Saturday. Adekunle wasn't sure how he knew, but the rhythm of the week was a ghost that still haunted his mind. A day that once meant freedom from lectures and the promise of a football match on television was now just another 24-hour cycle of heat, fear, and the stale, recycled air of their prison. The hope he'd felt yesterday had survived the night, but in the harsh light of morning, it felt thin and dangerously fragile. It was a single flickering candle in a vast, dark room, and the slightest breeze of doubt could extinguish it.
He sat at his post, the curtain pulled back a fraction of an inch, watching the men below. After their brush with Blade's militia, Ikenna's crew was jumpy. Their lazy confidence was gone, replaced by a paranoid alertness. They stayed closer to the building, their eyes constantly scanning the empty street. Their fear was a tangible thing, a vibration in the air. And Adekunle knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his gut, that this fear was the key.
The plan had come to him in pieces during the fitful, dream-haunted hours of the night. It was a wild, audacious idea, born from the unique intersection of their predicament and their profession. It was the kind of plan that, in the old world, would have been a clever prank. In this one, it was a declaration of war fought with unconventional weapons.
He waited until his uncle had finished tending to Funke. He watched Ben emerge from the bedroom, his face etched with a deeper exhaustion than Adekunle had ever seen on him. The lines around his eyes were canyons of grief.
"How is she?" Adekunle asked, his voice low.
"Sleeping," Ben said, which was not an answer. He walked to the kitchen and poured himself a small measure of their rationed water, his hand shaking slightly. "Her fever has not broken. She… she was talking in her sleep. She thought she was a little girl again, back in her father's village."
The words hung in the air, heavy with unspoken finality. She was retreating from the unbearable present, her mind seeking refuge in the safety of the past. The clock was ticking, its hands moving faster and faster.
This was his opening. It was now or never.
"Uncle," Adekunle began, turning from the window to face him fully. "We can't wait. Blade and his men might not come back for days. Or they might not come back at all. We have to get to that supermarket."
"And we have been over this," Ben said, his voice weary, dismissive. "There is no way out."
"There is," Adekunle insisted, his own voice gaining strength. "We don't fight them. We don't try to sneak past them. We make them leave."
Ben looked at him then, his tired eyes showing a flicker of interest mixed with deep skepticism. "And how do we do that? Ask them nicely?"
"We scare them," Adekunle said, the plan spilling out of him now, urgent and breathless. "We make them think Blade is back. We make them believe the dragon has returned to its mountain, and they are just mice in its shadow."
For a moment, Ben just stared at him. Then he shook his head slowly, a sad, pitying gesture. "Kunle, listen to yourself. You have been cooped up in here too long. Your mind is playing tricks. We cannot just… magic a militia out of thin air."
"No," Adekunle pressed, taking a step closer. "Not magic. Technology. Our technology. Uncle, what is the one thing that announced them? The one thing that made Ikenna's crew panic before they even saw the guns?"
Ben's brow furrowed in thought. His gaze drifted toward the window, replaying the scene from yesterday. "The truck," he finally whispered. "The sound of the engine."
"Exactly!" Adekunle felt a surge of triumph. "A deep, heavy diesel engine. A sound that doesn't exist anymore in this quiet world. We don't need to make them see Blade. We just need to make them hear his truck. We wait until after dark, when they're already jumpy, when every shadow looks like a threat. We make them hear that engine coming down the street, and they will run. Ikenna is a rat. He won't risk staying to fight a battle he knows he can't win. He'll abandon this place and he will not look back."
The sheer audacity of the idea hung in the air between them. Ben stared at his nephew, his expression a turbulent storm of conflicting emotions. Adekunle could almost hear his thoughts: it was insane, it was brilliant, it was impossible, it was their only chance.
"And how?" Ben asked, his voice a hoarse croak. "How do we make the sound of a truck in this room?"
This was the heart of it. "The amplifier," Adekunle said, his excitement making him talk faster. "The one we were fixing. It's still in the shop, but we have others. You have that old Pioneer amplifier in your closet. And the speakers… the big Wharfedale speakers you never use. They have powerful bass drivers. We have wire. We have tools. And I have the sound."
