Chapter 5: The Longest Four Minutes.

Caleb woke on the stairwell steps with the machete still across his knees and his neck bent at an angle that felt like a punishment. For a few seconds he lay there, listening. There were no moans and no footsteps, only the slow drip of water somewhere in the dark and the sound of his own breathing, deeper than he remembered it being.

He sat up and took inventory. His legs ached, but not the way they had the day before. His shoulders were tight but not cramped. His stomach, which should have been snarling after a day of protein bars and cold beans, sat heavy and quiet, like a sealed room. He was not hungry, and that was new. He counted his rations instead: half a bag of jerky, three protein bars, two cans of beans, a bottle and a half of water, and the purification tablets he had bartered for. A little over a day and a half, at the old rate. Maybe three days now, he thought, if I'm careful. It was the first time in his life that doing the math on food had felt like good news.

He walked south. The map Garrett had scrawled on the grocery receipt was an ugly thing, a few lines and Xs and the single word NO circled twice beside a building labelled FREIGHT. Caleb kept it in his shirt pocket and checked it every few blocks, crouching in doorways to unfold it as quietly as paper allowed. The city thinned out. Strip malls gave way to older houses, and older houses gave way to a long, empty boulevard lined with dead trees.

An hour into the morning, he passed the school. It was a low brick building with a faded banner stretched over the entrance, CLASS OF 2045, and the letters had come loose at one end so that the wind lifted them and let them fall. He did not go in. Through the open front doors he could see a long corridor lined with lockers, and in the middle of the floor a pair of small sneakers lying on their sides with the laces still tied. He told himself he was looking at the banner. He stood there a long time anyway.

Around noon he found a section of storm drain along the boulevard, wide enough to crawl through, and spent twenty minutes washing his hands and face with a half-cup of water and a piece of torn T-shirt. It helped less than he wanted. The smell had worked its way into his clothes, his hair, the lining of his nose, and he wondered whether it would ever come out. He thought about the shower in his apartment, and he thought about it with a tenderness that frightened him. It's just hot water, he told himself. It was not. It was a thing so ordinary that nobody he had ever met had thought to be grateful for it. He had stood under it for fifteen minutes every morning worrying about a bill, and he would have traded the bill, the apartment, and a year of his life for ten more of those minutes.

He kept walking.

They found him at three in the afternoon, and he never heard them coming. That was the first mistake. He was walking down an empty street with the map in one hand, tracking a row of mailboxes, when a voice behind him said, "Hey, buddy."

Caleb spun. Four people stood in the road thirty feet away. There was a big man in a canvas work jacket with a nail-studded baseball bat resting on his shoulder, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, thin and sunburned and wary, and at the back a woman with cropped hair who held a pistol low against her thigh like something she had forgotten she was carrying.

The big man smiled. "Easy. Easy. We're not looking for trouble."

They are looking for trouble.

"You got water?" the big man asked. "We've been out since yesterday. The kids, you know."

Caleb glanced at the boy and the girl, and they looked at the ground. "I've got a little," he said.

"A little's good. A little's great." The big man took a step closer, and the others spread out behind him, quiet and practiced, like people who had done this before. "Where'd you come from?"

"North."

"Through the market?"

"Yeah."

"Then you got stuff." The man's eyes slid over the backpack, the boots, the new jacket. "Real good stuff. Bet you got food, too."

Caleb felt the old familiar heat creep up the back of his neck. Okay. Think. What would somebody who knew what they were doing say? He took off the pack, slowly, and set it on the pavement. "I can spare a couple of bars," he said. "And water, half a bottle. That's all I can do."

The big man's smile did not change. "That's not what I asked."

"It's what I've got."

"I think you've got more than that." He lifted the bat off his shoulder and let it rest against his leg. "I think," he said gently, "you've got the whole bag."

The woman raised her pistol. She did it casually, almost politely, and Caleb's stomach dropped through the floor.

Drop the pack. Run!

For one terrible second he stood perfectly still. He thought of the four hundred dollars he had spent at the army surplus store, of the jerky and the jar of peanut butter he had saved because it reminded him of home, of everything he had gathered and told himself was preparation. All of it was sitting on the pavement. The boy and the girl were staring at it as if they were starving, because they were.

