Abiola Fashola was on his way to meet with the Yoruba street gang that ran his neighborhood when he saw the old man. A cold shiver of dread rippled through the troll's massive body.
The funny part was he didn't know why. Abiola had never seen the old man before.
He didn't look dangerous. The old man was human, but then most Yorubas were human. He wore olive drab work pants and a bright yellow shirt. He was big around the belly, suggesting he got quite enough to eat, though how he managed to do that in the Shomolu quarter of Lagos was a mystery. His skin was dark, his hair the color of iron. His chin was clothed by a wispy, gray beard.
So he didn't look dangerous and he wasn't doing anything unusual. The old man stood in the busy street haggling with a fishmonger whose cart was loaded with the rich variety of fish that could be caught in Lagos Lagoon: three-eyed fish and no-eyed fish, fish with parasites and fish with stumps where fins should be, fish that looked fine, but were loaded with heavy metals or bacteria or magical maladies.
The Yoruban quarter was pushed right up against the poisonous lagoon, which the people of Lagos used as dump, toilet, bath, and larder all in one.
The cart's contents turned Abiola's stomach. He had eaten better when he'd been a merc-too bad he couldn't stomach the killing.
He was tempted to dismiss his feeling as nerves, but he knew better. The shiver meant his dreaming mind had seen some danger his waking mind had missed.
The first time it happened to him his merc unit had been working some Igbo raiders that were coming out of the jungle to harass the oil workers that fed the Lagos pipeline. It seemed like cake duty, drawing a fat corp paycheck from Global Sandstorm (washed through the Edo Kingdom, of course) to hunt down some irregulars.
Only the irregulars didn't turn out to be so irregular. Later Abiola learned they were mercs drawing their own fat corp paycheck from United Oil (washed through the Igbo Kingdom, of course.)
Anyway, it had been a pretty summer day and they were working their way through some small family farm that had met some unfortunate and violent end.
They were on the north side of the farm, moving through fields that weren't growing anything but knee-high grass. The jungle rose up before them like an emerald wall, so close that Abiola could hear the cries of monkeys, the chatter of birds, the buzz and click of insects.
They moved across the farm using standard infantry tactics. First squad would sprint forward, while second stood back ready to provide covering fire. First would stop, establishing cover, and then the two squads would trade, second exposed, first concealed.
First had taken cover behind a truck turned over on its side, men laying prone behind the truck's engine block or its bed, AK-97s pointed at the jungle.
Second readied itself to rush forward toward the burnt-out hulk of a tractor forty meters from their position.
Abiola shivered.
It wasn't that he was a coward. He didn't fear combat. He was used to being bigger and more powerful than the men he fought. And he was a devout Christian, so he didn't believe this life would be his last. He did not want to die, but neither was he paralyzed by the thought that death might be waiting for him around every corner. Abiola Fashola was not a coward.
But suddenly he couldn't move.
So when second squad moved out, they went without him.
Giving Abiola a ringside seat when an Igbo ambush cut down every last man before they could reach the tractor's limited cover.
He would never know for sure what had caused him to freeze. Maybe his dreaming mind had looked out into the jungle and recognized the signs of danger: a glint of sunlight on steel, a fern stalk snapped and broken, the sudden peculiar silence of birds.
Whatever it was, from that moment on Abiola believed in it. So he took his fear of the old man seriously.
Abiola turned and hurried down the street, telling himself that things in Lagos were not always what they seemed. The old man could be scouting for the flesh-trade or he could be a corporate hitman, a merc recruiter, a drug runner.
Abiola did not wish to find out.
He ducked down a side street, took another turn, and ended up on Ikorodu Road.
In the late afternoon, Ikorodu was a snarl of traffic, an impossibly long line of cars and trucks so old they still ran on gas. Mixed in with the cars were darting motorcycle taxis called okadas, construction yellow danfo busses so crowded that people hung out their open doors, and the occasional caravan of trucks on their way to Victoria Island in the company of tanks and APCs.
None of them going anywhere.
A brown cloud of smog hung over the go-slow. Horns honked and men cursed. Boys no older than six worked their way between the stalled cars, hawking gum, newspapers, steamed bean cakes, sweating bottles of Gulder beer, anything that might sell to the trapped commuters.
In the chaos, no one noticed a hulking troll moving down the sidewalk.
