Virulent Part 5 (The end is only the beginning)

I walked to the communication hub and as I dialled Chike’s call code on their high-end video phone, I could feel Bisi’s hostile eyes burning holes in my back. At least she is not crying anymore, I thought.

Chike’s face came into view on the large view screen; he seemed relieved to see me. “what is going on?” I asked.

“Mr. Dotun. Thank God. I can’t talk much. Thinks are getting crazy out here. Things are worse than I thought. But tell me, the rats, did you notice any strange thing as you buried them?” Chike was tense, he kept looking over his shoulders, even though he appeared to be in a sort of enclosed lab.

“Yes,” I said, somehow knowing what he would say next.

“That means the plague has already reached the mainland and will soon climb up the food chain. You have to leave Eko now. Please take my wife with you; force her if you have to.”

I was about to inquire further when the screen went blank, but not before I saw the door behind Chike burst open and two burly soldier types enter the room.

***

We left Eko the next morning, way ahead of the mass exodus and death that turned that beautiful city-state into hell-on-earth, but not fast enough. By the time we made it to Benin four hours later, the quarantine was fully in place in Eko. We hoped to cross Benin and make it to Enugu where Chike’s brother promised safety in the form of a close-knit clan of hill dwellers, but a hastily set up quarantine zone for people coming in from Eko negated our plans.

All through the drive, we had kept abreast with developments. Though the truth was still scanty and bitterly guarded by the Eko government, Chike had managed to get the story out and the net links were abuzz.

I worried for a while, when we could not get clearance to travel further into Chike’s ancestral home where we felt we might find safety.

In the quarantine camp, which grew by the minute as more refugees flowed in, we waited two weeks for the second round of test results to either clear us, or sign our death warrants. My wife and Bisi, more like sisters now, comforted each other, they both lost family in Eko. Then Bisi died, not from the scourge, no, I think of heartbreak. Of Chike, we heard little. Some say he they placed him in a government facility safe from the plague; others said he tried to help the afflicted and contacted the late stage of the infection.

Because we left when we did, we managed to cross Ogun before the militia blocked all exits. From there, only horror tales escaped.

***

‘Sir...sir,’ an urgent voice intruded on my thoughts, drawing me back to the present.

I look up to see a Guardsman looming over me, blocking the rainbow hue from the cathedral windows.

‘What?’ I ask, grateful for the intrusion but wondering what he wanted. The Guardmen were notorious with how harshly they’ve been treating people since emergency law came into effect last week. Adunni says it is the tension, they are human after all.

‘Please head to the meeting tent, the result for the tests are out,’ he say, turning to walk away.

‘Wait,’ I call out, stopping him in mid stride, ‘What happens now?’

The Guardsman looks at me as if he was pondering how much to tell me, then he just shrugs and continues on his way.

I stand up from the plastic chair, take one last look at the Cathedral, and enter the tent to fetch my family. 

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• Virulent Part 3 (car envy)
• Virulent: Part 1 (Dead cows on the street)

Virulent Part 3 (car envy)

Never in all my years of rat baiting, poisoning and outright stumping, had I seen such secretions on dead rats.

“Don’t know,” Adunni turned to look at me, a worried look on her face, “Think this must be a reaction to the poison they ate, though I’ve never seen or heard of any substance that could cause this.”

“Neither have I,” I said, but I was sure I felt a twinge of recognition somewhere at the back of my mind. Not being much of the analytic thinker my wife and children are, I did not dwell on it.

I do not recall who suggested we check the rats already collected in the plastic bucket inside, but I recall it was my wife who suggested sending the twins back indoors, away from the excitement, but not before they had thoroughly scrubbed their hands with soap and rinsed it with water.

“Know what,” Adunni said to me as she closed the door behind the protesting twins she had just scolded thoroughly for acting naughty and not shutting up and doing what they were told, “What pains me is not that someone killed off these damn pests, but that that person is calmly watching behind a curtain while I clean the smelly mess.”

I did not respond, not that she expected me to. I know enough about the neighbours to know that the wife was not one to get her manicured nails dirty carrying garbage or smelly rats. Although the petite woman had not been wearing a surgical mask when I spied her earlier, I had expected to find if cupping her face. Without doubt, the stench would have reached their floor—it was that strong. Anyway, my wife insisted she was responsible for the bunch of dead rats thrown from the top floor towards the general direction of the bins. The husband would not be callous enough to not bring the rats down to the garbage, she said.

