Chapter 2: What We Carried
December 26, 2016 – The Morning After
The silence was a living thing, heavy and thick with the smell of iron and open ruin. We stood in our doorway, a fragile huddle of five, staring out at a world that had been unmade in twelve hours.
Papa was the first to move. He stepped onto the porch, his slippers crunching on broken glass. His shoulders, usually so broad and sure, were slumped. He picked up a piece of our shattered window, turned it over in his hand, and let it fall.
"We cannot stay here," he said, his voice low and final.
The house was a shell. The front windows were blown in. The kitchen was a wreck of overturned furniture and congealed, dark stains that weren't there yesterday. The monster—the thing that had scratched at our basement door—had taken the Christmas turkey, bones and all.
"We have to," Mama whispered, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. "It's our home."
"It's a tomb," Ade said, his voice cracking. He still held the kitchen knife. "They were inside, Mama. They know it's here. They'll come back."
Ngozi began to cry again, a soft, hopeless sound. That decided it.
Papa's eyes met mine. "Emeka. Ade. We move. Now."
The Inventory
Survival, we quickly learned, was about weight and worth.
We took Papa's old military duffel bag. We filled it with what mattered:
· Four bottles of water.
· A bag of rice, half-empty.
· Cans of beans and sardines.
· The remaining plantains, now bruised and blackening.
· A first-aid kit from under the sink.
· Papa's hammer and a crowbar.
We left behind:
· Photograph albums.
· Ade's new phone case.
· My comics.
· Ngozi's favorite stuffed rabbit, Mr. Hoppington.
She didn't argue. She just stared at Mr. Hoppington lying on her ruined bed, her small face a mask of quiet understanding that no child should ever have to wear. I grabbed the toy at the last second and shoved it into the bag. Survival needed a soul, too.
Stepping outside was like walking into a nightmare painting. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Mr. Adebayo, who always gave us extra sweets, was half-tumbled out of his car. The street was littered with abandoned vehicles, some crushed, others smeared with that same dark, viscous fluid we'd seen on the creatures.
We saw our first dead monster near the Okonkwo's fence. It was smaller than the others, dog-sized, with spindly, multi-jointed legs and a head that was mostly a circular maw of needle-teeth. Its carapace was cracked open, oozing black ichor. Ade poked it with his crowbar. It didn't move.
"Don't touch it," Papa snapped, pulling him back. "We don't know what they are. We don't know anything."
We moved in a tight formation, sticking to the shadows of broken walls. The only sounds were the wailing of a few survivors and the far-off, desperate pop-pop of gunfire. The world hadn't ended with a bang, but with a series of whimpers and screams, now fading into a shocked, suffocating silence.
We reached the main road. Chaos. People ran in every direction, clutching bags, children, nothing. A group of soldiers had set up a makeshift checkpoint, their faces grim behind sandbags.
"Citizens! Remain calm! Proceed in an orderly fashion to the National Stadium! It's a designated safe zone!" one yelled through a megaphone.
It was a lifeline. Order. Safety. Mama's face lit with a flicker of hope.
Then, we saw the price of that hope. The road to the stadium was a clogged river of panic. Cars were gridlocked, horns blaring uselessly. People were fighting, scrambling over vehicles. And above it all, we could see plumes of black smoke rising from the direction of the stadium itself.
It was a bottleneck. A trap.
A man ran past us, his clothes torn, his eyes wide with terror. "They're in the crowd!" he screamed at no one in particular. "They're just... appearing when the fighting starts! The red mist... it comes with the anger!"
Papa froze, his eyes scanning the chaotic scene. He saw what I saw: thousands of people, packed together, terrified, angry. A perfect hunting ground.
He looked at Mama, at Ngozi clinging to her leg, at Ade's pale, determined face, at me.
He made a choice.
He turned his back on the soldiers, on the megaphone, on the illusion of order.
"We are not going there," he said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "We go into the city. We find a place to hide. Somewhere small. Somewhere strong."
He pointed away from the crowd, towards the dense, skeletal skyline of the inner city. It looked dark and foreboding.
"But... the army is there," Mama pleaded.
"The army is drawing a crowd," Papa corrected, his voice grim. "And crowds draw them."
As if to punctuate his words, a new sound cut through the din—not a monster's shriek, but the sharp, percussive burst of automatic gunfire, followed by a fresh wave of screams from the direction of the stadium.
We didn't look back. We turned our backs on the promised safe zone and walked, a single family unit, into the corpse of the city we once knew. We were alone, armed with a hammer, a crowbar, and the desperate, terrifying knowledge that the only people we could trust were the five of us. The rules were gone. All that was left was what we could carry, and what we were willing to do to keep it.