The Bloody Way I Quit My Previous Job

 

(This is a story about how I quit my previous job, leaving in my wake a pool of blood and potentially - a dead body.)

Let me tell you about my previous job and the strange, bloody way I quit it.

Are you seated? Okay. Cool. Twende kazi!

My previous job was truly deserving of the title “job”-slow-paced, low-paying, turgid, routine, mundane, brain-numbing, skull-crushing, all that and stuff you can think of. I was trapped in my own personal hell, caught in a spiral down to a bottomless pit from which I would have never recovered if I hadn’t quit it.

I worked for this guy at an electronics shop at a mall in the Westlands/Parklands area. It was a small shop, tucked in a corner of the mall’s edge, overlooking the parking lot where people walked past as they entered or exited that wing.

The pay in this job was abysmal. Think of the lowest pay you can imagine, divide it by two, then deduct an additional KES 5,000. That was the reward for all that walk from Kangemi, and all that late-night walk from Parklands to Westy in the dark.

I did it for half a decade until I quit, and all it bought me in that duration was a royal blue T-shirt, now faded, and a pair of blue jeans that had started ripping at the seams. Every other piece of clothing was either a hand-me-down or a gift from my two older sisters. I spent more than half my salary on bus fare to and from the place. I dumped the rest into rent arrears. Whatever coins I could put together after that was what I used to get something for my belly.

I was a miserable existence, each day blending into the next like nightmares bleeding into reality, and the hours of the day strung along like an endless tightrope I couldn’t jump off.

I was, by definition, a shop assistant, meant to help customers find what they came looking for easily and quickly. But I was to be a sales rep, and also, I was the car washer, tasked with washing my boss’s car alongside that of his wife, who would often drive it out daily to I don’t know where because even when it was sunny and dry, somehow that car would still have muddy tires and even muddier carpets, as though she just trudged to a muddy Maasai Mara and came back.

All in a day’s work. All for the same abysmal pay.

As for my boss. Hehe. What can I say about that dirty little bastard? And dirty isn’t a euphemism here. That man reeked of unwashed buttocks. He had stubble full of black and grey hair, so neglected it looked like goat droppings on his face. He had sleek, shiny, black gelled hair that seemed to mat into dense clumps at the roots, and he loved to wear his shirts with the top two buttons unfastened, revealing his neck, from which dangled a sleek golden chain. But that chain was not what often drew my eyes to his neck. No, under the rolls of skin, his neck had a peeling effect, as though some disease was eating away at his epidermis.

Initially, I often thought that was the case, that he had some strange skin disease, until one day, I got close enough to feel the smell under the strong scent of cologne he wore and to see his neck up close. That peeling skin wasn’t even skin; it was layers of dirt peeling off. To make matters worse, he had a pretty strong BO under the thick layer of cologne. It reeked so bad that I had to excuse myself and vomit in the toilets. That’s how bad he smelled.

Anyway, this was the man in whose hands was my livelihood and, honestly, my life. I grew to resent him, but as a village boy who had simply come to Nairobi to make something of himself with nothing more than a high school education, I endured it all, because I had no prospects and all I ever hoped was simply to save enough to see if I could open a small shop where I lived and exit this grind that wore me down like a bar of soap.

So this was my entire existence - wake up, go to the shop, wash the car, do all that needed doing, get back home, sleep, wake up, repeat, until the end of the month when I got my wages and started the cycle all over again.

That was, until one strange customer walked in one lazy afternoon and changed my life forever. And for the better. But at such a steep cost, I am still unsure of how I will repay it.

The Stranger

When he walked into the shop, a disquieting air came in along with him.

I remember his uncannily white-and-black eyes, laser-focused on me, clear as day even behind those red-tinted sunglasses, staring at me as though I were the most pleasant thing he had ever set his sights upon. Immediately I looked into those eyes, it was beyond question that he was a hypnotist, because I could not look away for the duration he held my gaze.

He stared at me with particular interest and gave me the distinct feeling that he somehow knew me. Yet I had never seen this man before.

