My Zombie had solved my marital problems. At least the worst of them. My husband could not beat me when there was beautiful music sending his senses to lush, sweet places. I began to hope. To hope for a baby. Hope that I would one day leave my house and wifely duties for a job as music teacher at the elementary school. Hope that my village would one day reap from the oil being reaped from it. And I dreamt about being embraced by deep blue liquid metal, webs of wire and music.
I’d woken up that night from one of these strange dreams. I opened my eyes, a smile on my face. Good things were certainly coming. My husband was sleeping soundly beside me. In the dim moonlight, he looked so peaceful. His skin no longer smelled of alcohol. I leaned forward and kissed his lips. He didn’t wake. I slipped out of bed and put on some pants and a long sleeve shirt. The mosquitoes would be out tonight. I grabbed my guitar.
I’d named my Zombie Udide Okwanka. In my language, it means “spider the artist.” According to legend, Udide Okwanka is the Supreme Artist. And she lives underground where she takes fragments of things and changes them into something else. She can even weave spirits from straw. It was a good name for my Zombie. I wondered what Udide named me. I was sure it named me something, though I doubted that it told the others about me. I don’t think it would have been allowed to keep seeing me.
Udide was waiting for me there, as if it sensed I would come out this night. I grinned, my heart feeling so warm. I sat down as it left the pipeline and crept up to me. It carried its instrument on top of its head. A sort of complex star made of wire. Over the weeks, it had added more wire lines, some thin and some thick. I often wondered where it put this thing when it was running about with the others, for the instrument was too big to hide on its body.
Udide held it before its eyes. With a front leg, it plucked out a sweet simple tune that almost made me weep with joy. It conjured up images of my mother and father, when they were so young and full of hope, when my brothers and I were too young to marry and move away. Before the “kill-and-go” had driven my oldest brother away to America and my middle brother to the north . . . when there was so much potential.
I laughed and wiped away a tear and started strumming some chords to support the tune. From there we took off into something so intricate, enveloping, intertwining . . . Chei! I felt as if I was communing with God. Ah-ah, this machine and me. You can’t imagine.
“Eme!”
Our music instantly fell apart.
“Eme!” my husband called again.
I froze, staring at Udide who was also motionless. “Please,” I whispered to it. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Samuel messaged me!” my husband said, his eyes still on his cell phone, as he stepped up to me through the tall grass. “There’s a break in the pipeline near the school! Not a goddamn Zombie in sight yet! Throw down that guitar, woman! Let’s go and get . . . ” He looked up. A terrified look took hold of his face.
For a very long time it seemed we all were frozen in time. My husband standing just at the last of the tall grass. Udide standing in front of the pipeline, instrument held up like a ceremonial shield. And me between the two of them, too afraid to move. I turned to my husband. “Andrew,” I said with the greatest of care. “Let me explain . . . ”
He slowly dragged his gaze to me and gave me a look, as if he was seeing me for the first time. “My own wife?” he whispered.
“I . . . ”
Udide raised its two front legs. For a moment it looked almost like it was pleading with me. Or maybe offering me a hug. Then it clicked its legs together so hard that it produced a large red spark and an ear splitting ting!
My husband and I clapped our hands over our ears. The air instantly smelled like freshly lit matches. Even through the palms of my hands, I could hear the responses from down the pipeline. The clicking was so numerous that it sounded like a rain of tiny pebbles falling on the pipeline. Udide shuddered, scrambled back and stood on it, waiting. They came in a great mob. About twenty of them. The first thing that I noticed was their eyes. They were all a deep angry red.
The others scrambled around Udide, tapping their feet in complex rhythms on the pipe. I couldn’t see Udide’s eyes. Then they all ran off with amazing speed, to the east.
I turned to my husband. He was gone.
Word spread like a disease because almost everyone had a cell phone. Soon everyone was clicking away on them, messaging things like, “Pipeline burst, near school! No Zombies in sight!” and “Hurry to school, bring bucket!” My husband never let me have my own cell phone. We couldn’t afford one and he didn’t think I needed one. But I knew where the elementary school was.
