Page 102 of Death of the Author

Then Hugo sharply inhaled. “What the fuck,” he muttered. Zelu could hear him quickly snapping photo after photo with his phone. “What the fuck?!”

“Whooooa! Shut the window!” Marcy suddenly shouted. “Shut the window!”

Uchenna woke up. He peered out the window and shrieked. In an instant, he’d grabbed his backpack and started fumbling it over his shoulders. Zelu pressed her face against the glass to see.

There was movement in the trees. Black shapes, leaping through the branches. Zelu squinted, and realized they were men, dressed in dark clothes with their faces covered.

CRASH!Someone had run up to Hugo’s side and broken the window with... the butt of an AK-47!

Hugo put his hands up, utterly calm. “Marcy,” he whispered. “Relax.”

Zelu turned to the driver. “Fuck! What are you doing? Drive!” she screeched.

The driver didn’t hesitate. He pulled out the keys and leaped out of the car, leaving the door wide open. Zelu saw him throw the keys at two of the men who were moving toward them.

“Fuck!” Zelu screamed. She reached into the front pocket of her backpack and fumbled for her Mace.

Shhhhhhhhhhh!A waft of mist. Then Zelu’s throat, eyes, and nose began to sting and burn.

“Fuck off!” Uchenna shouted, his voice harried. Everyone was coughing. Zelu hacked, trying to clear her throat. Her nose was filling with mucus.

“Go!” Marcy hissed, her voice suddenly very close to Zelu’s ear. Through their coughing, Zelu heard a commotion outside. Someone was shooting. It was close.Blam!Zelu shuddered, clapping her hands over her ears, snot flying from her nose. In the liminal darkness of twilight and the flashing lights of the SUVs, she didn’t know what was happening. She reached for the door handle, but her palms were slick with sweat, and where was the shooting coming from?

Hugo got his door open and he, Marcy, and Uchenna were already spilling out.Shhhhh!A fresh wave of burning, itching, and coughing washed over her. More pepper spray! Had Hugo sprayed his own this time? Only yesterday he’d been bragging about how he carried some kind of heavy-duty version that no one would want to fuck with.

Men shouted in pidgin English and Igbo. The sound of their voices sent a ripple of terror through Zelu. Where were the soldiers her uncle and cousin had hired? Had they been gunned down when she heard the shots earlier? “Sharrap your dirty stinking mouth!” someone shouted. “Move, move, move!”

Zelu fought to keep her mind clear. Everything was blurry and painful. The bottom half of her face was wet with snot and drool. Something clattered. The scuffle of feet running. She knew what she had to do, but the fact was she could not get out of the SUV very quickly.

The passenger door was ripped open. Men in black clothes surrounded her like ghosts. One of them grabbed her shoulders and pulled her up; his grip was so strong that Zelu didn’t have a chance to stumble in her exos.

“Forget the others,” one of them said, motioning at her. “This is the one.” Zelu recognized him. This was Ogo, who worked at her uncle’s house!

“Are you the writer?” one of the men in black said, pointing a gun at her. There were four of them. Two of them were coughing, just like her.

“Y-y-yes.”

“Get back in the truck,” he said. “We are going for a ride.”

“Cooperate and you’ll be fine,” Ogo said with no trace of emotion. She wanted to spit in his betraying face.

She turned toward the rear of the car. Her hands were shaking badly as she grasped the side of the open door for support. Her mind was fuzzy. Where were the others?Pah!One of the men standing near her howled with pain. She turned around to see him writhing on the road, holding his leg. It was too dark to see why. The other three men had turned toward where the sound had come from, guns up. She stepped on something hard. She looked down. The writhing man had dropped his gun. She could bend. Pick it up. Start shooting. Killing. Save her friends. Live through this.

She made a split-second decision. She turned the other way and ran like hell. No gun. Who was she? She’d never held a gun in her entire life, let alone shot one. Zelu knew nothing of war, yet her world had suddenly become a war zone. So she fled. She’d never tried running with her exos before. It required such intense concentration, and since her biological legsweren’t doing the work, she didn’t get the benefit of true aerobic activity, so she just hadn’t seen the point. But now, she was so pumped up with adrenaline, she didn’t even think twice.

Her terror sharpened her senses, slowed down time, and tunneled her vision.Focus focus focus.They were behind her. PAH! One of them shot at her and the bullet bit at the leaves of the tree she was dashing past. She kept going. She kept going. She kept going. She was fast. Her eyes adjusted to the dark. She didn’t dare look back.

At some point, she remembered that she still had her cell phone in her back pocket. And it was all charged up for the flight home. The flight that she was definitely going to miss.Focus, she thought at herself.Keep going.She let herself think about her phone instead. It was with her in this moment. All she had to do was keep her balance and reach for it. She used one hand to dig into her pocket and managed to pull it out.

She had unlimited data and she had Yebo to help her, but who would she call? Who would answer quickly?

“Yebo! Call Msizi!” It rang and rang. She hung up after the fifth ring.

“Fuck you, Msizi! What the hell!” Tears flew from her eyes and she shook her head. No time to lose her shit. “Yebo! Call Chinyere!” It would be afternoon in Chicago, definitely worth a shot. Again, it rang and rang. Chinyere might have been doing a surgery or seeing a patient. Zelu whimpered. She hardened her face and wiped her hand over it. She needed someone,anyonewho would listen. She had an idea. “Yebo,” she said. “Get on Facebook and go live.”

As she ran, she held up her camera to her face. Already, she could see she had 8,873 live viewers. The location stamp was enabled. “Zelu here!” she huffed, feeling almost delirious as she looked into the bright screen. “I’m... I’m somewhere on some road in Imo State. You can see it... about an hour away by car from the Port Harcourt airport. Just got carjacked... escapedkidnappers... they were afterme, specifically! Guards were shooting back, so I ran...”

With every step, air pounded through her chest. It was amazing. She hadn’t known her exos could run this swiftly, and she was doing an epic job maintaining her balance. She was running on the side of the road and her speed was not much slower than the cars going by. What must she havelookedlike? In the darkness, they probably couldn’t see her that well, except right when they passed her. Several honked their horns, but no one stopped. She certainly didn’t. To stop on this road was to risk what she’d only just escaped from.

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