On his face, he wore this sinister smile, the smile of a conniving man, a man with an ace up his short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. When he passed me, that air of disquiet followed him like a malevolent wind, bringing an unsettling presence along with expensive-smelling cologne and a strange, musty smell of dirt.

He started out like a regular customer, and on that first day, bought a phone and a cover. But over the coming weeks, he slowly began to engage with me, appearing almost fascinated by me. By inconsequential me, who was carried along helplessly by the currents of time toward an inevitable grave.

I studied his face a little better whenever I felt he wasn’t looking. But even when he wasn’t looking, I could still tell that man had the presence of a two-faced monster, and that he was still watching me with savage eyes I couldn’t see. He had a tall, thin build, like a gazelle, a sharp jawline, as though chiseled in a woodwork shop, and an impudent gait, chest puffed out like a cock asserting its dominance.

But beyond the physical, it was just the air around him that unsettled me the most. He had a wolfish, predatory air around him. His presence often charged the air with a bizarre divinity, as if he brought something ancient and beyond human understanding with him. I, too, found myself fascinated by him because he exuded so much confidence and hypnotized me with those uncannily bright eyes that, at some point, I began to wonder whether I was experiencing something entirely different from admiration.

He also seemed to possess incredible knowledge. He often engaged my boss in a wide variety of topics and seemed well informed on all of them. Too well-informed, I might add, that even my boss gossiped to me after he was gone about how an aggravating know-it-all he was. And I could tell from my boss’s livid, glassy eyes that he was profoundly jealous because he often imagined himself as the man to own the room. Thus, having someone who exceeded his supposed ‘coolness’ bothered him a great deal. It did so much that he started overcharging that man each time he came over. I wondered, though: considering that strange man kept that unsettling smile throughout his visit, did he know about the rip-off and just not care? As I would later find out, he did, and he just didn’t care, because, once again, he had an ace up his sleeve.

The Deal

As mentioned, the man appeared fascinated by me and would sometimes engage me in small, meaningless talk, which started out with football talk, meaningless talk on geopolitics, but slowly, without even me realizing, he had started asking me about my life; about my dreams and aspirations, my deepest desires, about what I wanted to do with my life and what I hoped my future would look like. I found it strange, but then again, I was a young, desperate man, and I answered him honestly, because who knows? Perhaps he was to change my life.

And change my life he did.

I couldn’t tell what he was planning, but one day, as I was putting a screen protector on his sleek flagship phone, he asked me:

“Sam, do you ever want to leave this place?”

Baffled, I looked up at him. “Is the Pope Catholic?” I replied. “Of course I want to leave this place. ASAP!”

He laughed, and his laughter, like his voice, sounded as though it came from a different dimension, as though he were speaking to me from a deep pit.

“The way out of this place is very simple. You just need to have the guts for it.” He replied.

“Do you have a way out for me?” I asked, leaning forward to align the top of the screen protector with the phone’s top bezel.

“Oh, do you need my help?” He asked.

At that moment, I must have blacked out, because all I remember was handing him the phone with the screen protector already installed, with no recollection of how I had done it. As I handed him the phone, I took a moment to study him more carefully.

He seemed like the kind of person to be a drug lord. Truly, he often had the swagger of a man who made his money in all kinds of ways except the legal ones. He looked like a pimp with his buttoned-down Hawaiian shirts, a Mexican drug lord with his sleek, jet-black hair combed back, and a failed rapper with the countless chains hanging down his neck. He chewed his gum with obnoxiously aggressive bites and never took off those red-tinted sunglasses. Tell me from that description that this was no criminal, and I will point you out as a liar.

“If I do, I will ask,” I replied, hoping that would be the end of it.

“Oh, but you already did,” He replied, that creepy smile widening, and I found myself pulling back because some divine wind blew from his face onto me like a spell.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He got up, that mischievous, devious smile still on his face, paid, and left without another word.

That night, I did not sleep a wink. What did he mean I had already asked him for help? Was there a conversation we’d had that I had forgotten? Or was he working with my boss to see if I stole from him? Could he have been a government spy, sent to watch my boss for potential illegal activities? Could be, because even I couldn’t believe my boss did everything legally. He had that small electronics shop, of course, but was it enough to make that much money to buy countless luxury cars and an apartment in a very expensive place? Hmm.