People now believed that the Zombies had all gone rogue, shrugging off their man-given jobs to live in the delta swamps and do whatever it was they did there. Normally, if bunkerers broke open a pipeline, even for the quietest jobs, the Zombies would become aware of it within an hour and repair the thing within another hour. But two hours later this broken pipe continued to splash fuel. That was when someone had decided to put the word out.
I knew better. The Zombies weren’t “zombies” at all. They were thinking creatures. Smart beasts. They had a method to their madness. And most of them did not like human beings.
The chaos was lit by the headlights of several cars and trucks. The pipeline here was raised as it traveled south. Someone had taken advantage of this and removed a whole section of piping. Pink diesel fuel poured out of both ends like a giant fountain. People crowded beneath the flow like parched elephants, filling jerri cans, bottles, bowls, buckets. One man even held a garbage bag, until the fuel ate through the bag, splashing fuel all over the man’s chest and legs.
The spillage collected into a large dark pink pool that swiftly flowed toward the elementary school, gathering on the playground. The fumes hit me even before I got within sight of the school. My eyes watered and my nose started running. I held my shirt over my nose and mouth. This barely helped.
People came in cars, motorcycles, buses, on foot. Everyone was messaging on their cell phones, further spreading the word. It had been a while since people who did not make a career out of fuel theft had gotten a sip of free fuel.
There were children everywhere. They ran up and down, sent on errands by their parents or just hanging around to be a part of the excitement. They’d probably never seen people able to go near a pipeline without getting killed. Hip-hop and highlife blasted from cars and SUVs with enhanced sound systems. The baseline vibrations were almost as stifling as the fumes. I had not a doubt that the Zombies knew this was going on.
I spotted my husband. He was heading toward the fountain of fuel with a large red bucket. Five men started arguing amongst each other. Two of them started pushing and shoving, almost falling into the fountain.
“Andrew!” I called over all the noise.
He turned. When he saw me, he narrowed his eyes.
“Please!” I said. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
He spat and started walking away.
“You have to get out of here!” I said. “They will come!”
He whirled around and strode up to me. “How the hell are you so sure? Did you bring them yourself?”
As if in response, people suddenly started screaming and running. I cursed. The Zombies were coming from the street, forcing people to run toward the pool of fuel. I cursed again. My husband was glaring at me. He pointed into my face with a look of disgust. I couldn’t hear what he said over all the noise. He turned and ran off.
I tried to spot Udide amongst the Zombies. All of their eyes were still red. Was Udide even amongst them? I stared at their legs, searching for the butterfly sticker. There it was. Closest to me, to the left. “Udide!” I called.
As the name came out of my mouth, I saw two of the Zombies in the center each raise two front legs. My smile went to an “O” of shock. I dropped to the ground and threw my hands over my head. People were still splashing across the pool of fuel, trying to get into the school. Their ca
rs continued blasting hip-hop and highlife, the headlights still on, lighting the madness.
The two Zombies clicked their legs together, producing two large sparks. Ting!
WHOOOOOOOOSH!
I remember light, heat, the smell of burning hair and flesh and screams that melted to guttural gurgles. The noise was muffled. The stench was awful. My head to my lap, I remained in this hellish limbo for a long, long time.
I’ll never teach music at the elementary school. It was incinerated along with many of the children who went to it. My husband was killed, too. He died thinking I was some sort of spy fraternizing with the enemy . . . or something like that. Everyone died. Except me. Just before the explosion happened, Udide ran to me. It protected me with its force field.
So I lived.
And so did the baby inside me. The baby that my body allowed to happen because of Udide’s lovely soothing music. Udide tells me it is a girl. How can a robot know this? Udide and I play for her every day. I can only imagine how content she is. But what kind of world will I be bringing her into? Where only her mother and Udide stand between a flat out war between the Zombies and the human beings who created them?
