erstanding passed between uncle and nephew. They would go to the shop. The alternative—returning to the flat to watch Funke succumb to the poison in her veins—was not an alternative at all. It was an admission of defeat, and they were not defeated yet.
They moved away from the silent fortress of the Al-Hassan Superstore, melting back into the labyrinth of side streets. The journey back was a mirror image of their first escape, but the landscape of their fear had changed. Before, they were fleeing a known chaos. Now, they were walking toward one, their purpose a cold, hard stone in the pit of Adekunle's stomach. The world had been broken for three days. It was a long time. Long enough for new predators to claim territories, for new forms of desperation to take root.
Ben set a different course this time, a route that snaked even further away from the main thoroughfares. It took them through a district of half-finished buildings and abandoned construction sites, a ghost-world that had been empty long before the Fall. Here, skeletons of concrete and rebar clawed at the bruised evening sky. Stacks of cement bags had hardened into solid, useless lumps. Pools of stagnant, mosquito-infested water reflected the dying light. It was a desolate, eerie landscape that offered good cover but also a thousand places for an ambush to hide.
The silence here was different. It wasn't the watchful silence of the residential streets. It was the vast, empty silence of true abandonment. Adekunle felt exposed, his footsteps echoing unnaturally off the concrete shells. He found himself scanning the empty window frames of the unfinished buildings, imagining faces watching them pass.
They were halfway through the construction zone when a sound stopped them dead. It wasn't a human sound. It was a low, wet, guttural snarl that seemed to come from the ground itself. Ben pulled Adekunle behind a stack of cinder blocks, his hand gripping the tyre iron so tightly his knuckles were white. They peered over the edge.
In the middle of a wide, muddy foundation pit, maybe fifty yards away, was a pack of dogs. But they were not the familiar, skinny strays of old Lagos. These were massive, feral beasts, their coats matted with mud and blood. Their ribs showed, but their shoulders and jaws were thick with muscle. They were feasting on something large and dark in the mud, their snarls a chorus of savage satisfaction. They were the dogs that had been left behind, forgotten, and in three short days, starvation and the new laws of nature had stripped away any hint of domestication. They were wolves now. Wolves in a city of concrete.
Adekunle watched, mesmerized and horrified. This was another layer of the new world, another competitor in the food chain. He and his uncle were not just hiding from men; they were hiding from a world that was actively reverting to a more primitive, brutal state. They waited, their bodies rigid, until the pack finished its meal and trotted off into the ruins, disappearing as silently as they had appeared.
The encounter left Adekunle shaken. The image of the dogs, their eyes gleaming with a wild, alien intelligence, stayed with him. He had been so focused on the human threat that he had forgotten about the rest of the world, the animals, the environment itself, all of it twisting into new, dangerous shapes.
As true darkness fell, they finally left the construction zone behind and entered a familiar neighbourhood. His neighbourhood. The shop was only a few streets away now. But the familiarity was a curse. Every corner he turned, he expected to see a memory from the old world—Mrs. Adebayo selling roasted corn, the group of old men who played draughts under the big neem tree, the children laughing as they rolled an old tyre down the street. But there was only silence and shadows, and the absence of life was a more painful wound than the presence of destruction. The ghosts of the world they had lost were everywhere.
They reached the end of the final side street and peered around the corner onto the main road where the shop was located. The scene was utterly transformed. The burning cars had been reduced to blackened, skeletal husks. The initial chaos of scattered bodies and abandoned clothes had been replaced by a grim, wind-swept emptiness. The street had been picked clean. Anything of value—or anything that could be mistaken for value—was gone. The bodies of the vanished had been stripped by looters, their clothes and possessions taken, leaving only the dark, ominous stains on the pavement as proof they had ever existed.
The shop was still there, a dark mouth in a row of other shuttered businesses. Its rolling security door was still down, just as they had left it. But it bore new scars. There were deep dents and scratches in the metal, concentrated around the heavy-duty padlock at the bottom. Someone had tried to force their way in. They had failed, but they had tried. The shop was not the forgotten relic they had hoped for; it was a known target.
"They used a crowbar," Ben whispered, his voice tight with anger. "Amateurs. They tried to pry the lock, but they didn't have the leverage."
They waited and watched for a full twenty minutes, scanning the street, the rooftops, the dark doorways across the road. Nothing moved. The initial wave of looters had moved on to easier targets. For now, the street was deserted.
"We can't open the front," Ben stated, his mind already working the problem. "Breaking that lock will make too much noise. We have to go in the same way we came out of our flat. The back."
The back of the shop opened onto a small, enclosed yard, shared with the tailor next door and the bookshop on the other side. The yard was surrounded by a high wall, the same kind as the one at their home, but this one was topped with a vicious-looking crown of concertina wire that Ben had installed himself years ago.
"There's no way over that wall, Uncle," Adekunle said.
"Not over," Ben corrected him. "Through." He led them around the block, into the narrow, refuse-choked alley that ran behind the shops. He stopped at a section of the wall made of corrugated iron sheets, rusted and patched over the years. He knocked on it gently. The sound was hollow. "The tailor, Mr. Okoro, he put this section in last year after a car crashed into the old wall. It's thin. We can get through it."
They didn't have the tools to cut the metal, but they had something else. Brute force and leverage. Ben wedged the chisel-end of the tyre iron into the seam where two of the rusted sheets overlapped near the bottom.
"Push," he grunted.
Adekunle put his shoulder against the tyre iron with his uncle. They pushed with all their weight. The metal groaned in protest, a long, high-pitched screech that sounded deafeningly loud in the alley. They froze, listening. But no one came. No one cared about a strange noise in a back alley anymore.
They pushed again. The rusted bolts holding the sheet began to give way. With a final, coordinated shove, the bottom of the sheet bent outwards with a loud pop, creating a low, jagged opening just large enough for a man to crawl through.
Ben went first, squeezing through the narrow gap. Adekunle passed the backpacks to him, then followed, the rough edge of the metal snagging on his shirt. He emerged into the familiar, small yard behind the shop. It was exactly as they had left it. The rear door to the shop was solid steel, but it had a simple, heavy-duty bolt lock. A lock for which Ben had the key.
Ben's hands trembled as he fit the key into the lock. It felt like an act from another lifetime. The lock turned with a smooth, well-oiled click. He pulled the door open, and they slipped inside, into the deep, absolute darkness of the shop's back room.
Ben closed the door behind them, and the silence was total. They were in. They were safe.
For a moment, Adekunle felt a wave of relief so powerful it was like coming home. The familiar smell of ozone and dust, the shapes of the shelves in the darkness. It was a sanctuary of the old world.
Then he heard it.
A soft, scraping sound. Coming from the main part of the shop, beyond the closed storeroom door.
It was not a rat. It was a slow, deliberate sound. The sound of something being dragged across the concrete floor.
Adekunle's blood turned to ice. His relief curdled into pure terror. They weren't alone. The amateurs with the crowbar hadn't gotten in. But someone—or something—else had. The scars on the front of the shop were a misdirection. The real threat was already inside, waiting for them in the dark.