Destroyers by Dave Mckay (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

"Thank you," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. And once again, there was not a hint of her habitual foolishness.

Moses did not know if the hug meant that she was going to stay; he did not want to know just yet. It was just good to have her there. So they worked together quietly on fixing dinner, ate in relative silence, and then sat together in the yard, after the sun had gone down, just looking at the stars.

"Do you believe in God?" Rosy asked, when they had not said anything for quite some time. It was a deep question coming, as it was, from a twelve-year-old. Throughout the conversation that followed, she never laughed once.

"Yeah, sure," Moses said. "Why?"

"Does he talk to you?"

"Talk to me? Of course not! I just believe in him; I'm not a prophet or something," Moses retorted.

"Do you talk to him, then? Do you ask him what he wants you to do?"

"If I can't hear him, how can he tell me what he wants me to do?" Moses laughed. "Rosy, I just try to be nice to people, that's all."

"Everybody likes you," Rosy said.

"Right, and if you're nice to people, they'll like you too," said the big brother. "It's the best way to get ahead. It worked for me... in America, and in my business."

After a long silence, Rosy asked, "But what about God? Don't you try to be nice to people for him?"

"No, I do it for myself, Rosy. If you don't take care of yourself, no one else will."

Another pause. Then Rosy said, "God talks to me."

"Wah!" Moses turned around to face his sister as he asked her quite earnestly "What does he say?"

"Not like a voice, but like in my heart," she said. "Like I know I have to do something." Disappointment showed on Moses' face, as Rosy went on: "I know I have to go with Winky. He wants me there. It's about something big that is going to happen."

"Are we going to go back over that?" Moses asked angrily.

Rosy did not answer. And Moses did not say anything more.

An hour later, Rosy went to the mattress on her side of the hut, lay herself down, and fell asleep.

The next morning, when Moses got up he noticed that his sister's bed was empty. She must be working in the shamba, he thought. But when he went out in the yard there was no sign of her.

He raced back into the hut, pulled a box out from under her side of the couch, where Rosy kept her clothes, and it was empty.

Table of contents

Chapter 15. Destruction

Moses never fully recovered from Rosy leaving him. In some ways it was harder than the loss of his parents. But his special ability to direct attention away from personal pain was enough to carry him through. He tried to look on the positive side: There was nothing stopping him from visiting Rosy, and now there was time to make friends with the other boda-boda drivers.

In the end, however, his resolve not to drink, and the extra demands of doing Rosy's work in the shamba did not allow for much time with anyone apart from his best friend, Jiddy. His left arm had become so strong that he had little difficulty swinging the jembe, and he even learned how to do a reasonable job of laying bricks, with Jiddy's help. They were making plans for Jiddy to move in with him when the house was finished.

Then, in May of that same year, when Moses was still only fifteen years old, something happened which shook the entire world. It was not the immediate sensation in Shinyalu, tucked away in the Kenyan interior, that it was in the rest of the world, but Kenyans did have radio contact, and word of mouth travelled almost as quickly.

Something terrible had happened in America. The whole country had been attacked in a huge air strike... practically blown off the map. Millions of people were dead, and those who were still alive were fleeing the country to escape radiation, disease, and starvation. It was the biggest loss of human life in the history of the world.

Moses tried to text Ray but could not get through. Weeks later, Ray texted him with a new mobile number. He had been out of the country, in England, when the attack took place. Some of his relatives had survived but were stranded in the U.S. Nevertheless, for Moses, even Ray's family and friends were just statistics. Others in the village were even more indifferent to the actual sufferings of people they had never met. It was not so different to how Americans would have felt if they had received word that a village in Kenya had been wiped out.

Moses knew that his friend had bigger worries than sending messages to some teenager in Africa, and so he tried not to text too often; but each time he did, Ray was kind enough to send a short reply. He asked Moses to pray for his family in particular. Ray had never said anything to sound religious before that, but the boy could appreciate that, at a time like this, almost anyone would be praying. It was some weeks later that Ray's family escaped the holocaust and joined him in England.

The fall of America was a turning point in world history. It was understandable that people talked about it constantly. Those who had no radios would crowd around those who did, in order to get the latest updates. And newspapers sold out as quickly as they arrived from Nairobi. But apart from talk, life was surprisingly normal there in the village. People still worked their farms; made the long walk into Kakamega to sell produce, get supplies, or visit the hospital; and they still plied their trades, which, in Moses' case, meant taking customers up and down the dirt road to their various destinations.