Caleb let go of the straps. "Take it."

The big man blinked, as though he had not expected it to be that easy. "Smart," he said, and reached for the pack.

And Caleb ran.

It was the loudest thing he had ever done. His boots hammered the pavement, and the air tore in and out of his lungs. Behind him someone shouted, and then the flat, sharp crack of a pistol split the afternoon, and something whined past his ear and chipped a mailbox in a spray of rust. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to—

Left. Fence.

He cut left across a front lawn, and a chain-link fence rose in front of him, six feet high. Two days ago he would have stopped at it. He did not stop. His arms found the top rail and his legs pulled, and for one long bright second he was in the air, and then he landed on the other side with a hard clean thump and kept running. He ran through yards and between houses, over a low brick wall and into an alley that stank of burned things. The shouting behind him faded, swelled, and faded again. The pistol cracked twice more, farther away.

Storm drain. Right.

He saw the dark mouth of the culvert, half hidden under overgrown weeds, and threw himself into it feet first. Concrete scraped his elbows. He crawled twenty feet into the dark, curled around his knees, and pressed a hand over his mouth. Silence. Then, faintly, boots on pavement above.

"Where'd he go?"

"Check the alley!"

"Forget him. We got the bag."

A pause. "The bag. Come on."

The boots moved away. Caleb did not move. He stayed there for twenty minutes, hardly breathing, listening to the water drip and his heart slowly return to a pace that did not feel like dying. When he finally lifted his head, his hands were shaking so hard that he had to press them against his thighs.

The machete was still on his belt, and so were the hatchet and the folding knife. A bottle of water, half full, was in his jacket pocket, and the purification tablets, which he had split between his pockets out of some obscure instinct. Everything else was gone. Four hundred dollars, he thought. In a bag. For a bunch of strangers.

Then, to his own surprise, he laughed. It was a short, cracked sound that echoed down the pipe and came back strangely warm. I got robbed in a zombie apocalypse, and I'm relieved. He should have felt worse. Instead, he felt oddly light, like a man who has been carrying something heavy and has just discovered it was optional. He thought of the jar of peanut butter, and of the boy and the girl, and whether they were opening it right now, somewhere, with their fingers. He hoped they were. It was a strange thing to hope for the people who had pointed a gun at him. But the woman had looked almost sorry, and the kids had not looked at him at all, and he found he could not make himself hate any of them. They had wanted the same thing he had wanted a few days ago in a kitchen with a dead light and a bill on the table. They had simply been willing to do something about it sooner.

Then his stomach clenched.

It was not hunger. It was a deep, slow, ominous turn, like a ship coming about in a harbor. He froze. Oh, he thought. Oh, no. He did the math without wanting to. Two days, almost three, of cold beans and protein bars, and jerky and water, and nothing had come out the other end. He had not even thought about it, because the stone had told his body to wait and his body had listened. It was no longer waiting. The clench came again, stronger, and sweat broke out along his hairline.

He was in a storm drain. There were zombies out there, and the dead heard everything. He was not going to climb out into some stranger's yard and squat in the weeds while he was still being hunted. Even worse, remaining in the drainage. This is the worst day of my life, he thought, and then corrected himself. No. This is the worst part of the worst day of my life. He gripped his stomach with both hands and tried to remember whether there had ever been a plan for this. There had not. Every survival forum he had read at three in the morning had covered water, fire, shelter, and first aid, and none of them had said a word about this.

System Message: You have a gift called Dimensional Teleportation. You have been able to leave since the moment you arrived. Your emergency exit has always been available. You used it once without thinking, and you have not thought of it since.

Caleb stared into the blue notification. It reappeared once more after all the inner-voice conversations since the two days of landing in the apocalypse. He could have gone home at any time. He could have gone home when the big man lifted the bat, and when the pistol cracked. He had run across three yards and over a fence with his heart trying to leave through his mouth, and a door had been standing open the entire time, and he had not once reached for it. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Then, because there was nothing else to say, and because his body was making a request in a language that required no translation, he thought, with absolute and sincere conviction: Take me home.

A blue panel bloomed in front of him, brief and bright.

System message: Dimensional Teleportation: Departing.

The storm drain disappeared.

