Chương 59: Forty One Miles

The road north out of Prescot was four lanes wide and had trees growing out of the middle of it. Abe ran on the flat part at the edge where the trees hadn't gotten yet. He went past a burned-out gas station with the prices still up on the board. After the first hour he stopped looking at the sides of the road at all. There was nothing out there that could move. Every school kid in Calder knew what happened to people who went between cities. Everybody had the same three stories.

One of them was always about a coach with forty people on it. None of those stories was about a road with the world switched off. Running · Novice Lv 7 (0 / 2, 450) He passed the sign two miles out of Prescot, where a slip road came up onto the north road. It was old. Pre-Arrival old, the blue kind with the white writing, leaning back off two rusted legs with a bush growing through the frame of it. Somebody had shot it a long time ago and never come back to see whether it fell over.

Abe stopped running and stood in front of it with his hands on his knees. MANCHESTER 41 He read it about six times. Everybody knew the name. It was where the weather came from and where the tables were kept, and it was on every feed he had ever opened. Ask anybody in Calder what the biggest thing in the country was and that was the answer you got. It had never been a place you could go to. Nowhere was. Forty one miles.

Monday was the board, and Monday was tomorrow, and not one of the hours in front of him was going to show on a clock in Calder. Riddell had meant this. He had said a place with a real market and had not said the word. There would have been no point. Saying it to a boy in Calder is the same as saying the moon. Calder was a wall, twenty thousand people, and a board in a corridor that Nita ruled up in green marker. Forty one miles up this hill was the other thing.

There was nothing in his bag to eat and nothing on that road worth stopping for. He sat down on the guardrail under it anyway, for a minute, and looked up at the word. Then he got up and ran the forty one miles. He came over the ridge in the late afternoon and stopped dead, and said a word Peg would have killed him for. Calder had a wall and the wall was the biggest thing in Calder. He had grown up under it.

He had stood on the sea wall in November and thought it was the largest object he would ever put his hand on. He could not find this one's ends. It went off to his left until the sleet took it. It went off to his right the same way. Nowhere along it did it bend enough for him to guess where it came back around. There was a second wall behind the first, older and lower, with houses built against the inside of it. So they had outgrown a wall. They had built another one and outgrown that too.

Out on the flat, half a mile in front of everything, sat a third line that was only a fence and a ditch with lights on posts. Behind all of it the city went back and back until it went gray. There were towers. Not two, and not five. Abe stood on that ridge and gave up counting somewhere past thirty. The ones he could not count were the far ones, where they stopped being buildings and turned into a texture. There was a lake of roofs with cranes standing over it.

There was a river with four bridges on it that he could see, and probably eight more that he couldn't. Smoke came off it in about a dozen places, straight up, and stayed where it was in the stopped air. Three months ago Abe Dolan had never been further from his own kitchen than the Corn Road. He sat down on the wet grass in a stopped afternoon, on his own, and laughed until his eyes watered. The outer fence had a checkpoint on it with a line of trucks four deep and a woman leaning in at a window with a clipboard.

The wall gate behind it was worse. Two lanes going in and one coming out, a booth on each, and an arch that people were walking through one at a time. He counted eleven guards on it and then stopped bothering. Eleven. In one gateway. The trucks in the line were carrying food. Abe walked the whole line and looked in the back of every one. All of it was food, coming in, at four in the afternoon on an ordinary Sunday. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Prescot had one warehouse and he had eaten it. Calder had three guards for four hundred streets, and everybody in Calder could name all three of them. Abe walked in past every one of them with his bag on his shoulder and his boots wet to the knee. The city was full, and nothing had prepared him for that at all. Calder's Longmarket on a Saturday was busy. The whole of Calder's Longmarket would have gone into one street of this without touching the sides.

There were people on every sidewalk of every road, at four in the afternoon, on an ordinary Sunday. All of them were stopped mid-step with their faces doing something. A tram sat across an intersection with sixty on board and their mouths open. Abe walked down the middle of the road past it and did not know where to look. He went two hundred yards and had to stop, because he had worked something out and it had gone through him cold. He could not let the world in. Letting it in was the easy half.

Letting it in was as easy as falling over. Getting it back off again was the part that needed him quiet all the way down. There was no quiet to be had with a person close enough to look at him. In front of him there was not one street with nobody on it, and not one doorway either. The closest thing to an empty space he could see was a parked bus, though the bus had a driver in it. In Calder he had never had to think about this. Calder had four hundred streets and about three of them were busy.

