Zoo City - Lauren Beukes

Marabou strides into the townhouse, right behind him. I'm about to follow, but Mark puts his arm across the doorframe, like a security boom and gives a little shake of his head. From inside, there is the noise of gunfire, strangely hollow, and then a lot of shouting.

"Get the guns! Get the freaking guns!" fat boy squeals.

Another voice, pissed off, bemused (pissmused?). "Hey! You guys aren't supposed to be here-"

And a third, weary, "Dude, there are no guns-"

Fat boy screams. "No, no, no, don't you even fucking, don't you come near-"

Then there is a dull crunch, followed by whimpering.

Mark lifts his arm, wafts his hand ostentatiously to usher me inside. I enter the house, cautiously. It's done up in a mash of just-moved-out-of-home boy décor. They've made a bit of an effort. The classic movie posters: The Godfather, Swamp Thing, Kill Bill, all framed. The katana above the giant flatscreen TV is wall-mounted, the trophy cans of beer stacked on top of the bookshelf are perfectly lined up so that the labels all face outward.

There are two boys sitting on the plush red couch. One is bare-chested in jeans, the fly unbuttoned. He has natty little dreads and a small gold loop in his ear, and he's pouting like he ordered strippers for his birthday and got clowns instead.

The other I recognise from glimpses of a music video. The boy-half of iJusi has big heartbreaker eyes, an upturned button nose and dimples. He'll grow out of it, maybe even in the next six months, but S'bu still has something beautifully childlike about him, and even his poser attitude can't undermine the sweetness that rises off him like fumes. He's practically edible.

They're both holding Playstation controllers, the source of the gunfire, I now realise, and they're both staring at Marabou and the fat kid, who is holding his bloody nose with both hands. The Stork cranes its neck forward to nudge her hand with its beak. She looks at the blood on her knuckles with forensic distaste, and wipes it off on the side of the couch. Dazed, the fat kid collapses into the La-Z-Boy.

Mark sets the Mutt down, picks up one of seven remotes on the coffee-table – by coincidence, it just so happens to be the right one – and kills the stereo.

Half-naked boy opens his mouth to complain, "Hey, that's-"

The Dog gives a shrieky little snarl and Mark says, "Shut up, Des. No one's talking to you." He perches on the edge of the low black teak coffee-table, pushing aside a gimmicky odour-free silver ashtray shaped like a flying saucer, and folds his legs. "Well, boys, this is quite the scene."

S'bu stands up and walks over to the ashtray. "I know, I know," he says, in the patented world-weary way of teenagers. He pushes down on the top of the UFO, which whirrs open with a buzz and strobing lights, and stubs out his joint.

"She bwoke by dose-" the fat white boy starts.

"Shut up, Arno. It's your own stupid fault," snaps the half-naked kid with the dreads.

"You know you're not supposed to be smoking, S'bu," Mark chides.

"Didn't I already say, I know, I know?"

"Can these two take a hike?"

He shrugs. "Arno and Des are my boys."

"We need to talk about your sister."

"Whad's up wid your sisduh, dude? You didn'd say budding about your sisduh. Whad's up wid da Song?"

"Shut up, Arno," Des and S'bu say in unison.

"'Cos she hasn'd been awound. Shid. When lasd did we see her?"

"Dude. When last did you see your arse?"

Arno looks hurt, although it's hard to tell if his hangdog expression is par for the course, or just a result of his eyes starting to swell.

"Is that the only contraband?" Amira says.

"Des is holding," S'bu indicates his friend. Des cringes, pulls out a bankie of weed and gingerly hands it over to Amira.

"What's wrong, sweetie?" Mark asks.

"Nah, it's just, we thought you were-" Des says. "The cops."

"Zombies," Arno says at the same time.

"Why would you be worried about the cops?"

"I dunno. Just. 'Cos." He waves a hand vaguely in the direction of the ashtray. There's a couple of video game boxes lying next to it, starring flesh-eating undead and aliens. One, Grand Theft Auto VI: Zootopia, features a badass in a hoodie, packing a shotgun with a snarling Panther by his side.

"You know this means we're going to have to search the house. Again."

"Whatever," S'bu says, and slumps back into the couch, picking up the controller and going right back to his game, a first-person slayer. He's playing a mini-skirted girl with spiky green hair and a machine-gun for an arm facing down shambling hordes of particularly monstrous aliens.

"Do you want to go back to rehab, S'bu?"

"Doesn't bother me." But I notice he flinches, enough to throw off his shot. On screen, an alien manages to gore his arm, knocking his health down to 89 per cent.

