Birth of a Dark Nation (26 page)

Justin smiled, bared his fangs, and walked
toward his victim as Victor and I left, closing the door behind
us.

"Suck him down to the marrow," Victor
instructed through the door. "And don't make a mess."

We took the baby back to the master bedroom
where his mother was still sleeping. The man screamed, but I could
tell that Justin was muffling him with one hand while his lips
clamped around his neck, piercing an artery. I knew it tasted
savory and hot in his mouth.

His first kill. He'll love it. He might taste
the bitterness of the illegal substances in the man's system and he
will remember the difference between that and the blood of a human
who lives clean, un-addicted and un-diseased.

Some people deserved to die. Men who would
sell their sons to strangers for drug money deserved to die. He
would not be missed. His son would be better off without him.

"Your baby's father is gone. He ran off and
he's not coming back. You don't know where he is. You're not
worried about him. He always runs off. You'll be fine without him.
Do you understand?"

She nodded her head.

"Now go to sleep," Victor instructed. "You
will wake up and believe everything we said, but you won't remember
us."

She lay back down.

"Thank you," she sighed as she nodded off to
sleep. Her baby was still awake, gurgling happily, not having a
clue that his father was dead in the next room.

"We should check on Justin," Victor said. I
nodded.

I laid the baby down next to his mom, with
pillows around him so he wouldn't roll of the bed. He looked up at
me.

"Be great," I demanded of him. I wasn't sure
if I could really hypnotize a baby, but telling one to be great
certainly wouldn't hurt him.

We entered the other room and discovered the
corpse of the sick addict on the floor. Justin was quietly rocking
back and forth, drunk with pints of blood in his system.

"Rock Creek Park?" I asked. Victor
nodded.

"Bypass the axe and the garbage bags," he
instructed. "If his body is ever found, it's not like anybody will
give a damn."

I agreed. I looked down on the fiend's body
and knew we'd done the right thing. When Justin sobered up, he'd
feel awful about it, but he'd get used to it. We all did after our
first kill.

I woke Justin up early the next morning and
fed him fresh fruit to cleanse him and alleviate his blood
hangover. He could barely keep his eyes open. He was largely quiet
as the placed pieces of honeydew in his mouth, chewed, and
swallowed.

"Did I do…what I think I did?" he asked.

"Yes," I said softly.

"I…killed somebody?"

"Yes. You did."

"Oh my goodness…"

"He was a sick fuck, Justin. He would have
sold us his own son."

"That doesn't give me the right to take his
life."

"One thing you're going to have to learn is
that your morals are going to have to evolve right along with your
body. We are advanced beings for a reason. We live in the shadows
for a reason. We are older than the laws of this country.
Justin…that guy you drained last night was born into this world
with nothing, just like you and I were. Born with nothing, but with
every opportunity to get things right every day. Every day, he woke
up and decided to abuse drugs, abuse his family, and do whatever he
needed to do to get his fix. We're not above the law, Justin. We're
outside of it. We can fix things that the police can't fix, that
social services can't fix."

"I thought I could drink him until I got
full. But I couldn't stop."

"Even if you had stopped, we would have
finished the job."

"I can't control it."

"Yes, you can. You will learn."

"I was so hungry."

"You will learn to control the hunger. You
will learn how to survive."

"I would have killed that baby."

"But you didn't. You are getting stronger
every day. Your body. Your mind. Your willpower. You will be great.
And that kid will be great, too. You're still learning."

He ate the rest of his meal in silence. He
didn't ask me any questions as I told him to get in the van. He
didn't say anything on the half-hour drive to Mitchellville in
Prince George's County. And he didn't say anything when we met with
Salaad at the two-story warehouse in the remote industrial
park.

"Justin, this is Salaad. He's a friend of the
Razadi."

Salaad cut an impressive figure. He was tall
and lean—about six feet, four or five inches—with sandy brown skin
and close cut, but curly hair. Justin sized him up and spoke.

