Page 40 of Death of the Author

40 Wahala Dey

The drive back to the Port Harcourt airport started off boring. Uchenna was quietly brooding. He had visited his uncles while

Zelu was at her family’s house, but he wouldn’t talk about whatever they had said to him. Hugo was poring over the photos

he’d taken on his hike into the forest. Marcy was sleeping; she’d used the alone time yesterday to work on her dissertation

deep into the night, comfortable in the Nigerian heat.

Zelu looked out the window and mulled over her experience for the hundredth time since she’d returned. She’d crossed an ocean

for this, hoping that she would find alignment by coming home. Now she realized this was not her parents’ house anymore, and

her father’s grave was not her father. He was gone, and this part of her life was over.

The sun had gone down, but they still had about an hour of driving to go. Her uncle hadn’t liked the idea of them driving

at night, but they’d booked a red-eye flight, so they had no choice. Even the driver was unusually quiet, squinting at the

road as he gnawed on a chewing stick. The SUV in front of them was driving slower this time, thank goodness. In the dark,

one couldn’t see the potholes coming.

Zelu examined the threads of the cheap red, yellow, and blue Ankara-printed polyester T-shirt she was wearing. She looked at her exos next. She didn’t want to cover them anymore. She was tired of hiding herself for the sake of others. This entire trip hadn’t been what she’d hoped for, but really, what had she expected? She would never have been treated like a typical “daughter

of the soil,” even if she hadn’t had her accident. Now, whenever anyone saw her, they saw her exos first, and if they could

get past those, when she opened her mouth, she only spewed “foreigner.” She was directly related to half the people she saw

in the village and even carried the same last name, but she would never be “normal” to anyone there.

Light flashed into her eyes. She stared at the brake lights of the SUV in front of them, and then at the headlights of the

one behind them. They slowed down. “Must be a big pothole,” their driver said after a glance at Zelu.

“Oh, my poor ass ,” Marcy whined.

Hugo was leaning out the window to take a last few twilight photos of the trees flanking the two-lane road. “Works for me,”

he said with a laugh. Uchenna was fast asleep in the back seat and remained so even when the driver brought the vehicle to

a full stop. Zelu looked at the SUVs on either side again. In each of those vehicles were heavily armed men. This was what it was to safely move around here, being who she was.

Then Hugo sharply inhaled. “What the fuck,” he muttered. Zelu could hear him quickly snapping photo after photo with his phone.

“What the fuck?!”

“Whooooa! Shut the window!” Marcy suddenly shouted. “Shut the window!”

Uchenna woke up. He peered out the window and shrieked. In an instant, he’d grabbed his backpack and started fumbling it over

his shoulders. Zelu pressed her face against the glass to see.

There was movement in the trees. Black shapes, leaping through the branches. Zelu squinted, and realized they were men, dressed

in dark clothes with their faces covered.

CRASH! Someone had run up to Hugo’s side and broken the window with... the butt of an AK-47!

Hugo put his hands up, utterly calm. “Marcy,” he whispered. “Relax.”

Zelu turned to the driver. “Fuck! What are you doing? Drive!” she screeched.

The driver didn’t hesitate. He pulled out the keys and leaped out of the car, leaving the door wide open. Zelu saw him throw

the keys at two of the men who were moving toward them.

“Fuck!” Zelu screamed. She reached into the front pocket of her backpack and fumbled for her Mace.

Shhhhhhhhhhh! A waft of mist. Then Zelu’s throat, eyes, and nose began to sting and burn.

“ Fuck off! ” Uchenna shouted, his voice harried. Everyone was coughing. Zelu hacked, trying to clear her throat. Her nose was filling

with mucus.

“Go!” Marcy hissed, her voice suddenly very close to Zelu’s ear. Through their coughing, Zelu heard a commotion outside. Someone

was shooting. It was close. Blam! Zelu shuddered, clapping her hands over her ears, snot flying from her nose. In the liminal darkness of twilight and the

flashing lights of the SUVs, she didn’t know what was happening. She reached for the door handle, but her palms were slick

with sweat, and where was the shooting coming from?

Hugo got his door open and he, Marcy, and Uchenna were already spilling out. Shhhhh! A fresh wave of burning, itching, and coughing washed over her. More pepper spray! Had Hugo sprayed his own this time? Only

yesterday he’d been bragging about how he carried some kind of heavy-duty version that no one would want to fuck with.

Men shouted in pidgin English and Igbo. The sound of their voices sent a ripple of terror through Zelu. Where were the soldiers

her uncle and cousin had hired? Had they been gunned down when she heard the shots earlier? “Sharrap your dirty stinking mouth!”

someone shouted. “Move, move, move!”

