“the dead
the vics of fate
they should fight;
rewrite their own stories…”

—Anonymous

MOST PEOPLE DIE ONCE. But there are some who die twice. Or thrice. Or as many times as possible. They can’t help their fate, and even if they be reborn—over and again—they will still end up as the lump in the throats of men, to be painfully swallowed like a dose of death. Most times those lumps bear prickly needles that puncture your lungs as they go down. Most times the doses don’t get washed down normally, but stick right in your throat ‘til their bitter compositions melt back down your tongue, causing you to retch in vain since your stomach will still house them in the end. They are the remains of destiny, the proof of helplessness. The Fates and Furies aren’t the only deities of fate; there is a generation of gods whose powers exceed the heavens; they determine the heights and the depths and the directions of the end. Once, one of such gods latched onto the life of a Nigerian girl—a wisp of a young adult who was yet to know the world.

The little girl ran out of their sitting room, her sandy brown face flushed red. She stood facing the barren mango tree inside their compound, her cheeks rising with a deep smile that slit her eyes. Her father’s friend had visited again with his son, Ifeanyi, who was just her age, 14. And while the elders discussed and joked and laughed out loud, they had noticed that she was getting along with the boy as usual, and so had called both of them husband and wife, maybe for the fun of it. And Ifeanyi had gazed at her as a result, his eyes brimming with puppy love—or what did her Health Science teacher call the kind of love young adults often have for themselves? She couldn’t take the embarrassment even though she liked it so much—Ifeanyi was complete just like her big brother, Evans—so that she had to run out here to ease herself of the tension that the joke had caused her.

From around the mango tree, a hazy figure seemed to wave and smile at her. But no matter how hazy it appeared, it felt like a twitter of reality. So that she smiled back at him and inched two steps forward, so slow that one would think she was too nervous to meet a long-lost lover. But even if she was nervous, the hazy figure wasn’t. It had the build of a man and it acted like the same, not hesitating to rush at her and take her in its arms. She could feel herself grow big, not like this young adult she was, but like a real real adult. A woman. She could feel the man’s arms were fluffy rather than brawny, like the strong arms of a lazy wind. But his dark eyes were real, weren’t they? His chiselled jaw. And his mahogany-coloured skin. They looked like they belonged to a superhero from a place far away in her fantasies. Or was it a past life? She had been seeing him since she woke up yesterday evening in the bathtub that was overflowing with warm water. Just like now, he was a smiling haze that only knew how to wave.

Once his face closed in on her, he was no more smiling, but his dark brows were knitted in a frown, and his voice the accent of her English Language American teacher filtered into her ears, lighting up her face; and for some reason, her eyes were misty and she was shaking as he called: “Let’s get out of here, Adaora. I know that man. He almost killed me in my hotel. We can’t trust him. Adaora, come on!” He grabbed at her arm, pulling her away into a furious haze that seemed ever too inviting. But then, another voice called from behind her, this time realer than the whispers of a probable past.

“Adaora.”

She turned back to take in Ifeanyi’s smiling face. It made her smile as well, puffing her cheeks and slitting her eyes and reminding her she was just a wisp of a young adult who was only lost for a while. “Your dad is calling you,” he said, reaching out his hand.

She followed, looking at the litter of pebbles beneath. And she walked up the doorstep casing—the first, then the second. And once she was going to take Ifeanyi’s hand, a sharp, murderous sound blew off the young man’s hand as if it were a racket against a tennis ball, only that this time there was a spatter of blood everywhere. It smeared her hand first, then her face, and her dress. And while she was screaming, bloody hands covering her bloodstained face, Ifeanyi was growling and rolling on the doorstep like a hacked snake. Motorbike engines were revving furiously behind her. She turned back, shaking. The bikers were brandishing long rifles and machetes and golfsticks and a couple of weird weapons—like shovels and rakes.

She wasn’t oblivious of her parents’ noises and Ifeanyi’s father’s as they rushed to witness the horror. The invaders got off their bikes already and were approaching with spirited chants as though stimulants for psychopathy. And within their wildness, they were smiling or grinning at her. Her. Her in particular. So she staggered backwards. And she fell back against the doorstep, right beside a sprawling Ifeanyi. Only then did she notice his stump of a bloody hand was lying by her side. Her eyes pulled wide and she screamed. Before she stopped screaming, one of the men was already pulling her legs. Her two legs. Her parents couldn’t come near, of course; even Ifeanyi’s father was mute, because the armed men were standing guard with machetes and shovels and rifles, ready to split the skull of whoever dared a move. To shut them off further, the one pulling her legs grabbed Ifeanyi’s hand and rubbed the bloody stump over his own face, grinning wide and jumping ‘til another psychopath slashed off Ifeanyi’s other arm so that the boy passed out and the parents went silent—one or all of them must have fainted, too.

