The silence that descended upon the shop was heavier than the concrete slab that had killed his uncle. It was a dense, ringing silence, punctuated only by Adekunle's own ragged, shallow breaths. He sat on the floor, his back pressed hard against the workbench, the rough wood digging into his spine. He was trying to ground himself, to find a single, solid truth in a world that had just dissolved into impossible fiction. But the only truth was the one he was desperately trying to deny. He had pushed a monster, and it had flown.
He stared at his hands. They looked like his hands. The long, nimble fingers, the calloused palms, the faint tracing of grease in the creases of his knuckles. They were the hands that had taken apart and reassembled engines, the hands that had turned the pages of Plato, the hands that had held his aunt's as he'd helped her drink water. But now they felt like strangers. Worse, they felt like weapons. He could still feel a phantom energy thrumming in the muscles of his arms, a deep, unsettling vibration like the after-effect of a powerful electric shock.
He curled his fingers into tight fists, hiding them from his own sight. He wanted to disown them. He wanted to amputate them from his mind, to sever the connection between his will and the terrifying, alien strength that had just poured out of them. It was a violation. His body, the one thing he had ever truly owned, had betrayed him with a power he had never asked for and could not comprehend.
Across the room, his aunt Funke was a statue in the storeroom doorway. The fear on her face was undeniable, her eyes wide as she looked at him. But it was not the fear he expected. It was not the terror of a woman looking at a monster. It was a different fear, laced with something else he couldn't name. Awe. Shock. A profound, world-altering confusion.
The spell was finally broken by the mundane reality of their situation. A gust of wind, carrying the scent of the coming rain, blew through the jagged opening the demon had torn in the shutter. The bent steel flap groaned, a mournful, metallic sound. They were exposed. The invitation was open for the next scavenger, human or otherwise, to come calling.
"The door," Adekunle managed to say, his voice a hoarse, unfamiliar croak. The simple, practical task was a lifeline, an anchor in the storm of his unravelling sanity.
He forced himself to his feet, his legs trembling and unsteady, like a newborn foal's. He did not look at his aunt. He could not bear to see the look in her eyes. He felt like a leper, unclean, a thing to be feared. He grabbed the tyre iron from the floor, its familiar weight doing little to comfort him, and stumbled to the front of the shop.
The demon lay in a broken heap across the street, a crumpled, inhuman shape that was already beginning to be washed clean by the gentle rain that had started to fall. Adekunle refused to look at it. He focused on the shutter. The steel was bent outwards, a permanent, ugly scar. Using the tyre iron as a lever, he began the laborious process of trying to force it back into place. It was heavy, stubborn work. He jammed the bar into the gap and heaved, his muscles screaming—his own, human muscles, this time. The steel groaned but barely moved.
He heard a soft scraping sound behind him. It was Funke. She had dragged herself from the storeroom, using the edge of the display counters to pull herself along, her broken leg a dead weight. She ignored the excruciating pain, her face a mask of grim determination. She found a heavy chunk of a broken cinder block and began pushing it toward the front of the shop with her good leg.
"Here," she said, her voice strained. "We can wedge this in the gap. It will not be strong, but it will be a warning."
They worked together in a strange, unspoken truce. The conversation about the impossible event hung in the air between them, too large and terrifying to address directly. So they focused on the work. Adekunle would bend the metal a few inches, and Funke would shove the block of concrete further into the opening. It was a pathetic, flimsy repair, but it was something. It was an act of order in a world of chaos. It was a way to avoid looking at each other.
When they were finished, the opening was mostly blocked. It wouldn't stop a determined intruder, but it might deter a casual one. Adekunle stepped back, his chest heaving. Funke leaned against a counter, her face pale and beaded with sweat from the effort. The silence returned, more pregnant and heavy than before. There was nowhere left to hide from the topic.
It was Funke who finally broke it. She looked not at Adekunle, but at the spot on the floor where he had stood when he'd pushed the demon.
