The world Adekunle stepped into was painted in shades of grey and orange. A thick, acrid smoke coiled from a burning car down the street, mixing with the dust kicked up by running feet and the hazy afternoon sunlight, which now seemed filtered through a dirty, rust-coloured lens. The air was hot and tasted of burning plastic and something else, something metallic and vaguely sweet, like old blood. The roar he had heard from inside the shop was not one coherent sound, but a thousand different tragedies happening at once. A woman's sharp, piercing shriek was swallowed by the guttural roar of a mob a block away, which in turn was punctuated by the rhythmic, percussive crash of someone breaking into a shuttered storefront.
His uncle's words echoed in his mind. We are ghosts.
Ben moved with a purpose that bordered on aggression. He didn't run, but his walk was a rapid, ground-eating stride, the heavy tyre iron held low at his side. Adekunle followed a step behind, his knuckles white around the cold steel of the file. The weapon felt like a foreign object, a cancerous growth on his hand. Every instinct screamed at him to drop it, yet a deeper, more primal part of him refused to let go.
His eyes darted everywhere, trying to process everything at once. He saw the detritus of the vanished: a single designer shoe lying in the middle of the road; a child's bright pink backpack, its contents spilled across the pavement; a wig, its synthetic hair collecting dust next to a toppled cart of yams. These were the quiet horrors. The loud ones were the people who remained. They moved like sharks in a feeding frenzy, their eyes wide with a manic energy that was part terror, part predatory glee. They were the ones who had immediately understood that all the rules were gone.
A man sprinted past them, a brand-new television clutched to his chest, its power cord trailing behind him like a tail. He didn't give them a second glance. They were not a threat, and they did not have anything he wanted. In this new world, that was the only social contract that mattered.
"Left here," Ben grunted, pulling Adekunle sharply down a narrower side street. The main road was a river of chaos; this was a quieter, more menacing tributary. Here, the sounds were more muffled, the destruction more personal. The fronts of houses had been torn open, their contents spilling out. A generator, prized more than gold, had been ripped from its cage, leaving behind only snapped chains.
This street was eerily quiet. The silence was a different kind of threat. On the main road, the danger was obvious and loud. Here, it felt like it was hiding, watching from the shadows of the narrow alleyways that cut between the houses. They walked down the center of the street, avoiding the tight spaces, their footsteps crunching on broken glass.
Adekunle's senses were on fire. He felt like an exposed nerve. The faint scrape of metal on concrete from a nearby alley made him flinch, his grip tightening on the file. He saw a curtain twitch in a second-story window and imagined a pair of eyes watching them, judging them. Was this what it felt like to be prey?
They passed an alleyway that stank of refuse and despair. Huddled in the back, behind a rusted, overflowing skip, was a small group of people. Five of them. They weren't fighting or looting. They were just… sitting. An old woman was rocking back and forth, humming a tuneless, repetitive hymn under her breath. A young man in a clean white shirt stared at his own hands as if he'd never seen them before. They were the broken ones, the people whose minds had simply snapped when reality broke. Their eyes were vacant, glassy. They had witnessed the impossible, and it had hollowed them out.
Adekunle felt a pang of something—pity, maybe, or a strange kind of kinship. He, too, felt the pull of that catatonic despair, the desire to just sit down and wait for it all to be over.
"Don't look," Ben ordered, his voice low but firm. He hadn't even turned his head, but he knew. He knew his nephew. "They are gone already. Looking at them will only pull you down, too."
Ben was right. Adekunle tore his gaze away, his heart a cold, heavy lump in his chest. He focused on his uncle's back, on the deliberate, steady rhythm of his steps. One foot in front of the other. That was all that mattered.
As they neared the end of the street, a sudden roar of shouts erupted from the main road ahead. A mob. Bigger and louder than the others. They were swarming over a large electronics store, tearing at its reinforced shutters with crowbars and their bare hands.
Ben pulled Adekunle back into the relative shadow of a doorway without a word. They watched from the edge of the side street, hidden from view. There were maybe thirty of them, men and a few women, their faces contorted in masks of savage effort. The shutter finally gave way with a groan of tortured metal, and they poured inside like ants into a sugar bowl. Shouts of triumph were followed by the crash of breaking display cases.
But then something else happened. Another group, armed with machetes and planks of wood, appeared from the other direction. They were not looters. They were protectors. Vigilantes. They descended on the looters still outside the store, and the street exploded into a whirlwind of brutal, primitive violence. A man's shout of joy turned into a wet scream of pain.
Adekunle watched, frozen, as a man swung a plank of wood studded with nails into another's side. He saw the flash of a machete in the hazy sunlight. His mind, the mind that could contemplate Plato and trace complex circuits, couldn't process the raw, visceral reality of it. This was not a movie. It was real. The man with the plank was screaming, not with rage, but with a kind of righteous fury, as if he believed he was defending the last bastion of civilization with his crude weapon. Perhaps, in his own mind, he was.
"Now," Ben whispered urgently. While the two groups were locked in their bloody struggle, he darted across the mouth of the street, keeping to the far side, using the chaos as cover. Adekunle followed, his legs feeling weak and unsteady. He kept his eyes down, focused on the broken pavement, on the blood that was already beginning to pool in the cracks. He could smell it now, sharp and coppery.
They made it across, melting into another side street on the other side. They didn't stop moving for another ten minutes, their pace even faster now, fueled by the fresh horror of what they had witnessed. They navigated the maze of residential streets, a grim parody of their usual walks home. These were the streets where Adekunle had played football as a child, where he had learned to ride a bicycle. Now they felt like an alien landscape, a hunting ground.
Finally, they turned a corner, and a wave of dizzying, sickening relief washed over Adekunle. It was his street. Their street.
But the relief was short-lived. His home, a three-story block of flats, was still standing, but the street was not the sanctuary he had prayed for. The gate to their compound had been torn from its hinges. A few flats on the ground floor had had their windows smashed. And standing near the entrance to their stairwell was a small group of men. Four of them. They weren't looting. They were just standing there, watching the building, their faces hard and calculating. They held pipes and pieces of wood. They weren't a mindless mob. They were organized. They were waiting.
They were claiming the building as their own.
And Aunt Funke, if she had made it back from the market, was somewhere inside.
Ben saw them, too. He stopped abruptly, pulling Adekunle behind the corner of the last building. He peered around the edge, his face grim. The easy part of their journey was over. They were home, but they couldn't get in. Not without going through them.
"They've taken the ground floor" Ben whispered, his voice barely audible over the distant sounds of the dying city. "They are waiting for dark. Then they will go up. Floor by floor."
Adekunle looked from the men at the gate to his uncle's hardened face, then down at the useless-feeling steel file in his hand. They had made it home, only to find the war waiting for them on their own doorstep.