Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a violent, hacking cough. Adekunle's lungs burned, each breath a struggle against a thick, cloying dust that tasted of pulverized concrete and dry earth. His head throbbed with a dull, concussive rhythm, and a sticky wetness was matted in the hair above his temple. For a long, disorienting moment, he had no idea where he was. There was only darkness—a blackness so absolute it felt like being buried alive—and a crushing weight on his legs.
Then memory returned, a series of fractured, nightmarish images: the impossible note of the trumpet, the shelter heaving, the ceiling cracking open to reveal a sky of fire and chaos, and his uncle's final, desperate shove.
Ben.
The name was a silent scream in his mind, and it shocked him into full awareness. He pushed himself up, his arms trembling with a weakness that felt profound. The weight on his legs was a fallen shelving unit, its metal bent and twisted. He managed to wriggle free, his muscles screaming in protest.
"Auntie?" he called out, his voice a raw, dusty croak. "Auntie Funke?"
A low moan answered him from nearby. It was a sound of pure, undiluted pain, but it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of life.
He scrambled in the direction of the moan, his hands feeling their way through a landscape of debris and ruin. His fingers brushed against a tangle of hair, then a shoulder. "Auntie, it's me. It's Adekunle."
"My leg…" she whimpered from the darkness. "I think… I think it's broken."
He needed light. The thought was a desperate, primal urge. He began crawling, his hands sweeping across the floor, searching for the crank-powered flashlight his uncle had dropped. His fingers closed around its familiar, solid shape. He fumbled for the handle and began to crank, the whirring sound a small, hopeful noise in the vast, oppressive silence. A weak, flickering beam cut through the dust-filled air.
He aimed the light at his aunt. She was half-buried under a pile of fallen sacks of garri and a section of the collapsed ceiling. Her left leg was trapped beneath a large chunk of concrete, twisted at an unnatural angle. Her face, pale and caked with dust, was a mask of agony.
But his eyes were drawn to what lay just beyond her. The main section of the ceiling had collapsed, creating a massive pile of rubble, concrete, and earth that now dominated the center of the shelter. And beneath it, protruding from the debris, was a single, still hand.
Time seemed to stop. Adekunle stared at the hand, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. It was a strong hand, a mechanic's hand, with calloused fingers and oil permanently etched into the lines of the palm. He knew that hand better than his own. It was the hand that had taught him how to hold a soldering iron, the hand that had steadied him on his first bicycle, the hand that had rested on his shoulder in moments of both pride and sorrow.
He crawled closer, the beam of the flashlight shaking violently. He reached out and touched the fingers. They were cold. Not with the chill of the damp shelter, but with the profound, irreversible coldness of absolute stillness.
He didn't scream. He didn't cry. The grief was too immense, too seismic to be contained in a simple sound. It was a vast, silent emptiness that opened up inside him, a void that mirrored the one the world had become. His uncle, the pragmatist, the survivor, the man who had prepared his entire life for the end of the world, had been killed by it. He had not been taken by the Fall, or by demons, or by the war itself. He had been killed by a simple, brutal equation of gravity and mass. A rock had fallen on him. The sheer, banal tragedy of it was the cruelest cut of all.
A sharp cry of pain from his aunt snapped him out of his trance. The living needed him. The dead could wait.
"We have to get you out," he said, his voice sounding hollow and distant to his own ears.
He turned his attention to her trapped leg. The chunk of concrete was too heavy to lift. He would need leverage. The tools. The red metal box. He swept the beam of light around the ruined shelter. The box was half-buried near the far wall, its red paint a slash of colour in the monochrome devastation. He scrambled over, his movements clumsy with grief, and unlatched it. Inside, the tools lay pristine and orderly, a small island of perfect logic in a sea of chaos. He grabbed the longest, sturdiest tool he could find: the heavy-duty tyre iron.
Using a smaller piece of rubble as a fulcrum, he wedged the chisel end of the bar under the slab of concrete. He put all of his weight on it, his muscles straining, his teeth gritted. The slab shifted, just an inch, but it was enough. Funke screamed as the pressure on her leg changed, a sound that was half pain, half relief. Adekunle repositioned the tyre iron and heaved again. The slab lifted higher, and Funke, with a final, agonized gasp, pulled her leg free.
He helped her to a relatively clear spot on the floor and examined the injury in the dim light. The leg was clearly broken, the bone jutting at a sharp, unnatural angle beneath the skin. A simple fracture was now a life-threatening emergency. He found one of the first-aid kits in the debris and did his best to immobilize the leg, splinting it with two flat pieces of metal from a broken shelf and wrapping it tightly with bandages. It was a crude, clumsy effort, but it was all he could do.