A few weeks ago, he came into the shop, and he and my boss engaged in their usual meaningless chatter. Then, after finishing the mushene with my boss, he came over to where I sat on a small plastic chair on the other side of the shop, farther from the counter where my boss sat.

“Put a screen protector over here for me,” He said, handing me his slick phone, which was different from the previous one I had worked on.

My boss watched silently as I took the phone and laid it on the small counter I used for screen protector installation. The man walked over to me. At that moment, he wheeled out the plan he had for me.

“So, Sam. You needed my help to get out of here. I am here today for that exact purpose.”

“I actually don’t remember -

“Oh, you asked me for help. You just thought it was a joke at the time.” He replied with a wink, his eyes blazing and protruding with a strange Alien expression that unsettled me greatly.

“I…I…” I didn’t know what to say. But then I thought of the years I had spent here with no progress. It had been five years of mark timing. I had walked in the same place for so long that the ground beneath my feet had turned into holes I was sinking into. If this person was offering to change my life, then did it matter how?

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You know your boss keeps some money behind the chair he sits on, at the counter, right?” The man said, leaning over my shoulder. He pretended to watch me put the screen protector on as he said it.

“I have been here for five years; of course I know that,” I replied impatiently. “And if you are suggesting we rob him, I can never get anywhere close to that chair.”

The man gave an obnoxious, whining laugh that sounded like a tea kettle hissing with steam. Then, in a serious voice, he said, “You know time is running out.”

I looked up at him, confused. He cocked an eyebrow behind his red-tinted glasses and stared at me intently.

“Who are you?” I asked, not rudely, but because I was now deathly curious. Why was he so interested in me? Why did he desperately want me to leave my job? What did he see in me that I would bring to his criminal empire?

“I am a helper of the downtrodden, here to help you,” He said.

I looked over at my boss, doomscrolling through TikTok with the volume obnoxiously loud, grunting and wiping his nose with the back of his hand like a feral child. Why would he never use his handkerchief? It was right there in his damned, deep pockets!

“Did he put you up to this?” I asked the man, because it surely sounded like mockery.

The man looked over at my boss and then back at me.

“I don’t know who that man is, and I don’t care,” he said coldly. “I am here for one thing and one thing only. You.” As he said that, I felt a chill spread through my body. If he wanted it to sound good, he failed terribly, because I trembled with fright as soon as he said he was here for me. Me? Why me?

He continued. “All you have to do is say the word, and I will take you out of here, right now. No hassle.” Then he leaned in, bringing with him that disquieting, divine air. “But you just need to get your small, dainty hands a little…dirty.”

At this point, I was invested. If for nothing else, just out of curiosity. I wasn’t the adventurous type, but I was certainly curious whenever I wanted to be. I wanted to be it right now. This man seemed convinced of his delusions, and I wanted to hear more, if only to have a good story to tell my friends if I ever got to have them.

“So, what do you have for me?” I asked.

“Shall I?” The man asked back.

I paused briefly. Perhaps this could be my way to finally be able to afford sending some money back home to my starving mother and my diabetic father. Perhaps this would be the moment I would look back on, when I was 70 and dying from an incurable and aggressive form of cancer, and think, ‘Damn, I wish I had taken that deal.’ I wasn’t about to risk that.

“Yes,” I replied.

When I said yes, I felt almost as though I had signed my name in blood somewhere in another dimension.

The man instantly turned, walked back to the counter, and paid for the screen protector.

Then a strange silence settled over the shop and the entire mall.

The Act

I picked up the heavy statue from his worship area on the shelf and held it behind my back. I used my free hand to point somewhere on the other shelf as a distraction.

“Where? Here?” My boss asked, leaning forward and peeking into the cupboard.

“Yes,” I replied.

