Chương 50: Ninety Seconds

Abe stood in a stopped stockroom with his hand six inches off a jar of peanut butter, and did not close his fingers. This was the part that counted. Not the roll-up door, and not the walking about. The world was going to start again when he shut his hand. Nothing else was going to start it. There would be no version of the next ten minutes where he got to say afterward that it had happened to him. In November it had been four loaves, and he had told himself it would be the only time.

This was a rehearsed route, walked four times. And it was Prescot, because Prescot was the only other city he had ever been to. He wanted nine more days. He had gone looking for a better reason than that and had not found one. Eleven steps. Second bay, chest height. The camera over the racking was going to see all of it. He had stood underneath it and worked that out an hour ago. All he had against it was his hood, and his face down, and being quick. Abe closed his hand.

The world came on like somebody had thrown a switch on the side of it. Sound first, all of it at once. A fan up in the roof. A radio out on the shop floor with a lot of brass in it. Two men fifteen feet away behind a plastic curtain.

"... and he's still got it up on the ramp telling me there's nothing wrong with it."

"There's nothing wrong with it."

"With the wheel off. In his hand." One of them laughed in the wrong place. Cold air moving on his face, which he had not felt in four days. Then his own heart, going like a fist on a door. He went. Second bay, four jars, into the bag. Energy bars off the end. The carton was already open so they went in loose, and he lost three under the racking and did not stop for them. Dried fruit. Nuts. The powdered milk was heavier than he had planned for, but he took it anyway. Sugar low down.

He got both hands under it and the bag came off his shoulder and he had to kneel to get it back on. Everything was louder than it had been in his head. The jars knocked. The bag creaked every time he moved. His own breathing was going like something in a bag, and under all of it there was a plastic wrapper caught on his boot that he could not get off and did not dare bend down for. He had planned this in a room with no sound in it. There is no way to plan for how loud you are. Nine seconds gone.

He knew because he was counting, and he had been counting since his hand shut, because counting was the only thing keeping him from listening to the men. The radio stopped. Not the song. The song kept going. One of the men had turned it down. That was worse, because a man turns a radio down when he has heard something.

"Hang on." Abe went flat against the end of the racking with the bag under him. He had not decided to do it. He was on the floor before he knew he was going. Footsteps. Not toward him. Along the curtain and away, then a pause, then the sound of a hand on the plastic. Nothing in a still teaches you this. An hour looking at a frozen man's face teaches you nothing about being in a live room with him.

Abe lay on concrete behind forty pounds of stolen food, with his cheek on the cold of it, and found out he was quite good at not moving. The footsteps went back.

"Cat," the man said, through the curtain.

"Out the back again."

"Shut the door, then." Stealth · Novice Lv 3 (0 / 450) Abe read that from the floor, upside down, with his heart going, and could have laughed if laughing had been survivable. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. He was halfway to the tuna when he found the powdered milk still in his hand instead of in the bag. Putting it in took four seconds he had not planned for, and he took them, because he was not doing this twice. Forty seconds.

He got up and went along the second bay. The tuna was where he had put it in his head. The crate of drinks was by the door and he was going to be out in twenty seconds. Then he stopped in front of the carton of chocolate with the lid already cut off. He should not have, and he knew it while he was doing it. But he was eighteen years old and he had been hungry his whole life, and there was a wall of the good kind in front of him. He ate one standing there. It was better than anything he had ever put in his mouth.

He ate a second one straight after it, fast, like a boy getting away with something, which is exactly what he was. Then he took eight more, and the crate of drinks, and a box of the cereal with the cartoon on the front. By then the bag would not shut. It weighed more than he had planned to carry, and the count in his head had gone past ninety. Stealth · Novice Lv 4 (0 / 800) He got to the door, and somebody came in through the curtain behind him. Abe did not turn around.

He heard the plastic go, and a boot come down on concrete. He got both arms through the straps, stood in the middle of a stranger's stockroom, and started to get quiet. Four count. No chasing. No wanting it. He got nowhere. He tried again and got less. His heart would not sit down. The radio was too loud and so was the fan, and a part of his own head, a loud part, had gone entirely over to arguing about whether to run. Running was the wrong answer and he knew it while he was wanting it.

