The Leafy Man

Nyapia and a two-year-old boy starved under an orange grove. She could get food in Abedo, just a mile away, but everyone in that town was dead. If she went there, she would see the rotting corpses of people she had grown up with, her family, her neighbours, her friends, her patients. But if she did not go she would watch the child die of hunger. They had not eaten in two days and the boy was too weak to cry. Nyapia did not know his name.

Were her ancestors punishing her for not being a good mother?

She barely remembered raising her own children. She had always been too busy in her hospital, so the burden fell on her younger sister. Now, her children called their aunty ‘mama’, while they called her ‘mummy’, a strange word that they had learned in school.

She could not ignore this child. She had to find something for him to eat.

Thankfully, they had enough water. A red brick house stood at the edge of the orchard, and it had a rainwater catchment system with a ten thousand litre tank. It, and the grove, belonged to Opata, who built it for his farmworkers. His family fled the morning Miss Doe attacked, unaware that the best place to hide was right in their backyard. Being too close to the orchard, the house was safe. The food in the kitchen had sustained them for a couple of weeks. There was certainly more food in the main homestead, about a hundred meters away, but Opata would have locked up before flight. She would have to break padlocks, and Miss Doe might get her in the process.

She wondered if Opata’s family had made it to safety. They had a new van, and the roads were smooth enough to enable them to speed away. She dreamed about her own family every night, not knowing if they escaped the bloodbath. She was afraid of finding out, for if it was a horror she would lose the little strength she had to survive. They knew of the effectiveness of oranges, and she could only hope that they had made it to one of the groves near their home before Miss Doe got them.

She had to go to Abedo.

She put the boy in a large kasero used for keeping chicken, and secured the lid to ensure he did not crawl out. Then, she shoved the basket into the makeshift hut she had built using plywood and grass. It did not bother her that she was caging a child in a basket like an animal. She had watched him every minute since they took refuge, making sure he did not crawl away from the protection of the oranges, but now she had to leave him. A cage would ensure he stayed in the grove.

She cloaked her body, head to toe, in orange leaves and piled a lot more onto her bicycle. When she stepped out of the orchard, she was a moving shrub. She rode slowly, cautiously, but when Opata’s homestead came into view, she stopped. Her muscles tightened on the handlebars and her teeth pressed hard against each other. The house, a little over forty meters away, was supposed to be a nice red colour, but it was black for Miss Doe sat on every inch of the walls and on the roof. Unlike its natural predecessor the anopheles, whose sight was limited to about ten feet, Miss Doe had the eyes of an eagle and could spot prey from a mile away. It saw her and at once rose into the air like a pall of smoke, conjuring the image of a veil being lifted off the house to reveal the green roof, the red walls, and the yellow wooden window panes. It floated in thick clouds above the rooftop, like whiffs of black smoke, and waited for her. Even from the distance, she heard its hum, the irritating buzz that in the past had given her sleepless nights and at worst a bout of malaria, but now it was amplified a billion times, humming a song from hell.

She licked her lips, but they were dry and cracked. She tried not to breathe to calm her heart down, but her muscles felt like sponge and air replaced every solid inside her. What if it had mutated, yet again, to tolerate the scent of oranges? The clouds thickened above the rooftop as more insects flew in to join the wait, like a mighty army gathering.

She looked behind her at the grove. It was safe in there. She could go back and hide. But the thought of the starving child forced her to face her nightmare. With a yell, she pumped the pedals and the bicycle shot forward. Her shout turned into the scream of a tribal warrior as she charged straight into the enemy line. If the thing was to drain her blood, then let her go in a burst of bravery.

Miss Doe fled as she approached, soaring higher and away to escape the smell of orange leaves. She hit the brakes and her scream turned into a laugh of triumph. The citrus magic still worked.

Fifty meters, she thought. That’s about the distance from oranges that they could tolerate. But the leaves she had draped on herself could not emit as much scent as the entire orchard, and so as she got further away from the grove, the bugs came closer. Too close. Ten meters away.

