Lagoon

^Prologue The Bone Collector

For a tarantula, he is not very big. He lost a leg battling a pepsis wasp five years ago. But he is healthy. He lives well. This patch of forest is good for him – full of plump, slow-moving and juicy prey, and rich dark places to catch them.

Nevertheless, the tarantula believes that life is best lived by embracing the changes that come his way. So he gently places a leg on the cool pavement; the leg beside the space of the one he lost. This leg is the most sensitive, always has been. With it, he can feel the soul of the great spider artist of the land, she who weaves all things into existence.

There is no vibration on the road. No approaching human vehicles. But he knows that when they come, they come fast and hard. He has crossed this highway many times. And always in the late evening when the surface is cool. Like now.

Still, each crossing has been a close call. First he would feel the vibrations, and then a vehicle would appear on the horizon. He’d scramble for the other side, wondering if it was finally time to be reborn. But he had always made it and gone on to experience the meaty bloody bounty of the new patch of forest.

Today it is time to seek fresh pastures again. Something dynamic has happened. Last night, he felt a vibration so intense it made his entire body shudder with pleasure. Then hours ago, he felt an even more intense vibration, down to the finest hairs on his body, the spinners in his abdomen, the bottoms of each of his feet. The vibration was glorious. It was a call for change.

Now, he will answer that call.

The moment his sensitive leg touches the pavement, he starts running. Strangely, losing a leg has made him faster and more agile. This has always been to his advantage in capturing food and mating. Despite the physical pain, the blow to his identity that the loss of the leg caused, he knows that that wasp did him a favor.

He is only a third of the way across the road when the rumbling comes. The vibration. But not the delicious vibration of last night, or of hours ago. This one is average, expected, uninspiring. A human vehicle. The tarantula scrambles faster, certain that he will make it across. Certain of his extraordinary speed.

Crunch.

Once Adaora’s car passes the small stretch of road flanked by forest, this portion of the Lagos–Benin Expressway stretches its old tired asphalt with ease and comfort. The crushed body of the large, seven-limbed tarantula sinks into the road’s sun-warmed surface like fresh palm oil on hot bread.

Ayodele will be fascinated at this aspect of her new world. She has yet to realize that there are other things inhabiting Lagos besides carbon-based creatures. There are greater beings of the earth, soil, sea, lagoon and land. This stretch of highway has named itself the Bone Collector. It mostly collects human bones, and the bones of human vehicles. But sometimes it likes the chitinous bones of spiders, too.

^{Chapter 26} Papa

The boy was there. He had no mobile phone. He had never touched a computer. The cramped room he shared with seven other homeless boys had no television. He had no access to any type of screen, large or small. He hadn’t even been immunized against polio. But he was there. Standing before the wrought-iron fence with the hundreds of other people.

To his left was a group of colorful, odd-looking folk who were arguing with a group of mean-looking men. And to his right, dressed in white, were people who’d been “born and born again”. They were the type who would bring him into their home which was really a church to feed him pounded yam and meatless egusi soup as they talked about the magic white man who used to live in the desert.

Despite all these interesting things happening around him, his attention was on something else. The woman he knew wasn’t a woman was speaking.

Papa, the man who took care of him and the other boys, had brought him and four others after hearing on the news that there was a gathering in front of this house. Such gatherings were good places to pick pockets and beg. The boy was not good at picking pockets. He was too slow, too distracted. Something always caught his eye. A woman’s shiny shoes, a man’s funny way of speaking, an insect on his shoulder. And next thing he knew, he’d forget what he was doing, sometimes with his hand still in someone’s pocket.

Today, the distraction was the woman who was not a woman. Even before she started speaking, he noticed her. Oh, he had seen her. She was a lizard and then she was a woman. He saw her run out of the house as a lizard, between the tall dark-skinned man’s legs. It hurt his brain to process the sight of the tiny green lizard swelling and inflating into a mysterious woman with scary eyes.

Vaguely, he remembered her from Bar Beach just before the water had taken the three people. The memory of the stolen people was stronger than most in his head, but he still could not make sense of the one who was the woman who was not a woman. He could not comprehend the fact that he was seeing her a second time. He could only feel a remote sense of recognition and curiosity.

He’d pressed his face to the fence and listened but barely comprehended a word she said. Still, he understood he was witnessing something deep, just as he had witnessed the three people taken on the beach by a grasping fist of water. One of those people had been that dark-skinned man whose legs the lizard had run between. That he remembered.

The boy grinned as the woman spoke. She had a voice like the sweetest candy. He rarely got to eat candy. He especially liked minty chewing gum; it made his thoughts clearer. And when he chewed, the motion of his mouth made him know that if he tried really, really hard, he could speak. His voice would rush up his throat like warm honey and he would produce words and they would make sense.

Yes, he liked the odd woman’s voice very much. As he grinned, he felt warm wet saliva dribble from the sides of his mouth down his chin. Drooling would earn him a slap on the back of the head if his guardian noticed, but he couldn’t help it. Not right now. He was imagining he could speak and doing so was worth the punishment.

When the woman finished talking, there was silence. Everyone around him just stood there. But he liked the looks on their faces. People were dreamily staring at the woman or their mobile phones. He turned this way and that. It was as if he were the only living person in a sea of people-trees. No one moved. They all just smiled pleasantly, as if they were imagining charming possibilities and surprising potential. As he was.

“See what the Lord has brought us?” one of the born and born again people finally said, breaking the silence. He held up his hands, making his bright white robes billow. He was heavyset and his shiny black leather shoes were the type worn by men who drove shiny expensive cars that they would park in the driveways of those gated houses the boy was never allowed near. The last such house he’d walked past, the gate man had sneered at him and pointed his big gun at the boy and said, “Boom!” as he laughed and sat back on his stool. Yes, this man looked as though he would hire a man like that.

“These alien beings will be embraced by the Lord!” the man said.

“Enough!” someone shouted back. “This isn’t the time for that!”

It was a woman’s voice. The boy looked around but he was too small and could not see who it was.

“Enough?” the man in white responded. “The size of the Lord’s flock will never be large enough! Not until he has gathered all of his sheep! Today is a new day. A day when—”

The boy followed the stone with his eyes as it sailed through the air. It hit the bishop on the butt, leaving a dirty mark on his immaculate robes. He yelped and whirled around, furious. There were squeals of protest from the people near the bishop.

“Hey!’

“O ga, o!”

“Chineke!”

“What the hell!”

Then something flew in the opposite direction. A bottle of mineral, the liquid inside was brown, possibly Coca-Cola. It must have missed its target, for it landed on the ground, shattering, splashing a young woman with glass and liquid.

There were exclamations in three different languages, none of which the boy could understand, except for the Pidgin English.

The man in white raised his hands, pleading, “I… I didn’t throw—”

The boy turned around and saw his guardian a few steps away. The other boys had already pressed themselves to him. None of them looked like they had stealing on their minds. Except one boy named Oyo, who was extracting a man’s wallet from his pocket. The man looked down into Oyo’s eyes and slapped him across the face. Their guardian flared up and punched the man in the belly.

The mute boy laughed silently and was about to run to his guardian when he heard another hard slap. He jumped and for a moment, because the sound was so familiar to him, felt his own cheek sting and warm up. He turned around and saw the bishop had fallen. There was a tall, sour-faced man with an open hand standing over him and another woman and man yelling at the bishop.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

The gunshots made the boy crouch low to the ground, hiding his head in his arms. He stayed there, even as people started running. Two men beside him were throwing punches and then a third jumped in. A woman was shrieking in a high-pitched voice that made the boy want to tear his hair out. Then she grunted as something smashed into the side of her head.

“Heeeeeeey!” several men beside her exclaimed. Something crashed to the ground. Two soldiers shot in the air to get people’s attention. This only caused more chaos. When the boy saw a soldier’s chest blow open from the impact of two bullets, he took off with everyone else. Where was the white smoke coming from? He sneezed and coughed, his eyes tearing up and his nose running. The air smelled sour, bloody, dirty. His chest burned when he inhaled. His ears felt stuffed with cotton. He didn’t know where he was going. Or where his guardian had gone.

There.

His guardian. Dragging the four other boys down the street. The mute boy raised his hand and waved, before being overcome by a fit of coughs. He wished he could scream. He needed to scream. He glanced at the house, looking for the woman-like creature with the sweet voice. If he could only hear her speak again, he was sure he could force his voice to work. But she was gone. There were people on the lawn. Some trying to get into the house. There was a group of people embroiled in a terrible fight. Why was everyone fighting?

He could not think about that now. He tried to run toward his guardian but the people around him were running in the opposite direction. People on the other side of the crowd must have tried to come toward his part of the crowd, because now the boy was pressed between five older boys as the crowd squeezed. He couldn’t see his guardian any more. He struggled, but his feet weren’t even on the ground and the crowd was moving away.

When it released him, he ran. A woman fell right before his eyes, wisps of smoke issuing from a bullet hole in her leg. She was one of the women wearing the men’s clothing. The boy ran and ran. As the sun went down, the boy would witness more than his mind could contain.

^{Chapter 27} Fisayo

It was different for Fisayo, the younger sister of Jacobs. The Yoruba woman who was the smart secretary by day and prostitute by night. Since seeing those three people taken by the fist of water the night before, she hadn’t felt like herself. Seeing the footage her brother had shown to the Black Nexus only made her feel more hopeless.

She stood on the concrete walkway that ran alongside Bar Beach. Less than twenty-four hours after the creatures had invaded the water, she had returned to the beach out of habit. Since dropping out of university, this stretch of sand was where her future resided. She would walk it until the day some man wanted more than just to have sex with her. Since she’d put aside her dream of being a nurse, she’d embraced the idea of being a wife, like her mother. A woman who minded the home, the children and lay on her back for only one man. The prostitution was just to make ends meet until that time came.

The time had already come for Bunmi, her best friend, the person who had first shown her how to exchange sex with men for money. Bunmi, whom she no longer heard from. Bunmi, who lived in a mansion on Victoria Island with a rich and powerful businessman she’d met while walking along Bar Beach. The future would come for Fisayo. Bar Beach was where she knew her destiny waited for her.

Nevertheless, after the great boom last night, seeing the shape-shifting creature skulk out of the water and then the three people kidnapped, she’d started wondering if her future was somewhere else. Something else. She had started walking and her legs took her to Bar Beach. When she got there, she barely recognized it. The waters had crept more than halfway up the sand. There were barricades set up in front of the concrete walkways, closed beachfront shops with signs up that said “KEEP OUT”. And in front of the barricades, every hundred feet, stood armed soldiers. The one she approached was young, probably no older than twenty. He was sweating and shifty-eyed. He clearly didn’t want to be on duty.

Why are there soldiers on the beach? she wondered. And barricades? As she approached the young man to ask him, her phone went off. The caller ID said “unknown”. When she opened it, she saw the face of an angel. A serene African woman with dark skin and perfect braids. She reminded Fisayo of an old photo of her grandmother when her grandmother was young.

“That’s the girl from the beach,” she whispered. And from the footage Jacobs had, she thought. My God.

This woman on her cheap mobile phone that couldn’t do more than make and receive phone calls, gazed at her as if she could actually see her. Fisayo froze. If she had looked up, she’d have realized that people walking up and down the street had also stopped and were looking at their phones. Two cars and a truck on the road nearby had pulled over. Hawkers had stopped hawking.

Then the woman on her phone began to speak. Right there on the walkway, Fisayo sat down. Today, she was wearing jeans, a gently fitting red blouse and gym shoes, instead of her usual tight short skirt, breast-popping top and pumps. So she was comfortable as she heard the most horrifying thing in her life. The alien woman had hijacked her phone. She was speaking about taking over Nigeria. Fisayo shut her phone.

She got up. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. This was the rapture, the apocalypse, the end. She opened her mouth to take in more air. She wanted to get to the beach and stand before the water. She wanted to be taken, like those three people who’d been embraced the night before. What have I done that is so terrible? she wondered as she stepped up to the soldier. Selling my body? It is just a body. I have a pure heart.

The soldier was staring at his mobile phone, his mouth hanging open, his gun leaning against his leg. His hands shook. Fisayo could hear the strange woman speaking on his phone, too.

“We do not seek your oil or your other resources,” the woman was saying. “We are here to nurture your world. So, what will you do?”

“What the hell is this?” he whispered, looking at Fisayo. “Is this a joke? Are we under attack by terrorists?” Her heart leaped. His eyes were filled with raw fear. One could not gaze into such eyes and not feel the same thing.

It was hard for her to speak but she did. “I… I don’t know,” she said. “But I know that—”

BOOM!

They grabbed each other and dropped to the ground. Fisayo screamed, clutching the soldier. Her head was vibrating. The ground was shaking. The young man, who smelled like sweat and soap, was shuddering and holding on to her, too. Everything trembled. Birds and bats fell around them. These were followed by smaller creatures, mosquitoes, flies, gnats, which fell to the ground dead. The concrete walkway cracked beneath them. Car alarms went off. Two cars on the road crashed into each other. Several people fell over. The air began to stink of fish.

And then it stopped. Fisayo thought she might have gone deaf. Her ears felt plugged and the young man was speaking to her. All she heard were muffled sounds. He was helping her up. Her nose was bleeding, as was his.

He was asking her something. She squinted, straining to hear him. “Are you all right?” he shouted.

“Yes!” she shouted back, wiping the blood from her nose.

He grabbed his gun, looking beyond her. She turned and gasped. Four men were fighting. There were several naira notes on the ground. Two of the men were grabbing at them. Another two were trying to stop them; one picked up a large rock.

Fisayo turned away before the man brought it down on the other man’s head. The soldier started running toward them, his gun in his hand. Not bothering to remove her gym shoes, Fisayo turned and ran past the barricade onto the barred Bar Beach.

Aside from the surf being way too high and starting to flood some of the beachside restaurants, the water seemed normal enough. It wasn’t boiling hot or freezing cold. It was still clear and wet. She touched the water that lapped at her shoes and brought it to her lips. Still salty. A low wind blew gentle waves on the water and the sun was setting.

“Take me!” she shouted at the ocean. The air smelled cloyingly fishy yet the more she inhaled, the clearer her mind felt. Clean, clean air. “Take me!” She threw off her gym shoes and socks and moved into the water.

Dead fish, large and small, littered the sand and the gentle waves that moved in and out. She saw a deflated jellyfish and the lumpy red and white claw of a large crab. She splashed past them. “Please! Take me, o!” she screamed, crying. Her head ached, her nose was still bleeding and the world was still muted.

She stopped, thigh deep, the waves moving around her legs, staring out at the vast, dark blue water. The sun was barely above the horizon. Soon to set. Yellow-orange like a piece of candy. She spotted an oil tanker in the distance. Then she saw… she didn’t know what it was. In the growing darkness, the huge thing was black and undulating, pushing up and pulling in great pillars like giant phalluses. Red lights pulsed within it. A horrible vehicle; the devil’s danfo. It stretched across the horizon. Had the oil tanker heard the great BOOM, too? Was it louder there? She couldn’t see the tanker any more. Had the aliens taken all of them?

In the middle distance, something enormous and serpentine leaped out of the water and splashed back. She felt a lump in her throat. Strange ships in the distance, monsters in the deep. The end was certainly near. “TAKE ME!” she screamed. Then she dove in. Plash!

She swam. The salt water stung her eyes and her arms quickly felt strained. Soon, she was far out enough to not feel the bottom. She kept swimming.