He pulled out his phone, his hands trembling slightly as he swiped through his audio files. In the old world, he had been fascinated by sound design, downloading audio clips for short-film projects he never had time to finish. He scrolled past soundscapes of rain and birdsong, past explosions and gunshots. And then he found it. A ten-minute, high-fidelity audio loop of a large diesel truck, recorded for a documentary. He pressed play.
A low, guttural rumble filled the kitchen from the phone's tiny speaker. It was a pathetic echo of the real thing, but the sound was there. The DNA of the beast.
Ben listened, his head cocked. The engineer in him was taking over, overriding the frightened husband. He was no longer thinking about the danger; he was thinking about the problem. The puzzle. He looked from the phone, to the closet where the old hi-fi equipment was stored, to the living room windows.
"The acoustics…" Ben muttered, almost to himself. "The sound would be too clean. Too perfect. It would sound like it was coming from inside the building."
"So we degrade it," Adekunle countered, his mind racing to keep up. "We run it through a filter. We can even use one of the old graphic equalizers to boost the low frequencies, cut the highs. Make it sound muffled, distant. Like it's coming from two streets away, and then getting closer. And we don't point the speakers out the front window. We point them out the back. Toward the alley. Let the sound bounce off the buildings. It will confuse them, make it harder to pinpoint the source. They won't be thinking about acoustics, Uncle. They will only be thinking about survival."
Ben was silent for a full minute, his eyes closed. He was turning the plan over in his mind, examining every facet, every weakness, every possibility of failure. Failure meant death. Not just for them, but for Funke. Success, however… success meant a chance. A chance at the medicine. A chance at life.
When he opened his eyes, the weariness was still there, but it was overshadowed by a grim, reluctant resolve. "Get the equipment," he said, his voice firm.
A wave of relief so powerful it made Adekunle feel light-headed washed over him. The argument was won.
The rest of the day was a blur of focused, silent work. They became the men they had been before the Fall, but with a terrifying new purpose. They pulled the heavy, wood-veneer Pioneer amplifier from the back of Ben's wardrobe, blowing off a thick layer of dust. They retrieved the huge, coffin-sized Wharfedale speakers, relics from Ben's audiophile phase in the 1980s. Their cones were intact, the rubber surrounds still supple.
They turned the living room into a workshop. Tools that had been packed away were brought out. A soldering iron, spools of wire, wire cutters, a multimeter. It felt like a desecration, turning their home into a factory for a weapon of deception, but it was a necessary one.
Ben, the master craftsman, took the lead. He worked with a precision and focus that belied his age and his exhaustion. He checked the capacitors on the amplifier, resoldered a dry joint on the power supply, his hands steady and sure. He was in his element, a man speaking the only language that still made sense in a world gone mad: the language of circuits and signals.
Adekunle's job was the sound itself. He used an old, half-broken tablet from their junk drawer—its screen cracked but its audio processor still functional—as the source. He found a signal-processing app he had downloaded years ago and began to manipulate the truck audio file. He EQ'd it, muddying the sound, boosting the sub-bass frequencies until the speakers would put out a low, vibrating rumble rather than a clear sound. He created a loop, then duplicated it, making the second version slightly louder, the third louder still. He could, in effect, 'drive' the truck closer with the press of a button.
They worked through the afternoon, a silent, two-man team, fuelled by sips of water and the burning intensity of their goal. They were creating a ghost, a phantom made of electricity and sound waves. They were building a lie so convincing it would, they prayed, save their lives.
As dusk began to settle once more, painting the room in long, orange shadows, they finished. The two large speakers stood facing the rear windows, angled upwards. Wires snaked across the floor, connecting them to the amplifier, which in turn was connected to the tablet. It was a crude setup, a Frankenstein's monster of old and new technology.
Ben stood back, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He looked at their creation, then at Adekunle. "It is ready."
Adekunle looked out the front window. Below, Ikenna's men were settling in for the night, their guard lowered slightly after a quiet day. They were laughing about something, the sound drifting up to the third floor. They had no idea that a storm was about to break.
The plan was in place. The machine was built. Now, all they could do was wait for the deepest dark, and hope their ghost in the machine was convincing enough.