to me. “What about my family?”

  “I know—I know. I was wrong. I’m sorry—I really am, Lamp. But someone else had killed her! It wasn’t me!”

  She scoffed and turned away from me, holding her hand up over her mouth.

  “I wasn’t in the right mind, Lamp. And-and I didn’t know what to do. It was Kofi and Grunt’s idea to move her body and take it to the water plant.”

  Lamp turned and rushed toward me. She stabbed her index finger into my chest. “I pulled you from the lake, gave you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and come to find out, you’ve been lying to me the whole time? You’re the monster, not Frankie! You are! You’re the monster!”

  “Stop!” I said, and pushed her off of me.

  Lamp swung her fist at me. I knocked it away.

  “I don’t wan
t to fight,” I said.

  Damned, if she didn’t throw another punch. I swatted it away and had my hands around her throat before I knew what happened.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “I’m an enhuman, faster than you ever dreamed of being. Lucky for you, I didn’t choke you out for hitting me in the throat.”

  Lamp took another swing at me.

  I batted her hand away. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Before I got all of the words out, she tackled me. I shoved her off of me, but she recovered faster than I anticipated and bounced to her feet. I rolled over just as her boot slammed against where my head was supposed to be had I not moved. Rolling over on my side, I sprung up and caught a kick to the head. That sent me to the ground and a million stars floated in my head. She kicked me in the side, and I let out a guttural yell.

  I shook my head and said, “I didn’t kill your sister!”

  Lamp said nothing. She pulled her leg back to shove her size eights back into my side, but I caught her foot and twisted it. That gave me enough time to recover and get to my feet. She was on her feet almost as quickly. We circled each other, both of us using Nigerian fighting stances.

  I threw a combo, left-right but she blocked it. I countered with an elbow to her face, but she blocked it with her forearm. She threw a jab and caught me in the mouth. Just as quickly, she followed with an elbow slicing up toward my chin. I dodged it, countered with a kick to her side, and almost connected but she slapped my leg down. I snapped my leg back to my body just as she swept my heel and caught me good.

  I fell but rose quickly. She came at me fast and hard, swinging. I moved and she passed me. I turned and forced her backward all the way over to the beds. She swung fast and hard, but I dodged, ducked and swerved out of every strike. Auntie Yajna would’ve said I was Azumah Nelson in his prime. She couldn’t land any more punches. Lamp was good, though. Real good. However, I grew tired of fighting her, plus I had so many questions that took precedence over everything else.

  “Time to end this,” I said.

  “Shut up, Liar—”

  I ran toward her, gathering up about four steps of momentum. She swung a fist at me and corrected her swing when she realized I leaped in the air, but I was too fast. I leaped over her reach, and she missed me by mere millimeters. With one leg, I bounced my foot off of the bed to her left, spun and landed behind her, clothes-hanging her to the floor with a powerful swipe around her neck. Her back hit the hardwood with a thud, and the impact knocked the air out of her.

  I said, “It’s over.”

  She dropped both of her arms to her side, gasping for air. I placed the heel of my boot at her neck.

  “We done, here?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer but started sobbing. I felt like crap for fighting her.

  “I said, are we done, here?”

  “Yeah,” she said, gasping for air.

  “Just let me explain.”

  “There is nothing that you can say that will ever make me forgive you.”

  I lifted my boot, and she knocked my leg away from her. Extending a hand to help her, I said, “Can we now figure out what’s going on?”

  Lamp swatted my hand away and picked herself up. She went over to the door and placed her hand on the doorknob.

  I grabbed her hand, and said, “Lamp, please. I’m sorry for everything. I really am, but I need you. We need each other.

  “I don’t need you.”

  “But if you open up that door, what’s going to be out there, doesn’t care about your sister’s death, or anything that’s happened to our people…Please? I can still hear them flesh-hungry canines out there.”

  She relaxed her shoulders and dropped her hand.

  “I just want to find my sister’s killer.”

  In a sudden jerked action, she doubled over, throwing her hand out to brace herself from falling into the door frame. “Dammit! My period’s early.”

  Her eyes were dilated, and her head was hot with fever.

  “I don’t think you’re having cramps.”

  She swatted my hand away, “What are you talking about. I know my own body!”

  “That may be, but I think…”

  “You think what?”

  “I think—”

  ~

  She collapsed on the floor, and not knowing what to do, I did what I thought was best: I searched the news feeds via a corneal stream to see if there was anything on the pandemic and came up with nothing.

  How could there not be any news about it?… Government cover-up!