Kolo. She swore under her breath.

At the house, the buzzing was so loud that she could not hear anything else. The door was wooden and fastened with a bolt and padlock. She used a crowbar to wrench the bolt system off, and the door swung open. She walked in, but the bugs were so thick outside that they blocked sunlight, keeping the house in darkness. Thankfully, there was a torch on a shelf just next to the door. She went into the kitchen, but whatever fresh food there was had gone bad. There was enough flour and seeds, yet they required cooking, and it was risky to make frequent trips out of the grove to find fuel. She had to proceed to Abedo, which had shops full of tinned foods, or raw nuts, things they could eat without cooking.

She went into the bathroom and stood at the sink for a long moment, looking into the mirror. Shades of grey blossomed in her hair, which she held in thick knots like a little girl, the best she could do to keep them neat in the circumstances. After a month of hiding from Miss Doe, dreadlocks were germinating on her head. Wrinkles had taken root on her face, making her look twenty years older than forty. She wondered if she and the child were the last people left in the world.

She soaked a cloth in soapy water and wrapped it around her nose for she expected to find a lot of bodies in Abedo. The stench would be horrible. She did not want to disrespect the dead by spitting, or throwing up. She hoped the wet cloth would be a helpful gas mask.

When she stepped out of the house, she looked toward the orchard. It was a fuzzy blur, for Miss Doe hovered around her, creating a curtain. She took a deep breath, climbed on the bicycle, and rode to Abedo. Miss Doe flew around, keeping a distance of several meters, encasing her in a cylinder, putting her in the middle of a black whirlwind. She could feel it probing her shield for weaknesses, and she gripped the handlebars tighter, and her legs pumped the pedals harder, urging the bicycle to go faster. How long before the leaves lost their potency?

If it were not for Miss Doe’s seething, she would have heard the music the tires made as they rolled over the sand. She would have heard the wind blowing, the leaves singing, maybe a pigeon cooing to her lover and children making a racket as they kicked a ball. She would have heard all these sounds a month ago. Now, the only thing in her ears was this buzz. It sounded like pebbles beating down hard on a tin roof. Her pores opened and sweat drenched her clothes.

She rode faster, but the sand slowed her down and the bugs kept pace.

THE government issued her this bicycle three years ago when they reluctantly included traditional healers in the Roll Back Malaria Campaign. They did not recognize Nyapia as a proper doctor or scientist, but they knew people in the village listened to her for she had served them for over twenty years, after inheriting the profession from her father. She never went far in formal school but acquired knowledge the ancient way, becoming an expert in plants and diseases, and she studied divination with the enthusiasm of a mathematician. To the dismay of her community, she disassociated herbal medicine from spirituality. She believed mixing the two had hindered proper research and development of their technologies. Eventually, when they saw her performing greater miracles outside the shrine, they accepted her as a medic only. The government gave her the bicycle to promote insecticide treated nets, which no one in the village liked to use. They instead used the nets for fishing, or to protect their grains from birds when put out in the sun to dry. But she knew of plants whose scent repelled mosquitoes, and so she encouraged her village to grow them near homesteads, on addition to cutting bushes, draining stagnant water, and rubbing lothiru extract on the skin as a repellent. The campaign slowly yielded fruit as the village collectively fought the disease.

Then, a company calling itself Pest and Germ Control Corporation came up with a new method. It had modified the genes of the anopheles to create a new species that does not carry malaria parasites. It called it Miss Doe. PGCC asked the government for a trial site. A politician influenced the Ministry of Health to choose Abedo, hoping the project would bring employment and increase his popularity. PGCC then camped in the area and introduced Miss Doe. Their plan was to out-populate and replace the natural mosquitoes with the disease free bugs. A simple plan. A great plan.

Only that, Miss Doe ran riot.