She felt her lace-front wig lift from her head, leaving only her wig cap. That wig had cost her far too many naira but at the time she’d seen it as an investment in her future. Now it was gone… she hoped she’d soon follow.

The water embraced her. Like a hand. Like a womb. It’s taking me, she thought. She shut her eyes and stopped swimming, held out her arms, floated on the surface. She could feel her body being turned in circles. She opened her mouth and inhaled her last breath of air, fighting to stay relaxed. Then she rolled over, exhaled and sank into the darkness.

When she was washed back onto the beach, she thought she was dead. She opened her eyes and tried to gasp. Instead, she threw up nearly a gallon of water. She vomited and vomited. Then she got up and walked to the water and shouted, “May God set you on fire!” She tore off her wig cap and rubbed her short, wet, damaged hair, freeing it. As she turned to leave Bar Beach, she noticed someone sitting on the sand. A man.

She squinted. It was a man in military uniform. She went a few steps closer and then froze. He was soaked… because he’d just dragged himself out of the ocean. She recognized him. He was one of the stolen people. He, too, had been rejected. Or maybe he was one of them now. She moved toward him, her bare feet kneading the sand as she walked. She would shout at him. She would slap him. She would… She stopped. There was something enormous lying on the beach beyond him. Enormous like… a whale? There were people around and on top of it, too. She could see that several of them had machetes and knives. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

Then movement in the water caught her attention and she gasped. They were coming out of it – people who were not people. Men. Women. No children. Tall. Short. Mostly African. Some Asian. They walked around her and past her without looking at her. Without seeing her. What looked like a white man dressed like an Igbo man; he even wore a red, black and white striped woolen chieftaincy cap. Ridiculous! All wrong. Foreign. Alien.

She felt something break, deep in her mind. Last night, she had sold herself to an American man who afterwards told her she was not dirtier than any other women from any other part of the world. She had watched the devil snatch people into the ocean and return them, infused with evil. She had later seen one of the evil shape-shifters in recorded footage on her brother’s phone and then on the screen of her own phone. A whale had died on Bar Beach. Now she was seeing the city of her birth and upbringing invaded by the evil. And not one of the creatures turned to look at her. To them, she was nothing.

Her eye twitched and her shoeless feet ached. She shoved her wig cap into her bra and scratched at her tender scalp. She had to find her brother. But she would help others, first. She had to tell people. She had to bring Lagos the news, and it wasn’t good news.

When she’d walked down to Bar Beach, she’d been looking for her future. Now she had found it. The world was ripe, on the brink of rotting, of apocalypse. She had to save it. Save it from them.

She’d start with him, the man they’d returned.

But when she looked where he’d been sitting, he was gone. Then she saw him. There he was, stumbling onto the walkway. She took off after him.

^{Chapter 28} The Plantain Tree

Adaora grasped her son Fred’s hand as they watched Father Oke, who stood a few feet away. Someone had thrown a rock at him and then one of the people in his flock responded by throwing a bottle of Coke towards where the rock had come from. Now the tall, sour-faced man who’d initially thrown the rock stood before Father Oke. The woman who’d been splashed with Coke and broken glass stood behind him, glaring angrily at Father Oke.

Father Oke raised his hands, pleading, “I… I didn’t throw—”

The man slapped Father Oke hard across the face. As Father Oke went down, two of his followers surged forward, only to be yanked back by other followers.

“You may not have thrown it, Father, but you’ve kept my mother poor with your damned church,” the man who’d slapped him sneered, looking down at the cowering bishop. “Rubbish.” He glared at the stunned followers and spat to the side. “All of you are rubbish.”

“Look am!” a young man in the onlooking crowd said. “Na de idiot priest who go slap woman on YouTube! Na justice!”

“See how you like it!” a woman shouted at Oke. “Who winch now?!”

Adaora would have smiled if she hadn’t been in fear for Father Oke’s life. She despised him, but she didn’t want him beaten to death by a mob. She squeezed Fred’s hand harder and he squeezed back. “Mommy,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Don’t let go.”

“I won’t.”

Near the front door in the yard, Ayodele was watching all the wahala in the crowd, a pleasant smile on her face. Anthony stood beside Ayodele, grasping Kola’s hand as the little girl continued to film, holding the camera with her other hand.

Benson still stood outside the wrought-iron gate. “Shoot it!” Benson yelled to the soldiers on his left, spit flying from his mouth. He was standing beside Adaora, hopping from one foot to the other like a child about to have an accident, his eyes wide and wild. He was pointing at Ayodele. “Shoot it, Private Elenwoke! Shoot it now!”

“No!” Adaora shouted. Still holding Fred’s hand, she turned to Benson. “No! Don’t!”

Private Elenwoke looked confused as he raised his AK-47 and aimed through the gate at Ayodele.

Ayodele’s eyes fell on him.

“Don’t!” Adaora screamed.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

The smile dropped from Ayodele’s face as she stumbled back and looked down at her abdomen. There were several holes through her white shirt, at her belly and her chest.

“Kola!” Adaora screamed. Kola had been next to Ayodele, filming her, when the soldiers started shooting. Now she was sitting at Ayodele’s feet. Her left arm was bleeding. Adaora let go of Fred’s hand and pushed past Benson and Father Oke’s white-robed followers, fumbling for her key ring. She shoved a key in the keyhole and opened the gate. The moment she was in, Fred ran to her and grabbed her hand. They both ran to Kola. Adaora heard people flooding into the yard behind her.

She reached her daughter as Anthony stood looking down at Ayodele, who’d begun shrieking and thrashing. Adaora picked Kola up and moved her away from the woman writhing on the ground.

Kola was whimpering as she sat, trying not to look at her left arm. “Is it bad, Mommy? Is it bad?”

“It’s not bad, honey,” Adaora said, looking over her daughter’s arm. Blood pumped from the gunshot wound to the beat of Kola’s heart. It took all Adaora had to stay calm. “Relax,” she breathed. “Lie down, sweetie.” As Kola did so, Adaora took her arm and held it up. Gravity would slow the blood loss. She wasn’t sure if she should apply pressure with the bullet possibly still in there. Beside her, Fred began to cry.

Adaora glanced at Anthony. He was looking down at Ayodele, who screamed and undulated and… began to melt. The sound of marbles on glass was everywhere, filling Adaora’s head, the noise making it hard to think. Adaora could feel even the tiny hairs on her face vibrating and pulling. Her stomach shuttered and her head throbbed. Benson and five soldiers stood over them, pointing guns at Ayodele, expressions uncertain.

Benson was shouting at Ayodele; he’d been shouting the whole time. “Don’t move! Just, just, just stay right there, now.”

A soldier knelt beside Kola with a first aid kit.

“Keep her arm up,” he said, opening up the box.

“Ah!” she heard Fred cry. She turned round to see Chris wrapping his arms around the boy, and every muscle in her body tensed.

“It’s OK,” Chris whispered into his son’s ear. “Shhh.” He looked at Adaora. “Is she OK?”

“She’s been shot,” Adaora said.

They looked into each other’s eyes for several seconds. Then Chris nodded at Adaora and she nodded back. The soldier was examining Kola’s arm. The bleeding didn’t appear to be slowing.

Yards away, Ayodele was still shrieking as Anthony stood over her, unsure of what to do. She had bled not a drop of blood. She wasn’t just melting, she was disintegrating. Her skin was growing grainy, her hands and the lower part of her face losing their shape. She was staring at Kola and Kola was staring at her. Then Ayodele looked up at Benson, her gaze moving wildly between him and the other soldiers. Her left eye had dissolved to nothing but the look in her still intact right eye was one of pure hatred.

Benson fired his gun, hitting Ayodele in the leg. Anthony leaped to the side. “Shoot it!” Benson yelled. “Kill it! Kill it!” Three soldiers opened fire on Ayodele again. They shot her in the thighs, chest, face, everywhere. Her fragile, greying body was hopping and jerking on the ground. Adaora pulled Kola close as the child screamed and sobbed. She hoped Chris was doing the same for Fred.

The sound of marbles grew so loud that she hunched over Kola to protect her from the harsh noise. She struggled to keep Kola’s arm up. Through it all she could hear muffled screaming. The voices of men, not Ayodele. Then she felt more than heard a wet pop!, and hot liquid sprayed across her face. And then… silence.

She opened her eyes and immediately wanted to shut them again.

Where the soldiers had stood, heaps of raw meat wriggled and then became still. Her husband was covering Fred’s face. The one soldier who had been tending to Kola’s arm had his hands over his ears and his eyes shut. Anthony was on the lawn, mere steps away, his head pressed to the grass, his hands over his head. All of them were wet with blood. Adaora was the only one in the group who had her eyes open. There were people from the crowd in the yard, some running into the house, others standing yards away, staring. Most were still cowering, terrified by the gunshots and alien noise. However, Adaora focused only on her children, husband, the soldier beside her, Anthony, and… the alien. Ayodele slowly got up and stood tall before the veiny masses of yellow-white fat, pink-red tissue and muscle, bunched brown skin, and broken bone. She was whole, spotless, and now wearing a plain brown dress. She was scowling at Adaora.

Adaora looked up at her, pleading silently. She didn’t know what she was asking for but she was pleading. These aliens had come in peace. Had come. Had.

Ayodele turned to the bloody lumps and Adaora hid her face in Kola’s neck. “It’s going to be fine,” she murmured into her daughter’s ear. She heard the sound of marbles again. And when she looked up this time, she hoped that Ayodele would be gone. She was not. But the wet piles of meat, the scattered clothes, even the spattered blood, were gone as though they had never been there.

In their place was a plantain tree, heavy with unripe plantain. Adaora stared at it, understanding what had happened. She felt like both vomiting and sighing with relief. Ayodele had taken the elements of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium that had been Benson and the other soldiers and rearranged them into a plant. Does the soul transform, too? Adaora wondered. She’d never believed in God but she was a scientist and knew that matter could be neither created nor destroyed. It just changed form.

“Are you happy with that?” Ayodele snapped at Adaora.

Adaora nodded.

“I am not,” Ayodele said. She walked toward the gate. In the emptying street, a few people were fighting, some were gawking, others crying but most of them fleeing. Adaora’s mouth fell open as she noticed this for the first time. She’d been so focused on what was happening in the yard that she hadn’t realized that something worse had happened in the street! There were bodies lying on the road, wounded people crawling to safety, a car burning, people crying. Adaora could hear the sound of glass breaking.

“Don’t,” Kola whispered. She cringed at the pain in her arm. She was looking at Ayodele, now halfway across the yard. “We need you.”

Adaora looked at her daughter, shocked. No! No, leave us. Keep going, she thought to Ayodele. I beg you.

Somehow, over all the noise, Ayodele heard Kola’s soft words. She stopped.

“I’m sorry that you hurt,” Kola said, weakly. “So do I.”

Ayodele came back to them. Chris got to his feet and picked up Fred, backing away from Ayodele as she knelt beside Kola. There were tears in Ayodele’s eyes. Adaora put a protective arm around Kola as Ayodele looked at them. As Adaora watched, two tiny, dented metal objects fell from beneath Ayodele’s brown gown; one landed in the grass beside her and the other landed on her thigh and tumbled to the grass. It was still hot, but not enough to burn. A bullet.

Ayodele looked into Adaora’s eyes. Adaora held her breath. The warm, curious, light-hearted being that Ayodele had been was gone. The eyes Adaora looked into now were those of an angry, bitter old woman. Adaora didn’t move away with Kola as Ayodele leaned closer. It was instinct. Despite the look on Ayodele’s face, Adaora knew this creature would not harm her child. Ayodele unwrapped the tight bandage from Kola’s arm. Blood immediately began to seep out of the wound.

“Mommy,” Kola moaned. Adaora took her other hand.

“It’s OK,” Adaora whispered.

The expression on Ayodele’s face softened as she ran her hand over the blood on Kola’s arm. Wherever her hand touched, it absorbed the blood like a sponge. Soon, there was only the bullet wound left. Adaora’s stomach clenched at the sight of it. Ayodele lightly touched the injury and her hand seemed to disintegrate into a colorful mist like the type one would see rising from a waterfall in the early-morning sun. Kola tensed as the mist sank into her arm.

“Does it hurt?” Adaora asked, trying to keep her voice calm.

“Feels like ants,” Kola whimpered. “I hate ants. I hate ants, Mommy!”

“They are not ants, dear,” Ayodele said, her voice gentle and soft, almost as it had been before. “It is me. I am speaking with you. Rebuild yourself, Kola.”

Kola closed her eyes, and Adaora could have sworn she felt heat pulse from her daughter. She smelled smoke.

“Good,” Ayodele said. “Become better.”

Kola was breathing heavily now and frowning, her eyes still shut. Now Adaora could actually see the acrid-smelling smoke lifting from her daughter’s arm. It was thick and white and rose lazily into the air like incense.

When Ayodele took her hand away, the hole was gone. Kola took one look at her healed flesh and then leaned forward and vomited, coughing between heaves from the smoke.

“It is overwhelming,” Ayodele said flatly. Adaora didn’t think she sounded all that overwhelmed.

Something crashed, but not from the street. Adaora looked up at her house. “Oh my God!”

The smell of smoke hadn’t come from her daughter’s healed arm. Something in the house was on fire. Her husband, Anthony and the soldier who’d been helping Kola ran inside. Ayodele followed at a walk. Adaora scrambled to her feet, hesitated and then followed, dragging Kola and Fred.

While Ayodele had been transforming the soldiers, dispelling bullets from her flesh and healing Kola’s arm, looters had stolen Chris and Adaora’s televisions and computers. They’d tracked in dirt and destroyed the back door. And someone had purposely turned on the gas stove and tried to set some yams from the pantry on fire. Chris put out the smoldering tubers with the fire extinguisher. The soldier, whose name was Hassam, helped, too, though he had a glazed look of shock and confusion in his eyes. “That woman healed the child,” he said, turning the stove off and opening a window. “She kills and gives life.”

Adaora sat the children at the kitchen table and Ayodele sat across from them. She made a fist and rested it on the table. To Adaora, this was worse than slamming it. She paused, glancing at her husband, who was a few steps away. Then she went to check on her lab. The lab’s door was closed. A good sign.

“I hate humans,” Ayodele said. Adaora could hear her clearly, even though Ayodele was in the kitchen and she was down the hall. “I want nothing to do with you, “Ayodele continued. “Any of you.”

Adaora frowned, about to go back to the kitchen. She trusted Ayodele to not hurt her children, but that was as far as her trust went. Ayodele had caused those men to explode and then turned them into a tree. That’s what one got for trying to kill her… could she even be killed? Adaora didn’t know. Maybe Ayodele responded so strongly because they made her experience pain, Adaora thought. The way she was screaming and thrashing, she was not just in pain, she was shocked to be in it. Whatever the reason, it clearly wasn’t good to get on her bad side. Adaora brought out the key to her lab as she grasped the door’s knob. Her heart was racing.

“Do you hate all of us?” she heard Kola ask Ayodele. “You just saved me.”

Before inserting the key, Adaora tried the door knob. It turned. “Shit,” Adaora hissed. She leaned her head against the door, tears rolling down her cheeks. She focused on the voice of her children in the kitchen.

“And just because a few humans acted stupid, it doesn’t mean we’re all stupid,” she heard Fred add. “We learned that in school. And you’re much smarter than everyone at school put together.”

Adaora smiled, wiping away her tears.

“And you can’t cause all that has happened and then just leave,” Kola said firmly. “You said you had a mission! That you were the am… ambah-sidoor, remember?”

“I will think about it,” Ayodele said.

