Mufutau Ogbe lives with four other people in a single room so tiny they can’t afford to have furniture because it takes up too much space. It goes without saying that they don’t have any money.
Mufutau came to Rosewater in ’66 with unbridled Burkitt lymphoma. One of his eyes was twice the size of the other. His face was asymmetrical, with a swelling from his cheek bulging out. Mucus dribbled from his nostrils incessantly and people shunned him. He got no education, and no training for a vocation. As a burden on his parents, he was abandoned with a herbalist who said he could cure him where chemotherapy had failed. After the Opening of ’67, Mufutau saw his own face undistorted for the first time in his adult life. It cost him every kobo he could save to get to Rosewater.
At ten past midnight, his phone wakes him. He stands, stretches and dresses in all black, careful not to wake his roommates. He checks his pockets for any identifying mark. He opens his palm and the plasma display glows in the darkness. He touches the ID hack and his chip is deactivated. He leaves the room and makes his way down the stairs. Outside the hostel, a car waits. A drunk pukes against a street light. On the night air a flowery fragrance dominates, as if Rosewater is trying to live up to its name.
The car door opens and Mufutau gets in the back.
It starts to move as soon as the door is shut. There are four other occupants. The light in the car is dim, but all are dressed the same, in lightweight material, with dark hats. One is Mufutau’s friend Segun, who is a weeder by day, and who got him this gig. Most of the others are unremarkable, but one has the glowing green where the whites of his eyes should be. An alien. Ogberi.
“I’m Laark. The last of you is here and in a few minutes we will arrive at our destination, a government facility. If anyone wishes to back out now, please speak. You can keep the deposit I gave you. I don’t care if you snitch or not, because it won’t matter. Anybody? No? All right then.”
Mufutau tries to avoid eye contact. Everyone knows they can jump into your body if you stare too long.
“I’m going to give you each twenty devices. I’ll tell you what to do with them when we arrive. Once you have done this, I will pay you in full. Twenty thousand dollars, as agreed.”
Mufutau looks forward to the pay. With that kind of bank balance he can leave Rosewater and return to Nigeria. It is odd to think of the city as a different country, but that’s the new reality.
“Shouldn’t we be armed?” asks someone.
“No need. The facility is forgotten, left behind in the rash of government infrastructure works and self-congratulatory war memorials.” Laark yawns, but not like one tired. He seems to Mufutau like a lioness doing that thing they do.
The car halts and they all spill out. The door shuts and the car drives away, programmed to return in an hour. Laark hands out backpacks to everyone, then leads the way to the gates of a building in the middle of nowhere. There’s a chain-link fence, rusted, covered in creeper plants, flowers and thorns. About ten feet high, though it’s difficult to tell through the dense leaves. A raw ganglion discharges close by, sending lightning up into the sky with a green glow.
“Drones?” Mufutau whispers to Segun.
“That thing with the floaters yesterday took care of them,” Segun says.
Mufutau doesn’t know what “thing”. He pulled a night shift at a restaurant and slept all day.
Old as the gates and fence are, there’s a keypad keeping everything inaccessible. Laark knows the code, and the gates spring open. There are no lights, but some of the men have torches. The creaking of unoiled hinges leaks away into the night, but Lark doesn’t care, so Mufutau doesn’t. They are in a concrete space with vines that criss-cross the ground and crunch underfoot. There is a flat main building that Laark trots to, garlanded with six-foot biohazard symbols and warnings to back the fuck away in English, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Arabic, Mandarin and weird writing that might be Russian. The warnings seem to be stuck on with stickers. Mufutau notices a sheen of dust on every surface and dirt on the air, competing with the flowers.
Nobody else seems worried about the symbols, so Mufutau keeps quiet.
The building and the door appear to be made of reinforced nuplastic. Laark ignores the door, sprays something foamy on the wall in a vague circle, and waits. A foul stench fills the air and the nuplastic flows like liquid into a puddle. They have an entrance. The entire block is a large, wide auditorium that could perhaps contain forty people. In the centre, the floor is open to a sub-level. Mufutau and the rest walk up to the edge, kicking up dust from the floor.
Even before they see what’s down there, they begin to cough from a chemical smell, and Mufutau thinks again about the biohazard signs. Laark has one of those glow orbs that are activated by contact, and he tosses it in.
At first glance it looks like someone has driven large trucks and eighteen-wheelers and trailers into a hole in the ground. The gap in the floor is itself a hundred metres square. The vehicles seem to draw the eye, before their load takes over. There are hundreds of variously sized drums in the space, on their sides, upright, intact, broken, all covered in bio- and chem-hazard symbols, and the obvious source of the vile smell. But Mufutau is from Rosewater now, and he reasons that whatever harm they come to will be healed by Wormwood or the god Koriko. They no longer need to wait for the Opening, which is a thing of the past since the dome disintegrated.
He cannot see the how deep the hole in the ground goes. That’s a lot of barrels and a lot of toxic waste.
Laark gestures towards the hole. “Get in. Leave one charge on each vehicle.”
“I’m not going in there,” says Segun. This makes the others hesitate, although they fan out around the hole. Laark materialises a handgun. He moves so fast that Mufutau has no idea where his holster could be. It’s one of those models with inbuilt silencers.
“I thought you said we wouldn’t need guns,” Mufutau says.
“The job doesn’t require guns, but it seems I need to motivate at least one of you. Now get in there.” Laark waves the gun in an arc that covers all the hired men. “It’s twenty large, my human friends. Did you think you would be planting cocoyam and singing Ipi Tombi?” His eyes are even greener in the dim light.
“We should have hazmat suits,” says one of the others.
“You don’t need them,” says Laark. “Believe me.”
Mufutau is closest to Laark and the alien pushes him. He pinwheels, but manages to land awkwardly on something slippery. He ends up hanging on to a drive shaft with his feet trying to get purchase on the body of a barrel. It’s a short fall, maybe six feet, so he isn’t injured. He hears other impact thuds as the others jump in, but he has already started to lay charges, a driver’s cabin here, a petrol tank there, a hole in a barrel elsewhere. The stench is unbearable and he wonders how much oxygen is down there. At times an air bubble bursts lazily on the surface of the black goo in which the barrels and cars rest.
Mufutau half fears Laark will leave them all down in the hole to rot, and is pleasantly surprised when a rope ladder unfurls into the hole, and they are all helped out, soaking wet and perhaps burning because the liquids are maybe low-grade corrosive as well as toxic.
Laark pokes an app on his plasma phone and Mufutau feels a reassuring vibration, notification that the funds have been transferred. He plans to have a long bath in an expensive hotel and to locate the most expensive sex worker he can find.
“Thank you, gentlemen. You have performed exemplarily. Now. Run.” Laark’s hand hovers over a control grid on his phone. A button blinks amber.
Mufutau and the others slouch towards the exit.
“You’re going to need to run a bit faster than that, my friends. But as you wish…” He pushes the amber button, and it turns red.
The reports from the explosions are different, as well as the shock waves. Some just pop, others are ear-shattering, while many just go “whumpf”. The hired men start to run, but waves of heat and kinetic energy bowl them over before they reach the door. Mufutau looks back and sees flames reaching out of the hole as if it is a doorway to hell. The fire is in strange, thin columns, deep yellow, blue and red. There is a cloud, grey, almost black, rising.
Laark just stands there laughing like a fucking hyena while the exhalations of the hole burn and dissolve his body.
Mufutau thinks the alien collapses in a fit of coughing before the smoke makes it impossible to see anything.
Or breathe.