Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

I wake with a start, my heart thudding. Benoît is fast asleep, lying behind me so we're curled together like a pair of quotation marks. His hard-on pokes into my back with innocent insistence, not privy to our decision to forgo the delights of each other. It wasn't the dream. There was a noise.

I sit up, listening carefully. There is the sound of running feet. A shout drifting up from the street. A door slams. More shouts. Gunshots. Unreasonably, I immediately think of Songweza. The way the sound is dulled, it seems like it's coming from the Twist Street side, and I glance out the window to check. The street is quiet, not even a plastic bag stirring in the trees.

The Mongoose's face appears at the end of the bed, nose snuffling as he stands up on his back paws to peer at me.

"Looks like it's just you and me." I slip out of bed, pulling on some clothes and a pair of slops. "The unholy alliance." Benoît doesn't stir.

The lights are on at 608. I rap lightly on the door and Mr Khan, the little tailor whose wife has a talent for weaving anti-theft charms into his work, opens the door a moment later. He used to have a small shop in Plein Street, but now he does what business he can out of Elysium Heights. His wife, Mrs Khan, supplements her charm-making by advising residents on government grant applications. It helps that her Black Scorpion is easily hidden in her handbag when she goes down to social welfare, with applications and ID books in hand.

Mr Khan beckons with little grabbing gestures for me to come in quickly before scurrying back to the window and the unfolding drama. I step over bolts of cloth and squeeze in round the sewing machine on the desk to the window, where Mrs Khan, their twelve year-old daughter, the sex-worker from across the passage and a man I can only assume is her patron for the hour have taken up viewing positions, all looking down over the street. We're not the only tenants enjoying a little 4 am drama. On either side of us people are leaning out of the windows to look, smoking and chatting.

"It's these gangs," Mrs Khan tuts, shifting her weight to balance the sleeping baby on her hip. "And that damn private security." The police are a joke with a punchline you've heard before. Armed response runs Zoo City and the downtown area the same way dogs piss on their territory. They're only interested in protecting their buildings. If a crime happens across the road, it's as if it doesn't happen at all. They lose interest as soon as it's out of their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, Elysium and Aurum fall out of the borders of privatised law. Our landlord is

too snoep to pony up for protection.

There is another crackle of gunfire. A muzzle flash is reflected in the broken windows of the building on the corner. Then a man scrambles out from the cover of the trees lining the avenue, firing back over his shoulder. His trainers make a tennis-court squeal as he skids on the wet tarmac. A Bear lumbers out behind him and looks both ways, as if checking for oncoming traffic.

This is not the strangest thing I have seen in our street. There was the attempted rape that was interrupted – Mrs Khan roused some of the larger men on our floor, and they beat the would-be rapist into a coma. There was the night D'Nice got stabbed, unfortunately not fatally. There was the murder in the stairwell a few weeks ago. But the weirdest was the night the owner of a local brothel paraded her girls and their menagerie naked down the street hoping to drum up new business.

"Dogfight turned bad," says one of the guys leaning out of the window of 610, with great authority.

"Not too late to place your bets," his goateed friend says. But their laughter is hollow.

"No, man," Mrs Khan says, annoyed, "shows what you know. It's a gang war, definitely. The 207s were moving in on the Cameroonians two weeks ago now. This is revenge, you'll see."

Mr Khan tries to shoo his daughter back to her bed. "Come on, my baby, you need to rest for school tomorrow." But the girl doesn't move. This is better than TV. And probably better than school too, as far as her life education is concerned.

On the street below, there is another shot. The Bear's shoulder collapses with a jerk. It roars in pain, rises to its full height, and then seems to think better of it. The man tugs at the Bear's arm, trying to get it to move. It roars again and then drops back on all fours. The man starts to run, gesturing urgently for the Bear to follow him. It starts after him. But it's too late.

More bullets, AK-47 rounds this time, rip through the animal, knocking it sideways. The man screams and starts running back towards the Bear, then hesitates. The Bear shambles another step and then collapses on its backside with a surprised whuff. It tries to get up, confused. The AK-47 stutters again. The Bear's forepaws slide out from under it. Its jaw strikes the kerb with an audible crack. The people at the window wince. Very slowly, the Bear's head lolls to one side. The man turns and runs like hell is at his heels.

It will be.

We hold our collective breath. A tsotsi holding that favourite weapon of revolutionaries, criminals and revolutionaries-turned-criminals walks cautiously out from beneath the scaffolding of the trees, the AK-47 at his hip ready to be swung up. There is a blur of wings hovering above his shoulder. A Sunbird. He walks up to the Bear and prods it with his foot. It doesn't move. He empties another clip into it anyway. The Bird darts forward to see, darts back again.

There are sirens in the distance. Private security, not police. You can tell by the pitch of the wail. The tsotsi looks up and sees half the building standing at their windows, watching. He gives us a cheerful wave and steps back into the trees, his Bird darting about his head.

