Apocalypse Now Now Read online

Cape Town

  Dear Mr and Mrs Zevcenko,

  Over the past few months I have attempted to gently shepherd Baxter toward a more healthy world view, one where he is able to consider the impact of his actions on himself and others. Unfortunately at this stage I believe a more direct approach is needed.

  Baxter’s delusions are such that I believe he may be becoming a danger to himself and others. A discussion about voluntary commitment into a mental health facility was immediately dismissed and has merely resulted in Baxter fabricating further about himself. I believe that the potential for violence, either to himself or to others, is acute. I hope we are able to frame this in a way that is consistent with this journey Baxter believes he is on.

  Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of and I know that during this time you will be tempted to look for things that you could have done to prevent this. There is nothing you could have done. Brain chemistry is as unique as a fingerprint and some of us are more vulnerable to mental illness than others.

  I would like to schedule a meeting with you to speak about the possibility of involuntary commitment for Baxter. Although I don’t take this step lightly, I believe that it is the best thing for your son.

  Please contact me at any time, night or day, should you have any questions. You have my sincere promise that I will do everything necessary to make Baxter well again.

  Kind regards,

  Dr Kobus Basson

  9

  OBAMBONATION

  LARGE WINDOWS LET in the sun, for which I’m grateful. I stop my work for a moment and lift my head to the rays and enjoy the feel of them on my face. But I quickly return to plunging my cloth into the bucket and then pulling it out and scrubbing the floor vigorously.

  My new life is one of solitude and hard work. I scrub the floors of the house until they shine, but it never seems to be enough. The housekeeper is a small woman with a ruddy complexion, a thick neck and oval face, and a sharp tongue. She punishes my ‘laziness’ by pulling my ears viciously. More than once I have thought about strangling her. But I don’t want to go back to the soldiers. I’m not sure whether I could avoid their advances this time.

  My father and everyone in the commando are dead. I know this, but it is difficult to come to terms with. Sometimes I hear children outside and think, just for a moment, that it is Mari or Tessie. Or I hear a male voice in the distance and expect the craggy, bearded face of my father to appear. But it never does. Most often it’s the magistrate. He’s a tall man with a gaunt face, but he’s kind. He seems to take an interest in me, asking me many questions about when I was first brought here. What do I dream? What do I know about my father and my uncle Niklaas’s gift? I don’t tell him about the boy with the spectacles. I don’t tell him anything. I am a Boer and he is an English dog.

  I finish scrubbing the floor and haul the heavy bucket into the kitchen. The cooks are laughing and one cuffs me playfully on the ear. At least they speak Afrikaans. I empty the bucket outside. A girl covered in bandages stands outside. Even her face is covered, but her eyes are black and shiny and she looks directly at me.

  ‘Lepers,’ the housekeeper hisses and crosses herself. ‘Lord help us all.’ She turns to me. ‘What are you doing staring like you’re lovesick? Would you like to join the lepers outside?’

  ‘No, mistress,’ I say, bowing my head and looking at the floor. I’ve learnt that this is the proper response to anything she has to say to me.

  ‘Yes, well, you’re lucky,’ she says with a cruel tug of my ear. ‘The master seems to have taken a liking to you. If it were up to me you’d be out onto the street with the rest of those scum.’

  She sends me to fetch more water from the well and I lift the bucket and carry it outside. The leper girl follows me as I walk. I imagine myself with my face wrapped in bandages and a chord of fear strikes in my heart. The girl follows me to the well and then stands a distance away watching.

  ‘Who are you?’ I turn to say to her in Afrikaans. I’m allowed to speak Afrikaans in the kitchen, but never in the rest of the house. I refuse to speak English when I’m not forced to.

  ‘Luamita,’ she replies in Afrikaans.

  ‘I’m Ester,’ I say.

  ‘Ester,’ she says as if tasting the name in her mouth. ‘You’re a Siener.’

  I turn around sharply.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says soothingly. ‘I am a friend.’

  ‘You’re a leper,’ I say, more harshly than I mean to.

  ‘No,’ she says matter-of-factly. She looks around quickly and then unwraps one of the bandages that covers her face. Beneath are not the grotesque sores I’m expecting, but a patch of bright, shining skin.

