Zoo City Part 16

Everyone is quiet for a moment. Des and Arno watch me watching S'bu kill aliens. Upstairs, there is more thudding. Impulsively, I shrug Sloth off onto the recently vacated pouf, squeeze in next to S'bu, and pick up Des's discarded controller.

"This is two player, right?"

"Yeah, but"

"Killing aliens with S'bu Radebe. That's profile gold. Credo Credo will love it." will love it."

"They're Cthul'mites, actually."

"Whatever. They all bleed the same." From the player screen, I select the huge black guy character with Mike Tyson tattoos on his face and whipblades mounted in his forearms. Nice to see game designers keeping up the stereotypes.

"You any good?" S'bu gives me a sideways glance.

"f.u.c.king terrible. It's all you."

"Oh great." But he cracks the slightest of smiles.

"Anybone wand a beer?" Arno says, heading for the kitchen.

"Get them now before they're all confiscated," S'bu calls out after him.

"I'll have one," I shout, gutting a particularly loathsome specimen with s...o...b..ry jaws and elongated fingers with my whipblades. I'm already down to 46 per cent health. It's only when Arno comes back, cracking the bottles of Windhoek open with his teeth, and sets mine, foaming, on the table in front of me, that I realise what I've done.

"Oh thanks, but actually, I'm gonna skip." I barely manage to duck as an arachnidy thing with a wobbly glutinous ma.s.s on top, like the b.a.s.t.a.r.d love-child of a jellyfish and a spider, spews a cloud of mechanical insects at me. Luckily S'bu is there to liquidise it, and most of the insect cloud terminates in shrieking sparks.

"Our beer too good for ya?"

"No, it's just that I don't particularly want to go back to rehab either."

"No s.h.i.+t, man," Des says. "That place is ill. All full of whining junkies with the s.h.i.+vers."

"Abnd zombies," Arno adds, hopefully.

"Don't you guys have some place to be?" S'bu snaps.

"No, man. We're here for the duration."

"Seriously, I think I heard your moms calling."

"Dude. Uncool."

"Madoda. Take a hint and hamba hamba."

"Fine. Come on, Arno, let's go aim for hadedas on the fourteenth hole."

"Bud I like hadedas."

"Gijima, fatty boomsticks. Can't you see I'm in the middle of an interview?"

Des grabs the set of clubs leaning against the wall by the fridge, and heads out, not bothering to pull on a s.h.i.+rt. He gives S'bu the finger as he goes. Arno follows, dragging his feet, but taking his beer with him.

"You guys don't strike me as the golfing type," I say, stomping frantically on the remaining clockwork insects. Unfortunately, not before one bites me. A red haze over my POV indicates that I've been infected. Antibiotics required. "Where's a medpack when you need one?"

"Yeah, it's all right. I prefer playing on console. Being Tiger Woods and s.h.i.+t? The medpacks are red plastic dropboxes, white cross."

My health is dwindling, one point at a time. I'm down to 22 per cent. "So which rehab did you go to?"

"Listen, just 'cos we're both in recovery doesn't make

us best friends or nothing."

"I did mine in prison. Involuntary."

"That where you get the Sloth?"

"Well, just before. But yeah, close enough. He helped me get through it."

"There!"

"What?"

"Medpack."

"Got it." I steer awesomely muscular black guy over to the first-aid box handily wall-mounted next to a fire alarm. Nearly missed it, thanks to the red throb of my infection. 'What about your sister?"

"What about about my sister?" my sister?"

"I mean, was she there for you?"

"There for me?" He gives me a skew look, but still manages to frag the tentacle-faced frog creature that pads down the wall. "No. Song's there for herself."

"So you were just smoking weed? Little hectic to go to rehab for that."

"Ha. Tell that to Mr Odi."

"Uh-huh." From his earlier reaction, I thought maybe he'd been to Donkerpoort, or one of the other fundamentalist h.e.l.lholes that rely on the scare-em-clean-withbeatings-and-a-Bible model of addiction therapy. It's straight cold turkey. Kids chained up outside, naked and s.h.i.+vering out the sweats. Methadone is for weaklings. And if you're really bad, they'll bring out the dogs.

"Wasn't so bad, I guess. It's the detox therapy the old man's into that kills me. Lentils and colonic cleansing and s.h.i.+t," S'bu says. "Boss!" A grotesque spindly torso lumbers towards us. I lash out with my whipblade, slas.h.i.+ng right through its chest and into its ribcage. The split halves reel obscenely, trying to reconnect. Then the cracked ends of the ribcage start lengthening, until the split chest becomes a mouth full of gnas.h.i.+ng teeth.

"Gross. How did Songweza find it?"

"How does the Song find anything?"

"You tell me."

"She was cool with it. You know what they say? I'm only here because of her. That she's the talented one."

"I don't buy that c.r.a.p! Sorry."

I've died, impaled on the spiny teeth, my corpse spewing great fountains of blood as the boss lurches around, trying to find S'bu's punky schoolgirl.

"Don't worry, I'll reload." S'bu pulls up the menu and instantly skips tracks on history back to a moment when we were both alive and well.

"Wish they had a 'restore saved game' for the real world."

"Tell me about it," he snorts.