I watched them surround Ibrahim and hack him to death and then his wife as she tried to run away. Others began hacking at his cattle. It was horrific, the precision. They knew exactly where to cut to take down a steer in one chop. They worked so fast. As if they had trained for this! Then they took Aminu. His wife only stood there in shock. She didn’t try to run. She was the one with two children and she didn’t try to run. Then Aminu’s cattle and mine, too. The whole street began to smell like blood. I don’t know why, but I just stood there as Aminu had. Yet no one noticed me. I was still in my moment, I pulled the town into me, I’d settled on its surfaces, into its crevices. Maybe that’s why it took so long for anyone to see me or my cattle.
I heard a steer near me bellow. A guttural sound. It had already been chopped down. Those were death cries. Star. She was falling in pain and a woman standing over her had a machete raised. She was going to chop at Star again. This was when I finally raised the gun I’d always kept slung over my shoulder, and I fired. I did this before I even knew I did and the woman twitched and stumbled back, Star still braying in pain. There was a mist of blood from where the bullets hit the woman. I felt it spray over me. Now the air smelled of her blood, Star’s blood, so much blood. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to kill, and I still screamed.
More chopping sounds and then bang and bang, again. They were shooting some of the steer in the head. Executions. More townspeople had come to kill the rest of my cattle. For some reason, no one came for me as they did my friends. There were people from that town all around me. Mouths open, machetes raised, guns up, shooting, hacking, blood and flesh in their eyes, on their hands, spattering their feet, flying in the air. But no one saw me. Even after I’d shot the woman.
At some point, I turned and called my cattle and those of us who could, ran. Only two of my thirty cattle made it out of that town with me. Two! They killed the rest, along with my comrades. The road was dirt, despite all the brick and mortar buildings and autonomous vehicles made for the paved road. This served us well, because when we ran, we kicked up clouds of dust, making it harder for them to follow. I jumped on my cow Carpe Diem and rode her and that was how the three of us escaped.
When we reached a place over a hill that led into the desert, we stopped. I brought out my phone. I saw the news. They were calling my friends and me “herdsman terrorists” and said we’d returned there to attack the town yet again and instead gotten attacked. It reported the “victory” as a blow against herdsman violence after a great tragedy. I saw one photo before I shut my phone. It showed the townspeople celebrating, as if they’d won a war. People in the photo were roasting the meat of the cattle they’d killed over open fires. Some of those had to have been mine. Had they even removed the bodies of my friends? Or did they roast and eat them, too, in their violent fog?
And now, here you come into my troubled life.
CHAPTER 6
Sense of Wander
So I’d killed yesterday and so had DNA. And he’d nearly been killed and watched his friends and “family” killed. What kind of strange coincidence was this? I massaged my glitching arm, blinking. Throughout his telling, not once had I thought about my own yesterday. How could I? I stared at him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“This blood,” he said pulling his shirt. “It is not mine. It is that woman’s. The woman I shot. Killed.” He rubbed his face with one of his large calloused hands and looked off toward the open land. He looked back at me, and I flinched. There were more tears in his eyes. “If you are truly sorry you will tell me why you are out here.”
I pressed my lips together. “You don’t want to hear it.” I almost said that it didn’t matter.
“Tell me, if only to help me get my mind off what I lost last night.”
“Filling your mind with more loss to fill a void of loss isn’t—”
“Please,” he said. “Oh please, just tell me.” More tears fell from his eyes. “Please. Or I will break.” He shivered. “I am dead. I want to die.” He grasped his head, sitting right there in the sand. “I want to die, AO. They’re all dead.”
I looked down at him, rubbing my sore and glitching arm. I still couldn’t bring forth the words to recount what I’d done yesterday. “You won’t die,” I said. “You . . .” But I quickly shut my mouth. He’d lost dear friends. And to tell a herdsman who has just lost most of his herd that he could always buy more cattle was as callous as telling a mother who’d lost a child that she could always birth more children.