Adaora went into her lab. As she descended the stairs, she could practically feel it. Yes, people had been down here. The broken lock made that clear. As soon as she’d turned on the lights, she turned them right back off again. She’d seen all she needed to see. Nothing was on fire. But the floors were wet from the smashed aquarium, the limp bodies of her beloved fish already drying. The television and computer were gone. The place was ransacked. They did all this while we were fighting for our lives in the front yard, she thought. What kind of people would do that? But she knew the answer. It didn’t take much in Lagos. All it took was a semi-peaceful alien invasion to destroy everything she held dear. Well, nearly everything. Her children were alive and happy.

She went back up.

“Sit,” Anthony told Chris. The children were upstairs in Kola’s room, asleep, and Adaora was watching over them. Downstairs, Ayodele watched out the window with the soldier Hassam.

In the kitchen, Chris sat down at the table. Anthony placed the large bowl of cold jollof rice before Chris and dug a spoon into it. The power was out and it would have been crazy to turn on the generator; the noise would attract more attention. Plus, the microwave had been stolen.

“Eat,” he said.

“Do you think she’s an angel, then?” Chris asked.

Anthony shook his head. “Not at all, chale. You need to start thinking outside the box, my friend.”

Chris frowned at him, frowned at the rice and frowned at the spoon in the rice. He slowly picked it up. Then he ate, and as he ate, he began to feel better. Anthony crossed his arms over his chest, watching him.

Upstairs, Adaora leaned against the wall, glad her two children were asleep before her. They were OK. Both of them. She felt emotion swell in her chest as she allowed herself to remember Kola being shot. The blood. The pain on her eight-year-old face. Adaora took a deep breath and steadied herself. When she turned to go downstairs, she realized that she was floating three inches above the ground. My idiot husband is right, she thought numbly. I am a witch.

Outside, Lagos rioted and aliens invaded.

^{Chapter 29} The Eko Hotel

They walked up the beach and into Lagos. All were well dressed. All were dry. There were about a hundred of them. They were solemn. Not serene like Ayodele. Though they did not shamble along, though they looked alive and well, they reminded Agu of zombies. It was something about the way they had walked out of the water and seemed so indifferent about doing so. As he sat there facing the ocean, his back to Lagos, he felt present at the death of something. The death of Lagos. The death of Nigeria. Africa. Everything?

He squinted, the salt on his drying face stinging his eyes. The surf slapped his ankles as it rushed in and out, slowly retreating to its normal level. The spacecraft in the sky (this was all Agu could think to call it), spread across the entire near-dark horizon, hovering above the water. Shifting and undulating, peaks rising and melting and rising again. It was too far out for him to tell just how high it hovered over the water. Or what sound it made, if it made sound.

Something huge and snake-like leaped out of the water. It arched in the air, twisting in a spiral and noiselessly dropping back into the depths. At least ten grey shark-like fins all in a row surfaced not far from shore. They – or it – sharply turned and headed farther out to sea. What have they done to the ocean? he wondered, pulling at his soaked clothes. He coughed as he inhaled a whiff of smoke. He could hear the distant crash of shattering glass, shouting, shots being fired, echoes of raucous laughter. Something had happened while he was out at sea. Wet warmth dribbled down his face and he touched the cut on his forehead.

“Dammit,” he moaned, leaning back on his elbows. His head ached and his entire body felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds. He’d deal with the cut later. He’d deal with himself later. He coughed again as he pulled off his shirt. He wrung it out, the water spattering on his soaked boots, and put it back on. He was alive, and worse things had happened. He chuckled. This wasn’t the first invasion of Nigeria, after all.

He trudged across the sand, then through the back roads to Adetokunbo Ademola Street. Here, the sound of many voices, honking horns, the patter of hundreds of feet increased the closer he got. He walked up an alley to the street and for the first time, he saw what was happening.

“Shit!” he exclaimed. “What in God’s name… ?”

He couldn’t move; he became two eyes and a sinking stomach. The streets were full of people. A group of teenage girls ran by screaming, looking over their shoulders like they’d seen a ghost. There was a fight going on across the street. A group of boys was smashing car and building windows with wooden planks and hammers. They jumped on and kicked at unfortunate vehicles that had to slow down as they tried to get down the congested road.

Several buildings were on fire. Competing music blasted from multiple places. There was a sudden rush as a white man ran by, pursued by ten Area Boys all shouting, “Stranger! Kill am! Kill the stranger!” The man rounded a corner and the boys followed. After a moment, Agu heard the sounds of cheering and laughing and one voice screaming.

To step into this nightmare was to step into the unknown. He’d seen such chaos before, when he was sent north during fresh riots between Christians and Muslims. He’d learned the hard way that he could never trust people during such times. Anyone could get swept in to the mob’s violent mentality at any moment.

He spotted police and soldiers trying to break up a particularly large fight between many men. He felt a stab of guilt. He was supposed to be with them, working to restore peace and order. He shook his head and stepped into the street. No, he thought, remembering Benson and the others assaulting the woman and then beating him up when he tried to stop it. All that’s changed. He stepped back into the shadow of one of the beach shops and reached into his pocket, feeling for the piece of paper with Anthony’s phone number on it. It was mush, soaked through from the water. Slightly panicked, he ran through the number in his head. Relief. He remembered it clearly.

“Excuse me, sir,” he called to a man rushing by. “Sir, abeg, may I borrow your phone?”

The man stopped and turned to him with eyes so wild that Agu stepped back.

“Eh,” the man said, frowning and stepping toward Agu. “My phone, you say?”

There was a loud crash. Agu and the man whipped around. There were cheers as someone smashed through a computer storefront window. The alarm went off as over thirty people rushed in, then it died. Agu could hear the people inside.

“Yes,” Agu said, fighting to focus. “I just… I just need…”

“Why?” the man said, now narrowing his eyes. “Why do you want to use my phone? What for?”

“To reach my friends,” Agu begged. “Please, o. Something is happening on Bar Beach, I have to—”

“Your friends? What about Bar Beach, eh? Are you one of them?” the man gasped, stepping further away. He spoke in Igbo. “Do you want to communicate with them?”

“What?” Agu asked in English.

The man turned on his heel and ran off, as did a few others who had heard what the man said. Agu felt the air leave his lungs; something was very wrong. Looters, rioters, several of them stopped to stare at him. Some moved toward him. A group of Area Boys gathered to his left.

“This man!” a woman shouted, pointing at Agu. She had short wild hair and no shoes. She looked like she’d just walked out of the ocean herself. “He is one of them! Look am. Get am! He is one of them! I saw him go into the ocean last night and come out!” Her eyes bulged with madness. “He was taken by the aliens and infected with alien disease!”

Agu felt a flash of rage toward Ayodele. What has she done?! But he was trapped. All he could do was turn and run like hell. The Area Boys and who knew how many others gave chase. They came at Agu from all directions but he dodged them. He ran past a burning car. He leaped over two women fighting. He crunched over the glass of a broken window in front of a burning building. Then something smashed against the side of his head and crashed to the ground. A bottle. Coca-Cola? he wondered. The gods must really be crazy.

He stumbled, his head hurting. But he had to admit, he did not feel like a man who’d just been smashed upside the head with a glass bottle. He felt… fine. He touched the spot where he’d been hit and pressed it. No pain. No swelling. But his hand came away bloody. The other cut was still seeping. He was OK. But the rage that was already boiling in him surged. This time toward the people who’d just tried to kill him… for being something he was not. He could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

A man ran up and punched him in the face. “Kill you,” the man growled. He punched Agu again. Two other men joined in, kicking him in the small of his back and kneeing him in the balls. His goddamn balls! Yet it didn’t hurt. He felt nothing but a fresh hot flare of fury and it filled his entire being.

He grabbed the man who’d kneed him, brought his fist back and smashed him in the belly. The man flew back, his arm denting the side of a car before he tumbled over it and fell into a group of onlookers like a meteorite crashing to earth. Everyone on the street went completely silent, staring at the pile of unmoving people, knocked over like bowling pins; the man Agu had grabbed lay amongst them, one of his legs twisted in a bizarre direction. Agu blinked, his mind calming, the red clearing.

So Agu, the soldier, trained to defend people during a time of need, who had instead probably just killed someone, turned and ran like hell.

Shouting, fighting, breaking, laughing, running, hiding: this was the scene on Adetokunbo Ademola Street. Agu needed a mobile phone. But something had happened while he was riding the manatee, and now asking to use one suddenly seemed like a bad, bad idea. Thankfully, Agu had a plan B.

He stumbled up a manicured driveway to the luxurious Eko Hotel, skirting around the over-maintained palm trees and past the locked-up gift shop. As it was a haven for expats, he’d expected the place to be like a fortress. The Eko Hotel was made for times like this. Instead it was surrounded by skittish armed security guards who barely said a word to him as he passed. They let him, because he knew every single one of them. He’d known them for years. Thankfully, for the moment, the rioters weren’t focused on the Eko Hotel, but Agu had a feeling that the respite was only temporary. Any symbol of wealth in Lagos would eventually become a target.

What struck him most when he stepped into the lobby of the posh hotel was the shiny floor. It was so shiny he could see the terrible state he was in. His fatigues were wrinkled, wet, soiled with sand and spattered with his own blood. His face was puffy and ashy with sea salt, his lip and forehead crusty with dried blood. At least the swelling had gone down in his right eye and he could see through it now. Here, he could find out what had happened while he was in the sea. And use a telephone.

The lobby was packed with terrified tourists and expats. The Eko was one of the few places in Lagos where, ordinarily, you saw more than a few white faces. European and American businessmen, mainly. It was no different now. To Agu’s eyes, they looked bloated and red.

“The fuck if I know,” a thickset British man yelled, throwing himself onto a nearby sofa. He had a wheeled suitcase but he didn’t look like he was going anywhere. “It’s a citywide 419! The whole bloody place is fucking itself!”

The businessmen around him nodded in agreement.

“I have a satellite phone. How the blazes did they hack into it?”

“That guy says they’re tearing each other apart out there because everyone thinks everyone else is an alien and no one knows what the aliens really look like.”

“Superstitious bollocks. At least this place is safe.”

“For now.”

“How can they just shut down the airports?”

“Fucking aliens, my arse.”

Agu tucked his chin into his neck as he slipped past them. He didn’t want to answer any questions. He peeked into the computer center. Every single one was in use. “Shit,” he whispered.

He rubbed his forehead as he approached the reception desk. Focus, Agu, he thought. First things first. Get back to Adaora’s house.

“Obi,” he said, leaning on the reception desk. A smile touched his lips, his first in who knew how long. It felt good.

His little cousin Obinna’s back was to Agu, as he spoke with several of his colleagues. Further down the counter, one poor desk clerk was stuck arguing with a frazzled-looking group of white women.

“Please, just calm down,” the desk clerk begged, holding up her hands.

Two of the white women were leaning on each other and weeping as they glanced at the front doors. They were probably afraid that machete-wielding Area Boys were about to burst into the hotel. On any other night, Agu would have sneered at such women. Tonight, it seemed, their fears were more than justified.

Obinna turned around. “Agu?” He grinned. “Brother!” He leaned over the counter to give him a hug.

Agu held up his hands. “You don’t want to hug me,” he said. “I smell like hell and I’m dripping with sweat.”

“You came from out there?” Obi asked.

“It’s bad,” was all Agu said.

“What happened to you?”

Agu had always looked out for his little cousin. He’d been the one to get him this receptionist job. The son of his mother’s closest sister, Obi might as well have been his brother. But that didn’t change the fact that Agu had been aware of all his life: Obi lacked courage and imagination. When there was a fight, Obi fled. When challenged, he fled. When someone did wrong and it was time to stand, he fled. Best for him to stay at the Eko and know nothing about Ayodele or where Agu was headed.

“I just got caught up in it,” Agu said. He glanced over his shoulder and met the eyes of the flustered, red-faced British expat. The man was staring at him as if he were an alien. Not again, Agu thought. He turned back to his cousin.

“Obi,” he said. “You’ve got to help me.”

“Na wao,” Obi said, looking him up and down. “Seriously, bro, what has happened to you?”

“You will never believe me,” Agu said, lowering his voice. He hesitated, reconsidering his request. But what choice did he have? “Please, abeg, I need… internet. Let me use your laptop. I know you have it back there.”

“Why not use the public ones?” Obi asked, frowning.

“I need to send a text. But all your computers are being used,” he said.

“For?”

“I just need to contact someone.”

Obi paused, looking at him for a moment. Agu almost laughed at the ridiculousness of his little cousin looking him over as if he were some Area Boy. Obi was still the Obi he’d always known: a coward, and more loyal to his job than the cousin who got him the job.

“How do I know you’re not one of… one of them?” Obi blurted. He looked as if he regretted the question the moment it escaped from his lips, but he didn’t take his words back. Agu snorted with disgust and sucked his teeth loudly.

Two of Obi’s colleagues were walking toward them. One was a tall, intense-looking man and the other was a short woman. Toyin and Vanessa, going by their nametags.

“Who is this?” Toyin asked.

“Abeg, fly,” Agu snapped at Toyin, growing impatient.

“Do you know him?” Vanessa asked Obi, ignoring Agu. “We can have him thrown out. Look at him.”

Obi, his own cousin, looked uncertainly between Agu and the newcomers. Images of all that had happened tried to flood Agu’s mind. Being underwater. The questions. Fighting Adaora’s crazed husband. And if he ever got his hands on Benson, that would be a dark day indeed. The speedboat and the men torn apart in the water by monsters. The sea cow that had brought him to shore. The dead whale. The riots. His power. He might have killed someone back there in the street.

Agu took another deep breath, feeling a bit steadier. He had to get to Ayodele. If he could get her to the President, all this might stop. Might.

“Look,” Agu said, raising his voice. “I know what’s going on. I am a soldier. You see my clothes? Ehe,” he nodded. “I have been to hell and back tonight.” He paused. “I have… seen them. I know them. Please, abeg, Obinna, brother, let me just get online for a few minutes, o.”

Vanessa and Toyin stared at him, open-mouthed.

“So you have seen them?” Vanessa finally asked, her voice soft with awe.

“I have.”

“Are they dangerous?”

They could be, he thought. “No.”

Vanessa shook her head. “I have to disagree, after what that one did to the airwaves and networks.”

“And by the way you are looking,” Toyin added.

“They didn’t do this to me,” he snapped. “Human beings did!”

“What the hell is going on out there?” Obi asked him, ducking down to get his laptop and setting it on the counter.

“Chaos,” Agu said, waking the computer and clicking open Obi’s Skype application. Thankfully Obi had some credit on it. “And if you let it touch you, you become part of it. Do things you’d never do.” He looked up at his cousin. “Obi, I know you have a mobile phone.” Obi looked away. Mumu! Idiot! Agu thought angrily. “Just call my parents, sha. Please. Make sure they are all right.” He typed in Anthony’s number – he hoped he remembered it correctly – and quickly tapped out a brief message.

Obi nodded, bringing the phone from his pocket and turning away.

After hitting send, Agu leaned back against the counter. He could see that a building across the street was on fire.

“They are OK,” Obi said, turning back and hanging up the phone. “They said there were some men – soldiers – but they stayed inside and they’re fine. Who—”

“The story is too long to tell,” Agu said. He felt faint with relief. So it seemed that Benson had made good on his threat against Agu’s family. Evil man.

“Do you think this is the end of days?” Obi asked, wide-eyed.

“No.”

^{Chapter 30} Crusade

Adaora read the text message from Agu three times: “Stay put. I’m coming. Agu.”