Running is a boy on a road with a bag and a description, in a city he does not live in, with a wall around it and one gate.

"Who's that?" Ten feet. Maybe twelve. In November a man in the room would have finished it. That was not a rule the world enforced and it never had been. It was only ever that Abe Dolan could not get his own heart to sit down while somebody was looking at him, and it had been true in a hall on Fenner Street in October and true in a storeroom on Marley Street four weeks ago. He had spent that November night talking himself down.

The shed, and the board, and his sister, and finally his father, one after another, and none of them had worked, and the settle had. He did not go through any of that this time. He put it down instead. The bag, and the man, and the twelve feet, and the chocolate he had eaten like an idiot in the middle of a robbery. He stopped pushing at any of it. He put his attention on his own breathing and let the room go on being a room. The boot came down again, closer.

"I can hear you," the man said, to the room. Four count. Nothing about him was calm and nothing about him was near it. But underneath the noise there was a place where the rain stops, and he had been going there four and five times a night since October, and since Sunday it had been a thing he owned instead of a thing he could sometimes find. He got there at about fifty seconds. It did not feel like a skill. It felt like hanging on. The radio stopped mid-word. The fan stopped with its blade in the wrong place.

The man stopped three steps into the room with his weight on the wrong foot and his arm out at the height of Abe's coat. Abe stood eighteen inches from him and shook. That was all he did for a while. He shook hard enough to rattle the crate on his back, in a stopped stockroom, in a city he had no business being in. The man was about forty.

He had a fleece with the company's name on it and a lanyard turned around the wrong way, and his mouth was open and his eyebrows were up, and he had not gotten as far as deciding whether to be angry or frightened. There was a name stitched on the fleece under the company one, and Abe did not read it. He looked at the wall over the man's shoulder until he was sure he had not. He did not want to know it.

A man with a name was a man who would be standing here on Wednesday morning explaining a gap on a shelf to whoever owned the place. This man had seen him. Not the shape of somebody. Not a noise in a stockroom. He had come around a curtain and put his eyes on a boy in a wet coat with a bag on his back, from ten feet, with the lights on. The camera had the rest of it. Abe had kept his face off it the whole time he was working, and he had not thought about it once from the second somebody came through that curtain.

And whenever Abe let the world in again, wherever he happened to be standing by then, this man was going to finish that step into an empty room. Arm out. Nothing in front of him but a gap on a shelf and a door standing open at the bottom. Abe went out under it on his back with the bag dragging. It took three tries and the crate came out of the top and he had to reach back under the door for it. A boy who can stop time, flat on a wet loading dock, pulling groceries under a door.

Then up the service road, past a woman with a phone against her ear, past a van with its door open and one boot showing. Out into a city that had not moved a millimeter since he walked into it. He got a long way from that loading dock before he stopped. When he did stop he put the bag down on a frozen street and sat on the curb next to it. Nine days of food in there. Maybe ten. Then he read the screen he had not had time to read when it came. Stealth · Novice Lv 4 (0 / 800) Two levels in ninety seconds.

It had registered at the end of November, on the night of the four loaves, and it had sat at Novice 2 ever since without moving a single point. Four weeks. In four weeks the hardest thing he had asked of it was walking down a school corridor without being noticed, which he could already do, so it had paid him nothing at all. Lying on a concrete floor twelve feet from a man who was hunting him was not something he could already do. Running on the road had worked the same way. Eight hours of it paid four levels.

Ninety seconds on that floor paid two, and both times the pay came out of the part where he almost failed. He had not thought about June once from the second his hand closed on the jar until now. He picked the bag up. Four streets back there was a man with a name stitched on his fleece, and Abe had looked away from it. The man was standing in a stockroom with his arm out, waiting for Abe to let go of the still so he could find out he had been robbed. Abe was not going to let go for nine days.

Then he was going to need another warehouse.