The scraping sound stopped, leaving a silence that was louder and more terrifying than the noise it replaced. It was a listening silence. Whatever was in the main shop knew they were there. It had heard the click of the lock, the soft thud of the closing door. Adekunle stood frozen in the pitch-black storeroom, his body locked in a state of pure, primal fear. His imagination, a faculty he had once prized, was now his worst enemy, conjuring a thousand monstrous shapes in the darkness beyond the door. He could feel his uncle's presence beside him, a knot of coiled tension. The familiar smell of dust and ozone was now thick with a new, unwelcome scent: the smell of another living, breathing human.
Ben's hand found Adekunle's shoulder and squeezed, a firm, grounding pressure. It was a command: Be still. Be silent. Think.
The back storeroom was their territory. It was a cramped space, no more than ten feet by ten feet, lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with components and half-repaired electronics. It had only one door—the one leading to the main shop floor. They were cornered.
Whoever was out there had the advantage. They were in the larger, more open space. They knew the layout. And they had been here long enough to be dragging things, to be settling in. This was their nest. Adekunle and Ben were the intruders.
Adekunle's mind raced. How had they gotten in? The front shutter was secure. The back door had been locked. He thought of the roof—a flat, gravelled surface with a few old ventilation shafts. It was possible. A determined person could have pried one open, dropped down into the shop's ceiling space, and then broken through the fragile particleboard tiles. It was a difficult, dangerous entry. Whoever was out there was desperate, and resourceful.
They needed to see. Fighting in the dark was suicide. Ben seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. Adekunle felt his uncle move away, his feet making almost no sound on the dusty concrete floor. He knew this room better than he knew the lines on his own hand. Adekunle heard a soft, careful rustling as Ben felt his way along a low shelf. A moment later, there was a sharp click, and a weak, sickly yellow beam of light cut through the oppressive darkness.
Ben held up an old, grease-stained work light, the kind that ran on four D-cell batteries. The light it cast was feeble, a pale imitation of its former power, but in the total blackness, it felt as bright as a searchlight. It illuminated his uncle's face, showing the deep-set lines of strain and the grim resolve in his eyes. He held a finger to his lips, then pointed the beam at the storeroom door.
They approached it as if it were the cage of a sleeping lion. Ben held the light, his other hand gripping the tyre iron. Adekunle held the file, its point facing forward, his knuckles white. The door between the storeroom and the shop floor wasn't locked; it just had a simple thumb-latch. Ben reached out, his movements agonizingly slow, and turned it. The soft snick of the latch disengaging sounded like a thunderclap in the charged silence.
He pushed the door inward, a mere crack at first, and peered through. Then he pushed it further, swinging it open into the main shop. He swept the weak beam of the work light across the room.
The sight that greeted them was one of methodical madness. Heavy workbenches had been dragged and overturned, forming a crude, semi-circular barricade around the center of the shop. Towers of old televisions and stereo systems had been piled precariously on top, creating a fortress of obsolete technology. Their tools—spanners, hammers, heavy-duty socket sets—were gone from their organized wall racks. They were scattered across the floor, used as chocks and wedges to reinforce the bizarre structure. It was a nest. A den.
The scraping sound they had heard had been the sound of this fortress being built.
And in the center of the nest, sitting on the floor with his back against an overturned workbench, was a man.
He was thin, wiry, and shirtless, his bare torso covered in a sheen of sweat and grime. His hair was a wild, matted tangle, and his eyes, wide and luminous in the sudden beam of light, were filled with a frantic, animal terror. He was cornered. He held a long, wicked-looking shard of glass in one hand, the broken neck of a bottle, and he held it up, his knuckles trembling.
He was not one of Ikenna's thugs. He was older, perhaps in his late forties, his face gaunt with hunger and terror. He looked like a castaway, a man who had been shipwrecked in the middle of this concrete jungle. His mind had clearly been shattered by the Fall, and he had reverted to a state of pure, territorial survival.
The moment the light hit him, he let out a low, guttural hiss, like a feral cat. "Go away," he rasped, his voice a dry, unused thing. "My place. Go away."
"We mean you no harm," Ben said, his voice calm and steady, a stark contrast to the scene before them. He kept the light trained on the man, but he didn't advance. "This is our shop."
The man's eyes darted between Ben and Adekunle, then around at his fortress of junk. A flicker of confused ownership crossed his face. "No," he insisted, shaking his head. "It was empty. The world is empty. This is my place now. My safe place." He gestured with the shard of glass at the barricaded front of the shop. "To keep the whisperers out."
"The whisperers?" Adekunle asked, the word slipping out before he could stop himself.
The man's head snapped toward him, his eyes locking onto Adekunle's with a terrifying intensity. "You hear them, too," he stated, it wasn't a question. "At night. The whispers from the dark. Calling your name. Promising things. They lie. They lie, and then they take you. They took my wife. She heard the whispers, she went to the window, and then… she was just clothes. Just empty clothes on the floor."
His voice cracked, and a single tear traced a path through the grime on his cheek. Adekunle felt a pang of pity so sharp it almost made him lower his weapon. This man wasn't a monster. He was a man drowning in grief and trauma, and he had built this strange nest to keep the ghosts at bay.
"We are not the whisperers," Ben said gently. "We are just men. Like you. We need some things from our shop, and then we will be gone."
"No!" the man shrieked, scrambling further back into his nest. "No, you can't! You can't take things! It's all part of the wall! You touch the wall, you make a hole. The whispers get in through the holes!"
He was utterly, irrevocably insane. Reason was not a language he understood anymore. And then Adekunle saw it. Wedged deep within the barricade, used as a structural support to prop up a heavy workbench, was his uncle's heavy-duty, industrial socket set. The large, red metal case was unmistakable. The breaker bar they would need, the star-shaped bits—it was all in there. Everything they had risked their lives for was now part of a madman's retaining wall against the phantoms of his own mind.
The situation was impossible. To get the tools, they had to dismantle his fortress. To dismantle his fortress was to threaten his sanity, his very existence. And he was armed with a shard of glass, cornered, with nothing left to lose. A fight was inevitable.
And a fight meant noise. A loud, desperate, scrambling fight in the middle of the night. It would be a dinner bell for every scavenger, every feral dog, every predator within earshot. They would be trapped in the shop, with a dead man and a new siege beginning, this time with enemies who knew they were inside.
Ben seemed to understand this at the same moment. The calm, reassuring tone left his voice. He took a step forward, raising the tyre iron slightly. "Listen to me," he said, his voice now low and hard. "We are not asking. I need the tools in that red box. Give them to us, and we will leave you to your… your wall."
It was the wrong move. The shift in tone, the threat of aggression, was like throwing a match on gasoline.
The man screamed, a high, thin sound of pure terror, and lunged. Not at them, but at the wall of his fortress. He began grabbing things—old circuit boards, heavy transformers, chunks of metal—and hurling them in their direction. He wasn't trying to hit them. He was trying to scare them away, to reinforce his nest with a storm of projectiles.
"Get back!" Ben yelled, pulling Adekunle back toward the storeroom as a heavy capacitor whistled past his head and shattered against the wall behind them.
They retreated into the storeroom, pulling the door almost shut, leaving only a crack to see through. The man continued his frantic work, screaming incoherently about the whispers and the holes in the wall.
They were back where they started. Trapped in the dark storeroom. But now, the beast was awake. And it was standing guard over the one thing they needed to survive.
Adekunle looked at his uncle in the dim glow of the work light. The path forward was gone. There was no clever plan here, no psychological trick they could play. There was only a broken man, a fortress of junk, and the impossible choice between a hopeless retreat and a fatal confrontation.