Abiola Fashola was big even for a troll, two meters sixty-one and pushing three hundred twenty kilos, only the last ten of which were from too much Star beer. His skin was dark chocolate and a pair of ornate horns the color of bronze began at his forehead and curled around like a ram's. He wore camouflage pants from his merc days over heavy work boots. A black t-shirt revealed muscular arms that could pop a human skull like a balloon. A meter-long machete hung from his belt by a lanyard.
He also wore a simple gold cross hidden beneath his long, black beard. Abiola had great love for the baby Jesus, but he tried not to let it show.
In Lagos, universal love and brotherhood was the kind of thing that could get you killed.
As he walked down the street his vision swarmed with augmented reality objects, ghostly icons floating over reality, powered by the mesh network that blanketed the road.
Most of it was garbage, spam pop-ups offering to increase the size of certain parts of his anatomy. (Like he needed any part of himself to be bigger.)
He powered down his comlink and looked around. No sign of the mysterious old man. Maybe it'd all been in his imagination, after all.
Abiola weaved through the crazy, crowded streets of Lagos, following Ikorodu Road another couple blocks before ducking east again.
After losing the mysterious old man, Abiola almost felt good. Until he heard a cruel voice behind him say: "If it isn't Mr. Troll," and he remembered the errand that had brought him here in the first place. • • •
They ended up in a little bar, Abiola nursing a Star beer the street gang bought him. Abiola loved Star, but this one tasted a little off. Bottled beer went for five naira, but he couldn't help thinking this one had cost more.
Abiola raised the bottle in a gesture of respect and said, "Thank you for the beer, Babafemi Kosoko."
Yeah. This one had cost quite a bit more.
The bar was small, a ramshackle collection of salvaged wood over a dirt floor. It was filled with the six or seven area boys Babafemi had brought with him, all of them armed with automatic weapons and wicked looking knives.
Babafemi and Abiola sat alone at a battered table. Babafemi was young and handsome. He wore jeans, real western blue jeans, and a pale green t-shirt that proclaimed: "I don't have an attitude problem, you're just an asshole." The boy couldn't be older than twenty.
His given name meant, "Beloved by his father."
Babafemi flashed a lopsided grin, bright against his dark face. "We've been watching you, Abiola Fashola. Trolls are rare among the Yoruba people. Especially ones who used to be mercs."
"That part of my life is over," said Abiola carefully.
"Yes, but you still have the skills, no? You don't have to be a merc, but you still have the skills."
Abiola took a pull of his beer.
Babafemi was not human, not really. Oh, he was biologically human, Abiola was sure of that, but the part of human beings that made them feel for others of their kind, that held them back from terrible violence, that caused them to reach out a helping hand when none was required, that part of Babafemi was utterly missing.
Abiola hated killing, he was sick to death of killing, but he would have killed Babafemi for a quarter-naira and he would have taken the job without a second's consideration. He would've taken no joy in it, but he would have done it anyway for the same reason one puts down a rabid dog: because the world would be a better place without Babafemi in it.
Except instead of killing Babafemi, Abiola was going to end up working for him.
"The 38 Dragons have forgotten their place," said Babafemi. "They've been giving us trouble."
"Isn't their place down south where Shomolu bumps up against Surulere's northeast corner?" asked Abiola. "Maybe they're giving you trouble because they've got their backs to a killing field. If you talked with them, maybe you could work something out."
A thin, cold smile knifed across Babafemi's young face. "Oh, we're going to work something out. It won't involve talking, though." The boy leaned forward. "And the Ammits would like your help."
An ammit was a giant crocodile. The awakened species terrorized the swamps and creeks of Lagos. It was a powerful and dangerous creature, but Abiola understood that calling yourself an ammit didn't make you an ammit.
These boys, these terrible boys played at being soldiers, played at being monsters. They called themselves tigers or crocodiles or dragons or lions, but in the end all they did was kill each other.
And whoever else happened to be in the way.
"I don't know," said Abiola softly.
"Eighty-five naira," said Babafemi, "and plenty more where that's from. Every time you join us for one of our little parties."
Abiola stared off into the distance. Eighty-five naira and a bottle of beer. How had he come to sell his soul for so little?
Babafemi leaned back in his chair, and slapped one of the young men crowding the bar on the arm. "Or you could always become a fisherman."
Everyone laughed at Babafemi's grand joke.
