For a long time, they just lay there on the ground, two broken pieces of a forgotten world, gasping in the thin, metallic air. The silence was the most terrifying part. It was not a peaceful quiet; it was a dead quiet, the silence of a planet that had been bled out, its life force drained away. Adekunle pushed himself into a sitting position, his body a symphony of aches and pains, and looked at the sky. It was a uniform, jaundiced yellow, a colour he had never seen in nature. There were no clouds, no sun, just a sickly, oppressive dome of light that felt like the ceiling of a vast, sterile infirmary. A fine, grey ash, as soft as velvet, coated everything, muffling sound and turning the familiar shapes of the yard into ghostly, monochrome suggestions.
His aunt lay beside him, her face pale, her lips tinged with blue, her breathing a shallow, painful rhythm. Her eyes were fixed on the yellow sky, but Adekunle knew she wasn't seeing it. She was seeing the face of the man who wasn't there with them.
"We have to move, Auntie," he said, his voice a raw whisper. "We can't stay in the open."
Funke didn't seem to hear him. A single tear traced a clean path through the grime on her cheek. "He's down there," she whispered, her voice cracking. "All alone in the dark."
The grief, which Adekunle had been holding at bay with the sheer physical effort of their escape, threatened to overwhelm him. He wanted to lie down next to her, to give in to the crushing weight of their loss, to let the yellow sky bear witness to their final surrender. But his uncle's face swam in his memory—Ben's face in that last second, not of fear, but of fierce, protective determination. He could not fail that memory.
"I know," he said, his own voice thick with unshed tears. "But he is not there. He is with us. He got us out. Now we have to finish the job." He reached out and squeezed her hand. "We have to live. For him."
His words seemed to reach her. She turned her head and looked at him, her eyes focusing for the first time. She saw the gash on his forehead, the raw, bleeding skin of his hands, the exhausted resolve in his expression. She gave a slow, pained nod. The survivor in her, the woman who had crawled home through the first hours of the Fall, was not gone. She was just buried under a mountain of sorrow.
Their old shop was the only logical choice for shelter. It was close, familiar. The back door stood ajar, just as they had left it what felt like a lifetime ago. Getting there was an agonizingly slow process. Adekunle found the tyre iron in the debris near their escape hole and used it as a makeshift crutch for his aunt. Every step was a fresh wave of agony for her, her face beaded with sweat, her teeth gritted against the pain. Adekunle bore most of her weight, his own aching body screaming in protest. The twenty-foot journey from the hole to the back door of the shop felt like a mile-long trek across a hostile, alien landscape.
They finally stumbled through the open back door and into the shop's storeroom. Inside, the darkness was a relief, a respite from the sickly yellow glare of the sky. The air was cool and still held the faint, familiar scent of their old lives. Adekunle gently lowered his aunt to the floor, propping her back against a sturdy shelf.
"I'll find some water," he said.
Most of their carefully stockpiled supplies were buried in the shelter, but he knew his uncle. Ben was a man of redundancies. He always kept a few spare bottles of water hidden in the shop for emergencies. Adekunle found them under the workbench, right where he knew they would be. He opened one and helped Funke drink, the cool water a blessing on her cracked lips.
In the relative safety of the storeroom, with the door to the ruined world pulled shut, Adekunle finally had a chance to properly examine her leg. He used the crank flashlight, its beam now seeming pathetically weak compared to the memory of the shelter's bright LEDs. The sight made his stomach clench. The crude splint had held, but the area around the break was swollen to twice its normal size and had taken on a dark, bruised, purplish hue. A faint, foul odour was rising from it. Infection. Deep and aggressive. The antibiotics in his backpack were no longer a preventative measure; they were a desperate, last-ditch defense against a battle her body was already losing.
He found the backpack he had carried, its contents mercifully intact. He laid out the boxes of medicine, the bandages, the antiseptic wipes. He worked with a clumsy focus, cleaning the area around the wound as best he could, applying a fresh, sterile dressing, and laying out the first dose of pills.
"You have to take these, Auntie," he said, his voice firm. "All of them."
She swallowed the pills with a sip of water, her eyes never leaving his face. "You are a good boy, Kunle," she whispered. "You are so much like him."
The comparison was a fresh stab of grief, but it also solidified his resolve. He would not let her die. He would be the man his uncle had raised him to be.
They spent the first hour in a state of exhausted quiet. But as the initial adrenaline of their escape wore off, a new, more pressing need made itself known. Hunger. A deep, gnawing emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Their few tins of food were buried with his uncle. They had nothing.
"I'm going to look in the main shop," he announced, grabbing the tyre iron. "There might be something left."
"Be careful," Funke whispered, her eyes full of a new fear. "The man… the one who was here before."
Adekunle had almost forgotten. The mad king of the junk fortress. He nodded grimly. He pushed open the door to the main shop floor and stepped through, the tyre iron held ready.
