The world had become a single, ragged scream. It wasn't one voice but a thousand, a tapestry of terror woven from grief, confusion, and raw, animal fear. Adekunle felt his uncle's hand tighten on his shoulder, the knuckles digging into his flesh, a painful, grounding anchor in a sea of insanity. Ben wasn't looking at the street anymore; he was looking at Adekunle, his eyes wide, searching his nephew's face for an answer that wasn't there.
"In here. Now." Ben's voice was a low growl, rough and commanding. He yanked Adekunle backwards, pulling him from the doorway's threshold back into the dusty darkness of the shop.
The world outside was a nightmare painting, a snapshot of societal collapse. A car, its driver having vanished mid-turn, mounted the curb and plowed into the front of a pharmacy with a sickening crunch of metal and glass. People weren't just running anymore; they were running from each other, their faces contorted with a new kind of fear—the fear of the living.
With a strength Adekunle had never seen in him, Ben grabbed the heavy chain for the rolling security shutter. The metal door came rattling down, each slat a note in a descending scale of finality. It slammed into the concrete floor with a deafening clang, plunging the shop into a sudden, disorienting gloom. The cacophony of the street was instantly muffled, reduced to a distant, chaotic drumming against the metal shield. The only light came in thin, dusty stripes through the shutter's ventilation slits and from the pale glow of the workbench's magnifying lamp.
The silence inside was a different kind of loud. It was filled with the sound of their own breathing—Adekunle's quick and shallow, Ben's a deep, ragged wheeze.
"What was that?" Adekunle finally managed to say, the words feeling clumsy and useless in his mouth. "Uncle, what in God's name was that?"
"God has nothing to do with this," Ben snapped, his back pressed against the shutter as if holding the chaos at bay with his own body. "This is not God's work. This is… something else."
Adekunle's mind was a whirlwind. Plato's shadows, the empty clothes, the man who had simply been… deleted. "They just disappeared. They… evaporated."
"I saw it," Ben said, his voice tight. He ran a trembling hand over his face. "I saw it, but my mind… it does not want to accept it." He pushed himself away from the door and stumbled towards his workbench, his movements stiff and robotic. He sank onto his stool, his head in his hands. "All those people. All of them."
For a moment, they were just two men in a dark room, surrounded by broken electronics, the world outside falling apart. The immediate, primal fear began to subside, leaving a cold, heavy dread in its place. Adekunle felt a tremor start in his hands, a deep-seated vibration of shock. He clenched his fists, trying to stop it. He needed to think. Logic. Reason. That was his world. But there was no logic here.
"The phones," Adekunle said suddenly, fumbling in his pocket for his own mobile. The screen lit up, a small, hopeful beacon. Full bars. He tried to open a news app. Loading… He tried a social media app. A spinning circle. Nothing. The network was there, but the world behind it was gone. Overwhelmed. Broken. "The network is jammed. Nothing is getting through."
Ben looked up, his eyes seeming to focus for the first time. "The radio. The old one." He pointed a shaky finger towards a dusty shelf in the corner.
It was an ancient shortwave radio, a relic from his uncle's youth, with a thick telescopic antenna. Adekunle retrieved it, blew a layer of dust off its faux-wood casing, and twisted the knob. Static. He ran the dial up and down the bands, listening intently. Through the hiss and crackle, he caught snippets. A voice screaming in Igbo before being cut off. A frantic prayer in English. The faint sound of a siren that seemed to grow weaker, fading into nothingness. There were no broadcasters. No authorities. No one was in charge. There was only the sound of a world screaming into the void.
He turned it off. The silence was better.
"We have to stay here," Adekunle said, more to convince himself than his uncle. "Barricade the door. We wait."
"Wait for what?" Ben countered, his voice gaining a sliver of its old, gruff edge. "For the army? For the police? Look." He gestured towards the shutter. "There is no one coming to save us, Kunle. The people in charge are gone, too. Or they are hiding, just like us."
Ben's practicality was a slap of cold water. He was right. There was no cavalry. They were on their own.