Pray that Udide and I can convince man and droid to call a truce, otherwise the delta will keep rolling in blood, metal, and flames. You know what else? You should also pray that these Zombies don’t build themselves some fins and travel across the ocean.
The Ghastly Bird
“Do do?” the fat gray bird said, taking a tentative step toward Zev.
It stood on the other side of the yard; the side where Zev’s gardeners worked the hardest because they had to not only pull weeds but also to keep the jungle behind the fence from invading Zev’s well-kept space. The plump bird had a large, hooked beak, and when it turned to the side, Zev could see a plume of white feathers adorning its tail. Zev dropped the large glass of beer that he held in his hand. He didn’t drop his binoculars, which he held in his other hand. He brought them to his eyes.
It was a beautiful sunny day on the Island of Mauritius, the kind of day in which only good things happen. But even on this day, Zev never imagined that his dream would come true.
Zev had a rare day off. Usually, he was lecturing at the university, grading exams, typing up his latest scholarly paper, or in the bush searching for birds to photograph and classify. Today, Zev had huffed and puffed as he dragged his lounge chair to the center of his green short-grassed lawn, away from the shade of his perfectly manicured coconut, guava, mango, and banyan trees.
He’d plopped down with his second glass of beer, the lounge chair creaking loudly under his heavy weight. He was fully prepared to inhale the smells of the roses, lilies, and lilacs in his flower garden and watch the birds visit his cornucopia of bird feeders hanging from his Calvaria tree. Some feeders were filled with seeds, others with dried fruit, and some he’d put fresh mealworms in this morning. The Calvaria tree added its own fruit to the feast, to Zev’s delight.
This extremely rare tree had cost Zev thousands to obtain and even more to maintain. Now, not only was it healthy, but it was so healthy that it was dropping its thick-coated fuzzy brown fruits all over the lawn beneath it. Zev had been planning to remind his gardeners to clean up the fruity mess, but now he was glad he’d procrastinated. Look who had come to visit him.
Zev was familiar with many of the birds. One of the regulars was the clumsy white egret that often crash-landed onto Zev’s lawn. This bird liked to eat the mealworms. It was there now, happily snapping up worm after worm. Warblers, doves ad pigeons, parakeets, Mynah birds, crows. One parrot that had been visiting his feeders for years would even land on Zev’s shoulder and take sunflower seeds from Zev’s lips. Watching and interacting with the birds usually relaxed every bone in his body.
Now, however, he was anything but relaxed. He was so excited that his heart palpitated and he had to breathe through his mouth. However, his hands were steady. He’d been preparing for this moment all his life.
He bit his bottom lip hard and snickered to himself. He’d rather have thrown his head back and guffawed loudly enough to shake the skies. But he didn’t want to scare this bird away. No. That would break his heart. This was his moment. He felt that now he could die a happy man.
“Ah, look at that beak,” he whispered, his eyes starting to feel dry from not blinking, sweat trickling through the hairs of his armpits. “It really does feed on the fruit of the Calvaria tree! Round body, plume of white feather on the tail. Oh! I just knew it. It’s all correct!”
He was overcome again with shakes from stifling his snickers. After all these years! It was true. As he had always believed. It wasn’t a certainty he discussed with his fellow colleagues at the university. Zev wasn’t stupid. For an ornithologist to believe that the dodo was not extinct and to be open and adamant about it would first get him ostracized and then quietly fired.
Still, Zev believed what he believed and he was a hardheaded man, so no one could change that. The dodo wasn’t the stupid idiot bird that those Europeans liked to portray it as. No. It was simply friendly. There had been no humans on this island! Why would it have a fear of them?
But though they were friendly, dodos were smart, Zev believed. It only made sense. In Zev’s books, the dodo was known for being extremely stupid. Some called it an inflated pigeon, others just said it was more like a clumsy turkey.