The shop was a wreck. The man's barricade was still there, a monument to his shattered mind, but he was gone. Had he fled during the chaos of the war? Or had he been taken by it? Adekunle didn't know, and he found he didn't care. He swept the beam of his flashlight across the room, searching. The place had been picked over before, but he hoped some small thing might have been missed. He found a half-empty packet of stale biscuits behind a counter, and a single, forgotten tin of corned beef that had rolled under a workbench. It was a feast.
He was about to turn back when a flicker of movement outside the front shutter caught his eye. He froze, his heart instantly pounding. He crept to the ventilation slit and peered through.
The street was no longer empty. Something was out there.
It was loping down the center of the road, moving with a strange, unnatural gait. At first, Adekunle thought it was one of the feral dogs, but as it drew closer, he saw that it was something else. It was humanoid, but its limbs were too long, its back hunched. Its skin was the colour of dried blood, stretched taut over a frame that was both skeletal and powerfully muscled. Its head was long and narrow, like a dog's, and its eyes glowed with a faint, internal embers of malevolent orange light. It was a demon. A scavenger. One of the things that had been left behind.
It stopped, its head tilting, its nostrils flaring as if tasting the air. It was gaunt, starving, its movements twitchy with a desperate hunger. It was a survivor, just like them.
And it had caught their scent.
The creature turned its head and its glowing eyes seemed to lock directly onto the shop, onto the tiny slit where Adekunle was hiding. It let out a low, chittering sound, a noise that was halfway between the excited yip of a dog and the clicking of a thousand insects. Then, it began to move toward them, its pace quickening from a lope to a predatory, ground-eating sprint.
"Auntie!" Adekunle yelled, stumbling back from the shutter. "It's coming! Something is coming!"
He rushed back to the storeroom, his mind a whirlwind of pure terror. They were trapped. The demon was outside, and it knew they were in here. He could hear it now, scratching and clawing at the heavy steel shutter, the sound of metal on metal sharp and piercing.
He pushed his aunt further into the back of the storeroom, shielding her with his body. He stood in the doorway, the tyre iron held in a two-handed grip, his knuckles white. The scratching stopped. It was replaced by a new sound. A heavy, rhythmic thump… thump… thump. The creature was trying to shoulder the door down. The whole frame of the shop shuddered with each impact. It was immensely strong.
Funke was praying behind him, her voice a low, desperate mantra. Adekunle stared at the front of the shop, waiting for the metal to buckle, for the beast to burst through. This was how it ended. After everything they had survived, they would be torn apart by a single, starving monster.
The thumping suddenly stopped. A new sound began. The high-pitched screech of metal being bent. The demon had found a weakness at the edge of the shutter and was peeling it back with its claws.
A sliver of jaundiced yellow light appeared at the side of the door, then widened as the steel bent further. A clawed, three-fingered hand, black as tar, slipped through the gap.
Adekunle felt something snap inside him. The terror, the grief, the despair—it all coalesced into a single, white-hot point of pure, unadulterated rage. This thing would not touch his family. It would not take the last person he had left in the world.
He didn't remember making the decision to move. One moment he was standing frozen in the storeroom doorway, the next he was charging across the shop floor, a roar tearing from his own throat that was as savage and full of hate as any demon's.
The creature had managed to pull the shutter back just enough to force its head and one shoulder through the gap. It was halfway inside, its glowing orange eyes fixing on him, a low snarl rumbling in its chest.
Adekunle didn't swing the tyre iron. He didn't think to use the weapon in his hands. His actions were pure, primal instinct. He just needed to get it away from them. He ran the last few feet and slammed his open hands into the demon's chest in a desperate, two-handed shove.
The impact was not what he expected.
It felt less like pushing flesh and bone and more like pushing a train. There was a sensation of immense, irresistible energy flowing from his core, down his arms, and out through his palms. It was not his own strength. It was something else. Something vast and powerful and terrifying.
The demon, which should have been knocked back a step, was instead launched from the opening as if it had been struck by a speeding car. It flew backward, its body a blur, and slammed into the burnt-out husk of the car on the other side of the street with a sound like a wrecking ball hitting a wall of sheet metal. Its body crumpled, its limbs twisting at impossible angles. It didn't move again.
Adekunle stumbled to a halt, his arms tingling with a strange, residual energy, a pins-and-needles sensation that went all the way to the bone. He stared out through the bent shutter at the mangled, broken form of the demon across the street. He looked down at his own hands. They were just hands. A student's hands. A mechanic's hands. They were trembling violently.
What had he just done? That wasn't possible. It wasn't humanly possible.
He stumbled back, away from the door, his mind reeling, unable to process the event. He tripped over a piece of debris and fell to the floor, scrambling backward until his back hit the wall of his uncle's workbench. He sat there, shaking, staring at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. They were the hands of a monster.
He looked up and saw his aunt in the doorway of the storeroom, her face a mask of awe, terror, and something else he couldn't name. She had seen it all.
He had saved them. But in that single, impossible act, the world, which had already been broken beyond repair, was suddenly filled with a new and far more terrifying mystery. The most dangerous thing in this dead world wasn't the demons, or the starvation, or the poison sky.
It was him.