As he leaned forward and turned fully away from me, I raised the statue above my head and brought it down hard on the back of his head. I struck him with such extraordinary force as to crack his skull open on impact like a coconut. He collapsed immediately, blood gushing out of that open wound like a red waterfall. But as it turns out, killing a man with a blow from your pesky human hands while using something hard to hold as a statue is not as easy as they make it in the movies.

He fell down, alright, skull cracked open, but he was not dead. He writhed and groaned in agony on the floor. The man standing over me flicked his finger at me, egging me on. The smile was gone from his face, and instead, a bloodthirsty look dripped from his now-reddening eyes. It was monstrous, that look, twisting his face grotesquely as to make him appear like something not human.

I raised the statue and struck my boss again, and that’s when things went awry. This second blow further cracked his head open and sent streams of blood spraying everywhere; on the counter, shelves, on my face, t-shirt, and jeans. He went limp as his head dropped. Dead. Blood pooled under his head and spread outward like a giant red bird opening up its wings.

I called the man like a faithful worker calling his boss over to inspect his work. He looked at the body, his eyes burning with such fierce intensity that I thought they glowed a little. He turned the corpse over and studied it like it was some kind of trophy he was inspecting, seeming to derive a kind of sick pleasure from looking at that dead man. He stood up, and that smile returned to his face. He was well pleased. He led me out of the shop’s back room and asked me to stay put. Then, he stepped out.

When he returned, he had two black duffel bags.

“We fill these with money. As much as each of us can take. Afterwards, I go my way, and you go your way. We never speak to each other again.” He said, his voice now mechanical and cold, that previous hint of friendliness completely gone.

With trembling hands, I reached for the bag he handed me, still in shock that this was happening. That I had just killed a man.

The man went in first, stuffing the bag with the money from the safe behind the chair as I stood by, looking over my shoulder at the outside world, which seemed, for the entire duration, eerily vacant and quiet. As I stood there, I experienced neither fear nor grief nor even a freak-out. No. I was numb, just as I had been the previous many years working here - detached and just floating through time and space like a random speck of dust, going anywhere inertia would take me. Once he finished, he got up, stepped back, and asked me to fill my bag.

I reached into the safe and took as many of the note bundles as I could, until the bag was almost overflowing.

“Okay. Done!” I said, getting up from the safe.

I turned around, ready to look at the man and let him know that I was now well and truly in.

But the shop was empty.

Silently, almost imperceptibly, like a ghost, the man was gone.

But here is where it gets stranger.

Right there, on the shop’s marble floor, was his bag full of money.

Suddenly, I felt ill. My chest constricted, and my blood went cold. My skin tingled as the hairs on my body pricked. My vision blurred as darkness closed in on me from all sides and warped everything I saw, making it all distorted and warped like a particularly bad trip.

It had been a setup!

For a moment, I stood there, confused, tears in my quickly blackening eyes.

Then, without thinking, I scrambled past the bags, out of the shop, and out to the parking lot, my eyes fuzzy and my brain foggy. I could hardly think or see properly as I ran up and down, weaving between cars across the eerily quiet parking lot, frantically trying to find my partner in crime.

But he was nowhere.

And there was no one out here anyway. It was like everyone had just disappeared.

I returned to the shop, sat back in my small plastic chair, and stared blankly ahead, awaiting whatever consequences awaited me as I sifted through countless possibilities. Perhaps he had rushed back into his car for something, I rationalized. Maybe he had gone to bring his car and park it closer to the shop so we could get away easily. Perhaps he was playing a prank on me and wanted to see if I was trustworthy.

It was now lunchtime, about 1.10 PM. Slowly, as if people were getting dropped back into reality, life began again in the mall - endless meaningless murmurs, clickity-clackity sounds of footsteps, engine roars- slowly began to return, pushing aside the previously apocalyptic silence.

Fuck! I was done for here.

I looked behind the counter, where my boss still lay lifeless, face down. Blood had seeped beneath the counter and would soon spill onto the front, and everyone would know he was dead. I rushed to the back rooms of the shop and grabbed the mop, which I used to mop up some of the blood. That mop licked up the blood like a hungry leech, but it soon turned deep red and soaked through, and it could absorb no more, so it smeared the quickly congealing, blackening blood across the white floor.

