CHAPTER 7: "THE CHASE"

Speed didn't think. There was no time for thinking. The kids were coming—a mob of them, all shouting his name like it was a war cry, like they were a single organism with one purpose: catch Speed. Their shoes pounded the pavement. Their voices overlapped into a sound that wasn't quite words anymore, just pure enthusiasm and excitement and the energy of kids who'd just spotted their favorite person in the whole world.

Speed ran.

His feet hit the ground in that anime-style exaggerated sprint—all urgency and desperation. The 7-Eleven was still three blocks away, but he wasn't thinking about the store anymore. He was thinking about escape, about outmaneuvering, about the fact that he definitely did not have thirty minutes to stop and sign autographs for ten excited kids when he was already running on fumes and needed sleep more than he needed oxygen.

"SPEED! AUTOGRAPH! SPEED!"

Their voices chased him down the block. Speed's legs pumped faster. His heart was racing—part genuine panic at being mobbed, part the kind of adrenaline that came from being wanted, from being loved, but in a way that felt inescapable.

He saw it ahead—a red light at an intersection. Dead end. He couldn't cross without getting hit by traffic, couldn't wait for the light to change because the kids would catch up.

To his right: a dark alley.

Speed didn't hesitate. He cut hard, his body sliding into the narrow space between buildings. The alley was tight—barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side—and it smelled like old garbage and wet concrete. A dumpster sat halfway down, massive and rusted, the kind of thing that had probably been in this alley since the nineties.

Speed dove behind it.

He pressed his back against the cold metal, his breathing ragged, his chest heaving. His legs were tucked up against his body, trying to make himself small enough that they wouldn't see him if they looked this way. His AirPods were still in, but the music had been drowned out by his own pulse pounding in his ears.

The footsteps got closer.

"Where'd he go?!" one kid shouted.

"I think he went that way!" another one yelled, pointing in a direction that definitely was not the alley.

Speed held his breath. He didn't move. He barely existed in that moment—he was just the rapid heartbeat and the sweat and the exhaustion catching up with him all at once.

The footsteps scattered. The voices got fainter. They were chasing the wrong direction now, pulled by the confident assertion of the kid who thought he knew where Speed had gone.

Speed sat there for what felt like five minutes but was probably only thirty seconds.

When he finally emerged from behind the dumpster, his legs were shaking. Not from fear—from adrenaline and tiredness mixing into something chemical and wrong. He walked out of the alley slowly, checking both directions. The kids were gone. Somewhere down the block, they were probably still looking for him, still calling his name, still hoping he'd appear.

Speed muttered to himself, trying to process what had just happened.

"Damn, that was a LOT of kids," he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. He was breathing hard, still coming down from the sprint. "Felt like they KNEW I was coming this way..."

He paused.

The thought stuck with him in a way he didn't like. How would they know he was coming this way? He'd decided to go to the store, yeah, but he hadn't posted his route anywhere. Nobody had asked him where he was going. He'd just been walking through the neighborhood, doing his usual thing, and suddenly a mob of kids had appeared like they'd been waiting for him.

Speed shook his head. He was being paranoid. Kids recognized him. Kids loved him. Of course they'd mob him. That was normal. That was what happened when you were famous in your own neighborhood.

But the feeling lingered anyway—a small, uncomfortable seed of wrongness that he couldn't quite shake.

Speed started walking again. The 7-Eleven was still close. He still had time. He just needed to get the stuff and get home, and then everything would make sense again because he'd finally get some real sleep.

He was half a block down when he saw the old lady.

She was standing at a T-junction intersection, her walking stick tapping against the pavement. She was blind—that was obvious from the way she moved, careful and deliberate, reading the world through the stick instead of her eyes. An ELDERLY WOMAN in a light blue dress, completely lost in her own world, waiting for the light to change so she could cross the street.

Speed's bad feeling evaporated.

This was the part of his day that made sense. Not the mobs, not the fame, not the exhaustion and dreams and weirdness. Just the simple act of helping someone who needed it.

The light turned green.