Curiosity, morbid and irresistible, pulled Adekunle to the shutter. He pressed his eye to one of the thin ventilation slits, the cool metal a shock against his skin. His view was a narrow, distorted slice of the street outside. It had changed in the few minutes they had been inside. The initial shock had worn off, replaced by something uglier.
He saw a young man, no older than himself, use a rock to smash the window of the abandoned Lexus. He reached inside, not for a phone or a wallet, but for a half-empty bottle of water rolling on the passenger seat. Another man saw him and ran over, shoving him to the ground and snatching the bottle. They fought, two dogs over a scrap of meat, their faces twisted with a desperate, selfish fury. Adekunle watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the first man pulled a shard of glass from the broken window and lunged.
He recoiled from the shutter, a sick feeling rising in his throat.
"What is it?" Ben asked, seeing the look on his nephew's face.
"They're fighting," Adekunle said, his voice hollow. "They're already fighting each other." The rules were gone. The thin veneer of civilization had been stripped away in minutes, revealing the raw survival instinct beneath. His philosophical idea of shadows on a wall felt like a naive luxury now. The shadows had teeth.
Ben nodded slowly, a grim understanding dawning on his face. He stood up, his movements now more deliberate. He was no longer just a shocked old man; he was a survivor. "This shop is a trap," he said, his voice low and certain. "It is on a main road. It is filled with things people will want to steal. We cannot stay here. When the sun goes down… this place will be a target."
"So where do we go?"
"Home," Ben said, the word sounding like a prayer. "Our flat. It's on the third floor. Just one staircase. Easier to defend. And your Aunt Funke… I have to know if she is…" He couldn't finish the sentence. The thought was too terrible to voice.
Aunt Funke. The thought of her sent a fresh jolt of fear through Adekunle. She was supposed to be at the market. The bustling, shoulder-to-shoulder chaos of Tejuosho Market. How many people had been there? How many were left?
The decision was made. A single, terrifying goal in a world that had lost all direction: get home.
"Okay," Adekunle breathed, his mind starting to work, to plan. "Okay. Home."
For the next hour, they moved with grim purpose. The shop was no longer a place of business; it was an arsenal, a supply depot. Ben disappeared into the back and returned with two empty backpacks from a long-forgotten camping trip. They filled them with bottles of water from the small fridge and whatever packaged snacks they could find—biscuits, a few tins of sardines, a bag of groundnuts. It wasn't much.
Then came the weapons. There were no guns, but the shop was full of heavy, sharpened steel. Ben chose a long, heavy-duty tyre iron, its weight familiar in his hand. He swung it once, testing its balance. He looked like a warrior from another age. Adekunle searched the tool chest, his hands passing over screwdrivers and pliers. He found what he was looking for at the bottom: a long, solid steel file, a foot and a half long, its tip ground to a wicked point from years of sharpening blades. It felt cold and alien in his grasp. He had used it to repair machines. The thought of using it on a person made him feel sick, but he gripped it tighter.
They stood ready, two modern men reduced to the most primitive state. The sounds from outside had changed again. The screaming had subsided, replaced by sporadic shouts, the shattering of glass, and a new, terrifying sound: the triumphant roar of a mob.
Ben took a deep breath. "When I lift the shutter, we do not run. We walk. Do not look at anyone. Do not talk to anyone. We are ghosts. We move straight down the road, take the second left, and we do not stop for anything. Do you understand?"
Adekunle nodded, his mouth too dry to speak. His heart was a frantic, trapped bird in his chest.
"Stay close to me," Ben said, his voice softer now. He placed a hand on the shutter's chain. "Whatever happens, we do it together."
He pulled. The shutter screeched open, a cry of protest, rising just enough for a man to crouch and slip through. The light that flooded in was hazy, thick with dust and a strange, coppery tinge. The roar of the broken world washed over them.
Ben went first, crouching low and moving out with a speed that belied his age. Adekunle followed a second later, the pointed file held tight against his leg. He emerged from the gloom of the shop and straightened up, his eyes taking a second to adjust to the horrific new landscape.
The street was a warzone. Not of soldiers, but of scavengers. It was a world of breaking things, of taking things, of survival at its ugliest. And they had just stepped into the middle of it. The journey home had begun.