For the middle of the night, it's blinding out. There's a crystalline sky and a waxy moon. It is a redundant light, cause the sea of knee-high weeds it illuminates tells Wessel no direction.

It's startling how quick you can lose your way out here. Savannah and the city surround each other in splotches and swaths, but they remain distinct. You only ever know one side of Kettisburg, and you dare not leave it. Wessel loses his last clue as soon as he steps in a patch of grass, and the steenboks look no more assured when they bramble onto gravel. Less so when they are inevitably ground into chuck. Wessel can feel tonight's stew seep around his belly. The critter's version of rolling in its grave - perhaps.

No creature navigates both the wild and wilder halves of Kettisburg with grace, and only the hyenas do so without it. They are just as scary whilst snorting up a half-pack of Haribos from out back the Tesoco, as they are in the knee-high weeds.

Vezzo van Otten is a hyena. He, too, snorts Haribos, and does so with a glint in his eye, and not a care in the world. He barks and he bites with equal vigor. He leaves a wake. A rebel in the most cloyingly saturated way, and a self-proclaimed gangster. More like a brat in his pram. If it were up to his folks, he'd still have a pram. Overbearing, and not even Wessel, who makes a habit out of giving him a hard time over 'family', will stray from that.

He's one of those who tries and makes their life such a mess, that making it by is a great success. Jump in a well just so they can scale it, and look back on the feat as something affirming. Wessel would rather walk in a straight line. Revel in mediocrity and pointlessness, and get some sort meaning out of hating himself for it. Ahead is the tree he's meant to turn left at. Vezzo had called it 'the falling tree'. An unmistakable growth, jutting out at a seemingly impossible degree. Barren, for the tilt of it offers a delicacy scarcely afforded to the short and fat of the land; pigs and buffalo most likely.

Wessel has no clue why he follows him. They're good friends, yes. Best even. That's a question which similarly begs, but one he has spent far too many fruitless hours pondering, to further entertain. Still, there are hundreds of lines Wessel ought not cross between his front door and their predetermined post, and this friendship is not enough to erase them. But he walks still, boxing his shadow.

Vezzo van Otten is a force; deals only in ultimatums and cusses. You don't say no, not because you can't, but you don't want to. He has this pull. He is a force. He leaves a wake.

Ahead sits 'the only hill in the savanna', another landmark included in the directions. Wessel pulls the crumpled pamphlet from his hoodie. A warning about change in the the routes for the 315, but the back is a hand-drawn take on this wilderness. The dotted line is comparatively quite long between the tree and the hill, but he spanned that gap real quick. Is this little thing even a hill? Just as doubt forms, it is quelled. At the top, everything becomes obvious. Two beams of light appear in the middle of nowhere, decidedly skew.

Of course he would bring the Jeep. He loves it. Who cares what natural wonders he runs over? Who cares if it was bought by the parents he insists he doesn't need? Wessel can't complain too much since he is a permanent fixture in the passenger seat, but still. Really, he loves that thing just as dearly as Vezzo does. Gets him around, and gives him a reason to look think of his friend as a hypocrite. He sees him now, pacing around the toxic-yellow vehicle, waiting. Moonlight accentuates his paleness into something like light from the bulb. On the other hand, Wessel wonders if he, himself, can even be seen at all.

"Vez!" He shouts, letting his feet quicken down the slope towards the car. Vezzo lashes around, eyes all roly-poly like some sorta cartoon snake. He's on something, even though he said he wouldn't be. 'Gotta be sharp round them lions. Give em an inch- ah naw, Wes! I'm not talking like that. I'm talking like... well I'm saying that I gonna to be sharp tonight. Yeah? And it's all gonna go slick, yeah?' Something like that.

"Hey-ey!" he says in breathy exhales. "Man, I thought for sure yous was gonna flake, haha. Tonight is gonna be nuutsss." Bright fangs flash from his already ghastly countenance. A frightening, but gleeful smile. Depending on the scenario, it could almost be considered attractive.

"I can't be that late. What time is it?" Wessel always has to ask him that.

"Naaaah, you're early actually..." His phone flashes to life and he shoves it into Wessel's face: 10:44. "I just didn't expect you to actually come."

