A month. Four weeks. A lifetime. The passage of time was marked not by a calendar, but by the slow, inexorable drop of the water level in their last few bottles. The world outside their sealed apartment had fallen into a strange, grim routine, a rhythm Adekunle had come to know with the intimacy of a prisoner studying the cracks in his cell wall.
The morning would begin with the sickly, jaundiced light filtering through the gaps in the curtains, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the stale air. This was when the gang downstairs—the "New Men," as Funke called them in hushed, fearful tones—were quietest, sleeping off whatever cheap gin or palm wine they had scavenged the day before. This was Adekunle's time. He would move through the flat like a ghost, checking the bell-traps on the windows, reinforcing the brace on the door, his movements economical and silent. He was the keeper of the castle, the warden of their three-room world.
His aunt was his partner in this quiet existence. The antibiotics, a miracle of the old world, had fought the infection back from the brink. The fever had broken after a week of terrifying, delirious nights, but her leg was a ruin. The bone was knitting, but crookedly, and she would never walk on it properly again. Using the tyre iron as a crutch, she would move about the flat, her face a constant mask of managed pain. She had taken over the rationing, her sharp mind portioning out their dwindling food supply—a quarter of a tin of corned beef, a handful of dry biscuits—with a miser's precision. She would pray, her rosary beads clicking softly in the gloom, her faith no longer a thing of joyous certainty, but a stubborn, desperate negotiation with a silent God.
Adekunle's power, the terrifying strength in his hands, was a ghost he refused to acknowledge. He never spoke of it. He never tested it. He suppressed the memory of it with a fierce, willful denial. When he lifted something heavy, he made sure to feel the strain, the human burn in his muscles. He lived in constant, quiet terror of a single moment of anger or fear triggering that alien force again. The monster was in the room, and he spent every waking moment pretending it wasn't there, hoping that by ignoring it, he could starve it into submission.
His primary focus, his obsession, was the enemy below. He had spent hundreds of hours at his post by the window, a silent, unseen anthropologist studying a new and brutal tribe. He knew their faces, if not their names. There was the leader, the one with the machete, a man whose name was apparently "Jago." He was a creature of moods—sometimes prone to long, brooding silences, other times erupting in sudden, terrifying violence against his own men. There was Ikenna, the rat, who had survived by becoming Jago's sycophant, his informant, his whipping boy. And there were three others, nameless, interchangeable thugs who followed Jago with a mixture of fear and admiration. They would make runs every two or three days, returning with scavenged goods, their loud, triumphant shouts echoing up the stairwell, a constant reminder of the life and resources that were beyond their reach.
Life in the castle on the third floor was a slow, grinding attrition. The greatest enemy was not Jago, but monotony. They spoke in low whispers, their world shrinking to the confines of the dusty, twilight rooms. They told each other stories of the old world, of market days and university lectures, talking about them as if they were ancient history, myths from another civilization. The silence was a constant companion, broken only by the whispers of their stories and the faint, menacing sounds of the New Men filtering up from below.
The crisis came on a Monday. Adekunle knew it was Monday because it was the day Funke always unstitched the hem of one of Ben's old shirts to retie the splint on her leg. He went to the kitchen, to the carefully arranged row of water bottles, and picked up the last full one. He unscrewed the cap and poured a small, rationed amount into two cups. He looked at the bottle. It was now half-empty. He looked at the next bottle in the line. There wasn't one.
The empty space on the shelf was a void, a black hole that threatened to swallow the last of their hope. He stood there for a long time, staring at the space where a bottle should have been. This was it. The end of the line. By his calculations, they had perhaps two days of water left. Maybe three, if they were careful. After that, thirst would begin its slow, agonizing work.
He took the cups into the living room. Funke was sitting by the window, darning a sock with a surprising look of peaceful concentration. She looked up as he approached and saw the look on his face. She didn't need him to say a word. She looked past him, toward the kitchen, toward the empty space on the shelf. Her face, which had gained a little colour in the past weeks, seemed to pale.
"How long?" she asked, her voice quiet, devoid of panic.
"Two days," he replied, his own voice flat.
They sat in silence for a long time, the truth of their situation settling over them like a shroud. The fortress had protected them, but it had also been their cage, and the cage was about to become a coffin.
"The roof," Funke said finally, her gaze moving upward. "After the war… it rained so hard. Your uncle's big water tank. The one he set up to catch the rainwater for his garden. Is it still there?"
Adekunle's mind leaped at the idea. The roof. Of course. It was a large, flat space, and his uncle, ever the prepared one, had installed a huge, thousand-litre plastic water tank, connecting it to the gutters. It was designed to be a passive irrigation system for the small vegetable garden he had always dreamed of starting. After the weeks of intermittent rain, it must be full. The thought was a splash of cold water on his parched hope.
But then came the reality. The only access to the roof was through a locked metal hatch on the fourth-floor landing—the roof of the stairwell. To get to it, they would have to leave the safety of their flat. They would have to re-enter the stairwell, the echo chamber that carried every sound, and go up, past the very top of the building, a place they had never been.
"Jago's men," Adekunle said, voicing the immediate obstacle. "They use the stairs. We hear them. If we open our door, they will hear the locks."
"Then we do what you did before," Funke said, her eyes now gleaming with a fierce, desperate intelligence. "We do it when they are gone. You said they go out every two or three days. We watch. We wait for our chance. When they leave, we make our move."
The plan was simple. Terrifying. But it was a plan. It was action. It was better than sitting here, waiting to die of thirst.
The next two days were the longest of Adekunle's life. They watched the gang's movements with an almost unbearable intensity. Every time the men gathered near the front of the building, Adekunle's heart would begin to pound, hoping this was the day. But they would disperse, returning to their drunken stupor in the ground-floor flat.
On the third day, it happened. In the early afternoon, Jago emerged, shouting orders. The men gathered, armed with their pipes and machetes. They were going on a run. Adekunle and Funke watched from behind the curtain as all five of them left the compound, their confident laughter echoing down the street as they disappeared from view.
The moment they were gone, the clock started ticking. They could be gone for hours, or they could be back in minutes.
"Now," Adekunle said.
They moved with a practiced, silent efficiency. Adekunle grabbed his small arsenal—the tyre iron, the file. Funke handed him two empty five-litre water containers. The red toolbox lay in the corner, a silent, heavy reminder of another desperate journey. He wouldn't need it this time.
He went to the front door, his hands shaking slightly as he began to reverse the process of lubricating the locks. The silence of the building was now their ally, but it was also a canvas upon which any mistake, any scrape or click, would be a scream. He worked with agonizing slowness, his ears straining, listening for the sound of returning footsteps.
One lock. Two. Three. The door was open.
He stepped out onto the third-floor landing, into the cool, stale air of the stairwell. It felt like stepping onto another planet. He looked down the dark, spiraling abyss of the stairs. Nothing. He looked up. A single flight of stairs, shrouded in shadow, led to the fourth-floor landing and the roof hatch.
He turned back and gave his aunt a thumbs-up. He saw her face in the crack of the door, her expression a mixture of terror and desperate hope.
"Lock it behind me," he whispered. "Don't open it for any reason until you hear my signal."
She nodded, her eyes wide.
He heard the soft, oiled clicks as she re-engaged the locks. He was alone. Trapped in the stairwell. If the gang returned now, he would be caught between them and a locked door.
He didn't let himself think about it. He turned and began the ascent to the roof, his empty water containers banging softly against his leg, the sound a frantic, lonely drumbeat marking the beginning of his desperate quest for water.