The husband, a jolly fellow with a taste for flashy cars, was a cyber journalist. Though I worked for myself as a building contractor, I made it a point of duty to leave home at the same time with the blue collars. As such, we ran into each other now and then as we readied our cars for the day. We do not talk about much–sports, a little bit of politics, how exorbitant car parts were getting, and of course, the newest 4X4s.

Anyway, it was on one of those mornings a few days after we had buried the last of the rats that I ran into the neighbour. Like me, he was on his way to work and had left the spiral staircase leading to their flat a few moments after I walked by. I turned at the sound of footsteps behind me to behold his sheepish grin. Why does that guy always appear to be laughing at something?

“Good morning Mr. Dotun,” he said with more enthusiasm than I had ever noticed in him.

“Good morning, Chike,” I responded, not willing to endure his habitual frown at any use of the officious ‘Mr.’ for him.

“Well,” that annoying smile crossed his face again, “we haven’t had the time to thank you for what you did with the rats.”

Despite myself, I felt a touch of anger. Not only was the guy trying to apologise for letting us clean up their mess, he even had the audacity to tell me “we haven’t had the time to thank you.” I bite down my anger and turned to him (yes, I had looked away to hide any tell tale sign).

“No problem Chike, the rats constituted a serious nuisance to us too, it was no bother.” I managed to say this with more civility than I had hoped possible in the circumstance. Anger and its attendant violence are so tedious. So, while the grimy job of finding and burying all the dead vermin was a lot of bother, I did not say so, couldn’t say so. I tend to leave all the heavy lifting to my wife. I am used to it.

We walked together to our cars. Mine was closer. I stood by and watched as the door of his opened on auto as the installed AI responded to his sub-vocalised command. I know I shouldn’t feel envy, but I couldn’t help myself when the cool smell of real leather hit me. Chike’s car was brand new, equipped with auto-nav and full body protective cocoon. It was the type of car the guys in my club were all salivating over. I looked away. I thumbed my remote, and my ever-reliable Tokunbo’s door slide open, silent as a night hunter, a conventional door, unlike Chike’s eagle wing affair. Yes, we did not have the “in vogue” feel of Chike’s Benz, but we are not far off—even if the look was of a third model Toyota Catcher, from five years back. Chai, it is not easy to not envy, not when the thing in question was parked opposite the disused storeroom I call my home office.

I was trying my best not to look back at Chike and his very becoming car interior when his voice forced me to turn again to behold that wonder on wheels, with its wing doors, now extended to their full height, appearing to kiss the skies. “By the way Mr. Dotun,” he began, eager like, “what kind of poison did you guys use? My wife and I had wondered for long whether it is a new variety. It sure doesn’t work like those stocked by rat-keller hawkers.”

I cannot exactly remember what I mumbled to Chike, whatever it was, it must have been satisfying for I recall stepping aside for him to edge past and with a cheerful wave of his hands, drive out of the auto-gate.

They did not apply the poison?

To be continued...

New to Virulent? Catch read the previous chapters via the links below. 

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• Virulent Part 2 'What the rats foretold'
• Virulent: Part 1 (Dead cows on the street)

Virulent Part 2 'What the rats foretold'

I did not think anything was amiss when rats no longer scurried across our living room, their movement only captured by the corner of the eyes.

This was because the rats tended to disappear, or reduce in number, from time to time: victims of poison or the stray cats that now and again made their home under the water tank at our backyard. Perhaps I should have been alarmed when less and less rats darted away from my headlights as my car felt its way into its customary parking space beside the large water tank where the charging units stood, regal, blinking in an electronic symphony. I was also not alarmed when first the compound and then the house proper was saturated by the stench of putrefying meat. I was not too bothered and easily laid the reason for the deaths squarely on a highly efficient poison.

A good year to be a writer!

This is ending as a very good year for me as a writer.

First off, I finally got a publisher to take interest in my collection of short stories. The collection “Footsteps on the Hallway” will be published Jan-Feb 2013 by Melrose books Nigeria.

I was also able to attend the Farafina Trust Writers workshop on the third attempt and learnt so much from superb teachers.

Then there are two of my short stories appearing in two PAN-African anthologies, African Roar and AfroSF in Dec 2012.

I sure have come a long way and perhaps should start feeling like a writer. We’re moving on. J