She handed the phone back to Anthony, put her elbows on the table and let her head fall into her hands. Hassam, the soldier who had tried to administer first aid to Adaora’s daughter, had left. He said he was going to try to restore peace to Victoria Island. Adaora was glad he was gone.

The windows were open to let in fresh air – hot, humid air. The house stank of smoke, regardless. She wasn’t sure if it was from the fire Chris had put out or the burning house a block away. With her eyes closed, the sounds of windows being smashed, a door being kicked in, screeching tires, and people running and shouting on the roads and lawns was louder.

She peeked through her fingers at the tiny monkey sitting on the kitchen table looking sullen, and her belly cramped from suppressed giggles. The monkey was fuzzy, soft, brown, had a pinched face like a sour elder and was so small it could comfortably sit in the palm of Adaora’s hand. It looked exactly like a smaller version of the stuffed animal Kola grasped in her arms every night.

“Please,” Kola said to it. “Don’t be like that. Didn’t you say that you came here to talk to us?”

Fred was staring at the monkey, his eyes glassy and his mouth hanging open. He needed a nap. He needed real rest. They all did. The monkey pulled the sides of its mouth down, looking even more sullen. It crossed its tiny thin arms over its furry body and turned its back to Kola. It was clenching its fists so tightly that Adaora could hear the tiny joints pop. Ayodele had changed herself into this creature an hour ago because she’d decided that she no longer wanted to be a human being.

“I don’t think we should stay here long,” Anthony murmured, looking out the front window.

“I know,” Adaora said, joining him.

They watched Father Oke for a moment. He’d approached with about twenty-five others and now they stood on the lawn in front of the plantain tree. Father Oke marched back and forth, speaking passionately and gesticulating wildly. His flock clapped and waved their hands in the air, rejuvenated by whatever he was stirring them up to do. On the road behind them, a band of young men set upon a parked car, smashing the windows with tire irons and bricks. Some of them laughed and pointed at Father Oke and his people.

An okada pulled up to the curb outside Adaora’s house and someone climbed down. Adaora squinted, trying to see what was happening. The woman and the driver exchanged words and then the driver sped off. The woman shouted after him, looked around and started walking. She was wearing jeans and a red blouse and she walked with an unafraid, angry gait.

When the woman passed the group of destructive Area Boys they pointed and laughed. One even smacked her backside. The woman glared at the boy and slapped him in the face. He only laughed as he shoved her along. She cursed at the boys but kept moving. Father Oke and his congregation were too preoccupied to notice the woman and her troubles, let alone offer her any assistance.

Bad, bad, bad, Adaora thought, shivering. This is a bad situation about to get worse. She got to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”

Adaora closed the door quietly and descended the stairs into her lab. Chris was staring at the remains of her aquarium. She didn’t follow his eyes. She could smell her dead pet sea creatures and that was enough.

“Chris,” she whispered.

He didn’t turn around. After eating the bowl of jollof rice Anthony had placed in front of him, Chris had gone on to eat some leftover gari and egusi soup Adaora had made days ago. Then he’d eaten some biscuits, a bag of groundnuts and three oranges, and washed it all down with a bottle of Guinness from a box the rioters had missed in the cupboard.

“I’ll… I’ll go out and talk to Father Oke,” Chris said.

“No,” Adaora replied. “Are you blind? The man’s gone mad.” She took a deep breath and made herself speak before she could lose her nerve. “Take the children to your mother’s. They live in that gated community and—”

Chris whirled around, fire in his eyes. “How stupid do you think I am?”

“What? Chris, I’m just—”

“I saw you,” he said.

Adaora frowned, confused.

“Witch, harlot, tramp… whore!” He whispered his words, but this didn’t make them any less painful to him or Adaora. “I saw you with him, Adaora.” He sneered. “Wife.”

“You… saw? Saw what?”

“‘Saw what?’, she asks.” He stepped up to her. “Saw you! You and that soldier in the car, kissing. Out in public, like a common whore.”

Adaora was too shocked to speak.

Chris nodded. “God shows all,” he said. “In Jesus’s name.”

“I… I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean…”

“Don’t!” He lowered his voice. “Don’t give me that rubbish. You did something to me… before you left, you did something to me. You probably did it to him, too. If I could beat it out of you, I would. Because I love you, you are my wife. But you’re evil. Father Oke was right about that. You’re a marine witch. Tell me you are not a witch, tell me I didn’t feel what I felt. Tell me it wasn’t you holding me down on the floor when we were fighting.” He paused, and when she didn’t say anything, he added, “I don’t want you near the children.”

“I don’t care what you want,” she snapped. “They’re my children, too. I gave birth to them, not you!”

His eyes grew wide and his face went from brown to a deep dark brown red. He clenched his hands into fists. But Adaora wasn’t afraid of him. She could feel it inside her. All she had to do was let herself loose and this fight, like the last one, would be over before it began. She stared him down.

“Is everything OK down there?” Anthony called from the top of the stairs.

“Mommy?” Kola called. “Daddy?”

Chris’s eyes were twitching, but he was unclenching his fists.

“Yes, we’re fine,” Adaora said. She didn’t let her eyes leave Chris’s. “Just… talking. Kola, we’ll be up soon.”

“You sure?” Anthony said.

“We’re fine.”

“OK.”

Adaora didn’t hear the door shut and she was glad. She swallowed and repeated the hardest words of her life. “Take them to your mother’s. It’s safer there.”

“And you’ll stay here? To wait for him?”

“To finish this thing with Ayodele,” she said. “We need to get her to the President.”

“Let the soldier do it. That’s his job, not yours.”

“It needs to be the three of us.”

“Why?”

“It’s… it’s God’s will.” Adaora held her breath.

Chris laughed hard and she was relieved when he stepped away. “You know nothing of God’s will.”

Neither do you, she thought.

“You’ll leave your children to go with him?” he asked.

“Oh my God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t you see what Ayodele…” She took a deep breath, gathering herself. “Listen to what’s going on out there! Did you not hear what she said? This isn’t about our relationship, or whether I’m a bad mother!”

“You’re leaving me.”

Adaora sighed and looked away. “This is not the time for this conversation, Chris.”

“You decided to allow him to touch you.” His eyes glistened as he traced his fingers over her face. Every part of her wanted to flinch, but she didn’t. “God is always in control,” he said. Then he strode past her and up the stairs. Adaora sat down on the bottom step and looked at her feet, smelling the destruction.

Later, upstairs, she found Kola and Fred slipping on their shoes and arguing over who got to tell Grandma everything. Chris was packing biscuits, groundnuts and bananas into a briefcase. Anthony leaned against the counter, his arms across his chest, silent. Chris glared at Adaora but said nothing. Ayodele, still in her tiny monkey form, sat on the dinner table, her furry back to everyone.

“We called Grandma,” Kola said. “She said if we could get there, we will be safe!”

Adaora nodded. “She’s right.”

“Yet you’ll stay here where it isn’t safe at all,” Chris said.

Silence. Something outside crunched loudly.

“Correct. I’ll stay,” she finally said.

“Why?” Fred asked, breathing heavily. His nostrils were flaring. Adaora knew the look; he was trying not to cry. Kola hugged him to her.

“We need to wait for Agu,” Adaora said, trying not to cringe at the anticipation of Chris’s reaction.

“Why?” Chris snapped. “Is he your husband?”

Anthony chuckled to himself and looked at his feet, muttering, “Nonsense.”

“Kola, Fred, go upstairs and grab some of your school books.”

“Mommy, you should save the world,” Fred said. “If you have a chance to—”

“Shut up and go upstairs,” Chris shouted. “What kind of child enters adult conversation? Abomination!”

Kola and Fred ran upstairs.

“I’m not having this discussion, Chris,” she said when they were gone. Unconsciously her hand went to her cheek. “We’ve talked enough.”

“I… I’m sorry,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “I should never have laid a hand on you.”

“I don’t care.”

Pause.

“Adaora,” he said. “What… I… what was it that you did? When… when we were fighting?”

She felt her belly flip but said nothing.

He stepped closer and she didn’t move away. “Does it have to do with how you were born? You—”

“Chris, didn’t you dismiss me as a marine witch or whatever the hell you and those people fear so much?” Her eyes stung but she continued. “Just go with that for now, if that sets your mind at ease. Three things need to happen. One, our children need to be safe. Two, Anthony, Ayodele and I need to find Agu. You won’t understand and I’m not going to explain. Three, we need to get Ayodele to the President. And guess what, Chris, I happen to know where the President is going to be at 6 a.m. If Agu comes soon, we’ve got all night to get there. But we have to get there. With what’s going on outside, that’s going to be difficult.”

Pause. “Why the three of you?” Chris asked.

“I don’t… no, that’s not true.” She blinked as it dawned on her. She took his shoulder, gripping it. “Chris?”

“What?” He looked afraid.

Her heart was pounding. Her hands were shaking. She’d never been religious. She’d never believed in the mysterious as her husband did. She was a scientist. Her world was founded upon empirical evidence, on rigorous experimentation, on data. She was the thinker and he was the one willing to simply have faith. That had been what kept them balanced. Chris was a genius when it came to securing and growing contracts. He had stocks in America and in the UK. He followed hunches when he did business. He consulted dibias, witchdoctors and babawelos when he felt he was at a crossroads. And this had always worked. It had made them rich.

For Adaora, however, logic determined her actions. She went to church because she was expected to go, not because she believed. She studied the ocean and its creatures. She calculated, documented, observed. She wrote articles for academic journals and was respected in her field. She was a well-regarded professor and, though she made far less than Chris, her income had made them that much richer.

They had known each other all their lives. There was history. And there was mystery in that history that they had silently agreed never to discuss. Neither of them had ever called the other evil or illogical… until the last year after Chris had had the scare on the airplane from Lagos to Owerri and became born again. Since then, things had unraveled.

“You’re right,” she whispered.

“About what?”

“The world.”

His eyebrows went up. Then he smiled.

“No, no, not all the Christian stuff,” she said. “But the mystery.” She paused “Ayodele spoke of her people being catalysts of change. Wherever they go, they bring change.”

“You are part of the change,” he said.

“Maybe.” She took his hand. “Will you get the children to your mother’s place? Please. They are all we have.”

After a long pause, he said, “Yes.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

They both turned to go upstairs. Anthony, who’d been leaning against the door, listening, took a deep gulp from the bottle of water he held. He sighed as he walked back to the living room and said, “Finally, some progress.”

Chris took Adaora’s Mercedes, leaving her his smaller, faster BMW. Fred and Kola cried and cried. Aside from wanting to stay with Adaora, they didn’t want to leave Ayodele, who remained in her monkey form and still refused to speak. As soon as they were gone, Adaora sank into the sofa with the beginnings of a headache that could only come from deep conflict, the internal battle between relief and anxiety. And then a brick smashed through the window followed by a Molotov cocktail, setting the sofa on fire.

^{Chapter 31} The Rhythm

“Come out!” Father Oke shouted.

Anthony was beginning to lose his temper. It had been draining from him since those idiots had tried to shoot Ayodele. The drainage had increased tenfold when the soldiers wounded Kola. Normally, a deep breath and a glance at the sky could settle him. Not now. And the worst thing about it was that the Elders would see whatever he did.

The Elders. That’s what Ayodele called them. Not the Elders who were his ancestors, the Elders from the stars. Those… creatures that Anthony was having a hard time separating from himself. He could still hear their song, still hear the beat of their drums; yes, he could still feel them. They were deep in the ocean, just off the coast of this great megacity called Lagos. He felt them in a way he’d never felt anything before. Because they were still with him. They were listening through him. They were hearing, seeing and feeling with him. Nevertheless, he was still himself and when he got angry, he got… mad. When he was mad, he would take from everyone around him. He would take from the earth. From the very ground beneath his feet. And then he’d wield what he had taken, and the damage would be great.

He’d done it once when he was ten years old, when he still went by the name his parents had given him, Edgar. Just after his father had died and left his mother to shoulder the blame for his heart attack. For a month, Edgar had stayed in that house with his mother and siblings. They survived on leftovers from the funeral and supplies his mother had managed to buy the day before the ceremony. Nevertheless, when their water supply grew too low, his mother had finally given in.

On that fateful day, she was at the market while Edgar stayed home watching his younger brothers and sisters. His mother had thought the in-laws had given up. She’d been in the house for a month. But he knew they’d come. And a half hour after she left, they came to the small white house in the village with the satellite dish perched on the roof and the brown water stains on the walls. His relatives. His uncles, aunts, older cousins. All from his father’s side. They came to take what they felt was theirs. Back then, there were no mobile phones but the bush radio, the village grapevine, worked better than any digital form of communication. It was probably his Auntie Osei who lived across the dirt road who had notified everyone that his mother had finally gone out.

Edgar had sat on the small porch, watching them come. Their cars and SUVs pulled up and they waited. Gathering like ants preparing to haul away a dead spider. Ants never sleep. Ants are relentless. And ants know the scent of opportunity and do not hesitate to follow its trail.

His father’s relatives – about twenty of them – gathered beneath the large mango tree in front of the house. It was heavy with ripe fruit. Several in the group picked the largest mangoes. As if the mangoes were theirs to take. The day was warm and Edgar started sweating. After several minutes, as one big group, they walked toward Edgar’s home. His youngest sibling, Helen, was only seven months old. His brother Bamfo was nine. There were five of them in all, and ten-year-old Edgar was in charge.

“Get inside,” he told Bamfo. His little brother looked at him with such worry that Edgar felt like crying. His brother’s love, all his siblings’ love was so strong. They would die for each other. And they knew what death was. They had all been there when their father died of a heart attack, right in front of them all at the dinner table. They’d been in the middle of a wonderful Sunday feast – fufu and peanut soup with goat meat. A rare hearty meal. Edgar couldn’t remember what they had been celebrating. All he remembered was the look on his father’s face. From happy to pained to shocked. The expression remained as he took his last breath.

Edgar’s father had been the family’s Great Son. He was the oldest. He was the most successful. He was the loudest. And he’d been blessed by God to spread God’s Word. Edgar’s father’s family accused his mother of being a witch. They believed she had caused his death so that she could take all his money and build an empire with the children she had robbed from him. They were determined not to let her. They wanted their Great Son’s wife to be destitute for what she’d done. They wanted the children to starve. Those children were evil if they’d let their mother kill the family’s Great Son.

Edgar was an outspoken, compassionate child. He could never stand to see anything suffer. So he was known for helping tortoises across the road and ushering lizards out of the house. He’d once even caught a bird in the living room with his bare hands and set it free outside. He was tall for his age, though very lean no matter how much he ate. And when he spoke, because he had the gift of gab, he seemed even taller. His mother beat him often for his silver tongue and hugged him even more often for his praise songs. His father nearly burst with pride whenever Edgar sang a praise song to him. Edgar knew how to make his parents happy, most of the time. And Edgar had plenty of friends and never had to fight. Words were his weapons. He knew how to crack his tongue like a whip. But that was only when he got angry.

And this day, as Edgar watched his father’s people, who blamed his mother for his father’s death – this fateful day, Edgar got angry.

Uncle Kuffour was leading the way, flanked by Auntie Boteng and Uncle Mensah. They looked heated and self-righteous. These were three people who had spread the worst rumors about his mother. Just as he was good with words, Edgar was a sharp listener. He could hear a conversation from far across the room, catch every word, every syllable. He’d heard these three talk about his mother as if she were a dog.