One Saturday, two weeks after the attack, Josephat returned. Moses had been off on a fare to Kakamega when the itinerant prophet did his post office talk, but he learned from others that Josephat was claiming that he had predicted the fall of America. People accepted that he had been talking about destruction for "those who had destroyed the earth" before it happened, but most could not agree that he had specifically indicated that it would be America.

Moses was passing Amy's place late that afternoon. He was without a customer, so he decided to pop in and see his sister. Josephat was in the front room with three of the children, who were at a table doing their homework.

"You were right," Josephat said to Moses, when Amy had left to get Rosy from the backyard.

"Right about what?" Moses asked.

"About America being the ones God was going to destroy," Josephat said.

"I didn't say he was going to destroy anyone!" Moses said defensively. "And you didn't either."

"But you said Americans were destroying the world, didn't you?" Josephat asked. "And that's the people God said he was going to destroy."

He wants to drag me into his stupid prediction, Moses thought. And he did not want to be a part of it.

Just then Amy came back, and the topic shifted.

"Rosy's just finishing some haircuts," she explained. It seemed to Moses that, in the short time she had been there, Rosy was learning more at Amy's than at school.

Benji had been teaching her how to play the guitar, and Amy had taught her some fancy cooking. Now she was learning how to cut hair, not that it took much skill to shave heads, which was the preferred style for both males and females in rural Kenya. Amy had hand-operated clippers with an attachment that would leave a tiny bit of hair on and still keep it the same length all over the head.

Josephat had offended Moses. He could see that. So when Rosy came in, he left the boy to talk with his sister while he and Amy moved to the other end of the room and spoke quietly with each other. Moses could not resist listening, even when it meant missing some of what Rosy was saying.

"What do you reckon it means for us?" Moses heard Amy ask Josephat quietly.

"I can't truly say," Josephat replied. "He didn't give me any other 'structions. We just hafta be faithful, sister. There's others waiting too."

"Are you listening or not?" Rosy had become an avid talker since moving in with Amy, and she wanted a listener. Moses was happy to see the change in her.

"Sorry, Rosy," he said. "The haircuts... yeah. Is this the first time you've done it?"

"Today, yeah. Anna showed with the first one, and then I did it by my own. The little kids cry and fuss, but Anna helped to hold them steady."

Then she shifted the focus. "How is the house?"

"We're getting there. Jiddy's parents are helping with bricks, because he's going to stay with me."

"First they give him that bike, and now this," Rosy answered. "They think he is a baby."

"I won't complain," Moses laughed.

Jiddy's parents were wealthier than most in the village, and so, when he had done poorly at school, they had decided to give him a head start as a boda-boda driver by getting him the best bike in the village. At least it had been the best until Moses had arrived with his.

* * *

Over the next year and a half, the house was built to the point where Jiddy could move in. Life in general improved in Shinyalu, and in much of Kenya. The fall of America was, indeed, a horrible tragedy, but the fallout had been mostly good for the Kenyan economy. The whole world was taking in American refugees, and benefiting from it. More than twenty thousand had been brought to Kenya, and their professional skills contributed to the economy without draining excessive profits away, as had happened in the past. The United Nations was taking responsibility for rebuilding the economy. The dynamic leader of this new world order was U.N. Secretary General Xu Dangchao. The power vacuum left by the fall of America gave Dangchao opportunities that no previous Secretary General had ever come close to experiencing. He was able to use his powers to both entice and punish various national governments, and he seemed to be using this strategy for the good of everyone. Kenya was one of many countries that benefited from it.

Government workers were getting better salaries now in exchange for restraints on bribes and other forms of corruption. Even the police roadblocks, which had been used in the past to extort bribes from matatu and truck drivers,gradually disappeared. The Kenyan Government was able to exercise greater control over foreign investments, and U.N. intervention (especially restrictions on foreign trade) was ensuring that the benefits gained through those investments reached the masses in a way that they never had before. Tea plantations were being ripped out and other crops planted in their place. This led to price drops for maize and other staples.

"Whatever it is, I like it, Stump," Jiddy said to Moses early one morning when they were planting beans together on the shamba, before heading off to work. Moses who was seventeen by this time, had to explain a lot of things to the youth, who was his senior by almost three years. Perhaps it was because of his low self esteem that Jiddy took to calling Moses "Stump", reminding his friend of his missing right forearm. When he first started doing it, Moses was too taken up with the privilege of having an older friend to think of complaining, and even though he said enough to let Jiddy know that it bothered him now, Jiddy persisted with the habit that had built up over the past three years.

"It's because people are sharing things more equally now," Moses explained. "It's bringing prices down. America used to waste everything when it wasn't their land that was being used. Now we have enough for everyone in Kenya, as long as we don't waste.

"Waste not, want not, Jiddy. That's what Winky taught me when I first