"It was God's power," she whispered, her voice filled with a trembling, fearful reverence. It wasn't a question. It was a declaration. A diagnosis. She was fitting the impossible thing she had witnessed into the only framework she had left.
"Auntie, don't…" Adekunle started, a desperate plea in his voice. He didn't want it to be named. To name it was to make it real.
"Do not be afraid, Kunle," she said, her eyes finally meeting his. The fear was still there, but beneath it was a fierce, rising tide of something else. Hope. A desperate, dangerous hope. "God has not abandoned us. I thought He had. But I was wrong. He did not take us in the Fall because He had a purpose for us. For you. He has given you a gift. A terrible, mighty gift."
"It's not a gift!" Adekunle snapped, the words tearing out of him, raw and full of anguish. He held up his trembling hands. "This isn't me! I don't know what that was! It felt… wrong. It felt like something else, something ancient and powerful, used my body like a tool." He looked at her, his eyes pleading for her to understand. "I'm not a prophet. I'm not a saint. I'm just… me."
"And who is that?" Funke challenged gently, her gaze unwavering. "A boy who can fix any engine? Who can feel the current in a wire? Your uncle always said you had a gift. He just did not know the shape of it." She took a painful, dragging step closer to him. "The world is broken. The old rules are gone. Perhaps God knew we would need new rules. New weapons." She looked toward the street, toward the dead demon. "He has given you the strength to fight the darkness. You must not be afraid of it."
Her faith was a fortress, solid and unshakable. She had found a box to put the miracle in, a box labeled "divine purpose." But for Adekunle, the philosopher, there was no box. There was only a terrifying, gaping hole in the fabric of reality. Was it God? Was it a side effect of the celestial war? Had the energies released in that battle saturated the earth, changing the very laws of physics, unlocking some latent potential in human DNA? His mind reeled with impossible theories, each one more terrifying than the last. Because if it wasn't God's power… then what was it? And was he the only one?
He felt a wave of profound, soul-crushing loneliness. He was, perhaps, the first citizen of a new and terrifying humanity, and there was no one to explain the rules.
He looked at his aunt, at the hope burning in her eyes, and he knew he could not shatter it. It was the only thing keeping her alive. So he gave a slow, uncertain nod, a silent lie that felt like a betrayal of his own terror.
"Okay, Auntie," he whispered. "Okay."
The conversation was over, but the gulf between them remained. She saw a holy weapon. He saw a monster in the mirror.
He helped her back to the relative comfort of the storeroom and immediately turned his attention to her leg. The task was a refuge. He cleaned the wound again, the antiseptic stinging his own raw hands. He laid out the precious antibiotic pills, the small white tablets a testament to the world they had lost, a world where such miracles were mass-produced.
"We can't stay here," he said, his voice flat and practical as he wrapped a clean bandage around her leg. "This place is compromised. We need somewhere else. Somewhere defensible. Somewhere high up."
His mind was already working, seeking the next logical problem to solve, the next wall to build between himself and the terrifying mystery of his own body. He thought of their flat. It was a prison, but it was a familiar one. It was on the third floor. It had a reinforced door.
"Our home," Funke said, echoing his thoughts. "We can go home."
The thought was both comforting and terrifying. It meant another journey through the dead city. It meant facing Ikenna's crew again, if they had returned. But the shop was a deathtrap. They had no choice.
He helped her take the pills, holding the water bottle for her as she drank. This was real. The cool plastic of the bottle, the weight of the tyre iron, the pain in his aunt's eyes, the burning in his own raw hands. This was the world he had to navigate. The impossible strength was a part of that world now. He didn't have to understand it. He just had to survive it. And he had to survive the man it belonged to: himself.
As he watched his aunt finally drift into a restless, pain-eased sleep, Adekunle sat in the darkness of the storeroom, the tyre iron across his lap. He did not look at his hands. He looked at the door, at the flimsy barricade they had erected, and he listened to the steady, drumming rain. He was a sentry, guarding his last remaining family member. But for the first time, he understood that the most dangerous threat might not be from the outside. The monster was already in the room. And he had to learn to live with it.