Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon

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!”

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.