“Make we meet halfway.”
“Sure,” the Colonel replied.
The two men advanced on each other. As he approached, the King felt trepidation. Something was not right here. The army never talked. He suspected the press had something to do with this sudden offer to talk, but there was something else. He had been around enough rats in his life to know their smell. Looking around, he scanned the rooftops for snipers. The Colonel walked toward the King, keeping a fake smile plastered to his face for the press. No need to appear menacing to the world, he thought. Underneath it, however, he was cursing the King, wishing he could handle this his way: walk straight up to the King, draw his Collectors’ Edition 1911 Colt.44 automatic and blow the bastard’s head right off. Better than his morning shot of gin with a coffee chaser. He cracked his neck and swallowed hard to keep his anger in.
The crowd of protestors stood watching the King and the Colonel get closer. Whatever group mind had held them together before seemed to have deserted them. They began to break up into clumps of twos and threes, drifting to buy things from the ever-present hawkers, who, sensing a possible trade, had followed them. They stood munching on fruit or cookies and downing soft drinks. The Colonel saw the crowd begin to break up and smiled. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly mobs lost focus if their leader was separated from them. He glanced at his watch. In this instance, it had taken less than two minutes. Seeing the Colonel smile and glance at his watch, the King stopped and stared around him, convinced that he was walking into a trap.
“What’s wrong?” the Colonel asked.
The King shook his head and resumed walking. This was it, he thought. Well, at least there would be television cameras to record it all. If he died now, he died a hero of the people.
Drawing closer, the King recognized the Colonel as the officer he had been searching for all this time. This was the man who had murdered his family so long ago. He was older, but it was the same sneering smile and the eyes that the King could never forget.
What happened next would be described differently later. Some would mention butterflies surrounding the King; others, cats; others still, dogs; others said eagles. Some also said that a hand reached down from heaven and handed him a sword with which to smite the unjust army.
The King reached into his dashiki and pulled out an ugly dagger. Before the Colonel could release his pistol, the King sprang and sunk his knife deep into the Colonel’s throat. The soldiers at the blockade opened fire and the bullets lifted the King bodily into the air. He soared, arms spread, before falling to the ground in a broken rumpled heap.
The crowd scattered in panic, bullets and angry soldiers chasing them. The three druids stood their ground, bullets buzzing about them like angry hornets. Tired of spells, with Jagua in the lead, they were swatting at soldiers with their magic staffs, knocking them out. The protective bubble they believed their spells wove around them broke when a soldier they missed stopped and shot them all, point blank: Jagua in the face, the other two in the chest.
Madam Caro took four bullets in her ample backside but didn’t slow down, the pestle she used to pound amala and eba at her buka held high, pounding army heads into submission. An unknown man ran toward the oncoming soldiers wielding an old Igbo sword called an akparaja. Short, wide and double-edged, it cleaved heads off with ease, littering the floor like a pineapple harvest. He took ten soldiers before running out of luck on the end of a bayonet.
The youths who had been gathering rocks and stones earlier hurled a fusillade at the soldiers, but they hit the helmets and riot body armor without doing much damage. Tear-gas canisters were fired at them. Apart from the choking smoke, the canisters of gas caught a few by surprise, tearing holes through them. Cameramen sought shelter and continued to film. The street was too narrow, and the bulk of the crowd jammed each other tight. When the shooting finally stopped, there were bodies everywhere. Conservative estimates by the press put the casualty figure at about two hundred. What no one could have guessed was that when the film of the King jumping the Colonel and stabbing him was broadcast, he would be deified, turned into a prophet, an advance guard, like John the Baptist, for the arrival of the Messiah.
Elvis felt the hot sun burn his face, and with it the first stab of a headache. He opened his eyes and glanced around him, taking in the wilderness of crumbled and derelict buildings. To his right a pole rose up out of the ground, marking the site of what used to be someone’s house, a silent sentinel, a beacon.
“Hassan! Hassan!” a woman called out in a voice hoarse from effort, but only the howling of the wind greeted her.
All around, scavengers, human and otherwise, feasted on the exposed innards of Maroko. They rummaged in the rubble as bulldozers sifted through the chaos like slow-feeding buffalo. Here some article of clothing still untorn; there a pot; over there a child’s toy with the squeaker still working. There was a lot of snorting coming from a clump of shrubs as a pack of hungry dogs fed. The hand of a corpse rose up from between the snarling dogs in a final wave.
Elvis took it in and tried to recall what had happened before he came to be there. He vaguely remembered the dreams and walking. He searched around for clues as to where he was, and then it dawned on him that he was lying in the rubble of what used to be his house. By his foot a piece of paper stuck out from under a concrete block. He could see it was torn from an almanac. It bore the legend JESUS CAN SAVE. He shut his eyes and hoped this was another dream. He opened them but it was no dream. He struggled to his feet and stood swaying while he tried to gain his balance. Where was his father? Had he slept through all the destruction? When had it happened? Where had he been? Where were Comfort and her children? Jagua? Confidence? He searched frantically for any sign of his family, and one of the human scavengers, seeing him scramble about, called out: “No worry yourself. I done search dere. Nothing dey, only dead body.”
Elvis stared at him uncomprehendingly. Corpses? Whose? Where? But the man was gone. Elvis scrambled over a final pile of rubbish and rubble and stopped short when he saw a piece of colored cloth sticking out from the mud of the swamp. He recognized his father’s lappa. He stood still for a long time before he approached it. In that time he experienced nothing. Thought nothing and felt nothing. He wondered whether he would be able to weep for his father’s death. If he was dead, that is. It was more likely that Elvis would feel relief, though.
He scrambled down the pile of rubble, half falling, half sliding, until he came to the bottom. He was brought to a halt by his father’s foot poking out at an odd angle. He clawed the debris away and exposed the body. There was a hole the size of a saucer in his chest, ribs crumbled like a cracker into lots of pieces, as if a large object had rolled over them. Sunday’s eyes were popping and his mouth was forced open into a silent laugh. Elvis’s glance took in the body of a policeman lying not far from his father’s body. It only took a minute for him to work out the general sequence that must have led up to his father’s death. What puzzled him, though, was the policeman. What had killed him? He approached the body. The entire back of the head was missing and there were claw marks all over the body. It looked like he had been mauled by some large predator. That was really strange, because there were no animals of that size anywhere near Lagos or Maroko. It certainly wasn’t the work of a ghetto rat.
Elvis sat there in the rubble and tried to figure out what had really happened. He wished his head would stop pounding for just one minute. The inside of his mouth was furred and tasted like an old slipper. It bothered him that his father was dead and all he could feel was relief. Dead. That word fell with a thud like a mango loosened from a tree.