But she confirmed that wasn’t the case as soon as they tore off her shirt and pyjamas and the elders cried out. It was too foggy to see how many people were doing that. But they were wild, growling and chanting as they grabbed her little breasts and groped her abdomen while she struggled against the heavy hands pinning her 14-year-old body down against the pebbles. Her eyes snapped open and she shrieked and sneezed as a sharp object gored her genitals. She saw it. The grip of a shovel firm in a heavily-bearded psychopath’s hand. He was digging into her with the metal stump and she was responding with quivering hips and limbs and dilated eyes and mouth and with more shrieks that soon took her breath away.

Thus, Adaora died her first death.

When she woke up in the hospital room, no one knew she was back. Only she was aware. The doctor was telling her parents his conclusions, all bad words: that Ifeanyi would no longer be a human. That he lost too much blood since the bad guys carted him miles away and dumped him where help would find him late. And that as for her, she was too damaged inside there and she could no longer dream of having a baby of her own. The attendant nurses who came in later also did not know she was awake; they gossiped her misfortune while they changed her IV drip and told tales of what happened at the time she had lost her breath: that the bad guys hadn’t stopped when she passed out the other time. That they gored her the more ‘til she was squirting blood from her lower body. That it excited them so much that they even scooped out the blood and splashed it on her parents. That to the savages it was no use killing the parents since the worst thing to happen to a father and mother had already happened that day. And that the bad guys had biked away. Never to be seen again. Especially since the media confirmed many more people were hurt and massacred all around Port Harcourt and that the ones who harmed her and Ifeanyi were a much more deviant fraction of them who insanely fought for either of the two best gods of Abraham. But on what grounds was all of these?

Now, years after—long long long after that doomsday—Adaora was a beautiful woman with a rare sandy brown complexion that a Nigerian woman would boast of for the good of her life. And she had high cheekbones and a boldness that intimidated everyone. Her words were weaved under explosive headlines and she wouldn’t stop digging into the wells of worms and rots that littered the country and beyond. But there was one thing she wanted to get. One thing she wanted to tear apart. One thing she wanted to make into a forgotten past. It was an untold part of her story, a drive for her career in journalism. It was the truth about how her perfect brother, Evans, was hacked to death alongside his workmates at a meeting in a conference. This happened after she became 20. And it was an assassination of another part of her—making it her second death. How the hell did the criminals get away? How the hell did everyone forget about the carnage? How the hell did the same kind of crime keep happening all over the world without any sane person to clamp down on the monsters? How! Except that there were conspiracies within the country. Conspiracies she’d never find out.

One American detective, Barnis, also wanted to know how. But he was also looking for who, so he stubbornly traveled all the way from Washington DC to first find then shoot down the same devil who had massacred his ex-wife and her family. He found Adaora through her uncle and found out that the who was already with her. Not in person, but in her dreams. Her goals. Their common enemy was everywhere, and he had many connections.

And soon they were travelling to a refugee camp in war-torn Darfur, Sudan, to find a common enemy, but when they cornered him, he snatched a young female refugee, strapped a grenade around her, and blew her up much worse than Ifeanyi’s hands. And he latched onto the wheels and drove away proud.

If a child’s hand hasn’t gripped the hilt of the sword, he shouldn’t investigate the death that killed his father. Adaora must have forgotten this, and the enemy was ready to remind her. So he got Adaora’s family and burnt down everything that looked like their existence, killing the young woman the third time. Barnis grabbed her shoulders as the policemen arrived at the crime scene, but he recognised one of the cops, so he whispered to her: “Let’s get out of here, Adaora. I know that man. He almost killed me in my hotel. We can’t trust him. Adaora, come on!”

But all was vanity, and soon, they were being dragged by Nigerian cops into the Kirikiri Maximum Prison with the enemy sauntering up behind them.

Adaora knew she was going to die the fourth death and she wanted her newfound lover to stay out of it. Now that she had met the killer of her brother and the grim subject of her dream, she could leave peacefully. The enemy hated bold, fearless women. He hated them more as Adaora spat into his face. So he shot her in the face. Right between her two eyebrows. And she slipped down, her head pulling a bloody swipe down the blue-painted wall. But that wasn’t the end of her deaths. The enemy was pulling down his trousers, his fleshy shovel hard for a necromantic invasion.

Barnis was watching. He was watching the fifth death, his face a blank sheet of mahogany. If he survived this day, he would find her as a memory, just like the last time when she woke up in the bath tub and that time when she saw him around the mango tree. Maybe then, fate may send the villains to another part of Nigeria rather than Adaora’s village. But this…only if James Patterson could rewrite the victim Adanne Tanse’s story in his novel, Cross Country.

But like the Fates and the Furies, the gods are too proud.