And that's really what it was about. Choices. He could go work for one of the corps, who were less decent even than the mercs they hired. Or he could eek out a meager living, just another poor maghas paying tribute to Babafemi or some other petty thug while the poverty of Shomolu drained the life out of him.
Or he could go back to carrying a rifle for anyone with the naira, go back to killing for money.
No, there weren't any other choices.
So he would be a soldier in the gang wars. And why not? He'd just be killing another Babafemi on the other side. Hadn't he told himself he was willing to do that, just a few minutes before?
Abiola cleared his throat. "You're just going to kill the Dragons, right? We're not going to… hurt any innocents."
Babafemi's face screwed up into an expression of faux shock. "Innocents?" he said. "My boys and I would never hurt innocents." A broad smiled stretched across his handsome face. "But let me tell you something, Abiola. Isn't no one in this world who is really innocent."
Then Babafemi laughed out loud to show he didn't really mean it.
Even though Abiola knew he did. • • •
The western sky was on fire with the sun's death, molten orange shot through with gold, fading to dark blue and then purple. Beneath that magnificent sky the cool air of dusk carried the rotten stink of garbage and the rattle of automatic gunfire. Teenagers grunted or cried out as bullets took their lives and their bodies fell upon the mounds of refuse they sheltered behind, just one more piece of garbage for Lagos to bear.
How did I come to this place? Abiola wondered.
A bullet spanged off the 50-gallon drums of sludge Abiola crouched behind, sparking orange as it ricocheted away.
Sure, this is a lot better than being a merc, he thought sardonically.
He fired his AK high into the darkening sky, hopefully giving the Dragons something to think about without actually killing any of them.
The Dragons were making their stand at the back end of their territory, up against the short border with Surulere.
Babafemi said it was because the Dragons were afraid to come out and face the Ammits, but Abiola wondered. People whispered that dark things sometimes came out of the spooky Surulere and took the weak, the old, or the very young. Maybe the Dragons were back here to protect their neighborhood.
The border was a place of garbage. No metahuman would step foot in Surulere, not even to throw away refuse. So the people stacked their garbage here, dotting the border with stinking mounds of rotting filth.
Which gave Abiola an idea.
He glanced left, saw Babafemi crouched behind a pile of garbage, firing away with his Ares Viper Slivergun. Abiola drew a deep breath and shot out from behind his cover, crouch-running toward the gang leader. He dove behind Babafemi's pile of garbage.
"Hey, nice trick," said the boy. "You know you can get killed doing that?"
"I know how to end this," said Abiola breathlessly.
Babafemi's face brightened. "Yeah?"
"They won't fall back into Surulere."
Babafemi snorted. "Who would? That place's walking death."
"All you have to do is set a trap on either flank. Then we push them hard in the center they'll flee-right into our hands."
Babafemi scowled. "Too complicated. Good thing you're not in charge."
Abiola opened his mouth, but Babafemi cut him off. "Wait." And then he disappeared.
Abiola turned and fired a burst at the opposing side to keep the Dragons on their side of the twenty, thirty-meter no man's land.
Babafemi returned carrying a little girl in his arms. She was maybe eight, her eyes wide with terror. She shrieked as Babafemi wrestled her to the ground. She flailed at him with her little fists. Babafemi hit her hard in the face and she went limp.
"Hey, Dragons," he shouted. "Got one of your little sisters here. Surrender or I'll kill her."
"You can't do that," whispered Abiola fiercely. "These guys are thugs. They're not going to give over because of her."
Babafemi shrugged. "Then we'll just have to keep plugging people until they do give over."
Abiola looked down at the dazed little girl and then back up at Babafemi. He almost killed the gangster right then. But that would only make him at war with the Ammits, which was a sure death sentence.
And it would do nothing to help the civilians caught in the crossfire.
"Don't kill her," said Abiola. "I have another idea."
"What's that?" asked Babafemi.
But Abiola was already charging into the no-man's land, firing his AK straight and level. A Dragon popped up and Abiola laid him out with a well-aimed burst.
Fire sliced through Abiola's left arm, but he kept going.
He arced around a pile of garbage and caught the surprised gunner just as he was turning. Abiola roared and smashed his fist into the boy's face.
The Dragon dropped like an unstrung puppet.
Another gangster stepped toward him, his rifle leveled at Abiola's chest.
Abiola reached forward with his left hand, pushing the rifle's barrel up so that it fired over his shoulder. Then he dropped the Dragon with a blow from his right fist.
