Adaora sullenly crossed her arms over her chest and looked out the window as they passed the tall buildings of downtown Lagos, weaving madly through the dusty traffic. Two orange-yellow danfo so overstuffed with people that both had passengers hanging on to the outside swerved in front of them. Adaora pushed her hands against the back of Benson’s seat as they came to an abrupt stop. As they maneuvered around and passed one of the danfo, the solider driving the SUV leaned out the window, spat at it, and smacked its side, shouting, “Damn your mother! Mumu! Idiot! Go and die!”
* * * *
Moziz parked the car on the far side of the busy street. He had to squeeze between a beat-up old Honda and a dusty Ford SUV. There were no other spaces. There had to be over two hundred people milling about. Most seemed to be around his age. They all removed their masks.
“Which kine fucking nonsense come be dis one, na?” Moziz said yet again, turning the engine off. The four of them just sat there. Philo had said nothing about a damn mob. “Jacobs, find out wetin dis people sabi.”
Jacobs nodded, got out, stood beside Moziz’s open window, shoved his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans, and looked around. Moziz frowned as he watched people. Everyone seemed excited. “Na craze be dis,” he said.
“Maybe na people wey dey come from big party from person house,” Tolu said.
Moziz rolled his eyes, annoyed. “You no dey see,” was all he said, wishing Tolu would just shut up. Tolu never saw anything until it was explained to him in full. “Mek you no waste time, o,” Moziz said to Jacobs.
“I no go waste time,” Jacobs said. He walked into the crowd.
A few minutes later, he spotted several familiar faces from back when he had been in school. He was about to approach a guy he knew from his biology class when he saw bright flashes of color a few yards away. It took him several minutes to shove his way close enough. Then, he just stared. People were so taken aback that they gave the group enough space to wiggle through. The slow-moving procession brought music, confetti, and a great big rainbow-colored sign with a giant BLACK NEXUS painted in the center. Jacobs’s entire body went cold.
There were nine of them, the whole organization. Eze, Yinka, and Michelle wore matching black suits and red lipstick. They walked slowly, aware of all the attention. Royal wore red platform thigh boots, red spandex pants, and a tight pink T-shirt. He carried the boom box and was jumping about, shaking his backside for anyone who would watch. Royal would dance for his grandmother in the village, the man was so free. Okechukwu wore jeans and a white T-shirt, but he was the same, dancing to the music and even joining in with a group of laughing women at the perimeter of the crowd. Chioma and Yemi held the Black Nexus sign. Both looked like they wanted to creep right back into their closets, but they held their chins up. Seven was wearing tight jeans and an even tighter top as she smoked a cigar, ignored the leers of the men, and blew kisses at the women.
And who better to lead the group than the greatest queen of them all? Rome was decked out in a breathtaking rapa and matching top that fit his body as if such clothes were indeed made for men, too. He looked like a Yoruba queen. All of them were wearing headbands with alien antennae bobbing from them. All Jacobs could think as he approached them was that they were going to get themselves killed.
Jacobs raised a hand. “Rome!”
Rome caught his eye, smiled confidently, came up to Jacobs, and said, “The Black Nexus has come down to earth.”
Jacobs’s mouth was hanging open. Everyone was watching, too thrown off by the sight of the student organization to react. Yet.
Jacobs was having trouble finding words. “What . . . you guys . . . didn’t . . .”
“We’ve been calling you for hours.”
“Well . . . I . . .” He could feel a hundred eyes boring into him.
“Anyway,” Rome said, waving a dismissive hand, “we heard there was some commotion on this street and we assumed it had to do with what you showed us.”
Jacobs was having trouble deciding between doing what he had to do for Moziz and the others, and seeing the Black Nexus out in the open. He wanted to join them, but he didn’t want Moziz, Troy, and Tolu, who knew nothing about his cross-dressing, to see. For the first time in his entire life, he was immensely proud and intensely ashamed at the same time.