It needed only a day to mature from egg to adult. Within a week, there were thousands. The village woke up one morning to find a lot of dead birds in the grass. Their blood drained. Nyapia at once suspected Miss Doe. When two cows were found dead later that day, also with their blood drained, it confirmed her suspicion. She and other village leaders approached PGCC, who dismissed their fears. Mosquitoes do not feed on blood, they said, only the females need it to lay eggs. They had fixed that need in Miss Doe. She had no need for blood.

The next day, a child was found dead in her bed, a million holes in her skin and not a drop of blood left in her veins. Panic gripped Abedo. Some people fled to neighbouring towns. Nyapia resisted flight. She had discovered that Miss Doe dreaded orange leaves, and she placed these on her windows to protect her family and the patients in her hospital.

The death of the child attracted international media, and PGCC could not ignore it any more. Reluctantly, they acknowledged their mistake but claimed they had a fail-safe mechanism. They sprayed a special insecticide over the village to wipe out Miss Doe.

Instead, the chemical triggered a mutation. Overnight, Miss Doe ballooned from the size of a normal mosquito into a monster as big as Nyapia’s thumb. It no longer looked for food as an individual, but in swarms that swept over the village like dark clouds. Nyapia had just left home early that morning to tell others that fresh orange leaves were an effective repellent, when a dark cloud floated above the trees. She heard screams, saw people fleeing in terror with black clouds of insects chasing them. A cloud swallowed up a woman, and she fell, her screaming stopped before she hit the ground. The insects settled on her for only a few seconds, and then rose into the air, leaving her stiff in the grass.

Nyapia was too far from home to go back to her family, but luckily close enough to Opata’s orchard. She sped to it. On the way, she found the little boy abandoned on the roadside, covered in a blanket.

THE first corpse she saw nearly made her fall off the bike. The wet cloth around her nose cut out the smell, and the sweat and the whirlwind of mosquitoes limited her vision severely. She did not see the body until she nearly ran over it. She gripped the brakes. Tires screeched on the sand. The dead man lay partially hidden in the bush, nothing left of him but skin and bones. She knew the coat, grey with black stripes. It belonged to Mr. Okello, a geography teacher with whom she played scrabble every Friday evening, in the town centre when they gathered to drink malwa and eat grilled pork. Mr. Okello’s face stared at her with eyeless sockets, with teeth in a lipless mouth that appeared to be snarling. Flies danced on the body, but she could not hear them. All she heard was the seething of Miss Doe.

She forced herself to look away, stifling tears that threatened to blind her.

She was at the top of a gentle hill. The town lay below. She could not see it through the wall of mosquitoes, but she knew what it looked like. About forty small buildings with red brick walls and corrugated iron-sheet roofs stood in a perfect square enclosing a giant mvule tree. A market thrived in the square. Every Friday, traders traveled from distant districts to sell and thousands of people came to shop and to make merry. The attack had happened on a Wednesday, a quiet day in Abedo, when all the shoppers and traders were locals. All the corpses would be of people she knew. She clenched her teeth, bracing herself, and let the bicycle roll down the sandy road.

Miss Doe kept pace around her, whirring, buzzing a song of death, stalking her, looking for a chink in her shield, waiting for a chance. She probably was the only moving thing it had seen all month. Was blood the only thing it fed on? If it killed off every living thing in the area, would it starve to death?

It could not migrate in search of food. Its creator, to protect the technology and ensure maximum profits, fixed its genes so that it could not travel beyond a certain radius from the breeding site where the first egg of the generation hatched. This way, PGCC could charge governments per square inch of land that they had freed of malaria carrying mosquitoes. But how far from Abedo could Miss Doe travel? If Nyapia made a run for it, how far would she get before the orange leaves shrivelled and lost the scent that repelled the bloodsuckers?