At that moment, one of our regular customers, Maria, walked in.

“Hi, Sam,” Maria greeted.

I looked up from the floor and watched in horror as she stepped into the shop, her eyes immediately drawn to the two bags by the door.

“H…hi,” I stammered.

A horrified expression briefly crossed her face before she smiled again. “Is he in?” She asked about my boss.

“U…um. N…no,” I stammered. All the while, I hoped she wouldn’t come over and lean on the counter like she always did.

I quickly dropped the mop and leaned over the counter myself, taking up as much space as I could so she’d have nowhere to lean.

“Where is he?” She asked, eyeing me keenly.

“Um…out,” I replied, before quickly adding, “for lunch.”

Maria frowned, skeptical. “Don’t you bring him lunch from home?”

“Yeah. Yeah, but, uh, today he said he would eat out?”

“Are you asking me?” Maria asked, baffled.

“Oh. Sorry, sorry,” was all I could muster.

“And he left you alone here?” She asked, still skeptical, studying those two bags on the floor so keenly, like she was fighting back intrusive thoughts to check what was inside.

God, why wouldn’t she stop? With the questioning, of course, but also with her steps. She kept inching closer and closer to the counter. I leaned further forward with each step she took. But I realized then that, even as I leaned on it, she would still see that man lying in his blood on the other side if she got close enough to the counter. That counter just wasn’t tall enough.

“Did you have anything to tell him?” I asked.

“Oh, I think I’ll just call him,” She said, reaching for her phone.

I gasped audibly, making her look at me quizzically.

“Everything okay?” She asked.

My eyes darted around the room as I tried to think fast of something to stop her from calling.

“Why are you so restless?” She asked, concern on her face. “And you are sweaty and pale. Nini mbaya?”

I shook my head. I still did not have anything to distract her. Thinking quickly, I said, “Rather than call, how about you just go to the food court? He is there, at the Bhajia place.”

She looked at me, still skeptical. Then, I saw her eyes drop to my chest. “What’s that on your shirt?”

“Ketchup,” I replied without thinking.

“That sure is a lot of ketchup.” She replied.

“What can I say? I am a clumsy eater.”

She nodded and looked around the shop, still inching forward. Then, she stopped just short of the counter, still nodding.

“Okay,” she said suddenly. “Let me go to the food court and try to find him. If I don’t, then I’ll come wait for him here. Sawa?”

I gave her a thumbs up because, in that moment, the wind had been completely knocked out of me, and all I could do was hold my breath and wait for her to step out.

Step out she did.

Once she was gone, I looked down at my phone.

1.35 P.M.

It was clear that my friend was gone. Just as he had appeared, he had gone. As soon as Maria disappeared around the corner, I picked up both bags and placed them at the door.

Then, I used the laptop on the counter and typed something out, which I then printed on the small printer at the foot of the desk. Then, I stepped out with both bags, closed the shop doors behind me, and cello-taped the message I had typed to the door in large bold letters:

Out for Lunch.

Foot traffic was still sparse, so I managed to tape the message in relative anonymity. Once done, I took the heavy bags that weighed me down and quickly slipped away without kicking up much of a fuss. At the gates, the security guards were too distracted by a rude couple in a car, and I slipped out of the mall without even a perfunctory check.

I got an Uber just outside the mall and made my way to Kangemi, where I packed my bags and hid the money in different pockets. Then I picked up my passport, which I had taken a few months ago on the wild belief that I’d use it someday, and booked a last-minute ticket out of the country.

It was the wildest thing I had ever done in my life, and the more I did it, the more surreal it felt, like I was wading through someone else’s vivid fever dream of what it was like to be a fugitive.

The Consequence

I type this story from the sandy beaches of a hotel in a nondescript Middle Eastern country, looking out over the turquoise waters of a place that has become my home, as I sip on Tropical Fizz. It has been close to six months since the events I have regaled you with happened, and the police are still no closer to finding out the truth.

In fact, strangely, my boss’s body was never found.

After he was reported missing, the police broke into his shop, which was described as undisturbed. There was no mention of the discovery of his body, or the blood on the floor, counter, and shelves.