According to them, in her village, before she married his father, she was known to commune with the devil. Since his father’s death, his mother not only cooked for but slept with all of his father’s friends. And even before his father had died, she’d aborted several children. So they said. According to them, his mother’s nails were always dirty, her soup was always sour, and she’d used charms to get his father to marry her.

His mother knew of the rumors, even while forced to stay home and guard the house for the past month. And she cried every night because of them. Edgar could hear her through the thin walls. His mother was a pediatrician and his father had been a well-loved and well-known preacher. They’d done well. Together. And now that his father was dead, the relatives wanted it all. Edgar knew family was supposed to take you in when things were bad. But this family wanted his mother, his brothers, his sisters and him out of the way.

Edgar stood as they approached, and blocked the open doorway to his parents’ house. His house. His siblings’ house. His bare feet pressed firmly to the ground. He wore an old T-shirt and black shorts. He was dark-skinned like his father and he looked them all in the eye like his mother. “What do you want?”

“Get out of the way,” his Uncle Kuffour said. The others assented.

“Move.”

“Make this easy.”

“No one will blame you.”

“No,” Edgar said. “This is my parents’ house.”

“You won’t invite your own relations into your home, then?”Auntie Boteng asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Do you behave like my relations?” he asked. He took a brave step forward, feeling the rage bloom in him. In his mind’s eye, he saw his middle sister sobbing in the kitchen as she peeked around the entrance and watched Auntie Boteng act like a stranger. Auntie Boteng was her favorite auntie.

“Have any of you come to wish my mother well?” Edgar asked. “To see how your brother’s children are doing? Do any of you have hearts that aren’t frozen? Do any of you have any shame?”

He could feel it. In his chest, first, but then it radiated out to his entire body. He curled his shoulders to hold it in. But it was so hot, so powerful.

“Old man,” his uncle chuckled. He stepped closer to Edgar.

Edgar didn’t move. These people were here to take everything. He would never move.

As soon as his father’s oldest brother grabbed his arm, Edgar heard the music – sweet and pure and electric. It hummed up through the earth. And it sang to him in a clear voice, “Defend them.”

Then that which was building up within him, humming to the rhythm of the earth, burst. His uncles, aunts, cousins were all blown back. Two of the cars closest to them were blown onto their sides, before slamming back down onto the road. The homes across the street, including his aunt’s, were bombarded with red dirt, and they rocked on their foundations.

Those relatives never came back.

Edgar never explained the incident to his mother, though she later learned from the neighbors what had happened. Edgar never used the rhythm to do violence again. But when he got on stage, when he rapped and let the words flow from his tongue like warmed honey, he could feel it. It would be there when he needed it. So far, he hadn’t needed it.

But he needed it now.

Father Oke’s people were crowding the lawn and Anthony could sense they were about to do something terrible. They’d just thrown a Molotov cocktail into the house and some of them held more. He stepped toward the front door.

When he performed, he spun words as a spider spins its web. He drew it from within himself and worked with it. Then he threw it back at his audience enhanced and laced with energy and images. No one left his concerts unchanged. He was a positive force. But only because he chose to be one. That day, in the doorway of his mother’s house, he’d been something else. He’d had to be.

Now, he slipped his shoes off as he stepped out of the house to face Father Oke and his diocese. He stepped onto the soil of the flowerbed beside the path to Adaora’s house. It was cool beneath his feet.

“What are you people doing?” he asked evenly.

He set his eyes squarely on Father Oke. The man was bewitching and charismatic, so much like Anthony’s father. Anthony frowned. Father Oke’s actions were not so unlike what he did himself when he was performing as Anthony Dey Craze. But I don’t use people, he thought. I free them, I open them up to God.

Father Oke’s garments were smudged with dirt and the side of his face was swollen like Agu and Adaora’s. His eyes were rimmed with red and glistened with unshed tears. But his voice was firm: “We would like to speak with the extraterrestrial.”

“No,” Anthony said. “Speak to me.”

Now Father Oke laid his eyes squarely on Anthony. The two stood tall, proud and powerful. Both were adored by the people around them. Both knew it and could feed it. Anthony was calm as an underground river. Father Oke was a volcano ready to erupt.

“Bring it out!” Father Oke shouted, his eyes wide. “Bring it out now!”

Several of his followers threw stones at the house. Others shouted and shook their fists. Two men walked up to Anthony, hunched forward, fists clenched. At the door, however, they stopped, looking past him. Anthony turned around. Adaora stood behind him. She was holding Ayodele, who was still a tiny monkey.

“This is she,” Adaora said, her smile an angry smirk. She stepped past Anthony, eyeing the two men. “And she has nothing to say to you.”

She could hear the crackle of flames, feel the heat, and see light reflected in the broken glass on the ground. The top floor of the house must now be completely on fire.

“I don’t believe you,” Father Oke said.

“Where the hell would I get a monkey at this time of night?” Adaora snapped, but she knew his response before he spoke it.

“You’re a witch. I’m sure you have your ways.”

Several of his followers muttered agreement.

“Father Oke, or whatever your name is,” Anthony said. He stepped forward, placing himself between Ayodele and the two men. “Remove yourself and your people from Adaora’s property. There is nothing for you here.”

Father Oke flashed a menacing look at Anthony, then turned to his followers. He lifted his injured left arm, wincing theatrically. “Please say it with me, ‘This is my bible…’” He pulled a bible from his pocket and held it up with his right hand.

“This is my bible,” his followers repeated, their faces earnest.

“It is the Word of God,” he shouted.

“It is the Word of God!”

“Yes! Good, my sheep, good! I believe I am who I am. I believe I can do what it says I can do. Do you believe in me?”

“We do!”

“Yes, o!”

“Speak the truth!”

Father Oke, buoyed by the trust of his flock, did an excited hop, grinned and shouted, “Amen!” But when he turned back to Anthony, his grin was gone and his face was angry. He snapped his fingers and flung his right arm toward Adaora and Ayodele. ‘‘Grab am, grab am!” he yelled. The two burly men stepped forward.

“Adaora, get inside!” Anthony growled.

The moment the two men lunged at Adaora and Ayodele, Anthony let it loose. For the first time since he was ten years old, he unleashed the raw power of what he called the rhythm. It was a vibration that swelled up inside him and allowed him to touch all things. It rolled warmly over Father Oke, the two men, his followers and everyone on the streets. It put out the Molotov cocktail-ignited fire that had been eating Adaora and Chris’s home, and the one across the street that had ravaged most of the house. Weaver birds that had taken refuge in a nearby tree fell to the ground. Car alarms went off. The few unbroken windows around the block shattered.

And as the sonic wave rolled, Anthony stood still, eyes closed, and received information about all the things that the wave touched. His ability had grown stronger since he was a kid. Back then, when he’d handled his bitter relatives, he’d blown himself backwards into the house, hit the wall and been unconscious for ten minutes. Now he stumbled back only a single step. It was the rhythm. Ayodele’s people knew it well, too. They’d used it twice to read the city of Lagos.

Anthony took a deep breath and opened his eyes. There was smashed glass all around him. More glass fell from a broken window, tinkling as it broke against the sidewalk. Then everything was silent. And there were bodies on the lawn. Bodies. But he knew they were not dead, just unconscious. And yet he felt the same rush of power and stunned terror that he had felt when he was ten. He’d done this. He had controlled the vibration, the energy. He controlled it during his concerts to the point where the women felt ecstasy and the men felt exhilarated. Now he controlled it here, to read everything, to stop everything. To make order from chaos.

He knew so much. “Ayodele,” he said. “We’re not all bad, chale.”

Ayodele stood in the doorway, staring at him. She’d returned to her human form, except now she’d made herself taller, taller than him. She was at least seven feet. She was wearing a long, thick white dress.

“We will see,” she said.

“There’s more to this city than you imagined,” he said. He’d seen all that was happening in a three-mile radius.

He stepped inside and shut the door behind them, leaving Oke and his followers unconscious around the foot of the plantain tree. “We should get the car ready,” he said. “Agu is almost here.”

^{Chapter 32} Stylish, Expensive and Unique

“Who I be?” Jacobs whispered as they slowly drove down the near-empty street. He could barely hear himself think. Moziz and Tolu were arguing in the front seat about which way to go. They’d dropped Troy on the side of the road minutes before, where his machete-wielding cousins waited for him. Jacobs wondered how they planned to find the soldier who’d assaulted their cousin.

“Dis night na him be de night wey I go bombard am,” was the last thing Troy had said, before joining his relatives. As they drove away, Jacobs saw Troy snatch a machete and thrust it into the air. Those around him shouted and did the same. Two women walking toward them immediately turned and hurried the other way.

Jacobs leaned his forehead against the cool car window, trying to tune out Moziz and Tolu. He didn’t care which way they went. They passed a group of market women carrying obviously looted goods on their heads. Chairs, bundles of textiles, baskets of tomatoes, desktop computer towers, all of the women were laughing and singing as they passed a burning office building. A slack-jawed Philomena sat beside Jacobs, watching the women. At least she’d stopped crying.

As they navigated the side road, Jacobs focused on the trees. If he shut his eyes, he’d only see Rome, Seven and the other members of the Black Nexus getting beaten to the ground. He’d left them so that he could go capture some sort of being from space for the sake of making money. Was this what he’d come to? He was no better than Moziz or Father Oke.

“Mek we comot for Lag!” Tolu was bellowing. He had tears in his eyes. They’d been shouting back and forth for the last five minutes. “Na de last place wey anybody go wan dey if true true alien wan take over, sha. Remember, dem no human person!”

“Tolu close ya mouth. Mek I concentrate, drive,” Moziz said, as he swerved dangerously close to the side of the road. “When we reach my place, we go decide.”

“I don tell you now, mek we act fast,” Tolu said. “If we no do am now, we fit no do am again, o.”

“Look ya front!” Philomena screamed.

Moziz’ eyes grew wide as he tried to stop the car from hitting the girl in the road. Jacobs pushed at the seat in front of him as they screeched to a stop, his seat belt biting into his chest and neck. There was a sickening thump and he looked up just in time to see the woman’s body thrown onto the hood. Then she slid to the ground.

For a moment they were silent. Moziz just sat there, staring blankly at the woman lying in the street like a discarded doll. The headlights glinted off her skin. She didn’t move. Philo numbly got out of the car. Tolu reached under Moziz’ wrist and turned off the engine.

“Oh, men!” Jacobs screamed, throwing himself out. He shoved Philo aside and ran to the woman. The road was empty and it was pitch dark, except for the headlights. In the silence, Jacobs could hear crickets singing. The woman was tall and maybe in her thirties. She wore dark blue pants and a matching top with silver and red embroidery. Stylish, expensive and unique, he thought to himself. One of her black high-heeled shoes had flown off. Her nose was caved in, as was her forehead. She wasn’t bleeding, but Jacobs could see the white of bone and something squishy coming out of her forehead.

“Oh God! She don peme,” Philo said, standing beside Jacobs, as if he didn’t have eyes.

From far off, something grumbled like an enormous empty stomach and he looked around. “Wetin be dat?” he whispered.

“I no know,” she whispered back, moving closer to him.

When they heard it again, this time louder, Moziz started the car.

Philo looked up at Moziz through the windshield. “Wetin you dey do? We no fit just leave am! De woman—”

“Enter the ride!” Moziz shouted.

The concrete beneath Jacobs’ feet shifted. No, not shifted; softened. He looked down. It was squashy like a pillow. From down the road came a deep guttural growl that intensified into a roar. Every hair on his body stood up. His grandmother always used to yell at him for playing soccer with his friends in the road at dusk. She said one day the road would swallow him right up the minute the sun went down.

“Grab am!” he said. He had done enough shameful things tonight. “Help me!”

But Philomena had already run into the car. Jacobs ran to the woman, stumbling on the soft concrete which now shuddered with every step he took. It reminded him of the way a bull’s skin twitched when a fly landed on it. And it was warm beneath his feet. He could feel the heat right through his gym shoes. He locked his arms under the woman’s armpits. The first thing he noticed was that she was warm, too… and light. The second thing he noticed was that she was sinking. The road was trying to swallow her.

“Ah-ah! She no peme, o!” Jacobs shouted at the road, hysterical. “She no peme!”

With all his might, he pulled her body from the softening asphalt and, ignoring the angry roar of a creature denied a meal, slung her over his shoulder and carried her to the car. Moziz was accelerating before Jacobs even shut the door.

Philo, who was looking out the window as they turned and drove back toward downtown Lagos, started screaming and pointing. Jacobs wanted to slap her, until he glanced back and saw for himself. The road behind them was rearing up like a serpent of asphalt. It swayed this way and that, the two sets of yellow stripes clear in the darkness. It slapped at the trees beside the road as it rolled after them.

“She no peme!” Jacobs shouted back at it. “She no die, o!”

Moziz pushed the car’s speed up to eighty. It shuddered and shook but sped away from the road-monster. Breathless with relief, Jacobs plopped down in his seat and looked at the woman beside him, who should have been dead but wasn’t. She was staring back.

Tears were flowing from her eyes and her crushed face was pinched with pain. He quickly looked away, disgusted and disturbed. He bit his fist to keep himself from vomiting. “Papa God,” he gasped. He dragged his eyes to the back of Moziz’ head and then Tolu’s. None of them had noticed the woman was alive. Even Philomena, beside him in the back seat, was still looking out the window.

Because Jacobs was looking away from the damaged woman, he didn’t see it happen. None of them saw it happen, which was just as well. Jacobs, Philo, Moziz and Tolu had already seen more than they could handle. Any more strangeness and all their minds would snap. The woman’s crushed nose and forehead began to rebuild from bone to sinew to skin.

“Wetin be dat tin in de road?” she whispered.

Jacobs turned to the woman and his eyes grew wide at the sight of her undamaged face. For a moment his mouth simply hung open. Then he said, “I… I no get any idea, at all, at all.”

^{Chapter 33} Stick Boy

Agu was hiding in the shadows.

In the street was a parade of Area Boys and a few Area Girls with machetes, sticks and probably guns; looters, police and soldiers who’d deserted their duties, and several other kinds of riff-raff. Agu could handle all of them; he just didn’t want to. Better to sneak behind buildings and through back roads than be forced to hurt or kill people.

His nose was bleeding again after a fight with a group of guys who’d just finished destroying someone’s Mercedes SUV. Agu understood that they were angry at Lagos, angry at Nigeria, angry at the world. The alien invasion was just an excuse to let it all out. A beat-up-looking soldier in uniform was a treat for them… until they learned Agu wasn’t a normal soldier.

Agu had known he was abnormal since he was twelve, when four boys had cornered him and Stick Boy behind the church. Stick Boy was a poor skinny kid with a big mouth and a nose for mischief. Agu had a soft spot for Stick Boy, so he stood up for him often. This day, Stick Boy had won a large sum of money playing cards against some older boys. The card he’d been using to cheat had fallen from his pocket just as he was getting up to leave. Agu had been coming out of the church where he was an altar boy when Stick Boy ran and stood behind him crying, “They are trying to beat me, o! Help!”

Agu grabbed Stick Boy and they ran behind the church. When Agu refused to give Stick Boy up to the angry boys, two of them shoved Agu against the wall and one of them stepped up and slapped him hard across the face. That slap… it was unnecessary. They’d already gotten Agu out of the way but that boy wanted to make Agu hurt for having the nerve to try to defend Stick Boy. And that was when Agu tore his arm from the other boy who held him against the wall. He punched the boy who’d slapped him. The force of the blow was so powerful that the boy hit the ground hard and didn’t get up.