“But we were wrong. These people are here because of a damn celebrity!” Rome said. He snapped into a practiced pose as some women stopped to take his picture with a mobile phone. “Enjoy it,” Rome said to them, smirking. “That’s the closest you’ll come to looking this good.” The women laughed and scurried away.
“Celebrity?” Jacobs asked.
“That Ghanaian rapper Anthony Dey Craze is in there.” He pointed at the house.
Jacobs blinked and frowned, trying to mask his confusion. What did a rapper have to do with aliens? “I’ll . . . I’ll be right back,” was all he could think to say. He turned and pushed into the crowd. A few had begun to grumble about “adofuroo,” “fags,” and “bottom power.” “Kai! Wetin dey do you?” Jacobs heard a guy ask. “Are you man or woman?” He moved faster toward the car, feeling like a deserter. The Black Nexus had to be crazy to come out in a place so public. Yet they were so brave to do so. They’d been hiding for such a long time. Not so much out of shame, but out of a need to stay safe. Now an alien had come to Lagos. It wasn’t just the Black Nexus who were unsafe or at least vulnerable now. It was everyone. In his heart, he knew that if that alien was in the house, it was time. It was time for a change.
“Jacobs don return!” Troy exclaimed. Jacobs jogged back to the car, a smile plastered on his face. With each step he took toward the car, the need for revolution left him like air from a leaky balloon. Not yet, but soon, he told himself, to stave off the guilt that replaced his hope for change. He resisted the urge to turn around when he heard people shout in surprise as something happened. He joined his other group of friends.
“Whoo!” Jacobs said, getting in the car. “You no go believe dis one, I swear.”
“Wetin?” Moziz snapped. “How people hear about her if na only Philo sabi about am?!”
“No be de winch ’tory I wan nack you,” Jacobs said, feigning excitement. “Na Anthony Dey Craze! Dem say e dey for here!”
“Eeey,” Tolu and Troy exclaimed, sitting straight up and looking out the window.
Jacobs took the moment to glance back into the crowd, but he couldn’t see Rome or any of the Black Nexus. Moziz just sat there scowling, arms crossed. Things had suddenly become far more complicated. Moziz sucked his teeth. “God forbid dis kine situation, o.”
CHAPTER 19
OFFSHORE
For the third time in his life, Agu was somewhere that didn’t quite make sense. The first had been when he was ten years old, walking home with his fifteen-year-old brother. That evening, they stood out there on the road leading to their house, staring at the newspaper-wrapped bundle. Instead of going to the market, he and his brother had bought the meat a half hour before from a man selling it cheaply on the roadside. It was late in the evening and the sun had already set. They’d brought it home, given it to their mother, and secretly kept the leftover money.
Agu would never forget the moment when their mother unwrapped the meat, expecting a slab of beef or haunches of goat. An arm with a tiny, humanlike hand flopped from the package as if asking for a handout. The monkey was dead, its pink tongue lolled out, its tiny forehead smashed in, and its dried eyes wide open. Agu nearly vomited. His mother beat them both and sent them out to get rid of it.
Then there was the time when he was twenty-seven and woke up in the Sahara Desert. He’d been visiting his brother up north in Katsina and boarded a bush taxi he thought would take him home. The driver spoke terrible English, and Agu spoke terrible Hausa. Agu thought the driver said the destination was Lagos, but the driver had meant Agadez. Exhausted from a night of partying,
Agu had fallen asleep as soon as the bush taxi full of people started moving. He woke up two hours later to serious desert in a part of the world he never thought he’d see. They had stopped in a tiny town called Maradi, and the driver was refueling for the drive across the Sahara!
Now he was on a goddamn speedboat in handcuffs. If something happened and they capsized, he would sink to his death; Private Akunna and Private Julius were too stupid to realize this, or maybe they did not care. Aside from the two idiots who’d beaten the hell out of him in Benson’s office, there was a worried-looking oil worker and an irritated engineer.
