Why You Were Taken

YIP, YIP, YIP. ₃₀

Johannesburg, 2021

Someone flips the light switch and the image of the room jumps out at Kirsten. Cadmium blazes around five glistening tight-muscled men; dark, oily, like sealskin. They wear layers of light dusty clothes, wildlife-fur armbands, leather trinkets, and carry the biggest automatic weapons Kirsten has ever seen. Only two of the men aim their guns at them; Kirsten guesses that two AK47s are enough.

The youngest of the five pats them down, takes Seth’s gun off him. Looks embarrassed when he finds blood on Kirsten’s jeans. She has the unreasonable urge to tell him it’s not hers, but has a hand over her mouth. He snatches the insulin kit from her hand, sniffs it, drops it on the floor. She protests and the muzzle of the gun gets pushed right into her ribs. Seth strains a little against the man holding him down. Not too much to warrant being shot, not too little to show he’s not a pushover.

‘What do we have here?’ the man says.

‘A couple of white maggots,’ another says. He pronounces it mag-GOTS.

‘You a cop?’ he asks Seth, taking his hand away in order to let him speak. The animal teeth on his leather necklace click together, sending little circles towards Kirsten. Seth laughs.

‘I think that everyone knows that cops don’t come into Little Lagos.’

The man lets out three bars of a laugh, looks around at his colleagues. They flash their teeth. The moment is short lived: as soon as he stops smiling the others do too.

‘Then who the fuckayou?’ he asks.

‘A punk,’ says one of the other men. ‘A fuckin’ punk come to make trouble for us.’ Seth can see he is the dangerous one: hopped up on something – tik? Nyaope? White Lobster? – and unable to contain his jerky movements. Not a quality you want in a man pointing a large gun at your face. Kirsten senses that he has killed a lot of people. Bloodthirsty, she thinks. She can almost smell the warm red metal on him.

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

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

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

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

Kirsten glares at him.

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

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

Kirsten feels a gushing of saliva in her mouth. She tries to warn him but it’s too late, and soon hot vomit is spraying out of her mouth, through her guard’s fingers, through her nose, and she is doubled over. The man looks at her, horrified, and backs away. ‘You have the Bug,’ he says.

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

The other men also take a quick step back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Rolo sent you?’ the leader asks.

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

‘Give me your phone,’ he says.

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

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

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

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

‘We don’t sell lady-guns,’ he spits.

‘Good thing I’m not a lady, then,’ says Kirsten. He looks at her and then laughs his strange three-bar laugh again.

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

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

‘Z88?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ says Seth. He locates the correct ammo and passes a few boxes up.

‘More,’ says Seth. He passes 2 more. ‘Another one,’ he says, and the man shrugs and passes up another one. ‘You taking on an army?’ he asks, making the other guys chuckle.

‘Could be,’ replies Seth, serious.

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

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

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

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

‘Does it work?’ she asks.

‘It works,’ he says.

‘Then I like it.’

‘We only sell guns that work,’ he says, passing her bullets. ‘We like – what is it called? – Return Customers.’

‘You could have fooled me,’ mumbles Seth.

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

‘What are those things?’ she asks, pointing towards what looks like second-hand lipsticks.

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

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

‘How does it work?’ she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The animal lies twitching on the ground.

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

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

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

They’d only been inside the house for an hour but it feels like days when they exit out the front door. Dodging the rabid monkey, running down the steps, they both breathe the polluted air deep into their lungs. It’s warm, and Kirsten gives Seth his hooded jacket back, bunches her new gun and taser into her bag.

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

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

One, we’ve got one, Kirsten thinks.

One is all she needs, thinks Seth.

It looks like their luck may be turning, they both think at the same time, and get in the car. Kirsten checks Keke’s phone and sees a bump from Marko to check her chatmail.