  I drop the bucket and the water spills onto my shoes. I stare at her. ‘I’m an Obambo,’ she says softly, quickly wrapping the bandage back. ‘We are friends to your people.’

  My hand shoots to the little bottle around my neck. Luckily none of the soldiers thought it valuable enough to take it from me and they allowed me to keep it.

  ‘That was a gift from my people to yours,’ Luamita says, nodding to the bottle. ‘And the time has come to use some of it.’

  ‘No,’ I say, clutching the bottle protectively in my hand. ‘My father said to use it only to find the vehicle.’

  She smiles and steps forward until she’s standing right in front of me. ‘There is more to the finding of the vehicle than you understand. It is a journey that will take a long time. And even then the outcome is uncertain.’ She takes my hand in hers. Her grasp is soft and warm. ‘The boy with the spectacles,’ she says simply. ‘He is sixteen years old and a Siener like you.’

  ‘I am sixteen years old,’ I say dumbly.

  ‘The time when a Siener’s powers are awakened,’ she says gently. She lifts a hand and removes the necklace from around my neck.

  ‘You and he are connected,’ she says. ‘And he needs your help.’

  I hold the little bottle in the palm of my hand and look at the luminous liquid that shifts around inside. ‘The blood of my people,’ Luamita says. ‘Intended to help you to save us all.’

  I unstop the bottle and then look at her. She nods.

  I take a sip and the world explodes around me. Lights shoot past my eyes like fireflies racing each other in the wind. I feel like I’m picking up speed, going faster and faster like I’m in a carriage that is careening down a mountain pass. It’s terrifying but also exhilarating. My forehead expands as if water is erupting from it, and I can see everything around me. Everything. The tiny ladybird on the plant down the road. The perspiration on the forehead of a worker grunting as he lifts bags of flour onto a wagon. Everything, together, in the blink of an eye.

  My mind roars like the Cape Doctor whipping the branches of trees back and forth during a storm. I can see Cape Town down below me; people like ants in the dirt. The masts of the ships in the docks and beneath them the sailors laughing and cursing on deck. And then Cape Town changes and becomes monstrous. It seems to grow thick and grey, taking over the surrounding landscape like a plague of locusts.

  Tall, grey glass monoliths rise up from the ground like savage, pagan monuments. I gasp and clutch at my head. This is horrible, this is all wrong. My mind sweeps down like the wind and I can barely make out the grotesque and terrible shapes that loom up in front of me. I’m in a house and see a man. A man like Luamita, a man who glows. He is tall and strong and his body shines like a lantern. He is stroking a mountain lynx that sits on a perch like a bird. A mountain lynx with wings.

  I wake up with a jolt. My face is stuck to the leather of the couch in Ronin’s lounge. We’d come straight back to his place and I’d collapsed like a drunkard and fallen asleep instantly. Light streams in through the bamboo blinds and painfully needles my vision. I lift my hand to shield my eyes and wince. It hurts when I breathe and I have a nasty headache.

  I lift my T-shirt and pull a face at the dark purple bruise that stretches from my left nipple right down the left side of my body. I sit up and
make my way gingerly through to the kitchen and take a long drink of water from the tap.

  I open the freezer and grab a handful of ice, roll it up in a dirty dish towel and press it against my ribs. The bounty hunter strides into the kitchen wearing nothing but silk boxers with Taz, the Tasmanian devil, on them.

  ‘Trendy,’ I say softly.

  He shrugs. ‘Chicks dig ’em.’

  He grabs a beer from the fridge. ‘Ibuprofen?’ he asks, offering me several pills in the palm of his hand. I nod gratefully and pop two into my mouth and wash them down with more water from the tap. Ronin slugs the rest back with his beer.

  Seagulls wheel and pitch above us like TIE fighters as we climb out onto the roof to drink beer and eat cereal. Every spoonful of Rice Krispies is unpleasant because my ribs are so bruised that lifting the spoon hurts. Plus, I can’t get the smell of the Flesh Palace out of my nostrils.

  Last night’s events are a haze of fear, blood and death. I sip my beer and try to gain some sense of perspective.

  ‘Tone would never have allowed that shit to happen,’ Ronin says through a mouthful of bran. ‘Which means he’s probably dead by now.’

  ‘This Mirth guy was involved in the incident Pat was talking about?’ I say.