He sprinted toward another garbage mound, this time dodging Ammit fire and caught two more Dragons.
"Down on the ground," Abiola growled.
One of the men went for a knife and Abiola shot him dead.
The other got promptly and eagerly onto the ground.
Suddenly the sound of gunfire started to die off. Finding an enraged troll behind their lines was enough to scare the Dragons off.
Wearily, Abiola settled to the ground his back to the garbage mound. He was shaking with the after-effects of adrenaline and his left arm throbbed with pain.
For a moment he closed his eyes.
When he looked up again he saw Babafemi looking down at him, smiling from ear to ear. • • •
The full moon shone down on Babafemi Kosoko's paltry victory, its silvery light joining the firelight of the burning garbage mounds. The Ammits had set them afire to celebrate their defeat of the Dragons, filling the border with a choking smoke that tasted gritty in Abiola's mouth.
Seventeen boys and men had died and for what? So the Ammits could gain three more recruits (captured Dragons) and round up eight civilians-all women and children.
And so Babafemi could proclaim his superiority to all.
Babafemi raised his voice above the drunken hoots of his men. "I thank my good friend, my brave friend, Abiola Fashola, who greatly aided our victory."
A ragged cheer went up.
Abiola bowed his head, but could not bring himself to speak.
"Tonight our brother showed the true heart of an Ammit."
Abiola swallowed. This was what he'd been afraid of. He did not want to join Babafemi's gang. Doing limited jobs for them was quite different than being one of them. "I thank you," began Abiola, "but-"
He was cut off by one of Babafemi's lieutenants. "What should we do with these?" he asked, pointing at the frightened pack of women and children with the barrel of his assault rifle.
"Kill 'em," said Babafemi.
"No," Abiola barked.
A cloak of silence suddenly descended over the makeshift camp, only broken by the crackle and hiss of the dirty fires.
"No?" Babafemi whispered.
Abiola licked his lips. "I mean no disrespect, Babafemi Kosoko. Only.. I thought the reason for this mission was to show the people of Shomolu that the Ammits could protect them better than the Dragons."
"Which they'll see if the Dragons' people end up dead," insisted Babafemi.
And suddenly Abiola saw it. Most of the people of this neighborhood had run away during the fighting. If Babafemi killed those few who remained there would be no one to object if those who paid protection to the Ammits took over this land. In his own crude way, Babafemi was building political support and he wasn't going to let the lives of a few women and children stand in his way.
Isn't no one in this world who is truly innocent.
"Wait." Abiola was sweating, reaching for something, anything. "Without me you wouldn't have beaten the Dragons."
If the group of Ammits had been silent before, now their silence was arctic.
"Is that so?" asked Babafemi in a low, dangerous voice.
"Let them go," said Abiola. "For your new brother. Please."
Babafemi looked long and hard at Abiola, his dark eyes glittering in the firelight. "All right," he finally said. "For my new brother."
He turned to the cowering women and children. "You all may take your lives and go. Into Surulere."
Abiola stepped forward. "But no one ever goes into-"
Babafemi turned and looked coldly at him, and suddenly Abiola understood he had pushed this little dictator exactly as far as he could. If he said one more sentence, one more word it would be him who ended up dead, his great body sprawled atop a makeshift funeral pyre.
Abiola's mouth clamped down around the sentence he'd been about to speak.
Satisfied, Babafemi turned back to the women and children. "Go," he shouted.
No one moved.
"Go." This time he fired his Slivergun at the ground near them.
Shrieking with terror the women and children fled across the road that divided Shomolu from Surulere, running towards their doom.
Abiola remained, watching them go until they were nothing more than dark shadows in the silvery moonlight.
I am a fool, he thought. Basic pack psychology. I challenged the leader so he had to deny me to reestablish his dominance.
"Come on, brother," Babafemi sneered, "time to go."
The Ammits started to walk away from the garbage dump, but Abiola watching the horrorshow wreathed in shadow where two women and six children had just disappeared.
Then, without knowing he was doing it, he began walking, toward Surulere. Before the Ammits realized what was happening, he was already gone. • • •
Surulere was silence.
It was a bombed-out district empty of life, empty of hope. Rubble choked the streets. Most of the buildings had been burnt to the ground. Those that hadn't were pile of charred brick, blackened timbers reaching into the night sky like claws. Even after all this time, Surulere still smelled like charcoal.
