DOOMSDAY

Okoli poked his head out of the shrubs where he had been hiding.
He checked himself, satisfied there had been no injury, and began to dust his sandy-brown sweat shirt and jeans. He felt his hip pockets. It was still there: the wad of one-thousand naira notes he insisted on collecting before any negotiation commenced. Twenty thousand naira.
He grinned widely- a funny stretch of his thin lips to the edges of his smooth face which oozed satisfaction.
The kick this business gave him surprised even him. He was not indigent, yet some joy swam in him when Ije made distinctions in all nine subjects. Joy was a perpetual customer to WAEC, and he felt he owed it to their friendship to put paid to it. Okoli never expected to meet Shirley, this soon. Not after the hot verbal exchanges. Well, knowledge was power, and he was in charge.
Being no novice to the pattern of the questions, he had supplied answers to the 250 questions under the one-hour mark. The cross-checking which ended with a confident nod of his head cost five more minutes. Then the bubble burst.
In place of the manufactured identity card he was supposed to tender to the invigilator, out came, and clattered on the floor, three more. Thinking back, he realized he had been consumed by what pleasures sixty thousand would afford him later that evening, including bedding the evasive Lucy.
The three cards were all the invigilator needed to smell fishiness. Okoli had already fled, reaching the door in a nanosecond. He took a forty-foot leap to the ground floor amidst cries to apprehend him. Bullets dotted the ground around his escape route, and the bush admitted him in minutes.
A safety catch clicked. Five cold nozzles. The reminisce was over.