Chapter 51: Eight Hours Early
Chapter 51: Eight Hours Early
By midnight I’d been awake for forty minutes and I’d worked out how I was going to die.
Not in detail. But the shape of it was there in the room, and once I’d seen it I couldn’t stop seeing it.
[Duration Remaining: 08:03:11]
Eight hours. In eight hours the dome would stop existing, and fifty people who had spent a day knowing the first attack meant certain execution would be standing in a wrecked retail park at eight in the morning, in daylight, in one place, all at once — every one of them carrying whatever they’d bought.
And some of them had been preparing for that all day.
I’d noticed it in the afternoon without understanding it. Two of the group of eight had spent hours near the arch, not sleeping, not talking much, just sitting where they could see the whole floor. A man from another crew had been doing slow circuits since evening. They weren’t looking for open trouble; the rule made starting it suicidal. They were cataloguing.
Who came in with whom. Who bought what. Who slept alone. Who had a weapon and who was carrying a stick. What everyone was wearing, so they’d know them again at eight in the morning in a crowd going out through one arch.
Fifty vulnerable people, one exit, known time. It’s not a shelter at the end. It’s a queue.
I could feel their attention when I moved, and I knew exactly what they were reading off me, because I’ve been read the same way my whole life and never once in a useful direction.
Filthy clothes, boots coming apart, visibly underweight, no group, and a face that has never in twenty-two years matched anything else about me. In a room of exhausted survivors I look like something that wandered in off a magazine cover and got dirty on the way, and every single person in that dome had glanced at me twice.
Poor. Alone. Worth looking at. Therefore worth following.
The rifle was the only thing arguing the other way, and I made sure it kept arguing — carried across my chest where the shape was unmistakable, hand near it, in plain view every time I stood up.
Because that’s the calculation they’d be running, and I wanted the answer to be not worth it: one armed man, walking into the dark, alone, with forty-nine other people still to come out of a hole in eight hours’ time. You’d have to leave a safe position, in darkness, to follow someone who could shoot you, for goods you weren’t sure he had.
Everyone in that room was hiding what they’d bought. That was the one thing genuinely on my side. Coats bulged. Bags stayed shut. Nobody except the loud group knew what anybody else was carrying, which meant nobody could sort us into worth-robbing and not.
They’d assume I had something. They wouldn’t know it was a ring, and they wouldn’t know that almost everything I owned was already somewhere they could not reach.
I left at eight minutes past midnight.
Standing up took a specific act of will. Not because I was tired — I’d slept eleven hours and I was in better condition than I’d been in for a fortnight — but because I was about to voluntarily leave the only place on Earth where hurting me meant certain death, with eight hours of that protection left, and every animal instinct I own was screaming that this was insane.
The safest hour to leave is the one nobody’s planned for.
I walked to the arch at a completely ordinary pace with my pack looking almost empty and my rifle across my chest.
Two of them saw me go. I knew that before I reached the threshold and I made myself not check twice. One was the older man from the group of eight, sitting cross-legged forty metres back, who lifted his head and tracked me the whole way. The other was a woman near the wall who stopped mid-sentence and looked at me for four or five seconds — at my face, at the rifle, at my boots, at my face again, filing it — and then turned back to whoever she’d been talking to and carried on.
That’s what memorising looks like. It’s completely undramatic.
I stepped through the arch into cold air and stopped being safe.
The apron outside was wet and dark and empty. I could see three or four small fires out in the wrecked retail park where the people who hadn’t got in had settled to wait, which is its own kind of grim arithmetic — they’d worked out that fifty loaded strangers would be coming out at eight, too.
Don’t run. Whatever you do, don’t run.
Running is a signal. Running says I have something. I made myself walk out across the apron at the pace of a man who is tired and going nowhere in particular, and I took the south route, into the flooded car park, because it was the worst possible way to leave and therefore the least watched.
Water to the knees again. Glass again. The same submerged rubble I’d crossed at a dead sprint that morning, which I now knew the shape of.
Two hundred metres out I stopped in the shadow of a collapsed sign gantry and stood absolutely still for four full minutes, listening, watching the way I’d come.
Nothing. No splashing. No light.
I did it twice more over the next kilometre — once behind a wall, once lying in a ditch on the far side of an embankment I’d deliberately crossed at the skyline before dropping out of sight — and both times the answer was nothing, and both times I made myself wait the whole four minutes anyway, because the second and third check is where you catch someone patient.
Only then did I turn north-north-east and start looking for the rail cut.
The gunfire came about half an hour later.
I was in the cutting with weeds up past my knees and my boots full of water, and it arrived flattened by distance — a short burst, then two spaced shots, then a longer ragged run of them, then nothing.
I went down on one knee in the weeds and turned my head to place it.
South-west. The direction of the retail park, more or less.
I stayed like that for a while.
The shelter still had seven and a half hours on it. Whatever that was, it happened outside the dome — among the people at the fires, or between two groups who’d both come to wait for the same eight o’clock, or a crew running into something with too many legs in the dark. It could have been an ambush going in early. It could have been nothing to do with the shelter at all.
I had no way to know, and I noticed a part of me wanting to build a story out of it — one where I’d been clever, one where leaving early had saved my life and the shots were proof.
You don’t know. You don’t know who that was or why, and turning it into evidence that you’re smart is exactly how you get killed being smart about the wrong thing next time.
The woman with the bad haircut was still in there. So was the girl who’d come through fiftieth and cried on the floor. So were the men who’d been counting our coats.
I was not going to walk a kilometre back toward automatic weapons in the dark to find out which of them had been shooting.
What I took from it was smaller and more useful, and it settled somewhere alongside the grain of rice behind my navel.
Monsters are dangerous. Monsters are also consistent — they hunt, they feed, they defend ground, and once you know the pattern you can work with it.
People invent new reasons every day.
I got up out of the weeds, resettled the rifle, and started walking north-north-east along the rail cut, toward a voice on a loop promising water and walls and work available.
Behind me the shooting stopped, and did not start again, and the whole enormous broken world went back to being quiet.