Zelu fought to keep her mind clear. Everything was blurry and painful. The bottom half of her face was wet with snot and drool. Something clattered. The scuffle of feet running. She knew what she had to do, but the fact was she could not get out of the SUV very quickly.

The passenger door was ripped open. Men in black clothes surrounded her like ghosts. One of them grabbed her shoulders and

pulled her up; his grip was so strong that Zelu didn’t have a chance to stumble in her exos.

“Forget the others,” one of them said, motioning at her. “This is the one.” Zelu recognized him. This was Ogo, who worked

at her uncle’s house!

“Are you the writer?” one of the men in black said, pointing a gun at her. There were four of them. Two of them were coughing,

just like her.

“Y-y-yes.”

“Get back in the truck,” he said. “We are going for a ride.”

“Cooperate and you’ll be fine,” Ogo said with no trace of emotion. She wanted to spit in his betraying face.

She turned toward the rear of the car. Her hands were shaking badly as she grasped the side of the open door for support.

Her mind was fuzzy. Where were the others? Pah! One of the men standing near her howled with pain. She turned around to see him writhing on the road, holding his leg. It

was too dark to see why. The other three men had turned toward where the sound had come from, guns up. She stepped on something

hard. She looked down. The writhing man had dropped his gun. She could bend. Pick it up. Start shooting. Killing. Save her

friends. Live through this.

She made a split-second decision. She turned the other way and ran like hell. No gun. Who was she? She’d never held a gun in her entire life, let alone shot one. Zelu knew nothing of war, yet her world had suddenly become a war zone. So she fled. She’d never tried running with her exos before. It required such intense concentration, and since her biological legs weren’t doing the work, she didn’t get the benefit of true aerobic activity, so she just hadn’t seen the point. But now, she was so pumped up with adrenaline, she didn’t even think twice.

Her terror sharpened her senses, slowed down time, and tunneled her vision. Focus focus focus. They were behind her. PAH! One of them shot at her and the bullet bit at the leaves of the tree she was dashing past. She

kept going. She kept going. She kept going. She was fast. Her eyes adjusted to the dark. She didn’t dare look back.

At some point, she remembered that she still had her cell phone in her back pocket. And it was all charged up for the flight

home. The flight that she was definitely going to miss. Focus , she thought at herself. Keep going. She let herself think about her phone instead. It was with her in this moment. All she had to do was keep her balance and

reach for it. She used one hand to dig into her pocket and managed to pull it out.

She had unlimited data and she had Yebo to help her, but who would she call? Who would answer quickly?

“Yebo! Call Msizi!” It rang and rang. She hung up after the fifth ring.

“Fuck you, Msizi! What the hell!” Tears flew from her eyes and she shook her head. No time to lose her shit. “Yebo! Call Chinyere!”

It would be afternoon in Chicago, definitely worth a shot. Again, it rang and rang. Chinyere might have been doing a surgery

or seeing a patient. Zelu whimpered. She hardened her face and wiped her hand over it. She needed someone, anyone who would listen. She had an idea. “Yebo,” she said. “Get on Facebook and go live.”

As she ran, she held up her camera to her face. Already, she could see she had 8,873 live viewers. The location stamp was enabled. “Zelu here!” she huffed, feeling almost delirious as she looked into the bright screen. “I’m... I’m somewhere on some road in Imo State. You can see it... about an hour away by car from the Port Harcourt airport. Just got carjacked... escaped kidnappers... they were after me , specifically! Guards were shooting back, so I ran...”

With every step, air pounded through her chest. It was amazing. She hadn’t known her exos could run this swiftly, and she

was doing an epic job maintaining her balance. She was running on the side of the road and her speed was not much slower than

the cars going by. What must she have looked like? In the darkness, they probably couldn’t see her that well, except right when they passed her. Several honked their horns,

but no one stopped. She certainly didn’t. To stop on this road was to risk what she’d only just escaped from.

For a long stretch, she ran in the dark, no cars passing by. The only sounds were the tap tap of her exos and her own rapid breathing. If anything was out here, it would hear and see her. She’d glanced into the dark

bushes once, and between the trees, she could have sworn she saw the hulking mass of a masquerade. Watching her run by, silent

but weighted in its presence. She was alone and fully exposed, with nothing but her body and the technology on her person.

She felt a wave of terror so strong that she nearly dropped her phone.

She looked up at the sky. It was so clear that she could see the Milky Way. The only noises around her were the singing of

insects and the occasional screech of a barn owl.