  Ronin laughs and chases his mouthful of bran with a gulp of beer. ‘You could say that. When I was drafted into the army in ’84 my talent for fucking shit up didn’t go unnoticed. I was put into this new experimental weapons unit. Thought it was pretty standard until I saw what the weapons were.’

  ‘Missiles and stuff?’

  ‘I wish. No, it was some real Frankenstein shit, splicing together biological material to create an army. The National Party, going all out in their bid to perpetuate apartheid, were preparing for a civil war and Mirth was their supernatural golden boy. They made him the head of the unit and threw money at him. They didn’t care that he was twisted. The fucker giggled like a little girl when he experimented on living things. That’s how he got his code name.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Apartheid ended. Everybody thought they were going to see him jailed for life. But the Occult Truth Commission was a sham. He knew too much about the Hidden and was too powerful and too useful for the government to get rid of. So they hired him.’

  ‘Jeez,’ I say. ‘Talk about not holding any grudges.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s all about the money and power. As I soon found out. They made him the head of MK6, and he requested that I join him – either that or he’d have made me a scapegoat for the things our unit did on the Border.’

  ‘Like what exactly?’

  ‘Bad shit and lots of it. I can’t really remember that much because Mirth had me on a whole lot of experimental drugs to increase strength and endurance.’ He tries to smile but it comes out more like a grimace. ‘I was pretty screwed up,’ he says softly. ‘Well, more screwed up than I am now. Baresh helped me. Stopped me from going crazy and stopped me from being the monster that Mirth tried to make me into.’

  I watch him as he lights a cigarette and gets up to stretch. I feel sorry for Ronin. He’s like a dog with rabies; unpleasant and aggressive with a sense of doom surrounding him.

  ‘We all do bad things,’ I say, a little lamely. I tell him about Mikey Markowitz. We spent a whole holiday programming a game in BASIC together. There was this sense of camaraderie that we’d had. I still remember the feeling. Two months later I had to cut him loose.

  ‘Why?’ Ronin says.

  ‘Politics. Mikey was not a good person to be around. He attracted scorn and ridicule and I couldn’t have that while I was building the Spider. So I ignored him and pretended not to watch him become a sad loner. I guess I’m not really a good person either,’ I say to Ronin.

  I end up telling him about how I’ve pretty much manipulated everyone I’ve ever known. I can remember them all, each little betrayal, false flag and fake emotion I’ve used. Surprisingly Ronin doesn’t laugh. He looks at me the whole time with his weird blue eyes, smoking his cigarette right down to the filter as I talk. When I’ve finished he strokes his beard. ‘You’re a pretty weird kid,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say, and wonder whether I’m genuinely just realising this now or whether I’ve always known it.

  He shrugs. ‘Guess we’ve all got our problems.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  We sit for a while in silence. ‘So what happened to Baresh?’ I eventually say to break it.

  ‘Baresh was powerful and Mirth resented him for it. When the Crows killed him, I wanted to go after them but Mirth wouldn’t let me. We had a falling-out and I resigned. I thought I would be nailed for sure but Pat stood up for me. She quit too. I don’t know what I would have done without her.

  I think about last night’s weird dream. ‘Do you trust her?’ I say. ‘Pat, I mean.’

  ‘Completely,’ he says. ‘Why?’

  I tell him about the dream. Well, the part about the glowing man stroking Tony Montana.

  He looks at me. ‘This dream. It felt like finding that door in the club?’

  ‘Kinda,’ I say. ‘I don’t even know what that was.’

  I’m about to continue when my phone rings. It’s Kyle and he’s panicking. He says that Rafe is pretty much bouncing off the walls and that I have to get there. Now. The tone of his voice doesn’t leave much room for manoeuvring. Kyle is a pretty laid-back guy but when he gets freaked out it’s like trying to reason with a chihuahua on crystal meth.

  ‘I’ve got to go sort this out,’ I tell Ronin with a sigh. He nods but he’s stroking his beard braid thoughtfully. ‘Obambo are more than rare – they’re extinct. If she thinks she can stop him from being killed …’ He looks up at me. ‘I’ll give Pat a call,’ he says.

  I don’t have time to wait for a train so I phone for a cab. It comes quickly, a sputtering grey Mazda with a skew ‘Taxi’ sign on top of it. The driver is a sullen Senegalese guy wearing a muscle top and a beret. It doesn’t take long to get to Kyle’s house and I pay him and get out.

