The rubble explodes outward and juggernaut stands, then charges toward me, STOMP STOMP STOMP so that the ground is shaking. It is winding up one fist and when it punches, I am moving to the side to dodge. But its torso swings all the way around. I catch the fist with my hands but it sends me flying into the air. I flip and land on my feet but when I look up, juggernaut is almost on top of me. It slams both fists down, but I scramble through its legs and climb onto its back. It is swinging and fighting and trying to shake me off, but I am clinging fast and beating its armored back with my fists and making small small dent but still making dent so making progress. I am banging and banging, but then it is reaching behind and grabbing my shirt and flinging me in a circle before throwing me so hard I crash through the window of an empty bus that is on fire.
It is taking me too long to get back up. I cough black oil onto the pieces of glass under me. The seats are black and torn from fire and violence. Before I can come all the way to my feet, bus is shifting underneath me. Juggernaut is picking it up and shaking it in the air like it is toy, then it is throwing it down the street, and my body is crashing back and forth and side to side as bus is rolling to a stop with me in it.
Many thing is broken inside me so that I am seeing static every three seconds and I am not being able to move. Giant hand crashes through the bus frame and wraps around my body, then pulls me out and I am not being able to move as juggernaut is pulling me close and squeezing and there is being static and static, but I am also seeing crack in its helmet and oil leaking from face that is having nose.
I am damaging it.
Pain is shooting through me as it is squeezing, and my legs is dangling, and it is squeezing and squeezing and I am knowing soon that I am going to be dying. It is raising its other fist to be crashing onto my head, and I am not being able to move. It is going to kill me.
I close my eyes, then squeeze my arms tighter to my body. It is causing my whole chest and stomach to feel on fire, and I am hearing many thing snapping, but I am sliding out of its grip just as other fist is coming down. I land on the ground in a crouch and tear open the skin over my ribs to pull out a broken metal rib bone, then, through the pain that is knifing my whole body, I run and slash at the armor over the juggernaut’s stomach. It reaches for me and I slide behind it and slash the back of its heels to make it to be falling, then I am stabbing my rib bone into its spine and pulling it up and spark is flying and it is squirming and moaning and we are both being covered in oil as I slice open the back of its helmet that is coming away like calabash bowl that is breaking.
It rotates its torso too fast and I fall to the ground. I am too slow to get up because juggernaut is then palming my head and lifting me off the ground. It is on its knees because it is not being able to stand, and it is holding itself up with other hand, but it is squeezing my head and I am seeing and hearing nothing but static and I am knowing that thing is breaking in me that is not going to be fixed. But when I am not seeing static, I am seeing misshapen face and mouth that is opening, and I am knowing that this is where grenade is coming from.
In between bursts of static, I am hearing the sound it is making as it is preparing to fire grenade at me so close, and I am barely moving, but I am able to raise my arm that is holding my metal rib bone and I am jamming it into the juggernaut’s mouth so that grenade is not firing at me.
I hear thunder and feel nothing but fire and the feeling of one million ocean waves breaking over my body.
I am not knowing where I am landing. Somewhere far away. But my face is on the ground, and no matter what my brain is telling my body, my body is not doing. So I am lying there as sound is fading and sight is fading and fire is raging all around me, and then I am seeing small small body trapped under burning building and body is not moving. And tear is coming to my eye, because I am knowing it is Uzodinma and I am saying to myself, You are dying too, and it is question and answer at the same time, like I am knowing that I will never be seeing him again and yet hoping that is a lie.
Then darkness.
CHAPTER
39
Ify grits her teeth as she fights her way through another mob. Fires rage all around them, roaring and devouring everything, burning so bright they turn the night into daytime. The flames loom so high, consuming market stalls and office towers and multistory adobe apartments, that they cast the people rioting in the streets as silhouettes, otherworldly spirits come from fable or from dreams to wreak havoc through a city.
A group of men caught in a brawl see Ify and lunge toward her at once. She has in one hand a shockstick and in the other a machete, and as they charge her, she parries each blow and slices and dodges and hits with her shockstick, electrocuting her attackers and disabling them. Soot and dried blood coat her face, and when she stalks past the shattered remnants of a storefront window, she sees in the shards of glass what she looks like.
It’s the face of someone who has just watched national monuments burn, who has watched mobs form and lynch bystanders in Abuja National Stadium. It’s the face of someone who has heard cries for help from countless people—innocent citizens, former combatants, people trapped while trying to flee—and been unable to save them. One perpetrator of an attack shouts out the reason for their vengeance and opens the wound, then others remember when they were attacked, and cries for revenge spread like a virus through the entire city. INCAR Plaza is ablaze. Dead bodies and weeping wanderers, some of them already shell-shocked, have turned Millennium Park into a graveyard. Abuja City Gate has become a macabre manifestation of the madness contained in the city. From its lowest arch hang half a dozen bodies.
The city is lost. Too many people already remember too much. And even now, new crimes are being committed, new wrongs that people will remember, despite the government’s best efforts.
This is what will happen to the whole country if Xifeng is not stopped.
With her sleeve, Ify tries to wipe some of the soot and dried blood from her eyes. The resulting smudging only serves to make her look more demonic. She turns from the broken glass and heads away from the fires. She sneaks from shadow to shadow when she sees police coming, and increasingly they grow heavier in their use of force. What chills Ify is watching people be subdued, then bundled away into vans. It is like watching the wholesale emptying of a neighborhood.
As she gets farther and farther into Garki District and away from the worst of the chaos, she begins to feel as though some sort of natural disaster has struck where she stands. Nothing moves. Maybe the Nine-Year Storm is an appropriate name for what the Biafran War did to this country. No one can be seen. She can even still smell burning food that has been left to cook for too long. As though everyone has just vanished in the middle of the business of living. There are some signs of chaos, but they’re lighter here. The blood on the ground is patchier. People had enough time to barricade their storefronts and secure the windows to their apartments and hide in their basements before the warring began in earnest.
All the dead and maimed here are regular people, civilians. And yet Ify sees even these people being swept up in immediate cleanup operations. Massive land mechs with pouches attached to their fronts like kangaroos roam the streets, and mechanical arms unfurl from their sides to pick up the bodies or pieces of bodies that litter the ground, then drop them into the pouch that opens and closes with a soft hiss every time. Ify’s eyes widen in terror. The erasure of trauma in real time. Like concrete paved over a pothole before the earthquake that created it is even over.