SELMA
The vibrations struck the container first. The iron walls shook, the dust falling out of the roof. Something was thrumming at my feet, but now it was not far, but heavy-handed, and sharp, and rattling all the bones. My hands were clutched to the corrugated walls, and I was looking out of the slit of the window, breathing shallowly.
Outside, Nairobi was gone.
I had not been to the city as such. Some buildings were turned inside out, half a building, and others that were lying on their side, as though they would fall at the slightest touch. The concrete was cracking, the steel bending, the windows smashed. Dust and smoke hung in the air in heavy drifts. Fire was smouldering in patches and the odour of iron and scalded flesh was on the wind.
It began with buzzing, low and insistent. Then it flew, flashing a thousand wings, clashing, hitting the air, a miniature storm. Wasps. Giant, countless, crawling over the roofs, clambering on an automobile, writhing corpses underneath. One or other of the bodies was jerking unnaturally along, others would be beneath the skin with their eggs as large as fists, some on the tops, the rest pale and shuffling forward, their eyes blind, their mouths open. The walking corpses clucked and buzzed and pulled themselves over the road like puppets.
A shadow moved above them. Massive, and fluid. A giant spider, but bigger than the tallest building I had ever remembered. Its legs tore the street and sent debris flying. It crashed into the swarm, claws breaking, nests being pressed to death, wasps screaming and flying over in every direction. The buildings shook from the force and a few collapsed. The dust smothered the air, and it was all misty.
I swallowed hard. I could now see the scale, the rate at which this world had fallen apart. Out of a city that is alive and alive, to this... this nightmare. I located it not more than a couple of streets away. Ngong Road was destroyed and concrete and knifed steel in place where roads once ran cars, now impediments to the living and the dead.
I was swift, quiet and effective. Teresa and the other girls went with me, and we loaded all we could find: ropes, tools, spare clothes, flares and medical kits. No one talked, hands were shaking. Words were useless here. Any noise out there would have broken our concentration. Any shake of the metal wall reminded me that even our safe shelter, the container, was not so permanent, but weak.
Once more I looked at the slats. One of the walking dead had stumbled into sight, with its limbs jerking, a huge egg-sac sticking out under its flesh. On it, a wasp crawled with the egg in its stinger squashed against the dead. It trembled and threw itself onwards. I shivered. The buzzing of ourselves was intensified, and as though the city were an animate being, and raging.
When the loads were loaded, I went to the side hatch of the container. The street was out there as bad as ever. Rubble fell down in half-collapsed edifices. The cement masses as big as cars dropped in the street and the dust clouds puffed up when they hit the road. We heard the scream of men in the pandemonium, a few of whom were trampled, and others scrambled, with wild eyes and loaded with egg-cases, crying as the wasps stung them.
I was with three girls, Teresa, and me. Everyone was accounted for. Each movement was required to be specific. A single slip, a bare hand, and the swarm would have it away before we could draw breath.
The car.
I spotted it first. The old sedan, dust-covered though sound, keys still in the ignition. We had viewed it through the container window but now it appeared to be the only thing keeping us together. I walked at top speed, heart in my throat, pushing aside debris. The girls had started after them, carrying packs, snorting over metal and broken glass.
And then it happened. One of the wasps--larger than the others, predatory, causing the half-light to glimmer--plunged at Marco. It tripped him and fell into the road between us and the automobile. Its stinger struck cleanly. He yelled, gripping his arm. The pain was sharp, immediate. His left arm, his arm, sprayed with blood, went dead. He pitched, and was panic-stricken, and was holding on to the stump, in an effort to keep himself erect.
"Move!" I hissed, caught hold of a strap of his pack and pulled him into the car. He stumbles once more, cursing to himself, and the thought of having his arm knocked off makes every step even more painful. and I shoved him onwards, saying nothing, not wanting to see the injury, but smelling as much of iron as there was of air.
The hum had no mercy and shook the car, our bones, the walls of the container, and the street. The spider had not left. Its legs came beating on the road tearing off pieces of concrete. One wasp buzzed down from the upper floor of a fallen building and almost tore my shoulder open, stabbing the air just in time that I should have been. The confusion was complete, devastating, incessant.
We reached the car. I picked up the keys and pressed them into the engine, which started. Marco sank into the passenger car, holding the arm he had left, bleeding, panicked. Teresa came behind, with a small bag of supplies. Zak was sliding in the back with one of the girls. His limbs still smoked of his unconsciousness, his face still pale, and he was totally unaware of the mayhem about him.
And then it happened.
The wasp whose sting had given Marco a cut, enormous, predatory, inflexible, turned about toward the car. Its wings flutter wildly, and dust and debris fly about, and its stinger flints as it readies itself to attack. And something other... something strange had occurred.
I caught a glimpse of it in the corner of my eye, and my stomach went down. Teresa put up her hand, nearly unwillingly. The vines,--brown, sinew, dark green and weird--grew out of the ground beneath her feet, and twined upwards, seizing about the wasp within a few seconds. It fluttered, legs scraping on concrete, wings a-thrashing, but was fast, hanging by strands of coiled and tightening strands.
The nose of Teresa was bleeding, a streak of it came down her face, but her hand stood still, and was still and controlled. The wasp fussed angrily, buzzing more and more, though it was not able to move. The plants caught attacked on the pavement and held the attack.
No one spoke. Nobody accepted the fact of what had occurred. Only the reader could see it. The reader only had the capability of comprehending.
I jammed the gear forward. The groaning engine skipped on concrete pieces, the tyres. Marco puffed shallowly, ragtime, panicky. Blood leaked on the seat, staining the worn cloth.
Zack--was still unconscious--stirred himself somewhat in the back. Chris put a hand up over his chest and stabilised him. Smoke twisted out of his arms. He was still altogether unaware of the bedlam, the wasps, the spider, the city caving in all around us.
The avenue before us was broken and winding. The dust and smoke hardly allowed the sun to pass through. Razing caught on camera at a slow pace, beams of steel breaking, walls collapsing, human screams. The hum was throbbing at our feet. The gigantic shape of the spider stood in the distance cowering, waiting.
The wasp, impaled in the vines of Teresa, whipped about again and lay down. But the threat remained. The streets were swarming with hundreds of others. Every moment counted.
Craig clenched his hands on the wheel. No words, no plans. Only motion, only survival. The thump of each heartbeat, the shaking of each jolt of the car, made me think of what we were escaping to, what the city had turned into.
The container sank away behind us. The car moved through dust, debris and chaos. The world was no longer a city. It was a battlefield. A graveyard. A nightmare that could be felt as alive, death was in every shadow and something more in the wings.
And we were in between, running off in the remains, holding on to life with a strand of hair.