"Yeah, well I shouldn't have."

"Whatever." The dismissal rolls of his tongue. Nonchalant is his only emotion, and the practice shows. Actually, that is dead wrong, Wessel doesn't know why he even just thought that. Anger and cheer come easily to him, from the mundane and the arcane, but talk to him about anything that matters just a little bit and you'll get bombarded with 'dunnos' and 'don't cares', and of course, 'whatever'. A pedantically volatile being. Nonchalant is his standard emotion, but, really, one he rarely uses.

"So what are we doing here?"

"Check the trunk," Vezzo says, kicking out at the car. Wessel gives a long thought to legging out right then and there, even after he pushed himself all this way. No good secrets are ever kept in a trunk. The second he pops it open, he's culpable for whatever mess hides there. And he is sure it'll be messy.

And it is.

Ivory, rows and rows of it. Usually it's two tusks to a trunk, but this one has six hoarded up. Elephant bourgeoisie. That's three elephants dead, dang, this haul is punitive in comparison. Do you even gotta kill them to get their tusks? Wessel doesn't know, he's not a poacher. He's just a guy with a partial share of a carload of ivory.

"God, Vez! How did you get this crap?"

"Chill, chill. You know my uncle? The one with dementia?  Yeah, well, when he was well... well, he hunted loads. Loads. He has this whole room stacked with mounts and stuffed t'ings. I t'ink he even has a few extinct animals, but most of all, he has elephants, just little babies, like. And y'know, wit' his condition and all, he's an absolute potato. His bed ain't in that room and he's no way ever getting outta bed again. So I went over there with a hacksaw, and just cut the mounts up. That's what I wound up with."

"How much?"

"Fifty-thousand rands, and a cheetah. You're gonna get 20K, yourself, if you just stick it out," Vezzo says with a wink.

"Pheeeeeeeeww." Wessel doesn't know what to think about the cheetah, but that is something less than a blip when it's sat next to 50K. Even the twenty dwarfs it. That's a car of his own, right there. Summat with just a tinge of crappy.

"Nuts, innit?!"

"Nuts," Wessel says. "How'd you even find a buyer?"

"Y'know Musah? His parents are all wrapped up in the trade, like. He told me that while on a dose," Vezzo laughs his head off.

"Wish I didn't. And when isn't he on a dose?" Wessel says. Musah is an unsavory character, a bully who buys off friends with contraband. Nothing like this, nothing seriously illegal, but the doses and drinks they all like so much. The newly discovered fact that he's paying for the crap with his mom's blood money is just the ribbon that ties him up all nice and such. "When are they coming then - his folks?"

"15 minutes or so still. And it won't be them, per say, they told me they would just send some goons our way."

"They call their own people goons?" Wessel floats over to the front of the car, taking a lazy seat against the hood. As if drawn magnetically, Vezzo apes his movements.

"No...that's just what I called them."

"Well you said 'they said' which would mean they would've had to have actually said that for that to be right."

Vezzo turns back to him, mouth slightly agape. "Shut up," he says. Some might say that's a decidedly gash argument, but he just likes to keep it pithy. Wessel wonders if Vezzo is his goon, and is surprised to find the comparison far less obtuse than it sounds at first.

A big bruised bonsai cloud drifts before the moon, distorting the surrounding in a fractured darkness. The two boys sit like lovebirds, atop a souped-up car, atop a grassy knoll. Without the context, it could end up on a wall calendar. August or June maybe, it was June now, so that would be fitting. July too. Anything but February really.

"Have you ever noticed how February always gets the worst pictures on calendars?" Wessel asks.

"Yo! Who the? Do you really t'ink I'm spending my free time looking at calendars!?"

"It's cause February has the least amount of days, so those are always the pictures that get looked at the least. It makes sense when you think about it."

"Wow. That's really interesting, man. I never realized February had the least days of all the months, cuz I'm just a screw-up, poof-brain who doesn't know how to count. Thank you so so much for the lesson, idiot. Get off your high horse."

"I'm sitting on your trashy car, packed to the max with contra, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I dare you to call that a high horse again."

Just like that, they're back laughing. A comfort pumps through every interaction, it's strained and stretched, but refuses to snap- sticky too -all the st- words really.