But what really got to Abiola was the complete absence of sound. There were no human sounds of course, no laughter, no music, no shouts, but also missing were the sounds of insects and animals, absent was the whir of the giant beetle called Jauhekafer, gone were delicate flutter of batwings. Even the wind was still, as if the air itself was reluctant to visit the dead streets of Surulere.
The shuffle of Abiola's feet as he picked his way through the debris was the only sound that disturbed the funerary silence.
Surulere was a place of unmatched horror, even in Lagos.
During the first VITAS pandemic the district's entire population had been wiped out. A million people had gone to their deaths sick and panicked, crying out for help that would never come.
After the plague had run its course, nothing stirred in the district to break the silence.
Some said Surulere was still haunted by the ghosts of all those dead, others that the district had been colonized by the ghouls called sasabonsam.
Or something darker still.
A shiver wriggled down Abiola's spine.
Sure, he thought, like I need to be warned I'm in danger now.
He saw no sign of the women and children who had been chased into the darkness. It was as if the street itself had swallowed them whole.
And then, at last, he heard something.
A scream. A human scream.
Abiola ran toward the sound. He turned the corner and saw the women and children huddled together. A trio of sasabonsam circled them.
The ghouls were tall, their small bodies riding on slim legs that made them look almost like they were walking on stilts. They turned as Abiola came around the corner, and he saw smooth skulls and gaping mouths filled with sharp triangular teeth. Eyes filmed with white.
The ghouls were drooling.
Abiola roared, pouring all his pain and frustration out in a low, powerful sound that came from deep in his chest and rolled out into the world like distant thunder.
Then he dropped his AK-97 and sprayed the closest monster with bullets. The thing dropped, jerking spasmodically.
But its brothers were on him in an instant.
They skittered towards him on those long, slim legs, reached for him hungrily with their claws. Abiola pulled into his trigger and-
Nothing.
He was out of ammo. He threw the AK down and tore his machete off its lanyard, wielding the big blade like a knife in his great hand.
He would go down fighting, but he knew he would go down. He could kill these two, but not before they scratched him, infecting him with HMHVV, turning him into a ghoul.
Abiola would kill himself before he let that happen. He swallowed hard and took a step forward.
And then he heard something to his right. He and the ghouls both looked.
The old man.
He stood next to the women and children, about ten meters to Abiola's right, a placid smile on his round, dark face. Abiola's heart sank. His first guess had been right after all. The old man had been involved in the flesh trade, selling his fellow man to the sasabonsam.
This was what he thought as the old man raised his arms. Suddenly lightning flashed from the old man's palms, jagged arcs of bright, actinic light burning the ghouls down until there was nothing left but their smoking legs, somehow still standing.
"Come," said the old man, "it is past time we leave this place." • • •
The two men stood on the border between Shomolu and Lagos's dark heart as the women and children gathered together what little was left of their lives. Around them the garbage fires still smoldered.
"You are a master of Surulere," Abiola whispered.
The old man chuckled. "Hardly. Dark things live in that district, perhaps darker even than the sasabonsam."
"But you entered Surulere and came out again."
"To save you, my young friend. To save you. You might say I've had my eyes on you."
"Like Babafemi Kosoko," Abiola said bitterly.
The old man's eyes crinkled with amusement. "Not exactly. Though, I, too, admire your skills."
"Why have you been following me?" Abiola asked, the words a threatening rumble from deep within him.
"Abiola means, 'born in honor,'" said the old man softly. "Maybe I wanted to see if that name suited you."
Abiola turned that over in his mind for a minute. Then he said, "Who are you?"
"My name is Obi Akinlaja. I am a shaman, a master of Yoruba magic, of juju. I follow the old ways."
He turned and pointed at the dark stillness that was Surulere. "That may be Africa's future. Death. Evil. Darkness." He shook his head. "But not if good men and women will stand against it. I am putting together a team to run the shadows. I can't promise you it will be safe. But I can promise you it will be right."
Abiola glanced at the two women and six children picking at the broken remnants of their lives. They were homeless and heartbroken and terrified. But they were also alive.
He had done that, him and this funny old man.
Abiola's throat suddenly tightened with emotion. After plunging into despair and desperation he'd come out with a prize he'd never expected.
Hope.
He reached forward and enclosed the shaman's tiny hand in his.