Drop the still in the wrong place here and he was a boy in a road he had no papers for, forty one miles from home, holding a bag of cores. He would not get it back by wanting it harder, either. He had tried that in his own yard in October and all it had ever done was keep him sitting there. So he spent two hours in the first city in the country looking for a room with nobody in it. He found one up four flights, behind a door with a broken lock and a bucket under a leak.

He stood in the middle of the floor and let the world in. The noise came up off the street and hit him like weather. Four floors down there were brakes and a horn and about a thousand people talking, and none of it stopped, and none of it was going to. He sat down and tried to get quiet. It did not come. He counted, and the counting went nowhere, because underneath the counting he was listening to the stairwell. Somebody was on the stairs. Two floors down, going up, taking their time.

Abe sat on a wet floor in a strange city with his heart going, and tried again. The third try was worse than the second, because now he was trying. He made himself put it all down. The stairs and the horn and the bag against his back and the forty one miles. The fourth try took. The world went off like a light and the stairwell went quiet, and Abe sat there in it with his hands over his ears out of pure habit, breathing.

Then he sat a while longer with his back against the wall, and did not get up until his hands were steady. He ate the next morning, and he handed over money for it, which he had not done since the first week of December. He had come off that road with nothing in the bag. He had been hungry since the marsh. It had stopped being a feeling days ago and turned into a flat ringing he could hear. The place he found was three streets in and it went back further than the school. Aisles of it.

Racks up past his head with ladders on rails. A whole wall of bread, and a room off the side that was colder than the street. He walked the length of it twice in the still, picking out where he would have taken from. Then he worked out what taking would cost him here. Lifting one loaf off that shelf let the world back in. It always had. In Prescot that had never mattered, because Prescot at four in the morning had nobody in it and he could get quiet again on the step outside.

This place had ninety people in it and two more on the door. Abe stood in the aisle and worked it through. One loaf dropped him into the middle of all of them with his hands full, and no way on Earth of getting quiet again. So he got in the line and paid. It came to eleven marks.

"Colder again tomorrow, they reckon," the girl on the register said. Abe missed the rest of it, because he had not expected to be spoken to. Dyer had counted his crate. He had counted it well enough to know when six tins went to three. Then he had sat up all night beside it in a chair with a coat over his knees. Nobody in this shop was ever going to count anything. Abe could have walked out with an armful and nobody in the building would have known by how much.

He had spent seventy nights working out how to live with what he was doing. This morning it had cost him eleven marks and he had not had to work out anything at all. He bought two more loaves than he needed, and carried them out past a man on the door who did not look up. He spent the next two days doing nothing useful at all. The tower stairs took an hour and forty minutes of his own legs and put him level with the underside of the clouds. He found the ridge he had come over from up there.

It was a smudge, and everything between it and the smudge was roofs. Afterward he sat on the rail of a bridge with his boots hanging over a frozen river. There was a gull hanging four feet under him with its wings open and nothing moving on it anywhere. Abe leaned over that rail until his arms hurt. He was close enough to see the ring around its eye, and two feathers standing up off the back of one wing where the air had been holding them.

Running · Novice Lv 8 (0 / 3, 200) That one had come up somewhere on the last ten miles of the road and he had not stopped to read it. The lit hall on the north side turned out to be a station. The board on the wall was the size of the school gym and had eleven platforms under it. Trains stood at six of them with the doors open and people halfway through the doors. Abe walked the length of that board and read all of it.

Every line was a place, and every place had a time beside it, and there were people underneath with bags who were going to those places on purpose. He had heard the word Manchester all his life, and the tables with it. It had never occurred to him that the tables were kept on an actual floor of an actual building, with people standing on it. On his last morning he found a billboard outside a hall with a competition on it, and read it standing in the road. Sixteen names.

Every one of them had a realm printed after it, and every one of those said Realm 2, and the bill did not say what it was a qualifier for, because everybody reading it up here already knew. In Prescot, four Realm 2 prospects in one hall in December had been the biggest thing that had happened to that town all year. Here it was a poster on a wall, already peeling at one corner because it had been up a while.

Abe read the whole bill twice, and then read the names again to see whether any of them meant anything to him. None of them did. He had what was left of two hundred and sixty marks in his pocket. He had a bag of gray cores. Riddell could price those and could not afford them, and there was a green one in there that nobody in Calder had ever seen. Somewhere in this city was a market big enough to put a number on all three of those. It would sell him more essence in an afternoon than the Corn Road moved in a year.

He could have taken it instead. He had taken everything else for seventy nights and nobody had ever put a hand on him for any of it. But he had money for the first time in his life. He had not liked how the shop felt that morning, and he wanted to hand somebody something and get something back. He had come forty one miles for that, and he had spent two days pretending he had come to look at towers. He put a bag of cores he had no papers for on his shoulder and walked down to the arch.