Everything stopped as the boy lay motionless. Agu was sure he’d killed him. His father had been a great wrestler in his day and, just like Okonkwo in the book Things Fall Apart, his father was nicknamed Agu, which means leopard. His mother had happily given the name to her son. Now it looked like more than just his father’s name had been passed to him.

One of the boys ran to get his mother. Agu stayed. No matter the punishment, it was Agu’s duty to stay with the boy he’d hurt. Two minutes passed before the boy finally sat up, shaking his head and moaning. Those were the worst two minutes of Agu’s entire life. In those two minutes, Agu saw the future. He would be sent to jail. His brain would rot and his body would grow malnourished from a poor diet. His soul would deteriorate from exposure to other murderers. In those two minutes, he became a useless man who, when released from prison years and years later, would go on to rob people along the road instead of going to school. He would never become a somebody, someone who protected and preserved his family. His family was his heart.

When the boy finally stirred, Agu had decided two things: that he would become a soldier to protect the innocent and that though he might get into fights, he would never punch anyone hard again.

But he could feel the potential inside him. It left him feeling heavy and rock solid, despite the fact that he wasn’t that big at all. It lived in him like the roots of a thousand-year-old tree in its plot of land. So because he could not be rid of it, he locked it away deep. Until Benson and his other ahoa attacked that woman two nights ago. Outrage had prompted him to unbury his ability, and he found it even more potent than when he’d been a child.

Agu was nearly at Adaora’s house. He smelled smoke and realized the roof of the house beside him was on fire. It was one of those gated houses with a wrought-iron-topped concrete fence. How had anyone managed to set it alight?

“Sssss!” someone hissed.

Agu turned around. The two men were about his age and height. One of them wore a military uniform like his and the other a police uniform.

Agu realized immediately that the police officer was badly injured. The soldier was holding him up with difficulty.

“He’s been shot,” the soldier said.

As he spoke, the police officer’s legs buckled. Agu could smell blood and sweat from both. He moved to help.

There was laughter behind Agu. He groaned. A group of Area Boys. Young and armed.

“Shit,” both he and the soldier said at the same time.

The Area Boys swaggered into the alley, swinging their machetes and bats. There were smiles on their young brown faces, their teeth glowing white in the dark. They addressed Agu and the soldier in Yoruba, which Agu didn’t speak. But the soldier beside him did. The tone of his voice was firm and he motioned to the injured police officer.

Before Agu could say or do anything, one of the boys swung his machete at the soldier. Thock! The blade chopped through the soldier’s shoulder and blood spattered onto Agu’s face. The soldier screamed. Shocked and guttural. Then the scream became high-pitched and inhuman. Like glass balls whirled around in a glass jar. Agu was running before he knew he was running. Behind him he heard the Area Boys start screaming. Then there was a wet slurping sound. He didn’t look back.

Ayodele, he thought. That thing was like Ayodele. They were not helpless. They could feel pain. And they did not like it.

He ran across a street clogged with women linking arms – he didn’t hear what they were chanting, but walking in front of the linked women were three women who looked as if they’d been severely beaten. He ran through two groups of people smashing and looting. He ran through a main road congested with a go-slow so tightly packed that no one was moving and the air was nearly unbreathable. He stuck to as many alleys and side roads as he could. He did not speak to anyone. He did not fight with anyone. He did not help anyone… unless he couldn’t avoid it. Though the night was cool and the sky was clear, Lagos was broiling.

It had only been five hours since he’d seen Ayodele’s people walk out of the sea. Now, the gate in front of Adaora’s house had been torn down. The lawn looked as if it had been trampled by giants. Only the plantain tree was untouched. One of the windows in the upper part of the house was burned but no longer burning freely, embers glowing in the darkness. The street was relatively empty and littered with debris from garbage to tear gas canisters. Tear gas canisters? he thought. What had happened here since he’d left?

He knocked on the door. Adaora opened it. Without a word, he took her in his arms. If he let go, he was sure he’d fly into space.

^{Chapter 34} Fisayo

Fisayo was back on Bar Beach, watching the thing hovering over the water. It was undulating and glowing and she could see other things in the water just below it. Large things that rolled beneath the alien lights. She had a chunk of cardboard on her lap. In her hand, she carried a permanent marker she’d found.

A cool breeze swept off the water and it felt good in her short, damaged hair. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been outside without a wig. She normally wore long wigs of straight glossy black hair, usually expensive with lace-fronts. Her scalp suffered but her pocketbook always prospered.

Her days of whoring seemed so long ago now. The world had changed. Lagos was eating itself. She took the cap off the marker. It looked new. Good. When she touched it to the cardboard she felt such a strong tingle of emotion, she knew what she was doing was right.

Slowly, she wrote. Her hand was steady. Her mind was cloudy, though she thought it was clear. She didn’t think she’d ever see her cross-dressing brother again. He would not be welcome in heaven and nor would she. Fisayo sat back and examined her work. In the moonlight and the dim beach lights, she smiled. Yes, this was perfect.

Her sign read, “Repent. Lagos will never be destroyed!”

Her pants were filthy. Her blouse was stained with blood – her own and someone else’s – and the dirt of the earth. Her hair smelled of sweat and was stiff with sand and smoke residue. Her face was dirty with streaks from her own tears. Her bare feet ached and bled. She could not remember when she’d lost her shoes.

She stood up. She would tell everyone. She had seen aliens. And she knew for a fact that they could never ever be trusted. She would fight until there was nothing left to fight for because she loved Lagos. She’d shoved her wig cap into her bra and now she brought it out. She pulled the elastic string from her wig cap and tied each end to holes she made in her sign. Then she hung the sign around her neck.

When she reached the street, which was boiling over with confused, angry, fighting, laughing, destructive, terrified, driving, walking, running Lagosians, she raised her chin and then her voice: “Repent! Everyone! The end is nigh, o! Look to your left! Look to your right! Look up! Are they your friends? Your relatives? Or are they something else? Look closely, o! Repent!”

^{Chapter 35} Chris and the Kids

It was past midnight and Chris was still stuck in traffic but at least everyone seemed calm. He glanced in the rearview mirror. The white man was sitting in back and Fred was looking at him with a great smile on his face. Kola sat in the passenger seat but had twisted around to look at the white man, too. He’d spoken in Yoruba-accented English and said his name was Oluwatosin. He wore a rather expensive-looking white buba and sokoto and white leather shoes tipped with gold. He certainly dressed and spoke like a Yoruba man of means. But there was more to being Yoruba than language and style of dress.

While driving, Chris had spotted the strange white man being harassed by a group of young men. He’d understood instantly that the strange white man was one of them. Chris had screeched to a stop and yelled for the man to get the hell into the car. They’d driven in silence for five minutes now and Chris didn’t know what to do. At least no one was dead. Those idiots harassing him had no idea how close they’d come to being hunks of bloody meat.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you, Mr Oluwatosin?” Kola asked.

The man nodded and caught Chris’s eye in the mirror. “I am.”

Chris took a deep breath and muttered a prayer. He considered calling Father Oke and asking for his advice. Then he remembered he was through with that fraud of a holy man. “What… what is it you people will do?” Chris asked.

“We are doing what is already happening,” Oluwatosin said.

Chris was about to ask another question when Fred asked, “Can he come with us? He can join us for dinner!”

Chris’s body clenched. He’d wanted to drop the man-thing off the first chance he got and then speed away. He still didn’t understand why he’d saved him. His actions were mad and he was endangering his children. But now his son had put him in a difficult position. Hopefully, Oluwatosin had other plans. There was always that chance.

“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’ “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’ home. Moziz’ 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 to himself.

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’ 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’ 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, rose-like 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’ 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 mis-stepped on the stairs. “Wait, o,” she said, as she groped for it.

Jacob 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 match 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 open-mouthed 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’ 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’ 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 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!”

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.

At the sound of the gunshot, the fighting stopped.

Fisayo turned the gun on a woman and pulled the trigger, stumbling back as it fired. The bullet hit the woman in the arm. Lagos is hopeless. She turned it to a group of fleeing people and pulled the trigger. A man fell, blood pouring from the heel of his foot where he’d been shot. It is over. She’d never shot a gun but it felt natural to her. Maybe that’s why God had shown her the military man in the alley with the knife in his neck; had led her eye to the gun in the shadows a few feet away. It was not one of the big AK-47s that they normally carried; God had left her a weapon she could wield. In the name of Jesus; thanks be to God.

She pulled the trigger a fourth time and nothing happened. She smelled smoke. Her eyes stung with it. She’d done things. Terrible things. Her clients would have never guessed she lived in the “jungle”, deep in the slums of Ajegunle, Lagos. That for the last month, she’d had to live on a human-made island of packed rubbish. She smelled too good. She walked too tall. She fucked with too much skill.

She hoped her brother would forgive her someday.

Poof! Ayodele blew into billions of molecules just as Fisayo pulled the trigger of the empty gun again. To Adaora, it looked like she became the kind of mist you see at the bottom of a large waterfall. Slow-moving and grey. And it smelled like the sea. Several people screamed. Adaora didn’t blink. She wanted to watch.

But as she watched, Fisayo was there, surrounded by the mist, and then she was not. No, Adaora thought, horrified. There was something. She saw it only for a split second but she knew she’d seen it. In that moment, she had seen Fisayo, clothes and all, spread apart. She’d expanded as a photo expanded when only enlarged vertically and not horizontally. At the same time, Fisayo seemed to fade. Then she was gone. Adaora grasped her chest, understanding what she’d seen. Ayodele had pulled Fisayo apart on a molecular level. Adaora shivered.

Fisayo heard nothing. Saw nothing. And said nothing. She would never feel anything again.

A young man who’d been recording the chaos happened to point his digital camera at the boy just as the bullet hit him. He kept filming as the boy sat down hard and then lay back, blood pooling around his small head.

The young man squeaked with horror as three other men and a woman ran to help the boy. He continued filming as the three men realized there was nothing they could do. He got up close, not believing what he was doing. He’d never seen death. He’d always thought he’d run from it when he came across it, yet here he was, pushing his camera up into the boy’s face. No one stopped him. He and his camera were capturing the boy’s soul.

This young man with the recording camera would post the boy’s death on the internet minutes later using his phone. Millions would watch the boy’s surprised but calm face turn toward the camera. The pool of blood spreading behind him like an expanding halo. Then the boy’s face would go slack and the light would dim from his eyes, finally going out completely. The boy would join the group of murdered young people who became iconic figures of troubled times, like South Africa’s Hector Pieterson and Iran’s Neda Agha-Soltan. This child would become The Boy Who Died So the World Could See.

The mute boy never knew his father or mother. He was found in a dumpster and then placed in an orphanage. No one ever bothered to name him and he never knew how to name himself.

He was only eight years old.

Adaora threw herself back into the car and curled into a tight ball. Standing behind Agu, she’d seen the light go out in the boy’s eyes. A hand took hers and squeezed.

“What did you do to that crazy woman?” she asked Ayodele, who sat beside her in the car now holding her hand.

“I took her to the water,” Ayodele said. “That’s all she wanted.”

^{Chapter 38} Udide Speaks

Everybody saw it.

All over the world.

That was the real introduction to what was happening in Lagos. Nigeria. West Africa. Africa. Here. Because so many people in Lagos had portable chargeable glowing vibrating chirping tweeting communicating connected devices, practically everything was recorded and posted online in some way, somehow. Quickly. The modern human world is connected like a spider’s web.

The world was watching. It watched in fascinated horror, for information… but mostly for entertainment. Footage of what was happening dominated every international news source, video-sharing website, social network, circle, pyramid and trapezoid.

But the story goes deeper.

It is in the dirt, the mud, the earth, in the fond memory of the soily cosmos.

It is in the always-mingling past, present, and future.

It is in the water.

It is in the powerful spirits and ancestors who dwelled in Lagos.

It is in the heads and hearts of the people of Lagos.

Change begets change.

Ayodele knew it.

All her people know it.

^{Chapter 39} Code Name: Legba

I was there.

To be specific, I was in the Testament Cyber Café, not far from Bar Beach. The waters of the ocean were rising and the government was trying to figure out who was attacking us. Yet there I was in the cyber café totally unconcerned, and up to no good. OK, so I was good at it. I was good at being up to no good. I was good at 419. Nigerian internet fraud.

My code name was “Legba”. It was perfect because Legba is the Yoruba trickster god of language, communication and the crossroads. I am Igbo and I peddle in words. I am American, born and raised. Igbo American, then. Or maybe American Igbo. That sounds better.

I’d come to Lagos to spend time with my grandfather. Two months. A good chunk of my summer vacation. Granddad was cool. I loved him. I was glad to come and be with him for such a long period of time. Before, I’d only come to Nigeria with my mom and dad and sister and those times were only for a couple of weeks, or less.

This time, when I got here, I found my granddad was a spry old man who could still dance to highlife and liked to go for long walks every morning with his hands behind his back and a smile on his face. I was good at making Granddad laugh, too. He liked having me around. My major was engineering but my passion was acting. I could imitate anything. Any voice. Any personality. Granddad’s favorite impersonations were Grandma and the actor Nkem Owoh – I could do them both perfectly.

Anyway, I had a lot of cousins and I grew close to many of them. They were shady and I could type fast. And not only could I impersonate anything in voice, I could do it in writing, too. So, that’s what I was doing in that cyber café with my cousins Uche and Afam. Like I said, I was up to no fucking good. Who would suspect an Igbo guy who was American using the name of a Yoruba god? The stupid American white woman was going to wire her “Nollywood lover” another large sum of money, despite the fact that he hadn’t been there to meet her in Accra two weeks earlier.

My plan was genius. Seriously, the woman was an idiot. She really believed her Caucasian blood and money made her irresistible to one of Nollywood’s top film directors. She’d even told me these things in those exact words. She had no clue that she sounded like a racist condescending asshole. There was a very pure strain of White Privilege running through her. So why not capitalize on her idiocy?

There were many of us in the cyber café, despite the madness outside and the strange woman appearing on our computer screens and mobile phones earlier. We were all up to the same shit, manipulating the same weaknesses. Classic 419. To those with mediocre skills, it is like playing the lottery. To masters like me, it is like being a superstar gymnast on a very narrow balance beam – risky but sure. The payoff is only a matter of time. In my case, the payoff was every few days. We were all in there trying to finish up our last bits of business before the power went out. No one could say we were not dedicated people.

I’d just sent one of my well-crafted love-letter emails to the lady to ensure that she’d send the money ASAP. I told her that I was in Lagos and needed the money immediately to get to Accra; I’d return the money to her as soon as I got back to Lagos. I really could have been a writer. I could make a woman think and do anything with a few well-chosen words.

“Now we wait,” I said to Afam, leaning back in my chair. They were the cheap metal folding kind, but I felt like a king on a throne.

Afam grinned and we slapped hands and shook and snapped each other’s fingers. I did the same to Uche. Afam brought out a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. Beside his head the sign read, “Not Allowed: 419, Pornography, Spam or Smoking.” I looked over his shoulder and could see the café owner at his front desk turn our way, a sour look on his face. He was a squat dark-skinned Yoruba man who wore cheap clothes and no wedding ring. I chuckled when he didn’t get up.

There was a crash outside and, I kid you not, through the window I could see a group of youths jumping on an SUV like it was a trampoline. This was on the road right outside the café. They were shouting and laughing at the terrified passengers in the car. The SUV sped off, the guys on the car tumbling to the street. Most of them got up laughing. One of them was grimacing with pain as he held his knee. Everyone in the café looked worried, but most still turned back to what they were doing. It was scary, but I had a job to do, too.