They huddled together in the ruins of their sanctuary, two survivors in a freshly dug grave. The air was growing thin, the dust making every breath a painful effort. The silence was absolute. The war was over. The world was gone. And the door, their only way out, was completely buried under tons of collapsed earth and concrete.
They were trapped.
For a day, they did nothing. Grief was a thick, paralyzing fog. They drank a little water, ate nothing. They spoke little. Funke wept softly, her grief a quiet, constant presence. Adekunle sat staring at the pile of rubble that was his uncle's tomb, his mind a hollow, silent place. The sheer finality of it all was overwhelming. This was the end. They would run out of air, or water, and they would die here, in the dark, at the bottom of the world.
It was Funke who broke the spell. On the second day, her voice, though weak, cut through the despair.
"Your uncle did not build this place for us to die in it," she said, her eyes finding his in the gloom. The pain of her leg was etched on her face, but beneath it was a flicker of the fierce, stubborn resilience he had always known in her. "He did not save us from the fire just so we could drown in the dust. He would want us to fight." She gestured with her chin toward the toolbox. "He left us the means. It would be a slap in his face not to use them."
Her words were a bucket of cold water. She was right. Surrender was a betrayal of his uncle's final act. Ben had died pushing them toward life. The least they could do was crawl in that direction.
A new, cold purpose settled over Adekunle. He would not let his uncle's sacrifice be for nothing. He would get them out, or he would die trying.
The work was a slow, brutal torture. The only way out was up. He began at the back wall, below the gaping crack in the ceiling where the sky had once been visible. The collapse had sealed it, but he reasoned it was their best chance. The earth there would be looser than the solid concrete of the walls. He had no shovel. He had his hands, and a small, flat piece of sheet metal he had broken off a ventilation duct.
He worked in shifts, dictated by the small crank flashlight. He would crank it for five minutes, giving himself enough light to work, then spend the next hour digging in near-total darkness, his hands clawing at the packed earth and rubble. Every handful of dirt, every small rock he moved, felt both futile and monumentally important. Funke, unable to move, became the watchman. She would encourage him, her voice a steady presence in the dark, telling him when to rest, when to drink, rationing their dwindling water supply with a firm hand.
Days blurred into one long night of digging. His hands became raw, his nails broken and bloody. His muscles screamed with a constant, fiery ache. He grew thin, his face gaunt. They spoke little, saving their breath, their energy focused on the single, all-consuming task. Sometimes, in the darkness, he would talk to his uncle, whispering questions into the gloom. What would you do now, Uncle? Am I doing this right? And in the silence, he would almost feel an answer, a sense of his uncle's pragmatic, steady guidance, a memory so strong it felt like a presence.
After what felt like a lifetime—it might have been four days, or five, he had lost count—his scooping hand hit something different. Not rock, not earth. It was soft. He dug faster, his heart beginning to pound with a wild, terrifying hope. He cleared away the dirt and saw it. A root. A thick, dark root from the old mango tree in the yard above.
He almost wept with relief. It was proof. Proof that the surface was near.
The root gave him new strength. He dug around it, his hands now frantic. Two hours later, his scooping fingers broke through into… nothing. A small pocket of air. A trickle of dusty, stale air from above flowed into their tomb.
He worked at the hole, widening it, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He finally managed to clear an opening large enough to stick his head through. He pushed himself up, his head and shoulders emerging from the ground like a man crawling from his own grave.
The world he saw was not the world he had left. The sky was not blue, or even the familiar grey of a Lagos storm. It was a thick, curdled, sickly yellow, as if the very air had been bruised. A strange, fine grey ash coated everything, like a layer of diseased snow. The air was thin and had a sharp, metallic tang, like the smell of a dying machine. The sun was a pale, impotent white disk behind the thick haze. And there was no sound. No wind. No birds. No insects. Only a silence so absolute, so profound, it felt like the silence of a vacuum.
He stared, his mind struggling to comprehend the sheer, utter desolation. This silent, poisoned world was what Heaven's victory looked like. This was what it meant to be left behind.
He pulled himself the rest of the way out and then, with painstaking effort, helped his aunt, her face a mask of agony as he dragged her through the narrow opening. They lay on the ashen ground, two broken creatures cast out of the earth, blinking in the jaundiced light of a dead world.
This was not a reprieve. This was not a rescue. It was just the beginning of a new, and far more terrible, kind of survival.