Episode 3: Rescued, But Not Free
I woke up in a small room that smelled of camphor, herbs, and wet earth.
My head throbbed. My mouth was dry. For a brief moment, I thought I’d died and been reincarnated somewhere between heaven and a village dispensary. But then I saw the old woman fanning me beside a kerosene lamp. She looked at me with deep pity.
“Na God save you, my pikin,” she whispered. “You no suppose see another sunrise.”
That was the first human warmth I felt since the ordeal.
But I couldn’t rest.
“There were others,” I kept repeating. “They took more people. Please, we have to do something.”
The village head eventually came to see me—an elderly man in a faded cap and wrapper, flanked by two local hunters with dane guns. When I told him about the camp, the girl, the armed men, he sighed deeply and glanced at his guards.
“Dem don dey operate for that forest for months. You be the first wey escape alive.”
“But others are still in there!” I yelled. “We need to get them out. Call the police.”
He looked at me with sad eyes.
“We go try.”
Soon afterwards, a call was made to the nearest police division. They didn’t come until hours later, and even then, only three officers showed up in a battered Hilux with one half-functioning siren. They wore expressions of annoyance, not urgency.
“Where exactly did the incident happen?” the sergeant asked, like he was bored.
“I don’t know the exact coordinates, but I can take you back into the bush. The camp is real. People are still there!”
One of the officers scoffed. “You want us to follow you into that kind bush, with only two rifles? Oga, we’re not trained for jungle warfare.”
But I refused to back down.
With the help of two local hunters, we persuaded the police officers and formed a small search party. We trekked three hours into the forest—retracing my path through the muddy trails, shallow streams, and thorn-choked paths.
We found nothing.
The camp had been wiped clean.
No tarpaulin, no pots, no ropes. Just ash marks and broken sticks. Like they were never there.
The police snapped a few blurry photos, asked shallow questions, and then turned back.
“Oga,” one said to me, “just thank God say you escape. The others… maybe dem don waka.”
“Waka” was his word for dead.
I collapsed by the river where I once hid under the log. The water was calm now. Deceptive. I wanted to scream, to curse the gods, to dig through the ground with my bare hands until I found bones. Something. Anything.
But all I had were memories.
The bush had taken them.
And now… the world would forget them.
Unless I did something.
To Be Continued in Episode 4: The Silence They Paid For
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