SONS OF ELI

The day after they buried their father, the rain refused to fall. David sat outside the cramped mechanic’s storeroom that had become their new home. It wasn’t a house, it was a coffin for dreams. Four shaky wooden walls, a rusted zinc roof, and a future that leaked more than the roof ever could. Behind the buzzing chaos of a vulcanizer’s shop in Ajegunle, the world felt louder, dirtier, and far more brutal than it had any right to be. His shirt clung to his skin, soaked not by rain, but by sweat, the kind that burns when grief meets helplessness. The kind that clings when your thoughts won't stop spinning, and every possible future feels worse than the one before. Inside, Samuel slept, curled on a tattered mat beside their mother. His face was streaked with the dried salt of tears. Only four years old, he still didn’t understand why Daddy wasn’t coming home. He didn’t know what "execution" meant. But he knew what absence felt like. He could feel it in the stillness of their mother’s touch. He could taste it in the silence that hovered in the air like smoke. David hadn’t slept in two nights. Not since the judgment. Every time he closed his eyes, he heard the judge’s voice, cold and final: “Pastor Elijah Adeleke is hereby found guilty of money laundering, and murder.” Fast trail, Swift sentence. Quiet execution. Like a whisper in a crowded room. Heard by all, grieved by none. No appeal. No questions. No mercy. David’s chest tightened at the thought. He kept replaying it over and over. His father, his hero, reduced to nothing more than a headline. Branded. Disgraced. Forgotten. The same man who taught him to stand for truth, who prayed with trembling hands and preached with trembling passion. A man who gave everything to the pulpit, only to be crucified by the same hands that once clapped for his sermons. And worse—the world moved on. The church erased Pastor Elijah like a stain on white cloth. His name vanished from the website. His face removed from the bulletin. The board seat he once held was filled like he never existed. Even the so-called brethren stopped calling. Shame is contagious, and nobody wanted to catch it. So they left. They packed what little dignity they had left, and vanished into Ajegunle. A place where hope came to die. Their new home smelled of burnt oil, smoke, and rot. The roof groaned whenever it rained. Rats were their nightly visitors. But it had four walls and a door, and that was more than most in that part of Lagos could say. David dropped out of school the same week. His WAEC exam was three months away. He never wrote it. Education, dreams, future, all of it dissolved the day he picked up a job at Mile 2 offloading 50kg bags of rice for men who didn’t care that he used to be a famous pastor’s son. He bled through blisters. He cried silently on bad days. And he bruised when the bags fell wrong or when his supervisors felt wicked. But he always came home. Because Samuel needed food. And their mother’s cough was getting worse. She refused to stay idle. She started frying akara and yam by the roadside. Borrowed a rusted stove and frying pan from Mama Nkechi’s kiosk. Every morning, she tied her faded wrapper, adjusted her broken umbrella, and fried with trembling hands, hoping the smell would lure customers and that the sun wouldn’t punish her too harshly. Some days she came home with a few naira and blistered palms. Other days, she came back with nothing but smoke in her lungs and disappointment in her eyes. David once offered to take over her stall. She shook her head gently. “This... this is the only thing that reminds me I’m still alive,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Let me hold on to something... before I disappear too.” So he let her. Even though watching her fade broke something inside him. Samuel kept asking questions. His innocent voice always pierced David’s chest like a blade. “Is Daddy still sleeping?” “Why do people look at us like we smell?” “Why don’t I have friends here?” David never had the answers. So, he lied the only way love knows how to lie. “Daddy is sleeping in heaven.” “They don’t know us yet.” “Friends will come soon.” Samuel would nod and smile, comforted. Until the next question came. But the day the world shattered completely was the day their mother collapsed beside her frying pan. David had gone to fetch water. He heard the shouting before he saw the crowd. Panic gripped him before he even got close. She was lying on the ground, eyes closed, skin pale, chest barely rising. He didn’t think. He didn’t cry. He just carried her, sprinting all the way to the small clinic by the canal, screaming her name with every step. They hung a drip in her arm but said treatment couldn’t start without payment. He begged at the depot. Got turned away like a stray dog. “Too many boys like you come and go,” the supervisor said, not even looking at him. Desperate, David remembered the underground ring near Apapa. No rules. No mercy. Fifty thousand for the winner. That night, he stepped into the ring for the first time. No gloves. No training. Just rage. He fought like a boy with nothing left to lose. And somehow, he won. His mouth was blood. His knuckles torn open. His vision blurred. But he won. He limped to the clinic with money in his fist. But she was already gone. Thirty minutes earlier. They gave him back the unused drip bottle. Like it was change. David buried her himself. No service. No prayers. No songs. Just a hole in the earth. And a boy kneeling in the dirt, shaking uncontrollably. Samuel played with sand nearby. He didn’t understand that the second person he loved most in the world was never coming back. When they returned to their shed that night, David locked the door and screamed into his fists until his throat was raw. He didn’t just cry. He broke. Something in him shattered and never healed. From that day, he became two people. On the outside, calm, steady, dependable. The brother who made garri and sugar taste like heaven. Who told stories at night. Who helped Samuel with his homework and washed his socks. But on the inside, he was a wildfire. He remembered a man. The man. The one he saw outside his father’s office a few weeks before everything went dark. Tall. Thick shoulders. Black shirt. Eyes like ash. Smelled like gunpowder and wickedness. Lawrence. He had stormed out of the church building, slammed the door so hard it echoed like thunder. David almost bumped into him. Later, when he asked his father about it, Elijah just smiled sadly and said, “Don’t worry, my son.” But David had seen something in his father’s eyes that day. Not anger. Not confusion. Fear. He remembered Lawrence’s voice, low and threatening, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, Pastor.” David never forgot that moment. Not for a second. Years passed. He kept fighting in the ring. Silent. Cold. Deadly. They started calling him “Ghost.” He barely speaks. Barely smile. Barely lost. Meanwhile, Samuel grew into something beautiful. He fixed broken phones. Learned coding from torn books and busted laptops. He was quiet, brilliant, and soft-hearted. The kind of soul that makes people feel safe. David envied that light. It meant the world hadn’t stolen everything from his little brother. Not yet. One night, on the zinc roof of their shed, staring at the stars through the Lagos haze, Samuel asked, “Do you ever think about Dad?” David didn’t hesitate. “Every day.” “You think he was guilty?” “No,” David whispered. “He was framed.” “Then why didn’t anyone fight for him?” David looked at him for a long time. His voice came out like a stone. “Because nobody cared, Sam." Samuel nodded, quietly. He didn’t ask again. But David kept thinking. Kept remembering. Because deep in his chest, something refused to die. And one day, he swore The truth will return. Even if he had to rip it from the shadows with his bare hands.