"I remember you," he said, gripping Salaad's
hand. "You delivered Babarinde's invitation to me. Thank you."

"It's an honor to meet you," he said.

"Is it?" Justin asked. Salaad's smile
faded.

"You're Djinn?" Justin continued.

"I see your sense of smell grows stronger
every day. Come in," Salaad said. He pushed a heavy door open and
we entered the dark warehouse. I hadn't seen the inside of it in
years. Salaad flipped a switch and the room was filled with
fluorescent light bouncing off the gray walls of the hangar-like
facility. Old blue mats lined the entirely of the room, save
pathways dividing the space into quarters. There were balance
beams, pommel horses, ropes, and structures that looked like jungle
gyms.

"Where are we?" Justin asked.

"This is our gym," I said.

"You own it?"

"No, we don't own it. But we know the owners.
They're good Djinn."

"I feel like it's hard to trust Djinn," he
said, looking at Salaad squarely.

"Sometimes it is. But once you have a good
Djinn at your disposal, you've got a friend for life. Salaad is one
of the good ones. For real."

"Unless they possess you like that poor kid
we met."

"Morlas," Salaad muttered. "He's renegade.
I'm not like him. Nobody in my family is like him."

"I'll have to take your word for it," Justin
deadpanned.

"Listen, don't worry about that," I said,
touching Justin on his shoulder blade. "This gym here? This is your
playground now. You're going to learn how to run, how to jump, how
to climb. How to do all that superhero shit you only read about in
comic books and saw on television. You will work out seven nights a
week for at least four hours at a time. You will learn wrestling,
capoeira, fencing, a wide array of martial arts, and parkour."

"What's parkour?" he asked. I smiled.

"This is parkour."

I ran to the first quadrant of the room at my
top speed and scrambled up the iron holds embedded in the concrete.
I leapt from the top of the makeshift climbing wall onto some
hanging ropes and swung myself to the first balance beam. On the
beam, I forward flipped all the way to the end, launching myself
onto some staggered boxes, crisscrossing them like a videogame I
once played.

I flipped, jumped, climbed, and swung my way
across the entirety of this make-shift obstacle course designed to
mimic the very same environment that we live in from day to day.
This would prepare Justin for a life in the shadows and on the run
if need be. The back alleys, the dark roads—those were our domain,
for the safety of our kind.

I finished my run with a flourish: a spinning
jump that would have been more suitable for a figure skating event
in the Winter Olympics. I landed on both feet, inches from Justin's
face.

"Holy shit," he said.

"Let's get started."

Wake up. Eat. Run. Study. Eat. Boxing gym.
Eat. Big gym. Eat. Fuck. Sleep. These were Justin's days until we
felt he could fend for himself. No more resting, just lessons in
our history and our traditions in between training.

"Run!" Victor barked.

"I am running!" Justin hollered.

"Faster!"

We ran through Rock Creek Park in the middle
of the day, just like any other joggers.

"Keep running. If I catch you, I'm going to
fuck you."

"Don't you mean fuck me up?"

"No. I mean I'm going to put my penis inside
you if I catch you."

Justin sped off in a blur, the first time I
had seen him do so. He was getting the hang of this transition.

"That's funny as shit," I said.

"What's funny? I fully intend to catch up to
him." Victor quickened his pace.

"Excuse me?" I asked, catching up to
Victor.

"What, you think I don't have needs?"

"You don't even like dudes…this century."

"It ain't no fun if the homies can't have
none."

In a rage, I pushed Victor with all of my
might. He flew from the jogging path, over the grass, and into Rock
Creek.

Emerging from the water, he smiled.

"After centuries, you still can't take a
joke?" he asked.

"Gotcha!" I said, taking off in a blur down
the road.

Five miles later, we were in a clearing
somewhere in Montgomery County. Justin had slowed to a jog and
found a picnic area where he could rest.

"I'm thirsty," he announced.

"The creek is right there," Victor said.

"I ain't drinking that old dirty creek
water," Justin said.