  ‘What’s up, hombre?’ I say when Kyle opens the door. He looks tired. His hair is mussed up and he has dark rings around his eyes. ‘This is up,’ he says, holding up several pages of computer paper. ‘Fifteen hours of this.’

  Rafe has been drawing. A lot. Non-stop, in fact. Kyle has had to play nursemaid and try to keep my parents from figuring out that I’m not there.

  ‘Your mom phoned like four times,’ he says. ‘I’m out of excuses for why you can’t come to the phone.’

  ‘I’ll phone her,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell her that we’re having a great time and that we want to stay another night.’

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘Bax, I don’t know whether –’

  ‘What the hell are these?’ I say.

  Rafe’s crayon drawings are scattered around Kyle’s room like some kind of postmodern art installation. Hundreds of them.

  There’s one of me next to a guy with fiery red hair and a sword. There are several where we’re walking with grey men with weird colourful bulges on their necks. There’s one of a big black creature with wings looming above me. ‘This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,’ Kyle says tiredly. ‘He hasn’t stopped.’

  Rafe is lying on the floor of Kyle’s room and scribbling furiously with his crayons on a sheet of paper. ‘Rafe,’ I say. ‘Rafe!’ He looks up. ‘What is this? How do you know to draw this?’

  He shrugs and lifts the drawing he’s been working on. It’s a picture of what looks like me with a knife in my hand and a red eye on my forehead.

  ‘That’s why I’ve been freaking out,’ Kyle says. ‘He’s been drawing stuff with the Mountain Killer eye on it.’

  ‘Jesus, Rafe,’ I whisper and sit down next to him on the floor.

  He takes the crayon in his fist and writes a single word on top of the picture: ‘Siener’.

  ‘Bax, seriously,’ Kyle says. ‘You need to tell me what’s going on.’

  So I do. I tell him about what’s been hap
pening. About everything that’s been happening. He looks at me sceptically when I tell him about the elemental; his eyebrows raise so high when I tell him about the Flesh Palace and the Anansi that I swear he’s going to burst a blood vessel in his eye.

  ‘Seriously,’ I say, ‘I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but it’s true.’

  The painkillers are wearing off and my ribs begin to throb again. I shift uncomfortably.

  ‘Bax, are you sure you’re OK? I mean, I don’t think you’re lying. It’s just that maybe something’s going on in your head.’ He makes a swirling motion above his head.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ I say. ‘But we’re going to find the guy that the tooth belongs to. He must know where Esmé is and after that, well, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Kyle says, folding his arms. ‘I’m sick of being left out of this.’

  ‘No, please,’ I say, ‘I’m begging you. I need you to run interference with my folks and keep Rafe away from all this. If my parents find out that I’ve hired a supernatural bounty hunter they’ll probably have me committed.’ Kyle doesn’t unfold his arms. ‘I didn’t want to do this,’ I say. ‘But I’m invoking the Angela Dimbleton favour.’

  Invoking the name of Angela Dimbleton is not something I’d do lightly. But I don’t have a choice. The Angela Dimbleton favour is an oath that I swore to Kyle and it happened like this: Kyle’s first attempt at sex wasn’t, well, very successful. It was with a girl named Angela Dimbleton, the biggest, most loud-mouthed gossip at Westridge. YouTube videos went viral slower than Angela Dimbleton spread gossip. When she and Kyle got it on the results were less than spectacular. They were dismal in fact. Kyle was a little quick off the mark. Like hadn’t-even-gotten-his-pants-off quick.

  Having anything embarrassing happen in the presence of Angela Dimbleton was bad news but suffering from premature ejaculation while getting it on with her was pretty much like posting it on your Facebook wall.

  Kyle called me, mortified, and asked for my help. Luckily for him I’d been preparing a dossier on Angela Dimbleton. I’d hoped to use the dirt to force Dimbleton to help us sell porn but Kyle begged me. So I’d phoned Angela and had a little talk about her, her super-religious family and the abortion clinic she’d been seen coming out of. She’d folded, and the story about Lightning-Quick Kyle had been quashed. Kyle had been so grateful that he’d promised he’d do anything should I call in the favour. ANYTHING.