They were heading for an offshore oil field where, he gathered, something had gone wrong with the hose attached to the supply vessel FPSO Mystras. The report had come that thousands of gallons of crude oil were spilling into the sea. Because of everything going on in Lagos, many oil workers, military personnel, and police were abandoning their responsibilities and fleeing the city with their families to villages and towns east and north. Those who had stayed were dealing with the flooding, traffic, and general panic of the city. There was no one except Akunna and Julius available to check out the malfunctioning hose, nor was there anyone to keep an eye on Agu. So Private Julius and Private Akunna had had to bring him along. Thankfully, the water was smooth, so the risk of Agu bouncing off the boat into it was relatively low. Still, it was not long until sunset. With all that was happening, Agu didn’t want to be on the water at night.
“Are you sure we should be out here?” Agu shouted.
“Shut up!” Private Akunna snapped over his shoulder.
Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at the offshore oil rig and vessel, and Akunna cut the engine. The rig was a spidery structure made of concrete and rusty steel. Anchored firmly to the seabed by steel beams, it was a decades-old monster, a hulking, unnatural contraption of production facilities, drilling rigs, and crew quarters. Agu had circled it on boat patrols plenty of times. It was usually a place of noise and activity. Now it was deserted and quiet. The large vessel seemed unnaturally silent, too. Agu noticed that there was no pungent stench of crude oil from the reported spill. And there was an odd sweetness.
“Where is the oil?” Akunna asked, grabbing the shoulder of one of the oil workers. “I don’t see it. I don’t even smell it!”
“Ah-ah, we were all there,” the oil worker said, flinching away from Akunna’s grasp. His name was Biko, in homage to the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. However, Biko the oil worker was not South African, he was Igbo, and in the Igbo language the word biko meant “please.” He hated his father for giving him such a stupid name. It seemed all his life he was stuck begging people to listen to him. “You don’t mistake spillage, o. Please, you have to believe us. Call the Mystras. People will still be there. They will tell you!”
“He’s right. We had to evacuate the place because of the boom but there was leakage here,” Rafiu the engineer said. His stomach lurched. He would never be able to dislodge the guilt he felt for abandoning the oil rig when the hose was spewing oil into the water. He’d become an engineer to save the environment. He swabbed his sweaty face with his handkerchief. “We flashed the light on the water. You could see it bubbling up. I was going to—”
Private Akunna held up a hand. “Shh, shh!”
They all listened, bobbing on the water about a hundred meters from the oil rig.
Silence.
“I think we should turn back,” Agu ventured again.
“Shut up!” all of them shouted.
“Take these cuffs off me, at least!” Agu insisted. “Where am I going to run?”
Akunna looked at Agu with disgust. Still, he reached for his pocket and Agu’s heart lifted.
Private Julius’s voice stilled Private Akunna’s hand. “You hear that?” he whispered.
Agu felt chills crawling up his spine. Of all of them on that boat, only he recognized it. The sound of metal on glass. The noise came from the water just over the side of the boat.
“Uncuff him,” Akunna said, giving the key to Biko. Akunna went to look over the edge with Julius.
“You see that?” Julius said, pointing at something in the water. Rafiu joined them to see. As soon as Biko got the cuffs off, Agu moved closer to the center of the boat. Biko stepped to the edge with the others.
Fwit!
It flew right past the four of them and grazed Agu’s arm before plunking into the water on the other side of the boat. Agu felt a wet sting, and looked down at his arm. It was dribbling blood from a cut three inches long near his elbow. It only took Agu a moment to realize what had happened. He threw himself down and managed to crane his neck around to see fifty more flying fish zip from the water like poison darts.
He shut his eyes and closed his ears. But he could still hear the meaty sound of fish slicing human flesh and the agonized screams of the others.
BUMP!
The entire speedboat shuddered, and the floor cracked beneath Agu’s body. Something very big was ramming the boat. When it was hit again, the boat capsized, and they were all dumped into the waters roiling with monstrous and alien ocean life. Opening his eyes, Agu found himself trapped in the water beneath the boat. He saw a huge swordfishlike creature stabbing the boat with its spear almost playfully. Then he saw something terrible. A shark was tearing Biko’s arm from his body. Then Private Agu ran out of breath, and saw no more.