  I dared not call emergency. I would’ve been jailed on the spot for breaking ennie law. I tried a search in the Ghana National Library Archives for any incidents regarding an ennie biting a human, and to my surprise found over a thousand entries. They weren’t dated centuries ago like I thought they would be, either, they were dated within the last couple of years.

  How is this possible?

  I wasn’t the only one to have done such a horrific thing. There were others. Many others. I researched a few informative entries and knew what I had to do for Lamp. I opened the window, carefully, popped open the screen and crawled outside. I made sure to close the window and crept around the front. The dholes were lounging inside the living room part of the house like house guests that had no intentions of leaving any time soon.

  With my back to the house, I stood right outside the door and whistled.

  “Here, Cujo mutts! Come to mama!”

  The dholes came scurrying out of the house, and they were going so fast, even though they saw me plastered up against the wall, weren’t quick enough to turn around by the time I ran inside and rammed the door shut.

  I tried turning on the lights, but none of them worked. There seemed to have been no electricity in the house. There was another door, on the east side of the house. The one Dad went into. I peeked my head in there, seeing half of the king-sized bed.

  “Dad?”

  I took one step inside and tripped over something. It was my father unconscious on the floor. I lifted him, and with some awkward effort got him on top of the bed. This must have been the room he slept in. All of his stuff was thrown across the bed, over by an office desk and in the closet. Over the desk, framed in mahogany wood was a degree decorating the wall. I saw a name on the degree that was way too coincidental.

  Written in Old English Regular font was UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN, DEGREE OF DOCTORATE OF Medical Sciences AND Virology and it was awarded to my father, Kulo Xo. There was a small bathroom inside the bedroom, and I checked the wall cabinet. There was nothing of use there, toothpaste, a crappy toothbrush, and some dental floss. I checked under the sink and found what I was looking for: a first aid kit. Within a couple of minutes, I cleaned up the bruises on his forehead and patched him up using the gauze and band-aids I found.

  He let out a moan. I kissed Dad’s cheek and went out into the main part of the cabin. I didn’t hear it before with all the fuss of trying not to get eaten, but there was a generator humming right outside the cabin. An extension cord came through a custom-made hole in the wall of the kitchen and connected to an electric refrigerator. It was quite impressive for being in such a non-descriptive cabin. The frig had double thermal glass doors and stood against the wall, storing blood packs. A digital temperature logger indicated that the temp was +2 °C. There were three rows of cabinets topped with a steel surface that literally stretched from one end of the room to the other, barring a few feet on either side.

  I opened the left side of the fridge and found ice. According to my research, we needed a lot. Before I made use of that, however, was the task of telling Lamp the news. I went into the room, and she turned away from me, in a strong fit of contempt.

  “Lamp,” I said. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

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  I placed more ice in the tub, while Lamp called me the kind of names that would make a Vodun priestess turn to
ashes. She wasn’t happy at all with the news that she was turning into an enhuman.

  “It’s too cold, Xo,” she said. “Stop it. Don’t—don’t put any more in!”

  “Just a little while longer,” I said.

  I placed the tip of my finger on her forehead. She knocked it away, but not before I got a reading. Her temperature flashed across my corneal stream. After hundreds of thousands of people died from radiation poison, every person born after the Final Event had an upgrade put in their neural input to continuously scan their vitals and hers were off the charts.

  “Lamp, you have a temperature of 105 degrees!” I said.

  “You don’t think I know that,” she said, shoving ice off of her. “My thermochromic sensor readout is blinking like crazy on my corneal stream. All I see is red!”

  “Then you need—”

  “Just stop—I don’t need any more ice, you ingrate! You’re making me feel worse!”

  “I know what I’m doing, and STOP throwing the ice out of the tub! You’re making a mess.”

  “Get away—Don’t—Just leave! I don’t need your help. You’ve helped enough. Now, I’m becoming a freak, and it’s all your fault! It’s your fault.”

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  Lamp was hot, and she was cold, and then hot again. Her screams were ear-splitting. She reached out and squeezed my leg so hard, I grunted, but I didn’t complain.

  “There you go, Lamp,” I said, caressing her. “Let it all out. It’ll be over soon enough.”

  “I’m dying,” she said, her nose running. “I’m dying!”

  “No, you’re not, Lamp. Quite the opposite.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked it up in the archives of the Ghana Library.”

  She blinked her eyes, and I knew that she did a quick search on her corneal stream. “You’re right,” she said. “In the news feed, two other people have anonymously reported the incident within the last few hours but wiped the data from their neural implant clean before authorities could triangulate where the mind-call came from.”

  “Yeah, I saw that.”

  Suddenly, Lamp had a sneezing fit. Her arms flopped over the porcelain tub and drooped to the floor. She closed her eyes, gasping for air, begging God for just one second of relief.