Something growls. Wessel and Vezzo whip their necks to the background, their laughs mute, and their wide eyes shine with the reflection of headlights. Nothing pops out, not even after they spend a bit squinting between the fronds of grass. It's the foreground, anyway, which the other car is coming from. At first, it looks like a flying cheetah. The splotchy pup seems to be riding atop the savanna grasses as if they were waves, and at some rate too; flying in more ways than one, like! As soon as the angles quit being impish with illusions and the like, it becomes obvious that the poor thing is strapped up to a roof rack, not to mention dead. 

A plastic gun is shoved into Wessel's gut. It looks real enough, but weigh about as much as a stick of gum. "What am I s'posed to do with this?"

"Hey, maybe if you were more definitive if you were coming or not. I'm not about to splurge for another Glock juss for you to flake out." Vezzo pumps his weapon towards him with an air of machismo, and a blatant disregard for safe-handling, "Cheer up, though, That little guy's filled with lemon juice dissolved wit' a box of Warheads. Go for the eyes." 

"A squirt gun? You're too much." 

"So's ya ma!" Vezzo says.  

The safari van with a cheetah ornament rumbles over the ridge. Headlights stare at them like flashlights during an interrogation. As soon as the driver overcomes the blinding effects they, too, must be facing, the car drifts to a stop. Specks of dirt and shreds of glass get spit up into a big old cloud of debris. Out of it, emerges two men. One of them shares a resemblance to Musah, so is prolly his dad, but Wessel doesn't dare to speak to ask.  The other looks Slavic; god-awful mustache and an oversized gun. The accent proves it. 

"Where the tusks, little kids?" he asks, storming away from his car and starting to lean into theirs.  Vezzo just about stays on his feet as he slips off the hood to get back to the hatch, all the while begging with his open palms to the overaggressive buyer. 

"Right back here, dude. It's all good. Just like you told me to have it," he says, looking at the man who now certainly seems to be Musah's dad. Though keeping a sideways eye on the other at all times. 

"Don't mind Dej, he thinks he's funny," Musah's dad says. Dej sends back a crooked smile that reinforces the message and unfurls Wessel's knotted heart. The boy had his finger on the trigger, a centimeter from going into battle: splishy-splash versus semi-automatic. All this has got him wound like nuts, just gotta hope he don't get wound like flesh wound. Right?

Dej starts unloading the tusks, while Musah's dad unties the cheetah. Seeing it up close makes it really set in how silly the inclusion is. A stuffed cheetah?! This ain't Las Vegas, and unless Vez got work making cover art for hip-hop artists, it's just an overpriced teddy bear. When he goes over to pick it up, he says he's gonna take it with him everywhere; strap it up to a skateboard, and walk it, or something. Good god, that's gonna be pure cringe. He hefts its rigid corpse to the top of his car, hurriedly tying it around his own rack, with the strips of cloth the dealers used in the first place. He doesn't have the guts to place it proud on its feet, opting instead to lay it inconspicuously on its side, which although a little funny, is mostly comforting. Oh! he thinks that is just the most precious thing. Maybe it's the foreign substances, but he is acting all floozy, like, stroking it like a dancer, and mumbling baby-talk into its ear. Every second he pees away feels like minutes to Wessel, who's stomach is spouting nervous growls like you wouldn't believe! 

He's so concentrated on Vezzo's escapades, that it startles him when Musah's dad tosses the cash at his unsuspecting chest. Reflexes cause him to pull the trigger of the gun he has shoved in his pocket, wetting his pants a little. "Brilliant," he mutters, restraining the natural symptoms of shock to play it off cool, like. 

"Everything is good now, yes?" Musah's dad asks. 

Wessel gives the knoll a cursory scan, they got the ivory, Vez has his cheetah, and he has the cash: one, two, three, four, five bundles, he counts off. Everything seems to be in order, but anyways, Vez overheard the question and is on his way to wrap everything up all nice with some hair-gel schmoozing and oversold chortling. They could be bankers, acting like they are. Dej breaks the willful illusion with a few ill-fitting threats, each one paired with wild gesticulations of his AK. The conversation lulls into platitudes and low-brow chat about money, but Wessel hangs on every loose word, analyzing each glib utterance for the most minute of threats. Somehow still, he is shocked by the gunshots. 