"This is Zinzi December. She wants to talk to you. Help her out," Mark says.

"It's for a story for a magazine. Credo?" I bluff.

"Oh yeah?" S'bu isn't even vaguely interested, but Des perks up dramatically.

"Credo cooks, bro," he says, nudging S'bu's arm. "You're in Credo, you're in. Hells yes, lady. My boy is down."

"Great," I say.

"Whatever, you clear it with these guys," S'bu says, still intent on his game.

"Oh, we're 'down'," Mark says. He whistles for the Mutt. The Dog jumps off the red pouf and immediately starts sniffing around the room with great seriousness, tail wagging. S'bu lifts his feet for the Dog as it snuffles around the bottom of the couch.

"Just seeds, man," says Des.

The Dog follows its nose out of the room, Mark and Amira behind it. We can hear them climbing the stairs. A minute later, there is the sound of objects being thrown around.

"Shid, dude, whad if she breags by shid?" Arno says.

"Then I'll buy you more shit. Will you shut up? You're wrecking my concentration."

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 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.

"Fucking 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 slobbery 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 mass on top, like the bastard 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 shit, man," Des says. "That place is ill. All full of whining junkies with the shivers."

"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."

"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 shirt. 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 shit? 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 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 hellholes 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 shivering 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 shit," S'bu says. "Boss!" A grotesque spindly torso lumbers towards us. I lash out with my whipblade, slashing 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 gnashing 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 – crap! 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.

"What point do you wish you could go back to?"

"You first."

"The moment before I got my brother killed."

"Heavy," says S'bu, but I can tell he's impressed. And this is what I've come to, breaking out my worst personal tragedy to pry open a teenager. If I hadn't already hit my ultimate low, this would be a close contender.

"And you?"

"Before we signed."

"That's the worst thing that's happened to you? Seriaas?"

"I dunno, maybe we should have signed with someone else."

"Odi's a pretty intense guy."

"Yeah."

"Rehab must have been really shitty."

"Yeah." He squirms. "It's more like his philosophy? It's worse than straight-edge. Like, there's no fun at all."

"You seem to be doing okay."

"Yeah, right," he rolls his eyes up at the thumping noises coming from above. "That guy needs to take a chill pill, you know? Maybe literally."

"You think you would have got where you are without Odi pushing you?"

"Nah, man, I appreciate that, it's the keep-it-clean crap. I'm fifteen, yo. We're not little kids anymore. And I'm not even that bad. Songweza's the one who lands us in the shit the whole time."

"Where do you think your sister is?"

"I dunno. Jolling with her friends?"

"Any friends in particular?"

"Hey, what's this interview about, anyway?"

"The band."

"'Cos it sounds like it's about her."

"Can I level with you?" I say, jumping into the abyss.

"Sure."

"I've been hired to try and find your sister. The interview is just a cover."

"Fuck!" He flings his controller across the room. It narrowly misses the TV and smashes into the wall beneath the katana. The back pops off, spraying batteries across the floor.

"I'm just being honest with you."

"Oh, now you're being honest with me? So all that other bullshit was just, just… shit?" He looks like he's about to cry.

"No, I've really been to rehab. I really killed my brother," I say calmly.

"Whatever. Hey, lady, ever occurred to you maybe Song doesn't want to be found?"

"Or you don't want her to be found?"

"You are one whacked crazybitch. What, like I… I killed her or something?"

"Did you? No. I don't think that. But if she ran away with her boyfriend or whatever, it sounds like you wouldn't mind so much if she didn't hurry back."

S'bu shakes his head. "Lady, we have an album about to drop." He grabs a jacket slung over the back of the chair and heads towards the door, wiping at his eyes. "Where are you going?"

"Same place as Song. Out."

Sloth swats my arm in reproach. Like I meant to make the kid cry.

He storms out of the house, past Mark and Amira, who are sitting on the stairs, clearly listening in.

"And screw you guys too."

He slams the door.

"Didn't go so well, then, sweetie?" Mark says. His Dog pants happily, mocking.

"I've had worse interviews." This is true. The time I rocked up high to interview Morgan Freeman, for example. "You still trashing the place, or can I take a look?"

"Knock yourself out."

"Interesting ploy, the journalist," Marabou says, stroking her Bird's shrivelled head.

"You'd be amazed at how people open up when they think someone cares. Listen, don't wait up. After this, I'm thinking of taking in a round of golf. I'll expense a cab home."