"First of all, the water in Rock Creek isn't
all that dirty," Victor argued. "And second of all, you drank the
blood of a crackhead."

"Good point," Justin admitted. He walked over
to the creek, knelt down, cupped his hands, and drank from it. He
paused and appeared to gaze at his reflection for a few moments. He
returned, refreshed.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah. I just…I thought I saw something in
the water."

"A person?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Was it a Djinn?" he asked. I shook my
head.

"Oshun watches over the waters."

"What's Oshun?"

"'Who,'" Victor corrected. "She's a
spirit."

"A ghost?" Justin asked.

"Closer to a goddess," I said.

"Jesus," Justin said, sitting in the grass
and stretching in the heat. "Vampires, Djinn, goddesses walking
around…this shit is crazy."

"And you killed somebody!" Victor added
happily.

"Thanks for reminding me," Justin
deadpanned.

"Our religion, our faith… It's old," I
explained. "It's multilayered. It's full of history. At the end of
the day, we believe in one god. Our god has many names to many
people, but we usually call the creator Olódùmarè. From him came
many other spirits that rule us. What we believe is what many West
Africans believe. We brought these traditions with us just like
Haitians and Dominicans and Brazilians. It's not that different.
It's just that we…we brought our own flavor."

"When can I go back to work?" he asked.

"Whenever you want. You look healthy."

"I'll go tomorrow."

"But you will still work out every day."

"Okay," he said. He leaned back into the
grass and stretched out his arms and legs until he looked like a
starfish in the grass. He closed his eyes.

"How did you guys come to leave Dominica and
get to America?" he asked.

Victor walked over to Justin and beckoned me
to join him. He lay down in the grass opposite Justin, placing his
head next to him. I flanked the other side of Justin and let the
top of my head graze the top of his.

The sky above was one of those hazy shades of
blue that were common in the inner city, nothing at all like the
clean royal blue skies of Dominica. I closed my eyes and helped
Victor take Justin back to the island.

"When are we?" I heard Justin's voice ask, as
I recalled my life in our encampment. We were packing up our
belongings from our village, which had grown in area and
sophistication, but not in population.

"It's 1804. About 75 years after Dominique
got taken from us," I said.

"Shit, that's a long time," Justin said.

"I know. A long time to get over it, which
Victor and I did. Ariori, on the other hand, not so much. He spoke
little for the first few years. But life goes on."

~

When we arrived on Dominica, the French were
in control. Then came the British. On our corner of the island, it
really didn't matter who was in charge. If they were white, they
were not trustworthy, so we did not interact with them.

We observed that the whites owned African
slaves—what we were meant to be had we not overcome our captors and
started our own life. Although we hated the institution of slavery,
we still did not interfere. There was much we had to learn about
the ways of the white people. They were evil. They were deceptive.
And even the good ones—like Dominique—would be somehow eliminated
by them.

Years passed. We lived. We created. We
harvested. Year after year, our community grew closer and closer.
We established good relationships with our native neighbors. And
yes, we intermingled with them. As time went by, our men and their
women established relationships. They never resulted in children,
of course, so we often became the second husbands after they became
widows. These were genuine relationships between men and women who
loved each other, but they all eventually faded away. We just
didn't die.

As the island grew, and more Europeans and
their slaves came, it became more and more challenging to protect
our corner of the island, but we did it. We knew how to create our
own weapons, and when we could, we stole weapons from the white
men. Every few years, a different expedition would come "discover"
us again and try to invade. Making meals of them was fun. With
every failed conquest came new information about their so-called
"New World." We learned much about the new country called the
United States during that time, and how black people were building
it up, literally and figuratively.

The white men only confessed these things to
us under duress. But at night, their slaves would sneak off to
worship in the ways of their people, which were also the ways of
our people. By the bonfire, on the beach, we discovered our
enslaved cousins from other African lands and spoke to them in
French, in our own mother tongue, and after a while, English, the
eventual prevailing language of the island.