Although it was covered in dust, Okello knew the boxer motorcycle inside and out. It growled contentedly under him, kicking up bursts of red sand as he wove over rocks. The cargo carried was ostensibly vegetables, an impossibly large stack of corns, with sacks of potatoes, tomatoes.
Anyone who knew a boxer 100cc motorcycle from eight decades earlier when they were originally manufactured would know that this vehicle was simply not capable of carrying this load. But if that same person were to take it apart, they would find four ultra-high density graphene batteries.
The horizon stretched out far in front of Okello, and behind his visor, he permitted himself a small smile. His hometown of Lira City was just a six hundred miles out there somewhere, beyond mountains, rivers, and Lake Victoria. And the capital of Uganda, Kampala, was closer, about five hundred miles. As that crow flies, that is.
SNAP.
the line rose out of the sand in front of Okello before he could react, an involuntary grimace forming on his face. His bike was launched sideways in the air, engulfing the rider in weightlessness. The tomatoes rose, the ears of corns, the potatoes, all floating through space.
In the air, his body spinning to face the clouds, Okello closed his eyes, thinking of his three children survived by his wife. He had been going one hundred and twenty - a few more eternities to enjoy with their presence before he hit the ground.
BOOM.
THUD.
CHSSHH.
Okello bounced on the pads of fiberglass he had under his jacket twice, then slid in the soft sand. Sand in his mouth, his eyes.
A few more short eternities before it’s all over, Okello thought.
“Get up,” said the voice in French, the butt of a modified AK-48 prodding his shoulder. When Okello didn’t move, it repeated the words in Swahili, Kinyarwanda, then Kigongo. Okello knew all four, but only turned his head.
Gingerly, hoping his limbs all worked, Okello shook a bit of the sand off. Surreptitiously, he glanced around at men surrounding him. No, possibly not all men.
They were l’Aube, les enfants du soleil. Solar shields strapped to their backs, a variety of rifles and small automatics, most not drawn. About eight of them. No vehicles in sight. Maybe more out of sight. Stupid. He should have watched for the subtle glare of subtle sales.
He’s seen images of them on his retinals before they were seized by the overseer XVII of the Mutanda Mine. Mostly on the news on the dinky projects the guards would watch at the checkpoints. There wasn’t much sun in the Mutanda Mine, that’s for sure. But he hadn’t been sure if they were the real deal, the way they were fearmongered on the Republic-owned media programs.
His left audio implant hadn’t quite ceased yet, still playing some bouncy dance track in his left ear. He gathered himself enough to switch it off, then slowly, gracefully rose to his full height. He almost remained in a slouch as he often did to make a show of diminutiveness in most hierarchical company, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to do so in front of rebels who understood the candid facts of power, concealed or not.
“How can I help you,” Okello asked politely.
“Where are you coming from,” the figure asked. It was a woman’s voice, with a hard edge, rich unlike the sanitized international school flavor he’d have expected from a rebel. He chuckled to himself and got a blow to the head from the butt of the rifle.
“I don’t like hurting you,” the woman said, though she clearly did. She lifted her sand-visor to reveal steadfast amber eyes. “But watch yourself or you might not get up a second time.”
Okello’s vision swam for a moment, and he coughed up a bit of blood as he watched them look through the trail of flotsam that led to his bike.
Okello prayed for a moment, not sure to who exactly. And that’s when he saw it - that glint he’d looked for - the amber glint of a solar sale bundled up, covered impartially with a tan tarp, two dunes away. But were there more rebels protecting it?
Don’t like hurting you…ehh, iworoko - let’s go already Okello though, I’m going to not like hurting you too when the time comes.
And that. Is when the Gallyraptors came.
BAK.
Their talons made dull thuds on the ground.
“GALLIES,” several voices in the party screamed.
Okello took off, running, against every instinct in his body, right into the herd of oncoming, enormous bipedial birds.
Gallies are chickens, more or less. Gweno in Leb Lango, Okello’s mother tongue. Or they were chickens a few generations back, before big poultry got a bit to trigger hungry on the genetic modifications. Bigger chickens does equate to more meat production at chicken farms, but it also resulted in much stronger chickens, to put it lightly.
If I may editorialize, it is nice to think of the board members who were looking for those capital gains and ended up facing the supreme court in inethical and reckless genetic modification of livestock, a burgeoning field of politics. Illegal and mostly eradicated in the US, they’d sold in a firesale to Saudis and the Chinese, where the poultry companies, hubris all-powerful, had fallen victim to similar challenges. Northern Africa and the Mongolian highlands ended up, who knew, to be the best home for this increasingly ambitious new species. Their latin name was, unlike the Gallus Domesticus of the conventional livestock chicken, was introduced as a new species to be Gallus Rex, though they mostly were simply called gallies, or Supercocks after truncated headlines of viral news on the subject.
The galies focused on the upright members, dashing over Okello and pulling his oppressors off the ground with their talons and, for lack of a more viscious word, pecking. Pecking them rather seriously.