In their travelogues, explorers boasted about being able to run circles around the bird even when they were extremely drunk. Then they would bop the bird on the head and cook it up for dinner. Then they complained about how no matter what they did to the dodo meat, it remained tough and tasteless as an old shoe. Thus it gained another nickname, the “ghastly bird.”
Before men brought their boats, disease, and foreign beasts, the dodo had no predators. Or maybe it was too smart to be prey, Zev thought. They lived in the forests with confidence. They’d lay their one large egg in a nest on the ground in the middle of the forest and be sure that their egg was safe. But when men came with his unfamiliar dogs, pigs, and ship rats, the dodo and their nests had no chance.
But the dodo couldn’t possibly be as stupid as it looked. They must have a secret, Zev believed. A hiding place that not even man could find. Or magical powers. Maybe they could disappear and reappear at will or, during certain parts of the night, they could fly without needing to flap their tiny wings. The dodo wasn’t some overweight dopey looking creature. That was just a costume.
Once or twice he’d let this fantasy surface in conversations with his girlfriend, Sarafina. When his passion for the subject showed, she laughed in his face and rolled her eyes and said, “I think something is very wrong with you, Zev.” She’d broken up with him weeks ago. He’d really liked Sarafina. It tore his heart that a belief he held so close to his soul caused her to leave him. So he pushed it into the back of his mind and got on with his research, his lectures, his life work. He loved birds, so this was not very difficult. So what if he remained a bachelor all his life?
Even if he had married her, he’d have never shown Sarafina the cabinet in the corner of his bedroom where he kept a shrine dedicated to his favorite living bird, the dodo.
In it, there were plaster and wooden carvings of dodos. He had a tiny figurine of the bird made of hummingbird feathers. A large expensive porcelain dodo encrusted with chips of glass. And several stuffed toy dodos. He even had a dodo doll that he slept with at night, when none of his girlfriends slept over, of course. He’d collected dodo trinkets since he was a child growing up in India.
At the age of thirty-five, he had been a highly sought-after professor of ornithology. He could have gone anywhere. But it was Mauritius that he wanted to travel to. The home of the dodo. And now almost twenty years later, he still felt he couldn’t have made a better decision. Mauritius was not only beautiful, there was also a healthy Hindi population that reminded him of home when he needed it and an even healthier variety of birds. He wouldn’t have been happier anywhere el
se in the world.
He brought down his binoculars so that he could see the dodo with his own naked eyes. Three dainty mourning doves were battling for seeds under one of the bird feeders but Zev only looked at the dodo. The dodo was looking at him, too, which made his heart beat even faster.
Then it turned around in its lumbery way and ran back into the bushes.
“Wait! Please,” Zev said, but only quietly. It had eaten here; it would be back. Zev just sat there, his heartbeat slowing back to normal. Still, there was excited sweat on his brow and his mouth twitched into a giddy grin. He giggled, feeling utterly tickled inside. Then he slapped the side of his face and giggled some more.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to move, that he knew. If he moved, the moment would be over. But there will be other moments, he thought to himself. He was sure the dodo bird would come back. At least once. And he had to be there to see it; maybe even lure it up close with an especially juicy Calvaria tree fruit. I should get my camera.
He waited for a moment and then suddenly jumped up. The longer he waited, the sooner the dodo would return. Get camera. And he had to empty his bladder. He ran into the house. There was a bathroom that had a small window facing the backyard. He’d be able to look out the window from there to make sure the dodo didn’t return without him. He ran fast, his binoculars bumping against his large belly, tripping over the step into the house but quickly regaining his footing with a gasp for air.
He threw the bathroom door open and unzipped his pants as he looked out the window. As he urinated, he squinted. Then he gasped. “Shit!” He wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t finished, but from where he stood, he could see it. The dodo emerged from the spot in the bushes where it had disappeared, back under the Calvaria tree. Zev directed his stream of urine with one hand and grabbed his binoculars with the other hand. The moment he got the bird into view, the bird stopped eating and looked directly at him.