“Another seven hundred today!” Changamire looked elated as he showed his winnings on MWOR’s betting application. I checked the screen and thought, only yesterday he had won another six hundred during the course of our shift! So that’s a thousand in a space of two days. Had I had given up too soon? I was tempted to go back to the game myself.
On our A-level break my friend Mukazi and I used to rock up at MWOR’s betting house to gamble our leftover pocket money aggressively on the virtual soccer game. It ran a Pro Evolution Soccer 04-like game for predicting goals and stuff. Surprisingly we used to win a lot and would rush to Sizzla’s, a fast food outlet about five minutes away from the bet house. We had become regulars there.
Looking at Changamire boasting and glowing with his winnings every day gave me a severe case of FOMO. His specialty was the Aviator game. He played it as if he was behind the algorithm altogether. I thought the house always wins? Yes, Changamire did lose here and there but most of the time he ended up on the winning side. Alas, he had MWOR’s in a chokehold. So soon my mansion would be done. He flashed his cell phone in front of me: 3,152 US dollars!
So people’s lives are actually changing with this betting thing. One night I slipped out fifty bucks from my savings and decided to be fruitful and multiply. That fifty flew away together with the aviator plane. I went back to my gambling sabbatical.
A few weeks rolled by and Changamire wasn’t vocal about his winnings anymore. There was a silence to it.
“Njuga dzikuita here?”
“Yes, boss! Same old, same old…”
“Well good for you!”
He never left his phone though, with the Aviator tune filtering into the room all day… Something about this was unsettling. He never let the game get ahead of work but it now seemed the case.
I didn’t bother to question him; I mean, if he was making more money from Aviator, what’s the point of buckling down and working this hard? But sometimes there was an odd bang of the desk and few rumblings which made me wonder.
***
“Give us our fucking money!”
I rushed to the office and glanced inside. Two men held Changamire by the collar. His lips were swollen and his eyes looked purple. I sneaked my way out to call for security by the reception.
Two guards went back to the office with me. The two men in there weren’t giving up easily. “We’re not leaving without our money!”
Changamire wasn’t giving up so easily. Seeing the guards in the room, he tried to use the numbers game to his advantage. He tried coming out swinging with punches but he has lost his balance and failed to land any of them.
A tussle ensued between the security guards and the two guys, it was royal rumble season already. Amidst all the chaos he tried to escape but he was shoved and fell badly on his head and was knocked out.
That’s when all the fighting stopped and the two men fled from the office. Our boss came and called the ambulance and we rushed him to the hospital.
I was beside Changamire when he regained consciousness. He immediately tried to lift his head but I told him to rest up. “What happened? Boss, who were those men?”
“My mother is terribly sick. She had a stroke!” A hemorrhagic stroke. Tears were trickling down Changamire’s cheeks. “Hospital bills! The EVD surgery along the doctor needed 5,000 dollars exclusive of the hospital expenses. Man, it’s been crazy, I was short on cash so I borrowed so that I may cushion. I gambled it all, young man, and I lost most of it. I thought by playing Aviator I could raise enough to cover the bills and pay off my debt. I lost…” He closed his eyes for a moment.
I was dumbfounded, that’s why he was so agitated for the past two weeks. “And the men that were at the office earlier, aren’t you going to press charges?”
”I can’t, young man. Those guys are my wife’s brothers…”
Well damn!!!