Nothing!

It was as though they had stumbled into a cleaned-up shop. I do not remember doing a cleanup. My memory fails me sometimes, but I am certain I did not clean up that shop. There was not even a mention of money missing from his safe. Additionally, Maria, who could have blown this case open, never came forth to give her statement of our conversation as witness testimony. In the Kenyan dailies, my boss’s story became that of ‘A businessman who stepped out for the longest lunch ever.’

It was strange, really. My mind immediately went back to that strange man with his red-tinted glasses and strange, uncanny eyes. Had he returned and cleaned the mess once he figured I was gone? But it made no sense because he could not drag out a whole human body dripping with blood through the busy floors of that mall. Had I imagined all of it? Surely not. I never hallucinated. Ever.

I will say this, though: a few months before the events of the day that led me to quit my job, I had done something strange and unprecedented. As a sick joke, as a desperate last measure to see if I could get something out of this life, I had read online about how to summon a crossroads demon who grants wishes. And so, I had picked a four-way crossroads close to where I lived and had dug a hole dead center in that dirt path and buried a box of my picture, a bone from a black cat I had slaughtered and killed just for the ritual, and graveyard dirt from the grave I had dug for said cat.

But that was as far as it went. I didn’t believe in black magic or any of that. So, to me, it had all been a joke.

But…but could it…could have worked?

No. No, no, no, no! Surely not.

I don’t think that man was a demon because I don’t think demons exist. Just human beings with bad intentions. Whatever intentions that man had for me, I still have yet to know. All that happened that day was simply a strange crack in reality that one could never explain. As for why my boss’s body was never found? Simple - I never killed him. I just stole his money and left. Left behind, he was so devastated that he disappeared himself.

And now, here I am, enjoying my life, living in hotels, sipping mimosas, and enjoying cruises in this paradise of an island.

It is not all quiet, though. Something tugs at the back of my neck. It is like a nagging sensation, a disquieting feeling of invisible predatory eyes on me at all times. It grows stronger in the evening as I walk back to my hotel room and becomes more poignant each morning I wake up. As I walk the tree-lined streets back to my abode at night, I hear these strange footsteps rushing up behind me, quickly gaining on me. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and my skin tingles with fright. Someone is following me; something malevolent is after me.

I turn back sometimes to see who is following me. Could it be that couple walking slowly toward me, hands clasped like the world’s most in-love lovers? Or perhaps that quiet street-food seller by the corner, who always greets me with a grin a bit too wide. Or perhaps it is that jogger, who jogs past me each morning as I go on my morning walks, who sneers each time he gets near me, mumbling something under his breath to the effect of ‘fuckers!’

Or maybe it is that black goat that eats from the dumpsite behind the hotel. I never like those damned creatures of darkness. They often have uncanny eyes, a bit like that stranger’s. I don’t like how that goat looks at me, because its eyes give me the chills, like I am looking into the eyes of a predator in goat clothing. Each time I pass by that dumpsite, the goat stops browsing, lifts its head, and watches me until I disappear behind the wall. Sometimes it peers at me from around the wall, and all I see when I turn back are these two unyielding, white eyes watching me silently. Judging me. Condemning me!

Aaaargh! All that is just my anxiety at getting caught playing tricks on me, right?

But while my shoulders hang low, weighed down by my guilty conscience, I have no regrets about what I have done. How? How could I have regrets after moving from a life of meaningless drudgery to now being able to buy all that I want?

I plan to leave this island and settle somewhere in South America. I have always wanted to live somewhere in the South American Pampas and perhaps even marry a Latina. I do not know, though, if I will be welcome there, but we will see. I have the funds to take that risk. So I will gather my stuff and fly there. I have calculated how much money I have in dollars, and it should be enough to get me started; no matter how much I use it, it doesn’t seem to be running out, so I have plenty to spend.

But I will be careful, because I can feel those eerie footsteps ominously closing in on me, seeking to condemn me. I must make merry before they catch up.

(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of pure fiction and should not be taken seriously. I hope you had fun reading it!)