He landed on his bedroom floor. The carpet was soft and the air was clean, and for half a second the world smelled of detergent and old laundry and the faint, wonderful, ordinary scent of home. Then his stomach clenched again, and he ran.

What followed was private, loud, and, he would later decide, one of the most spiritual experiences of his life. He sat on the toilet with his head in his hands, and his eyes closed, in a bathroom with a flickering light and a cracked tile and a faucet that dripped, and he thought with total sincerity that this was the best place that had ever existed. A flush handle. A roll of toilet paper. A door that locked. Civilization, he thought. This is what they were fighting for. He started laughing, and he could not stop.

The shower took twenty minutes. He stood under the water until it ran hot, and then hotter, and then he stood there some more. Steam climbed the walls. The dirt of three days slid off him in black ribbons and swirled down the drain. He scrubbed his hair twice and then a third time, and still the smell lingered, a ghost in the back of his skull. He thought about the boy in the oversized sweatshirt, and the sneakers on the school floor, and the woman with the pistol who had looked almost apologetic. He braced one hand against the wall, and his shoulders began to shake. He was not sure whether he was crying or laughing, probably both, and the water ran over his face and made it impossible to tell. I'm alive, he thought. It was a very small thought. It was also the only one that mattered.

When the water finally began to cool, he turned it off, wrapped himself in a towel with a fraying edge, and stood dripping in the kitchen doorway. He looked at the clock on the microwave.

10:40 p.m.

He frowned and looked at his phone, lying face-up on the table where he had left it. 10:40. That's wrong, he thought. I left at 10:14. That's twenty-six minutes. I was gone for two days. He checked the date. His mouth went dry.

The blue panel opened in front of him, patient and calm, as if it had been waiting for him to notice.

System message: Time in any world you visit runs approximately 720 times faster than on Earth. Fifty-two hours there is about 4.3 minutes here. Add roughly two in the bathroom and twenty in the shower. Twenty-six minutes. The ratio applies to every world you enter, and only while you are inside it.

Your body ages according to Earth time. Four minutes. Your mind remembers all fifty-two hours.

Physique Enhancement has begun to slow your cellular aging. The effect is small and cumulative. It is not yet measurable.

Caleb sat down on the edge of his bed. He read it twice, and then he did the arithmetic himself, with unsteady thumbs on the phone calculator. Fifty-two times sixty was three thousand one hundred and twenty minutes. Divided by seven hundred and twenty, it came to four point three. He stared at the number. Four minutes. Two and a half days, a skull split open with a hatchet, a boy he would never forget, a gun, a fence, a storm drain, and all of it had fit into the time it takes to boil an egg.

A thought struck him like cold water. Am I going to age seven hundred times faster every time I go? Am I going to die of old age by Christmas? He read the second line again, and the air came back into his chest. Body, four minutes. Mind, fifty-two hours.

He lay back and looked at the ceiling, at the crack in the corner and the water stain shaped like a bad map of Florida. So I'm older, he thought. Not on the outside. He would carry every hour of it, every smell and sound and face. His body had paid for none of it, and his mind had paid in full. He had walked in at twenty-eight and out at twenty-eight and a half, and nobody in the world would be able to see the difference. He thought of Megan, and Tyler, and Dale, and found that he could picture all three of them very clearly and very far away, like figures at the wrong end of a telescope. It was an odd, quiet feeling. It had not been there yesterday.

The refrigerator rattled in the kitchen. He listened to it for a while. It was an awful sound. It was also the sound of a place where nobody was trying to kill him.

System message: You lost your supplies. You did not lose your life. You observed. You adapted. You abandoned an object to preserve yourself, and you returned. That is an assessment, and it is not negative.

Caleb smiled at the ceiling. For a while neither of them said anything. Then the panel changed.

System message: It is 10:41 p.m. You have, by my calculation, a great deal of time. You have not opened a single menu. You have not read a single line of your own interface. You are a man with a toolbox who has spent three days using it as a doorstop. Open it.

Caleb sat up slowly. The blue panel hung in front of him, patient and silent, the way it had since the first night in this apartment, white letters on pale glass. It had never asked for anything he did not already want. He looked at it for a long time.

Then, for the first time since the system had appeared, he lifted a hand, reached out into the empty air, and touched it.