“We should get the hell out of here,” Afam said.

“Relax, dude,” I told him. “We need to get a response first.”

“How do you know the woman is even awake?”

“She’s in the US. It’s 8 p.m. here, so it’s afternoon there. Trust me, I know her. She’s just sitting down at her computer.”

Uche looked ready to piss his pants. I’d never have admitted it but I felt the same way. I wasn’t sure if people were just wilding out or if it was murder-rioting like they occasionally did in the north when a Christian looked at a Muslim the wrong way. Uche bit his nails as he spoke, “But what if—”

“Afam, whatever the fuck is going on, we better wait it out here because some crazy shit’s going down. Who knows, this may be our last chance to get online for a while.”

“But what if…”

Ping! The white woman had responded. I could see the preview of the email in my inbox.

“The money is on the way. Sent it to the same address. When we meet, we can…”

As I was reaching for the mouse to click the message open, the room shook and the computer screens flickered.

“Shit,” Uche said, looking around. “Not that woman again. Please not again. What was that?”

“Don’t know, sha,” Afam said, his cigarette hanging between his lips.

We all froze. Not a good time for NEPA to take the power. Just stay on long enough to let me read my email, I thought, my heart beating fast with excitement. But I already knew it was good news. The money was on the way.

An old man walked into the café and stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips. He was wearing a long black caftan. With the door open, the noise of the riots was loud. Several people ran out, cautiously moving past the old man. The room rumbled again and I looked out the café window. A large truck passed by and people in the streets leaped out of its way.

Keeping one eye on the man standing in the middle of the café, I clicked the message open. Before I could even start reading, the room began to shake like crazy! We all fell to the floor. The lights went out. Monitors crashed down around us. You couldn’t hear anything but breaking, cracking, falling and yelling. Pieces of the cement ceiling began to collapse onto us. The old yellowed floor tiles buckled.

I was going to die.

The lights flickered. The door had fallen off and the doorway was now lopsided. A table had fallen on the three of us and we peeked out from beneath it. People coughed and moaned and lay sprawled on the floor or beneath chunks of ceiling or wall. A woman shoved a computer off her and it crashed to the floor. The owner slowly stood up from behind his counter. Those of us who could turned to look at whatever the fuck was entering the gaping hole that used to be a doorway.

It was massive. Taller than the room. But there was no longer a ceiling. So it could fit. It did not touch the ground, so the rubble, glass and bodies made no difference to it. Everything was still shaky and I’d been whacked on the head pretty hard by the table but I know what I saw.

It was a masquerade.

This was not some guys dressed up in an elaborate costume to perform Nigerian theatrics to celebrate the spirits and ancestors, this was the real thing. You’d have to truly see what I saw to understand. Its tiers of wooden platforms could have been twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. And it stood over thirty feet high. Bamboo sticks and canes stuck out of the top half and it was covered in ceremonial cloth decorated with colorful geometric shapes and magical designs… and the designs were spinning and moving. Alive.

There were forty, maybe fifty brown-skinned human figurines on it. I could see them running around it like fleas, no, like fairies or little people. I could see the mother, father, the one in police uniform, the horses, the trees, the palm-wine tapper. I knew all the characters because since I was a kid I’d enjoyed the performance of masquerades. The theater of them. But never could I have imagined something like this. The upper and lower parts were even divided by the giant yellow serpent, the sign of Igbo pride and mightiness. And it was looking around curiously.

The creature was every color of the rainbow, glowing deep and powerful in the night. And it made music. The creature’s cloth quivered with the beat it sent into the ground. The sound was impossible, I swear. The sound of life, the beginning.

Holy shit, this was Ijele. The Chief of all Masquerades, Igbo royalty. Ijele does not ask the small or big masquerades to leave the Village Square when it wants to enter. They have to. Ijele is the climax and it performs alone. If this thing wasn’t Ijele then I’d gone mad. It shook, hovering over the ground and began to move toward the one computer that was still standing. Oddly enough, this computer had a lit screen… and the old man in the black caftan was standing in front of it.

Nobody dared to move as Ijele, the grand masquerade of masquerades, one of the greatest spirits of Nigeria, slowly danced toward the man in black. And the man in black didn’t move. All this under the dark night sky, for the power in the area was completely out, even in the places that had generators.

They stood before each other. By this time, my two cousins had run off, as had anyone else who could. But I stayed to bear witness. This was something I could tell my grandchildren about, if I lived. I was witnessing a miracle. My days of fraud… even as I knelt there under the table, I knew they were over.

It all became clear to me in that moment. All that had been happening for the last several hours. The terrorist who’d hijacked all the computers and mobile phones. We’d all watched her speak, but still we were focused on our own things, on getting what we could get. I was so focused on getting the white woman to pay, even when the madness washed into the streets.

But this woke me up. The coming of Ijele. I am not being melodramatic and I am not crazy. And I am not out of danger. But I will never practice fraud again. Never. I swear.

As I cowered under that table and watched Ijele and the man whom I now believed was one of the aliens look at each other, I felt this great swell of pride and love for Nigeria. I felt patriotism. I would die for it. I would live for it. I would create for it. This was real. Tears were streaming down my face.

“Ijele,” the man in black said.

Ijele bounced and as it came down a drum beat deep like the bottom of the ocean sounded, shaking the husk of the building. GBOOM! It was like the sonic booms we’d heard twice within the last twenty-four hours, except much louder, much closer. The remaining café walls shuddered and some crumbled. No one groaned. Those who were able to had fled. Except me.

How do I explain what I saw next?

They went into the computer. Does that make sense? Ijele became like gas and the man in black became like smoke and together, they dissolved into the computer.

After several minutes, I got up and walked over to the computer. It was still on. I don’t know why but I logged into my email account. I was surprised when I could access it. But I wasn’t surprised to find all the emails and my contacts erased. And I was glad.

^{Chapter 40} Road Monster

I was there.

My wife, sons and I were stuck in the go-slow. The hour was past midnight but the place was like an angry party. The Lagos–Benin Expressway is a shit road. People get robbed there constantly. When I started my job, I would drive to work using that road but I was robbed so many damn times that I started taking the bus.

Then I heard about that luxury-bus-robbery-turned-bloody-disaster last year and I went back to driving. The place is full of Area Boys, even military men and police who waylay you like bandits or trolls from European fairy tales. And then there are the horribly maintained roads with potholes that will swallow your vehicle. No, let’s not call them potholes; they are closer to craters.

But this night, they were not the problem with the expressway. It was just packed. We were all fleeing Lagos. My wife has one of those nice mobile phones. We all watched the broadcast on it. I did not believe it was an alien. It had to be Boko Haram or some other idiot terrorist group from the north, finally making a play for Lagos. Those mumu shout that Western technology is blasphemous, yet they use it to enact their plans. Hypocrites.

Before the strange woman giving a speech on my wife’s phone finished, my wife and I agreed on one thing: We were getting the hell out of Lagos, immediately. Something was going to blow. Low and behold, not minutes after the woman finished speaking, BOOM! Something did blow! We didn’t know what, but we heard the sound. We threw the kids in the car with all the naira we had, some clothes, food and our laptops, mobile phones, chargers, and got moving.

We made horrible time because people were already trying to escape the slowly rising water. We managed to head northeast on the expressway and after about an hour, everything stopped. Nothing could move. Many tried to drive through the grass and dirt on the sides of the roads, but they got stuck there as well. People turned off their cars and climbed out to stretch their legs and talk, and soon the road became a market. Hawkers kept our bellies full with spicy suya, groundnut, cashew fruit – those girls were making a killing. But they were providing excellent service. Young men blasted music and eyed women. Babies cried and slept. Mosquitoes sucked blood.

Both sides of the road where we had stopped were flanked by shallow bush. There was nowhere to go until the gridlock broke up. I was sitting in the car and the boys were in the back sleeping. My wife was standing close by, talking to two women she’d just met. One was very tall and dressed like she was about to walk onto a Nollywood set, her tight pink-grey dress matching her pink and grey platform-heeled pumps. The other looked more like my wife, in black pants, heels and a white top.

“We’ll be stuck here for three days,” the black slacks woman said.

“It’ll be fine,” the tall Nollywood woman said.

“I pray, o,” my wife said.

“I heard it was getting crazy on Victoria Island,” the black slacks woman said, nodding. “Riots, idiots burning everything, people are posting it all on the internet. I was watching with my BlackBerry.”

My wife sucked her teeth. “Well, how different is all that from what happens every day? Didn’t that ‘luxury-bus-robbery-turned-tragic-accident’ happen near here?”

She was right – it did… right where we were parked, actually. Well, maybe about an eighth of a mile up the road, but that was close enough. I knew this because I had seen it with my own eyes. I’d never told my wife the truth about it. I’d been coming home from work when I drove past the scene that night.

Mangled, twisted bodies all over the goddamn road. I am not exaggerating. Traffic was routing through the grass and dirt to get past it. Unlike most, I didn’t slow down. I moved quickly. I didn’t want to see. Even in the dark, that swift passing was bad enough for me. My window had been open and the air had reeked of blood and fouler things. I must have been overwhelmed because I felt faint, my vision blurred for a moment and the road before me undulated and I could have sworn that I felt the car jump. But I hadn’t driven over anything. Then I was past the scene.

My wife later heard about the accident and asked me if I’d seen anything. I told her that I must have passed the area right before it happened. I don’t normally lie to her but she didn’t need to know that I’d been there. If I’d told her what I’d seen, she would have demanded details, I’d have told them to her and then she’d have cried for hours over the dead. Then my sons, who are always listening behind doors, would have had that sick look on their faces that they always get when they learn something they are not ready to learn. My white lie was to protect them… at least, until the photos came out in the papers and on the internet showing the brutal scene. There were torn up bodies littering the road, blood, intestines, skid marks of skin, twisted torsos, body parts broken off. The photo would make anyone want to vomit.

These roads are full of ghosts. I’d always known that. That’s why I’d have preferred to be as far from the expressway as possible at midnight on a night like this, when something was attacking Lagos.

But we were stuck.

I was looking down at the road when I saw a large black spider dart by and disappear into the grass. I shuddered. I hate spiders and this one was huge… and very fast.

“You’re a what?” I heard my wife screech. I’d tuned out of their conversation and now I tuned back in. My wife and the woman in the black slacks were staring at the tall Nollywood-looking woman.

“You’ve been talking to me for the last half hour,” the Nollywood woman said. “Do I look dangerous?”

I made eye contact with my wife before turning to look at the tall woman. She was… one of them. She looked so normal. Except… it’s hard to explain. There was a flicker of oddness about her if you looked long enough. Like she was more than what she was and less than what she was presenting, like a double-exposed photo. My wife took a step toward the car and I was about to leap out when the ground shook.

The boys woke up. “Daddy, what w’dat?” Loteh asked, slurring his words from sleep.

“I don’t…” I looked toward the Nollywood woman. She was looking up the busy road. So was my wife.

The ground shook again. This time harder. My wife came running to the car, the two women behind her. I watched the Nollywood woman, waiting to see her change into a monster or something.

“Udeh! What is going on?” my wife shouted.

I could only shake my head. I didn’t know where to focus. My children in the back seat, the shuddering road, my wife or the “woman” standing behind her?

“Get out of the car,” the Nollywood woman shouted. “Hurry! It’s not safe!”

My wife and I stared at her. The boys started scrambling out. I opened the door to get out. The woman in the black slacks ran around the car and up the street stumbling and pointing back at us, shouting, “I’ve seen one of them! Back there! Back there!” People leaped out of their cars and ran up the road with the woman, away. Away from us.

I grabbed my bag and my wife’s purse. One of the boys snagged a bag of food, the other, my wife’s phone. And that’s when the road began shaking like a snake fighting a feisty rat.

“Get off the road!” the Nollywood woman screamed. She was right beside me. Everything was shaking but even in the darkness I could see right into her eyes – clearly, steadily. They were brown but glowed like the sun was behind them; a sun from another world, maybe. In that moment, I understood in my gut, she was not human. She was not earthly. She was something completely other. But she was not evil, either. I felt dizzy but I had to stay alert. For the sake of my family.

I dragged my wife and kids into the grass, completely forgetting about the tarantula I’d seen run in there, and the Nollywood woman followed. If she said get off the road, then it was best to get off the road. We were the only ones to do so. It was dark except for all the headlights. Who would want to run into the tall grasses, bushes and shadows in such darkness? So everyone else ran up the road.

At least they ran away from… it. To this day, I will never really know what “it” was, o.

Not far from where the accident took place last year, the road was undulating. Then it began to stretch like hot plastic. Something beneath it groaned, deep and cavernous, “OOOOOOMMM.” The air stank of tar, and I felt a blast of heat on my face.

“Don’t move,” the Nollywood woman said. We didn’t. But everyone on the road did. They screamed and ran. People started their cars and tried unsuccessfully to drive out of the gridlock, into the grass. “OOOOOOOOOOMMM,” the road said, as it began to move beneath the vehicles. My nostrils stung from the stench. My wife pressed the kids close to her as she watched the Nollywood woman. My sons were crying as they looked up the road where something enormous was heaving and piling over itself.

The road was rising up in a huge snake-like slab of concrete, the faded yellow stripes still in view. Then it rippled into a concrete wave. It knocked cars off itself as it rolled toward the fleeing people. When it got to them – well, you heard nothing but shrieks of agony. I covered my sons’ ears. They were too far and it was too dark for us to see what was happening. I was glad.

And then it went quiet.

“OOOOOOM,” the road said. This time it sounded almost as if it were in ecstasy. The screaming had stopped. Had it eaten everyone? That was when the Nollywood woman ran into the road. She ran at the road monster, her heels sinking into the soft concrete.

“Stay here,” I said. My wife only looked at me and my children were pressing their faces to her legs.

Quickly I crept alongside the road, afraid to touch it but also not daring to go too far into the grasses. I slowed down when I was close enough to see the Nollywood woman. The monstrosity was so terrifying that I changed my mind and moved deeper into the grasses, getting on my knees and crawling. Snakes and tarantulas were nothing compared to what I could see.

Let me tell you something – that woman, she was from outside this earth, yes. But that thing, that thing that was haunting the road, it was from here and had probably been here since these roads were built, maybe even before then. I am not a Christian or a Muslim, or maybe I am both. But I also believe in the mysteries we can never understand, especially in my country. This thing was one of them.

“Bone Collector,” the Nollywood woman said, as she looked up at it.

It piled up before her, reaching five stories into the sky. I swear to you, this is what I saw. Concrete that smelled like fresh hot tar… and blood. It smelled like blood, too.

“Why?” the woman asked it. “Why do you do this? Why now?”

“I collect bones,” it said. The voice sounded blistering and wet. I felt the vibration of it deep within me. It made me feel like nothing but meat, like it could shake that meat from my bones, the bones it wanted. “I have always collected bones. I am the road.”

“Collect my bones and then never collect again,” the woman said. “I am everything and I am nothing. Take me and you will be free of your appetite.”

Everything around me seemed to go silent. I couldn’t even hear the grass rustling. Can you imagine? Never in my entire life had I witnessed such a selfless act. She was not from earth. Yet still. I thought of Nigeria’s worst diseases – pervasive corruption and unsafe roads. The one who had spoken through my wife’s phone was right. She and her people were indeed agents of change. I could feel the change in me then, while I knelt there. I’m sure I was not the only one, either.

I feel it now.