“Look at the Milky Way,” she said, holding her phone up. There were thousands of eyes looking through her camera, but she

felt like the only one there.

She kept talking to distract herself, saying whatever crossed her mind. “Not my first time seeing it. The first time I saw

the Milky Way, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I thought I was seeing clouds in the moonlight... but there was no

moon that night! It was in my father’s village. I always saw it there, whenever we went when I was growing up. Then I saw

it in Morocco, at a tourist location in the desert. That’s where, coincidentally, they shot a few scenes for Rusted Robots .”

Her heart hurt; it was working too hard. She took a deep breath and let it out, murmuring, “Clarity.” She felt better, a little. “Breathtaking,” she continued to her phone. “What would it be like to be an astronaut out there? In that silence. Relentless, beautiful space. Unconcerned with humanity.” She looked up into the sky again, looked well beyond the Earth. “Out there, I wouldn’t need exos. I’d be more prepared in outer space than all of you who can walk. Ah, I need only look up on this night of hell to be reminded that it’s only on this Earth that I am abnormal.”

A car passed dangerously close to her. “Shit! Watch it!” she screamed after the car. Some of the people passing her now had

to have also passed the situation she’d fled. Was the gun battle still going on? Where were Marcy, Hugo, and Uchenna? Were

they okay? And where the fuck was she going?

It was strange, but she had the answer to that. It’s just that what she was doing seemed impossible, so it was best not to

look directly at it. She was coming down now. Softly. She glanced at her video feed again. There were now fifty thousand people

watching her, and that number was quickly rising. She looked hard into her camera and said, “If someone who knows me personally

is watching, please contact my family. Tell them what happened, what’s happening. Please! Tell everyone! I need help!”

Now she was fully back to herself. She was doing this, and she could keep doing it. She would not fall. She’d mastered her

exos, here, on the Imo State road in Nigeria. Still, she didn’t dare look behind her or in the bushes.

“They... they stopped our car,” she continued to tell her phone. “Men with guns. I don’t know how I got away... I don’t

know how I’m even running. These exos. Saved me. I’m scared. Really, really scared. Look how fast...” She panned her camera

around her. “I know it looks shaky, but I can’t help it. I feel... feel like if I stop, I’ll fall. And if I fall, I’ll

be killed.”

A car zoomed by right beside her, honking its horn.

“See?” she whimpered. Now she was crying. “I can’t stop. I’m here and I can’t stop.” After a few breaths, she said, “Yebo,

show me the way to the airport and enable location tracking on Facebook Live.”

Yebo opened a small window at the top of her screen that showed her the way to the airport via GPS. And now, with her location public, if the kidnappers were following her, they weren’t the only ones who knew where she was going.

After running on the side of the road for over an hour, she began to see signs for the airport. Even with the streetlights

and more-frequent cars lighting the area, she was still hard to see. And an individual person running on the side of the road

was so unexpected that most who even glimpsed her probably assumed she was a figment of their imagination. Zelu was dirty

from dust and sweat. The exos were still working, but when she touched them, they were hot. Soon they would begin to burn

her flesh. She’d been running at close to forty-five miles per hour, and though her exos had the capability, they weren’t

meant to be used in this way.

On top of this, her adrenaline had begun to wear off and she was getting tired. She hadn’t looked at her phone in a while,

she’d just been holding it up. Now she looked at it. Five million people were watching. She frowned and then checked the chat. There were too many comments for her to see if anyone she knew

was responding. She held the phone to her face.

“I’m... I’m okay. Just tired. Uh... it’s late now. I’m near the airport.” She turned and started running up the exit

ramp. Up ahead she saw a flashlight pointing at her. “Someone’s up the road, maybe... waiting for me.” She squinted. She

couldn’t tell who it was. She was so overwhelmed with relief that the end was in sight.

She looked at her camera. “My fucking exos got me here... and my partner’s personal assistant app called Yebo! Call me

robot woman, whatever you want. I’m alive !”

More lights started flashing, and suddenly she could see that it was the Nigerian police, a bunch of reporters, and beyond

that, a crowd of other people.

“You’re safe!” a random woman shouted.

Zelu stopped as they all rushed to her. She looked at her phone. “If there’s ever a chance for me to leave this fucking planet, sign me up.” She held her phone up so that her many followers could see her point of view as people rushed toward her, and then she forgot about her phone as she finally collapsed into someone’s arms. They were the arms of a woman with a stethoscope wearing scrubs. Zelu’s vision was distorted by tears, her hearing blurred by her sobs. She was being carried into an ambulance, its flashing lights piercing the dark. Someone might have been telling her that her auntie Mary and uncle Ralph were flying in. At some point she was being driven. There were sirens. She was in a bed. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. She wept. She slept. And when the sun rose, she awoke.