She rolled into town. The roofs of two buildings arched over the road to form a gate. There was a billboard above the gate, with the words “Welcome to Abedo, Where You Eat And Drink And Die Of Happiness.” There were dead people in the square. Fortunately, she could not see the entire market for the murderer’s veil obscured her view. A woman sprawled on what once was a pile of fish, maggots crawled in a feast. She recognized her clothing. Mama Samaki, the oldest fishmonger in town. Mama Godi lay in what must have been heaps of potatoes. Two youths, Obore and Kamau, lay on a verandah beside a scrabble game, the last moves still on the board, the book in which they had recorded the scores stuck under a stone. Obore still had a tile in his fingers. Nyapia had taught them the game just a few months ago. The attack had been so sudden that nobody had a chance to flee. Maybe the tree had prevented them from seeing the attackers.

Shop doors were still open, with corpses sprawled across the threshold. She recognized Masasa, Kemigisha, Oketch, Ntare. They lay rotting. Nyapia retched. The wet cloth was an effective gas mask, but her brain conjured up a terrible odour. She tried not to spit, not to vomit, to respect the dead.

She did not see a corpse in Natasha’s shop, and so she went inside. It was stocked with tinned foods, bottled drinks, and nuts, exactly what she wanted.

A portable FM radio sat on a shelf, with a copper wire attached to the aerial for better reception. Natasha loved to listen to the news, and the radio was always on. Nyapia jumped at it, her fingers trembling as she turned the dial. The batteries were dead. She ripped open a new packet and inserted a pair into the radio, then tried again. At first, she got only static. She turned the dial, searching for the stations from nearby towns, until she heard music, the sweet voice of Juliana crooning Nabikoowa. The signal was fuzzy, and the angry seething of the vampires at the door drowned out the song. She turned the dial looking for a station with news, but could only pick up this one playing music.

That in itself was good news. People were still alive out there. They could afford to listen to Juliana. PGCC had not lied then that their creation would not travel far from its breeding zone. But how far was that? Perhaps if the song ended and the radio DJ mentioned the station’s name, she might know.

She strapped the radio around her neck with a rope to listen to it as she fed herself. She gulped down milk, and then juice, and then devoured a kilogram of dried gonja. Then, she placed a box on the bicycle carrier and packed it with biscuits, amukeke, raw groundnuts, UHT milk, mango juice, sugar, and spare batteries. It would take several trips to stockpile food in the grove, but this would be enough for a few days.

As she worked, a voice interrupted the music.

She listened. Fuzzy. The radio picked up two stations at the same frequency. She touched the dial and got a clear and crisp signal. Two people talked in foreign accents. It did not sound like the conversations she heard on air. Was it a radio drama? When one spoke there was no background noise, but the other had to shout above a steady roar, like that of a grain milling machine.

“There’s a bit of wind,” the one in the noisy place said.

“H Four will hold,” the other said. “Target is two miles away.”

“Roger that.”

Wazungu. As a village health leader, she had interacted with them over the year while they had camped in there area, and she could understand them unlike many in Abedo who struggled with their accent. She wondered about the conversation. It did not sound like a radio drama for it went silent for several seconds after ‘roger that’. Then, a sound cut through the seething of the mosquitoes, becoming clearer every second, until she thought she recognized it.

A helicopter? Was she hallucinating?

She dashed out of the shop, scattering the curtain of mosquitoes, and bounded into the square. She searched the skies, but the giant mvule blocked her view. She ran out of the market, until there was no tree to block her view, and then she saw a white thing shining in the sky. Coming towards her.

It was visible for only a few seconds. Miss Doe closed in around her and blocked her view. She ran again, trying to clear the air of the vampires, and she waved. Frantic. Miss Doe danced around her with increasing frenzy, but she noticed that the wall was thinning. It had also seen the helicopter, and was converging on it.

“There’s a black cloud just outside the town,” the radio said. Nyapia recognized the background noise as the roar of the helicopter.

“It’s him,” the other voice said. “He’s waving at you.”

