Manifest

Twenty-five

Eddie picked the charred remains of the clothes from the ground and carried a load of rubbish to one of the wheelbarrows a villager had commandeered to help ferry garbage to the receptacle down the street. The metal cloth lines were singed and still standing. All the wooden ones were burnt down to a couple of feet off the ground. All the ropes were gone and the fence by which the lines had been placed were blackened.

With each second, a new group of enthusiastic volunteers showed up to help, rendering Eddie useless. They greeted him and walked by as if it was such a normal thing for them to walk into a stranger's home and start cleaning up the mess. Eddie didn't understand it.

Inside, the sitting room was a mess. It looked like someone had ransacked the entire place. All the pictures were missing from the wall and most of the chairs were pushed aside or upturned. He really wasn't surprised. From what he'd learned, the mbono were a savage bunch.

Thirsty, he headed for the water dispenser in the dining room. The dining was in a similar state of disarray. The last time Eddie had sat down at the table to eat had been with his father. He'd been passing through the room because it connected the kitchen to the rest of the house, but also because the dispenser was there, too. It had been a while since he'd seen any of the chairs pulled out.

Currently, they were out of their places and the top of the table was off balance. He wondered what the mbono had thought they'd find underneath a dining table.

The dispenser had been pulled out of its place between the glass cupboards, so the water wasn't even cold anymore. He sat on one of the dining chairs, with a glass in his hand pinching his squelching stomach in frustration. A good thing he couldn't die from starvation because his insides were biting with vengeance.

Eddie finished his water just as his phone sounded in the room. He got up and spun on the spot, looking for it. If the phone was making that sound, then the battery was about to die. How had it gotten to the dining room? The last time he'd seen it, he'd just set it down to charge in his room, the night Enyong awoke.

Following the tune, he knelt by the door between the kitchen and the dining and stretched his hand under the cupboard. He felt a soft pouch, so he pulled it out to find his wallet. He opened it. His national ID card was missing. His driver's license was gone. All the other documents he'd kept in his wallet weren't there anymore.

He still had loose change, a couple of five-hundred-naira notes and all his ATM cards. Mbono hadn't been trying to steal his money. They just wanted information about him. That was intensely disturbing.

He lay down again and stretched his hand further underneath the cupboard till he found his phone and pulled it out just as the light went out and the battery died.

Eddie wanted to scream. As he knelt there, looking at his upturned dining room, he just wanted to throw his head back and let loose. He couldn't bring himself to do it. He didn't have the energy to, but if he did, he would be screaming.

Death was his theme, now.

He was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it. He could run around Antaikot, pretending it was an even fight between them and a society that had four hundred years of knowledge and a head start that Eddie didn't have.

Or he could just take a bath and relax.

As he tried to stand, he heard whispers coming from the kitchen. It appeared to be a man and a woman.

"How can there be nothing in the fridge?" the woman asked.

"What do we do now?" the man asked.

"I don't know. Do you have any cash on you?"