It was morning, and Joe had barely slept a wink.

He knew it was morning because of the hole in the ceiling. A hole small enough to ensure the captives in the dungeon got some air to breathe without getting the chance to escape. It bore quite a similarity to the holes one would find in the slave dungeons.

He leaned against the wall, groaning in distress as tears ran down his cheeks. He had been weeping all night, well and truly traumatized by what he had seen the previous night.

He had watched a man die at the hands of cold-hearted killers, and even though he had been knocked out moments later by one of those horrid thugs, he knew Dani’s body had been chopped up. The thought alone was nauseous enough.

It was utterly devastating. All he could think about was how a young man just like him had lost his life to the archaic, ridiculous and ignorant beliefs that made them unfair targets. And it was utterly frustrating.

Is this what life was meant to be for some of us? That we’ll spend our lives dealing with all this ostracization and stigma, only to be killed by some heartless, greedy monsters? Is this really what life is meant to be for us?

It couldn’t get any more tiring, could it? From the day people like him were born, society was pitted against them. They already considered them cursed, unusual and unworthy of acceptance. That was painful enough. But this… this was too much.

Did he ask to be born this way?

As his eyelids fluttered a bit, the sound of a key turning in the lock revived him.

The door opened, and he looked in snide contempt as the two thugs who killed Dani in front of him entered the room and walked briskly towards him.

“You pathetic bastards!” he spat in disgust as they moved closer.

Their response was to send him back to sleep, as one of them placed a cloth on his face, forcing him to inhale its contents…

***

“God, I’m gonna enjoy killing this cocky little piece of shit!” Keti growled as the hostage slumped against the wall, unconscious. “The stupid little bleach baby, calling us pathetic? What nonsense! He’s really triggering me!”

“You’re not the only one, man!” Moyo agreed, also peeved by the insult. “Stupid albino. Cursed little shit! Whoever is coming for his parts should come in quickly. This will be one slaughter I’m going to enjoy!”

Nothing triggered these two henchmen more than when a hostage got aggressive or insulting towards them. Fully imbibed in the ancient beliefs that declared people with albinism were a different breed, it was a grave stain on their ego to be insulted or lambasted by a person with albinism. You might as well insult their entire family tree.

As they stood there, seething at his unconscious body, it was only the orders of their boss that were preventing them from giving him an even more brutal beatdown than that which they gave the other hostage the previous night. They were angry, but they still had to keep it together.

“We’ll be back for you soon,” Moyo sneered as he looked into the unresponsive face of the captive. “And trust me, we’re gonna deal with you so well. Stupid little cockroach!”

Punctuating that insult with a spit on his face, Moyo looked down on him before following Keti out of the dungeon.

***

Kiros Villa, a dark blue bungalow, surrounded by tall orange walls, was a building situated on the outskirts of the town of Amela. A thirty-minute drive from the capital, this building was the home of Doctor Kiros, Moyo, Keti, and all the other henchmen who assisted the witch doctor in carrying out his heinous business.

As the white convertible pulled up at the front gate of the villa, manned by two macho men, the gentleman in a suit and a cowboy hat smirked at the gatekeepers. “I’m here for a business deal,” he said to them cockily.

One of them asked, “Your name, sir.”

“Nathan Dixon.”

The enquirer looked at the other one, who nodded. “Boss mentioned he’d be coming.”

They opened the gates, and Nathan drove through quickly.

Parking in front of the entrance, he stopped the engine, opened the door, and stepped out, moving in a manner that would have you thinking he had just won a million dollars, as he reached for the briefcase. With all the stories he had heard from others, though, that wasn’t a far stretch; those albino parts certainly brought a lot of money one’s way.

He walked up to the entrance, where there stood another henchman.

“I’m here for the albino parts,” he announced in a rather arrogant tone of voice. “Nathan Dixon.”

The henchman, looking quite unimpressed by his show of cockiness, nodded with a blank expression on his face and signaled him to come in. As he did, the henchman asked him, using his hands, to put down the briefcase and put his hands up, so he could be searched. After the searching process, he was beckoned to enter the room where the victim was.

After knocking, Nathan opened the door to find Doctor Kiros, another henchman wielding a knife, and a shirtless young albino man lying out on the floor in there.

“Oh yes, Mr. Nathan, good to have you here. It is clear you are a man of your word,” Kiros gushed enthusiastically.

“Of course I am!” Nathan responded, almost scornfully as he tossed the briefcase at the henchman, who caught it with a look of displeasure on his face. “You can count the money in there. Sixty thousand dollars.”

“Magnificent.” Kiros opened the briefcase and saw the bundles of dollars. “Give me and my servant a moment to count them.”

After a few minutes of counting the money and being satisfied, Kiros turned to Nathan and nodded. “Great. All is in order. Now you can observe the sacrifice.”

Nathan then walked to Joe, who was still unconscious. He crouched, looked over, and held the man by his face and nodded. “Mmmm… no black spots on the face, I see. Good, good…”

***

For the next few minutes, Kiros and Moyo waited impatiently, as their difficult customer did what seemed like a full body check.

“Goodness, boss, does he think this is some butchery or something?” Moyo murmured to his boss, clearly irritated by this client’s show off. He was still quite miffed by the way the man had tossed the briefcase at him.

The fierce glare from his boss, however, had him sit back and keep his irritation to himself. He knew that Doctor Kiros didn’t tolerate criticism of clients, particularly after they had brought huge sums of money to him.

Placing the victim’s right leg back on the floor after holding it up for what had seemed like quite a while, the client stood up and nodded. “Alright, I’m satisfied. No lesions on this one. I’m satisfied with that. So before you get to work on the necessary potions and whatnot, let me give you my wish list.”

He pulled out a small piece of paper and a pen, and put down some notes, after which he handed it to Kiros, who smiled and shook his head as he looked at the contents of the note.

“You are certainly one of a kind, Mr. Nathan.”

“I know,” he responded smugly. “Trust me, I know.”

Doctor Kiros quickly signaled to Moyo, who had just rolled his eyes at Nathan’s statement, and made a throat-slitting sign, with a stern look on his face.

Moyo stood up and nodded. Aside the subtle scolding in that sign, he knew it was time. Time to put this ‘white cockroach’ to the sword.

“Alright, Mr. Nathan, you can take a seat and wait while my henchman takes him back down to the dungeon and does the needful.”

Nathan nodded, and as he took a seat, crossed his legs and took out his phone to check something. Then he sat back, smirked, and said out loud.

“Operation Milk Joe is complete.”

What could that mean?