We know what's coming. None of us say anything. The Mongoose paces the window ledge, whiskers quivering. The sirens get louder. The Bear lies motionless on the pavement beside the metal frame of a licensed vendor's stall.

The air pressure dips, like before a storm. A keening sound wells up soft and low, as if it's always been there, just outside the range of human hearing. It swells to howling. And then the shadows start to drop from trees, like raindrops after a storm. The darkness pools and gathers and then seethes.

The Japanese believe it's hungry ghosts. The Scientologists claim it's the physical manifestation of suppressive engrams. Some eyewitness reports describe teeth grinding and ripping in the shadows. Video recordings have shown only impenetrable darkness. I prefer to think of it as a black hole, cold and impersonal as space. Maybe we become stars on the other side.

I turn away as it rushes down the road in the direction of the running man. Mr Khan covers his daughter's eyes, even though it's her ears he should be protecting. The screaming only lasts a few awful seconds before it is abruptly cut off.

"Tsk," Mrs Khan says, to break the silence that's weighing down on us, like someone has turned up the gravity. "This city."

But I've thought of something else. "Where are your parents?" I murmur, remembering the poison hallucination, the shop assistant with the name badge – Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! – bending over my five year-old dream self.

"The parents? Someone will have to tell them," Mrs Khan agrees. "Come you," she says to her daughter, hustling her away from the window, and all us rubberneckers too.

By morning, when I wake up groggy and grumpy from lack of sleep, the municipal street-cleaning crew has already done the rounds. The blood has been hosed down. The Bear's corpse is gone. The only evidence that it was ever there is a black stain on the tarmac like a blast radius and the yellow police tape cordoning off the street.

If only the cleaning crew could do the same for my car. Benoît stares at it without saying anything. I wasn't the only thing that got knocked about yesterday – the Capri got trashed too. Comprehensively. The door panels have been kicked in, the headlights smashed and a mostly illegible word, that might read "FUK" if you squinted at it right, has been carved into the paintwork on the bonnet in letters four inches high. The windscreen sags under fractal spiderwebs, caused by multiple blows from a metal object, like, oh, say the crowbar I found lying on the back seat. Which had also been used to gouge up the leather. The cherry on top was the smeared shit – human, judging from the smell – on the bonnet. I guess I should be grateful whoever made the deposit didn't do it on the upholstery.

"Hazards of the job," I tell Benoît. But it's easy to be off-hand now. Yesterday, when the taxi I'd found to take me and my eau de drain downtown from Sandton pulled in to Mai Mai, the market was already closed up, evening shadows stretching across the parking lot, deserted apart from the ruins of the Capri. I insisted the taxi driver stick around while I got the car started. I didn't know if they were still there, hunched under the tarp watching, or loose in the city somewhere, but I gave them the finger anyway. I should have left the car there, but I'm stubborn like that. Also: not about to be overly intimidated by a cluster of junkie tunnel rats.

Benoît looks at the bruises and scratches on my arm as I drive. They look worse today. If I'd thought about it, I wouldn't have worn a sleeveless dress.

"You should have called the police," he says.

"The police don't care, Benoît."

"Then you should let me come with you."

"Don't you have your own day job?"

"I'm quitting anyway."

"And you have travel arrangements to make."

"You could just say "no thank you", cherie ."

"You could do me one favour. It's dodgy, though."

He sighs. "I wouldn't expect any less from you."

"Hey, D'Nice is way worse than I am."

"But not nearly as cute."

"I'm telling your wife," I retort, but it's autopilot. Our easy banter is now laced with jagged edges.

"My polygamie offer is still open," he says, valiantly keeping up the façade.

"I might consider it, if you can get me the home address for one Ronaldo, bouncer at Counter Revolutionary, surname unknown. He works for Sentinel, same silly helmet on his badge." I flip a hand at the insignia on Elias's nametag.

"I'll see what I can do," he says, as I pull up outside the bottling plant where Benoît has been assigned to patrol today. Sentinel likes to shift security personnel around, so no one gets too comfortable, too familiar with the ins and outs, and sells the info on to someone like D'Nice. Who can be guaranteed to sell it to a gang of armed robbers.

"I don't have to do this," Benoît says, staying in the car. "They could live without a security guard for the day."

"What, and risk Elias's job?" I keep my hands on the steering wheel, the better to resist touching him.

"At least take my phone."

"I'll be fine. I'll stay away from storm drains and junkie tunnel rats with screwdrivers. Promise."

He looks pained. "I'll see you later, cherie ," he says, and leans across to kiss me chastely on the cheek.

It's only pulling into Mayfields golf estate half an hour later that I realise he seized the opportunity to slide his phone into the change tray under the handbrake. Sneaky bastard.

Unfortunately, the smell of drains still lingers in my car and clings to me when I step into Mrs Luthuli's. She's polite enough not to say anything, and she makes me strong tea, adding milk and sugar without asking. I drink it while she hunts upstairs.

After about ten minutes, she comes back downstairs with a shoebox. She puts on her glasses and starts removing the photos one by one. "What is it you're looking for, exactly?"