A rescue. The tragedy that had befallen her village must have made international headlines. They must have been monitoring the area using satellites, or maybe using drones, and they must have seen her riding into town. But how would this helicopter rescue her with Miss Doe gathering around it? Did they know the trick with orange leaves?

The helicopter now flew in circles, spewing a thick white smoke. At first Nyapia feared it was in trouble, that maybe the mosquitoes had got into the engine and caused it to malfunction. Her only hope was about to crash. However, unlike normal smoke, the fume did not rise into the air. It fell to the ground like a solid object, and rolled over the grass like a thick mist. It provoked tears out of her eyes, but the wet cloth on her nose prevented her from breathing it in.

Almost at once, the buzz of Miss Doe relented. Nyapia thought the smoke was insecticide, until she saw Miss Doe shooting to the sky in pillars, and then gathering to form a huge cloud that wiped out the sun. It was only a repellent.

“What’s happening?” the radio crackled. “We lost video.”

“Where’s the drone?”

“The bugs blocked our view. We can’t see anything.”

“H Four cleared the area. We see him. We are going down.”

“Roger that. Be quick.”

The chopper touched down. She could barely see it through the smokey insecticide. The engine shut down. The buzz of Miss Doe was faint, but it came from the sky, eerily.

As she started toward the helicopter, four men came running out of the mist. They wore protective white clothing that covered every inch of their bodies. Each had a tank on the back, a gas-helmet over their head, and a spray muzzle in one hand. Emblazoned on their breasts were four letters, in bright green. PGCC. Nyapia’s legs turned to water. The people who brought the apocalypse to her village.

She turned and fled.

“Hey!” One man shouted. It came out of the radio, and from behind her. “Don’t run!”

“What’s that?” the radio said.

“The leafy man ran.”

“He what? Why?”

“I don’t know. He just saw us and ran.”

Nyapia had not fully recovered from the hunger, but she was faster that the four men who had heavy tanks on their backs and cumbersome costumes. They could only waddle.

She thought it was foolish to run. They surely meant her no harm, they might have come to rescue her, but she could not trust them. Not after what they did to her village. When she was a little girl, her father had campaigned against birth control pills. ‘It makes our women barren,’ he had said. ‘It’s a trick of the white man to wipe out black people.’ Nyapia had dismissed his argument as ridiculous, but with Miss Doe blanketing the sky, she could again hear his warning, and she used all the strength left in her body to run. Stumbling, falling, the chemical stinging her eyes, nearly blinding her. She ran back to the square. To her bicycle.

“Come back!” The men were shouting, but their voices were getting further back. The distance between them steadily increased. “We came to rescue you! Don’t run!”

A strong wind rose. The smoke that they called H4 thinned. Nyapia now saw the walls of the town, about eighty meters away. She heard Miss Doe stir.

“Oh fuck! The bugs are descending.”

“Spray more H Four!”

Nyapia noticed that her leaves had lost their fresh green colour, and now had a yellowish tinge. Had the chemical killed her shield? She did not want to find out. The mosquitoes were coming back. Fifty meters to the market. A few more seconds of flight, if her strength held, but Miss Doe needed only a few seconds to kill.

“Stop!”

“We must go back to the chopper! The wind is too strong!”

“Don’t leave without the leafy man!”

Nyapia took this voice to be that of the mission commander. He was obviously in a safe place far away. The breeze turned into a gale. The mist thinned very fast.

“Fuck!”

A black cloud appeared in front of Nyapia. It flew out of the town and shot straight at her. Her bones turned into ice. She looked at the yellowed leaves, wondering how much power they still had, if they could still protect her. She waited for death, and the cloud stopped less than twelve feet away, a lot closer than before. The shield had weakened.

She heard a hiss. A jet of white smoke hit the cloud. The mosquitoes broke up and scattered, and fell to the ground, rolling about in a daze, but not dying, and not fleeing away. They jumped back up into the air, and regrouped into a new cloud, painting a huge black spot in the white smoke.