I watched it take her. I owed it to her to not turn away. I saw the pain on her face as she was pulled into the road’s hot flesh, as it turned to mush beneath her high-heeled platform shoes, pulled her down, her pink and grey dress pushed up around her as she sank. She never screamed, never made a sound, just let it take her. The road shuddered, the road stretched but in the end, the road was satisfied. It laid itself back down, and became still. And when it was done, I heard the relieved sigh of millions of ghosts.

Not long after, the gridlock cleared up. Some people came back, got in their cars, and drove away. My wife and I got into our car with our sons, drove around the abandoned vehicles, and left Lagos.

After the road ate that woman, I do not think any other people died on the Lagos–Benin Expressway. Not that night.

^{Chapter 41} African Chaos

I was there.

Though, maybe I shouldn’t have been there. Maybe my mother was right. She’d warned me not to travel to Nigeria. She said that of all the African nations, this country was the one she heard the weirdest things about on CNN. Internet fraudsters, Christians and Muslims killing each other in the streets, a government that openly robbed its people blind. To her, Nigerians were a race of troublemakers. “You ain’t no African,” she declared the night before I left. “You American. They gon’ eat you alive.” Then she hugged me and gave me five hundred dollars and a bottle of cod liver oil capsules.

My mother hated hip-hop, too. She called it “successful trash” and “crass ghetto bullshit”. She’d always felt I should have been singing in church. She said she didn’t raise a rapper. But I am what I am and I be what I be. I can sing well enough but the church isn’t for me. My mother can deny it all she wants but she raised me to be a free-thinker and go after my dreams. And despite her issues and the fact that my father left us with nothing but debt when I was a baby, she did a good job.

For years, I’d been digging on Anthony Dey Craze, the lyrical genius rapper from Ghana. A Ghanaian friend of mine turned me on to his work and then months later I saw Anthony live. His performance… how can I describe it? It changed me. Listening to him in my car or on my phone was one thing. Live was something else entirely. It was in the bass of his voice, the flow of his words. There was a rhythm to his performance that swayed the entire audience! You could practically see waves of it rolling over everyone. I’d never experienced anything like it. That shit came straight from the soil of the continent, I just knew it. I wanted to learn how to do that. So when I opened for him at a show in Atlanta and he asked me to go on tour with him in Ghana and Nigeria, all expenses paid, of course I said, “Hell yeah!”

The show that night in Lagos was amazing. I was the opening act and I don’t think the audience was expecting me. I don’t think they were ready for a six-foot tall African American woman in a glamorous evening gown with a shaved head who could both rap and sing. I took the stage like a dragon. I wrapped things up with a freestyle session. I was so deep in the zone that I don’t even remember what I was spitting. It was just coming and coming and coming. I should have known there was something in the air. Backstage, Anthony came up to me, gave me a big hug and said that I was officially his protégé. I was speechless! Everything in my life was coming together.

I grew up in Athens, Georgia. Up until three years ago, the farthest I’d ever gone from home was Jackson, Mississippi to attend Jackson State University and study psychology. I was the first in my family to go to college. And by my junior year, to my mother’s horror, I also became the first to record a hip-hop album. Never in a million years could I have imagined I’d wind up on the streets of Lagos during some sort of riot.

I’d gone out looking for Anthony after the concert. His producer told me he’d slipped out and that I’d find him down the road at someplace called Bar Beach. That’s why I was out there. I really didn’t plan to go anywhere alone. I just wanted to see if maybe he hadn’t left yet.

There were some guys milling about near the entrance of the nightclub. I leaned against the door and watched the road. The club was on the corner of a busy intersection, and I watched the traffic and enjoyed the night air.

This was how I actually saw it. I saw the sonic boom. I swear to God, the very air shivered. I saw it coming up the street. At first, I thought I was just tired and overwhelmed from such a wonderful night. I wondered if I needed to go and eat something. I can never eat before a performance, and now I was starving.

But the air really did shiver. And as I stood there, it came right at me. There was no physical breeze; it came like a ghost. Then it washed over me like a great wave of water. When it passed, I felt drenched, heavy.

There was a brief silence, like the moment after an intake of breath.

Then BOOM! Deafening noise that made my head vibrate!

People dropped to the ground, a man fell off his okada, windows shattered, car alarms sounded, two cars went over curbs. For a full minute, the constant traffic of honking, beeping cars, trucks, okadas, red buses, beat up orange danfo mini vans, motorized tricycles in front of the nightclub completely stopped. I should have gone inside. Instead, I stepped into the sea of people, holding my ears. In that first few minutes many others did, too. And soon the sides of the roads were full of people like me, curious, afraid, excited people who were scared of being indoors.

We were all wondering the same things: What blew up? Was something else going to explode? My head throbbed and I struggled to ignore it. I stood on shaky legs at an intersection, pressing close to a streetlight to avoid getting knocked around too much. The traffic started moving again but people were clearly scared. You could see it on their faces.

“Did you see that?” Someone tapped roughly on my shoulder.

Rubbing my temples, I turned. An old bent man in a long tan caftan and a wide-brimmed hat leaned on a dark wooden cane. He stank of many cigarettes and had a bushy grey beard and tufts of wiry hair on the sides of his head.

“I… I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “You saw it. Na wao, the first thing you say to me is a lie, kai!”

“I…”

“Maybe you know what it was, then?”

“The noise?” she asked.

“No, the shivering air. Was it a bird?”

“I don’t think so?”

“A plane?”

I frowned.

The man grinned. He didn’t have many teeth. Then he laughed wheezily and said something in another language. Could have been Yoruba, Hausa, or complete gibberish. I don’t think it was gibberish. The man had a glint in his eye and it put me on edge.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“You assume that I think.”

“I need to get back to the club,” I said, turning to leave. This was too much weirdness for me. Plus the car alarms and exhaust were increasing my headache. I turned back to him.

“Where are you from? Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, right?” he said.

“How did you know that?”

“I can tell, o. I got an American cousin,” he said with a smile. “I got cousins all over the world.”

“Um… wow,” I replied. An okada passed dangerously close to him as he stood with his back to the road. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice.

“Yes, you saw what you saw and I saw it, too,” he said. “It’s going to get really interesting here soon, you’ll see. It’s a great time to be in Africa! And at least you can say that you saw it all begin.” He pointed a gnarled finger at me. “You can say you were there. That is not something most young American girls can say. If you ever make it back to your country, make sure you tell them about your country here. Just because you are American does not make you American. This is your home.”

I smiled, despite the fluttery feeling in my chest. I needed to get back to the nightclub. “OK,” I said. “Well, have a good night, sir!”

“Scratch,” he said. “Call me Scratch.”

“OK, Scratch. Be safe.”

“No worry about me, o,” he said. He winked. “This my kine of night.”

I turned to run back up the street to the nightclub. I looked over my shoulder but the man was gone, already swallowed up by the late-night bustle. I took one last look at the busy street. What was that noise? I wondered. It was almost midnight and the street was busier and more frantic than ever.

I’d see Scratch again, twenty-four hours later when I was running for my life after we’d had to abandon our car on the way to the airport. I was with several band members and Anthony’s manager and we were all terrified, having witnessed riots downtown (we couldn’t find Anthony). Scratch was dancing with a crowd of market women in the middle of a dirt road as the women sang songs to the Lord Jesus Christ. When I saw the old man reveling with the women, I lost my fear. They reminded me of my mother and her church group on Sundays.

Boy, did I have a story to tell my mother. Legba, the god of the crossroads was alive and well in the country of his origin. Wow. I just might write a song about this, too, if I survive. I’ll call it “African Chaos”. And if there is one city that rhymes with “chaos”, it is Lagos.

^{Chapter 42} Mmia

Agu drove, Adaora sat in the passenger seat and Anthony and Ayodele were in the back seat. They were all quiet. Adaora was nibbling at toothpaste. The travel-sized tube was all she had in her purse that could fight off her nausea. Whenever she went scuba diving, she always liked to brush her teeth right after her return, so carrying it was a habit.

The last “dive” I did was nothing like the others, she thought, hysterically. Her mind moved to the incident on Ahmadu Bello Way. She could still see the little boy’s eyes as he died. The mad woman. Why had she done it? Ayodele said that the woman had lost hope. That wasn’t good enough for Adaora. That poor boy. She wiped her eyes and sucked down a bit more toothpaste.

They weren’t far from the airport. It was nearly 6 a.m. They had minutes. The closer they got the fewer cars they saw. Agu said the airport had probably been evacuated. But it looked flat out abandoned.

Whirrrrr!

At the sound they all leaned forward to peer through the windows into the dark sky. In a few hours the sun would come up. And what would it reveal? Adaora pushed the thought away and focused on the plane above. There was only one in the sky.

“Shit!” Agu said, speeding up.

“You think that’s them?” Adaora said.

“Of course it is,” he said. “Who else would it be?”

“Tonight?” Anthony asked. He’d opened his window to get a better look. Then he laughed. “Chale, could be a lot of things.”

“What does this man look like?” Ayodele asked.

“Like a taciturn old yam farmer,” Adaora said.

Agu chuckled. “He is tall and skinny like Anthony… but not healthy. He has many ideas but he hardly follows through on any of them.”

“Baba Go-slow,” Adaora muttered.

A minute later, they arrived. Agu stopped at the gateway that led onto the tarmac. Up ahead was the ramp that led to the drop-off and pick-up section of the airport that Adaora knew well. Even from here, she could see people milling about outside. Confused. No one was going into the airport; most likely the doors had been locked. But there were a few people leaving the building – running out and hopping into waiting vehicles.

The entrance to the tarmac was deserted and the gate was up. Agu shook his head with disgust. They drove in. It was easy to spot the President’s small jet. It was the only plane labeled ‘Nigerian Air Force’ and it was the only moving plane on the tarmac.

“Shut the lights off,” Adaora said.

They crept after the plane as it taxied to a stop on the far side of the tarmac. Agu parked the car in the darkness between two stair-trucks and got out. Adaora’s legs were shaking. Had they done the right thing by bringing Ayodele here? What would she say to the President? What would she do to the President?

The plane stopped. Nothing happened for several minutes. But through the round windows, Adaora could see the lights on and people walking up and down and looking out into the darkness. She spotted the President.

“I see him! Do you?” She pointed.

“I do,” Anthony said.

“The window near the center,” Agu said.

The President of Nigeria was looking outside. A soldier pulled him away from the window. Adaora could see two of his wives, too. Hawra was the junior wife who was in her early forties. People called her “the smart one” because she was a lawyer who also carried a PhD in political science and was rumored to be one of the President’s closest and mouthiest advisors. Zena was the senior wife and in her late fifties. People didn’t call her much of anything.

Finally, the door opened, lowering into stairs. The first to come out were three military officials. Guns up, they looked around. They must have deemed things safe because they stepped aside to allow Hawra and Zena to exit. The two wives, Zena a tall woman of nearly six feet and Hawra short and plump, wore white garments and veils. Then two older men in fine suits emerged – the President’s advisors. Then the President came forth. Two young soldiers were holding him up. He looked weak and semi-conscious. They half carried, half dragged him down the stairs, his legs barely touching each step. When they got to the bottom, one of the soldiers patted him on the shoulder as if in apology for the rough treatment.

This shriveled, sickly man was to lead the country during a crisis. Adaora had never felt so ashamed and conflicted. If he was this ill, why didn’t he step down, or at least delegate responsibility until he got better?

Adaora was the first to realize Ayodele was moving.

“Wait,” Adaora said, running after her, Anthony and Agu following. “Wait for us!” But Ayodele was swift. Though she appeared to be walking, she was covering the distance impossibly fast.

The soldiers raised their guns as Ayodele approached. She didn’t slow down. “President,” she said loudly. “I am here to speak with you.”

“Stop right there!” one of the soldiers shouted, when Ayodele was a foot from his gun. “I will shoot!” Three other soldiers joined him, guns raised.

“Who are you?” Zena asked in her shrill voice. She stepped in front of her husband. “What are you doing here?”

Out of breath, Adaora, Agu and Anthony came to a stop behind Ayodele.

“I am Private Agu, Amphibious Division, sir,” Agu told the soldier, snapping a salute. “We are only here to help.”

“Has the airport been shut down? There was no one in air traffic control! We nearly died landing!” Hawra said. “How can an entire airport be empty and dark?”

“Aren’t you aware of what is happening?” Agu asked.

“We know only what we’ve heard,” the President said, his voice weak.

“You,” one of the soldiers said, pointing at Anthony. “Are you that rapper from Ghana?”

“Yes.”

“Eeey, na wao,” one of the other soldiers said, lowering his gun. “I have all your albums, jare!”

“Say it, sha,” the first soldier said, grinning. “I dey craze!”

Anthony rolled his eyes.

Adaora stepped forward. “My name is Adaora,” she said. “I am a marine biologist. This is Ayodele. She is one of them, one of the… the extraterrestrials. She is their ambassador. She was the first to make contact and she seeks an audience with you, Mr President. We’ve gone through a lot to get her here.”

The soldiers pointed their guns at Ayodele as they moved to shield the President.

“Oh, move aside,” the President snapped at the soldiers, becoming a little more animated. “Do any of you think you can save my life? Look at me! I’m nearly dead already!” He muttered something in Hausa. “Come,” he said, looking at Ayodele.

She stepped up to him. Her long braids blew in the soft breeze. Both of the young soldiers holding up the President looked terrified. Above, the dark sky was warming as sunrise approached.

“Are you truly a stranger? An extraterrestrial? An alien?”

“Yes.”

“You look like a woman from Igboland.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

He chuckled weakly and then coughed. “Prove it.”

She paused. Then she said, “Watch closely.”

Even as she spoke, her words were falling apart, disappearing into the din of metal balls on glass, shifting and reshaping along with her body. The soldiers guarding the President dropped their guns, the wives screamed, and one of his advisors fainted. The pilot fell to his knees and began to vomit. The President watched with wide eyes. Thankfully the two soldiers carrying him did not drop him, though one of them started to sob and the other seemed to be having trouble breathing.

Ayodele was now a broad-shouldered, stocky white man in a blue uniform with bushy grey hair and beard and haunted eyes. He had a mustache like a handlebar. Ayodele-the-man put her hands on her hips and cocked her head.

The President’s mouth fell open. “Karl Marx,” he whispered. “I… I…”

“I know,” Ayodele said, in a manly voice. She stepped closer to him, graceful in her man’s body. “You believe in Marxism, yet you are too powerless to enact it.”

The President whimpered.

“I can read the air you breathe,” she said. When he still could not speak, she changed back. Her second transformation was too much for the guarding soldiers, the pilot, even the advisors. As one, they turned and ran. One of the soldiers holding up the President started praying to Allah under his breath; the other continued to sob.

“Does this help?” she asked, watching them run.

When her gaze returned to the President, he licked his lips and took a deep breath. “Y-yes.”

“Would you like me to look more Hausa?”

“It’s… no, you are fine.”

“I did not mean to frighten you.”

“You are evil!” Zena shouted from behind him.

“I am not,” Ayodele said flatly. “I am change.”

“How did you take over all the mobile phones?” the President asked.

“It wasn’t just the mobile phones and it wasn’t just me. They helped,” she said, motioning to Adaora, Anthony and Agu. “So did Adaora’s offspring.” Ayodele continued. “As did my people. As did your people. It is a matter of connecting and communicating.” She grinned. “And your technology is simple, easily manipulated.”

“And yours is not?”

“We are technology, Mr President. And no, we are not easily manipulated.”

“What do you want?”

“We do not want to rule, colonize, conquer or take. We just want a home. What is it you want?”

He paused. “To be alive again.”

“I will make it so.”