Bratadattatatat!

Slow on the uptake, Wessel unfurls his pistol, sending a trickle of acid Dej's way. The thing is pathetic, running out of juice halfway through the discharge, thus running out of juice halfway through the flight, and dipping harmlessly onto his ratty tank top.  Wessel can already the bullets shredding him like cheddar as he dives to the ground, such was the vividness of his expectation, but they never come. There is more discharge, he hears it, but tangible pain avoids him. Squinting, he dares look up, and when he sees the trio before him looking the opposite direction, he ventures to get to his feet. Something thuds into the car, looking up, he sees a pair of steely eyes hanging over the hood. A wily mane appears after it, shoving itself into the body of the cheetah, and looking unsatisfied with the giant cotton ball he pulls out of it. Lions, he sees them now. Two corpses sit contorted and bloody on the hill, and here is the third; atop Vezzo's car. Lions hunt in packs, everybody knows it, and these are hunters. 

Pop! Pop! Pop! 

Vezzo shoots at it. His shots are dangerously off the mark, scattered just like his head. if Wessel doesn't get out of the way he'll be fried just like Vezzo's brain. Two go straight through the body of the Jeep, and the third goes to the birds. He should have been the one stuck packing the fake. Not that Wessel has shot much before, but at least he ain't tripping!

Dej cleans up. What's left is a barely recognizable pulp. 

For a moment, the clearance falls into on-edge silence, the four men ebb towards a back-to-back huddle, weapons aiming outwards. They consolidate the smallest enclave of Kettisburg in the savanna of fleeting glints, jump scares, and knee-high weeds. More lions too? Fear, hope, and logic are all jumbled up in the head of anyone who tries to answer that. Everything feels sticky like syrup; the air, movement in general, it's suffocating, this trepidation. Up above, the clouds stall, the thickest one in the sky parked right before the moon. This is the darkest it's been. 

One, at the very least, breaks through. Gunshot medleys almost drown out the screams. Anybody who is shooting, which, by the sound of it, is everybody but Wessel, must be doing so blind. It seems awful silly to keep trying that when it's just as likely to shoot man as animal, so Wessel gets out of there. Good job, too, cause the huddle starts to sound more and more like a watering hole. The Jeep is only a few steps away, but walking that far towards the wilderness feels like walking out on a high-wire. No matter the logic, this seems ten times the risk, but his decision's been made. Even when he gets into the car, little comfort welcomes him.

Why couldn't Vez get a real car instead of this open-concept safari thing? 

He stomps on the gas twice before thinking of shifting the gear. Hurrying, he pulls it all the way down to 'L' which he has no idea what that does, so he has to finagle with the knob again. Finally, every thing is set, and he legs it. 

Then something slams into the side. "Wait!" Vezzo scream, hanging by his chest into the vehicle (so that's why) and stretching bloody hands towards Wessel's body. Continuing to drive off while steering with a lazy left hand, he drags his friend into the passenger seat. Vezzo slips in and lands sprawled and screaming, though the screams traverse on a one-way spectrum from terrified to celebratory. 

Another thud and Wessel turns his eyes back to the road just in time to see a lion tossed aside by the fender. The car is jolted left a little too, from the collision, but after that, it's straight ahead at full speed. 

"You're shot," Wessel says, looking worriedly at the sizable hole burrowed straight down his kneecap. 

"Haha, the maddest t'ing, is that I did that myself," he just laughs, and Wessel can't blame him considering he must be on twice the high. "Gimme your gun." 

Wessel hesitates, looking closely as far as he can ahead of their makeshift road before digging it out of his seat and tossing it over, also sparing another nervous look at the wound. He has the weirdest worry that Vezzo is going to squirt it on that, which makes him hurt just thinking it. 

He instead drains the last dregs of the barrel onto his pancaked tongue, shaking like a spastic as soon as the first drop lands. Swallowing is visibly strained, but after it, he thrusts his flexing neck out the window, his tongue still stuck out, now dripping in the same indigo concoction which laces his fangs, slobbering into the wind. Then he screams something guttural; animalistic. Something between a howl and laughter. A release.