“What the fuck!” The voice was both in the radio and behind her.

“What’s happening?”

“H Four isn’t chasing them off!”

“Nonsense,” the commander said. “Get the leafy man.”

A man screamed. Nyapia turned to see Miss Doe descending like rain, falling into the white mist, no longer deterred. It had already overcome its fear of the chemical. A cloud fell upon one man, who crumbled to the ground as if under its weight. Yelling. He vanished in the mist. The other men sprayed him with the chemical, but black clouds were swooping down on them as well. One man abandoned the cause, and ran, trailing a thick cloud, which overtook him. He fell, screaming.

“What the fuck’s going on down there?”

The helicopter jumped into the air. Miss Doe gathered around it, enveloping it in a cocoon. The down draught from the propellers could not drive it away. The chopper released more H4. The cocoon broke up, the insects flew about. For a few seconds Nyapia could again see the chopper, Miss Doe soaring above the propellers.

Something bit Nyapia on the shoulder. It felt like a knife. Her shoulder was exposed, without the protection of the leaves. A fat mosquito sat on it, drinking her blood. She slapped it. Blood exploded. The mosquitoes were now so close that she could feel the wind from their wings on her face. The shield was weakening. Only a few seconds now and she would be dead.

Not if she reached the bicycle.

She had fresh leaves on the bicycle, unless the chemical had spread into the market and destroyed her only hope.

She burst into a run. A sudden surge of energy boosted her over the tall bushes like an antelope fleeing a lion. A cloud chased. Another insect drove its proboscis into her shoulder. It felt like a dog bite. She slapped at it and ran into the market, hands flapping wildly to beat off the insects as they stabbed her back, face, and legs. Her shield was breaking down fast. But she got a fresh boost of energy on seeing that H4 had not touched the market. She ran faster. The bicycle was only fifteen meters away… and the mosquitoes jumped away, forming a whirlwind around her.

She wept.

Screams came from the radio. Voices tumbled out of the speaker like they were flapping about inside a madman’s head. It reminded her that there was still danger outside. If those PGCC fools sprayed more H4, it would destroy the leaves on the bicycle.

Nyapia threw the ruined leaves off and draped on fresh ones, then rode fast out of town, taking a path as far away from the helicopter and the PGCC men as possible.

“The bugs are in the chopper!”

“What the fuck!”

“Echo One. This is Bee. What is happening?” A new voice spoke. Nyapia thought that this person was also in the command centre somewhere far away.

“The bugs are in the chopper!”

An explosion rocked the world. Nyapia stopped to look. Flames leapt high into the sky, consuming whole clouds of mosquitoes, which rained down. Fire can kill it! The chopper had crashed. It was burning. H4 was flammable and it set the area ablaze, flames jumping higher than trees and consuming clouds of Miss Doe.

“Holy fuck!” the commander said in the radio. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

Nyapia heard something else above the panic of the voices in the radio, a mighty roar that she mistook for a hailstorm. A dark cloud spread above the town, but it looked like rain falling in reverse, from the ground toward the sky, as Miss Doe fled from the flames.

NYAPIA reached the orange grove a few minutes later, now afraid that the fire would run out of control and destroy the orchard. It however was comforting that H4 had not spread to a great distance, and that they were in the middle of a wet season. The vegetation would not burn easily.

She crept into her shack and hugged the little boy.

“Do you see him?” the commander said in the radio.

“No sign of him,” another voice said. “He could be in any of the little forests.”

“We must nuke this place.”

“No. She mutates each time we use chemicals. Nukes might not be a good idea.”

“Fuck!”

“The leafy man is the key. We must find him.”

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

Nyapia turned off the radio. She would not let them see her again. She would stay hidden, and go to town for food only in the night, but she now knew the weapons to use to reclaim her village from Miss Doe. The scent of oranges, and fire.