CHAPTER 20
SIEGE
“When you arrive, wait for me,” Benson said.
They were still on their way to Adaora’s house. Benson was using her phone to speak with some of his men who were already there. Adaora’s hatred for the man had reached an all-time high. “What?” he shouted into the phone. Adaora imagined his spit spattering her phone’s mouthpiece. He turned in his seat and glared at her. “What did you people do?” he yelled. “Tell the whole goddamn world?”
She felt more than a pinch of pleasure at his anger. So Anthony had succeeded. “If you’d have listened to us instead of—”
Benson ignored her and continued to growl into the phone. “Won’t be a problem,” he said. “There’s only one. How hard can it be? Just be on standby. The president will be landing at Lagos Airport around six a.m.” He paused and looked at his watch. Adaora glanced at hers too. It was 5:19 p.m. “We capture it, lock it down, and transport it to Kirikiri Prison. No fuckups.” He slapped her mobile phone shut and said, with a malicious glint in his eye, “Private Agu’s going to be looking at some jail time for this.”
* * * *
Ten minutes had passed, and Moziz and the others were still in the car. Without the air conditioning, the car was becoming a sauna. Moziz wanted to bang his head on the steering wheel. He had a headache, and his high was making him paranoid. Philo had texted him that indeed Anthony was in the house, but so was the goddamn money-making alien. How were they going to kidnap the alien with all these people around? With each minute, the crowd grew bigger. He even thought he saw a group of circus performers a few yards away.
Tolu wanted to forget the plan and go scope out women, but he didn’t want to cross Moziz.
Jacobs wanted his money. The Black Nexus could wait.
Troy was this close to getting out of the car, finding an okada motorbike, and heading to his cousin’s house. He had things to do: a cousin’s honor to avenge, a military man to exterminate. His phone buzzed again with a text from his cousin’s brother, ready to join the hunt for her attacker.
“Focus!” Moziz said. “Forget Anthony Dey Craze. Na bigger fish!”
Outside the noise of the crowd increased. “Fuck. What now?” Moziz groaned. They turned to see about thirty people coming up the other end of the road. The newcomers were all dressed in white and singing a Christian hymn. A bishop carrying a giant metal cross led the way. Moziz shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he opened them, and started the car.
Jacobs felt nauseated as he watched. The Christian procession was moving right toward the Black Nexus. Rome, he knew, hated Christians and often got into violent arguments with anyone who wanted a piece of him. And Seven wasn’t any better. She would insult any priest, reverend, pastor, imam, rabbi who looked her way. As the Christian procession approached, members of the Black Nexus didn’t even notice because they were focused on arguing with a group of husky guys. Jacobs knew he should have gone to them, supported them. Still, he didn’t move, and he felt awful for it.
“We’re going to go around,” Moziz said as they slowly drove out. “We’ll sneak in from the back.” The bishop leading the pack looked a little crazy. Moziz noted that some of the people with him looked angry. He rolled his eyes. These kinds of people always showed up whenever the masses stopped “suffering and smiling.”
CHAPTER 21
THE SEA’S COW
Agu held on for dear life to the fattest animal he’d ever seen. The manatee smelled like ocean-soaked cedar wood. Its thick wet skin was wrinkly like an elephant’s, hard like the corky material of a bulletin board, and rough like sandpaper. It swam at a leisurely pace, close enough to the surface of the water that Agu was able to keep his head above it. Around and below him the clear ocean waters roiled with strange, impossible sea life. What looked like a giant, bright-red-and-white flat snake undulated by not three feet below.
“What have you done to the ocean?” Agu asked the manatee. Were the monsters attacking the oil rig and the supply vessel, too? These were Ayodele’s people and earthly allies? Ayodele was not only a shape-shifter, she was a liar. She hadn’t come in peace at all.