Her exos were on the floor. Her phone was on the nightstand, plugged into a charger beside her. Her uncle was sitting on the

chair across from her, his head back, his mouth hanging open. Zelu quietly pushed herself up and winced at her sore upper

abdominal muscles and back.

“Shit,” she whispered.

“Good morning,” Uncle Ralph said, waking.

“Uncle,” she said, her throat hoarse. “It was Ogo, one of Uncle Onyemobi’s workers.”

Uncle Ralph twitched with fury. “I know him,” he growled. “Just rest.”

“Are the others okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “They got away. One of Onyemobi’s guards was shot in the leg.”

She gasped. “Oh my God!”

“He’s in the other room.”

“Will he be all right?”

“I believe so.”

“What about the kidnappers?” she asked, pulling herself fully upright.

“They ran as soon as you got away and the guard started shooting in your direction.”

She swallowed hard. “So if I hadn’t run...”

Her uncle nodded. “I think someone would have died.”

Her shoulders sagged, the reality of how close they’d all been to a full-on firefight settling into her bones. “But the kidnappers got away.”

Her uncle’s eyes flashed with heat. “For the time being. Now that I know Ogo was involved, I know what to do. Ah, the disrespect,

o. Word of mouth will punish him. You are known in the region. You are loved. And you are our blood. People will be angry

that these idiots ran you off.” He frowned deeper, cocking his head, and Zelu knew he was thinking about “jungle justice,”

when the community handled the meting out of punishment, usually with violence. She couldn’t stop him, but she didn’t plan

to be in the country when it all played out, anyway.

Zelu waved a hand. All that mattered at this point was that she and the others get the fuck out of here and onto a plane back

to Lagos, then home. She’d had enough of Nigeria for a long while. “Where are Hugo, Marcy, and Uchenna?”

“With Uchenna’s family,” her uncle said. “His grandfather wouldn’t have it any other way. Uchenna got in a fistfight with

one of the kidnappers who’d lost his gun. He beat the guy up pretty badly, but when the guy fled, Uchenna didn’t stop him.

Your white friend with the robot legs is shaken up, though. They all are.”

“What about Onyemobi?” Zelu croaked, another wave of worry hitting her.

“Onyemobi is well. He and I will handle the rest. Don’t worry” was all her uncle said, a dark look on his face.

When Uncle Ralph left to go make a call, she picked up her cell phone. It was dusty but otherwise in good shape. She looked

at its dark screen, afraid of what she’d see when she woke it up. She reveled in the ignorance for a moment. She’d been recording

live all that time. Millions had tuned in. People had heard and alerted the authorities. Her family had probably seen the

whole thing, too, by now. Her mother must have been sick with worry. She’d warned Zelu about this very thing, and Zelu had

dismissed her warnings. Her mother was probably cursing Zelu’s recklessness.

Zelu touched the screen, and the first thing she saw was that Yebo had done something interesting. It had created what it called a “Window of Love” on the top lefthand side of her phone. In it was a list of comments from social media that were full of compassion, praise, and encouragement.

We love you, Zelu!

Queen of Robots!

You’re so COOL!

Area Boy no fit catch you!

001100111!!

I wish I could be like you!

We were all watching!

I literally love you!

Never stop writing!

In all of what had happened, she’d forgotten she still had fans. There were people out there who loved her stories, who worried

about her, who wanted her to be okay, who loved her ! She shut her eyes for a moment, blinking away tears.

Then she saw the list of missed calls, emails, and texts from her mother, siblings, agents, and even acquaintances. It was

as if everyone who had her phone number had tried reaching her within the last few hours. Msizi had been calling every hour

since around the time she was taken to the hospital.

She took a glance online and saw that she’d made national and international news. Her live video had gone massively viral. The author who’d become famous for writing a drama about robots was now at the center of her own robot drama in real life. People were talking excitedly about the science behind her amazing exos. Though most of the chatter was kind, there were also people who were laughing at the arrogant Nigerian American who thought she was untouchable. Some were speculating about how much her ransom would have been. Some said the kidnappers were Boko Haram and that the terrorists had planned to sell her off as a robot wife. Someone said they were Fulani herdsmen who wanted to sell her off as a robot cow. Nigeria was looking very bad in all this. She put her phone down.

“Man, oh man,” she muttered. What had she done?

Yebo dinged and a window popped up.

Remember the Window of Love

It included a link back to all the kinder comments she’d viewed before.

Sighing, she threw her phone onto the blanket by her feet. What good was love if she could only see it through a window?