Chapter 7: A Man in Running Shorts.

Dale did not say anything about the shift Caleb had nearly missed. He looked at Caleb's face when he came in on Saturday morning, took in the gray skin and the hollow eyes, and went back to scraping the flat-top. "Fryer's yours," he said. That was all. Caleb tied his apron and took the fryer and did not feel a thing.

The next two weeks went by like a bus window. He clocked in at ten, flipped patties until the grease had worked its way into the cracks of his burn scars, and clocked out at six. He rode the bus home, ate whatever was cheapest, and lay on top of the blanket with his shoes still on. The panel stayed where it was. He stopped noticing it the way he had stopped noticing the refrigerator, as a sound that existed so that you could not hear it, a pale unblinking shape in the corner of his sight that said nothing when he spoke to it.

He tried a lot, at first. Good morning. Silence. Slow day at the grill. Dale's in a mood. You'd like him; he's very efficient. Silence. Hey. You know, I was thinking, we got off on the wrong foot. I'd like to make that right. Silence. He tried humor and he tried flattery, and on the fourth night he tried a long stumbling speech about how he understood now that the system was beyond him, how grateful he was for the chance, and how he hoped that someday the two of them could be something like partners. He fell asleep in the middle of it. When he woke, the panel was exactly where it had been. Okay, he thought. Message received. He was not quite sure what the message was.

The worst part was the nights. He lay in the blue half-light with his phone on his chest and let it feed him what it had always fed him: videos of men in expensive cars, videos of men in expensive shirts explaining why he was a failure, threads by strangers who had decided with great confidence that the world was rigged, that effort was pointless, and that anyone who disagreed was a fool or a liar. They had a name for what he was beginning to feel. They called it the black pill, and the threads loved it. Nothing matters. Looks, height, money. You are what you were born as. Give up. He read them for an hour at a time, and it felt like sinking into a bath.

He knew, in a small distant part of his mind, that those voices were the same voice that had told him, across a kitchen, that his parents had been gone for years. It was the voice of a person who had made peace with losing. It was comfortable, and it was warm. And in the middle of that warmth he would sometimes stop scrolling, put the phone down, and stare at the panel. Level one. The cruellest part was that the thread-voices were more or less right about him. He was still twenty-eight. He was still a line cook in a cheap apartment, and he had a floating screen that had told him, accurately, that the mountain was large and his legs were small. If the strongest beings in existence were still nowhere near the edge of the scale, what was a man like him supposed to do with a one? Some nights he made a deal with himself: Tomorrow, one thing. Just one thing that isn't scrolling. Most mornings the deal was dead by lunch.

He said none of this to anyone. He did not say it to Marcus, who asked him on the second Friday whether he was okay, and he did not say it to Dale. He certainly did not say it to the panel. The longer it stayed silent, the more he understood that he was afraid of it, and not in the shallow way he had been afraid in the apocalypse. This was the fear of a man standing before a judge he had once insulted. It had said it would be watching. It had said, do not waste it. And it had said Level one like a verdict.

On a Monday he did the thing he had been promising himself for years. He went for a run.

He did not decide to. He got off the bus two stops early because he did not want to go home yet and found himself at the edge of a small public park, where a gravel path looped through a stand of bare maples. A woman in a pink windbreaker jogged past with a golden retriever, and he watched them go. I should do that. It was a thought he had had a hundred times, and this time he did something about it. He went home, dug a pair of gym shorts out of the laundry pile, laced up the boots he had bought for the apocalypse because they were the only shoes he owned without holes, and went back.

He lasted four minutes. He stood on the gravel with his hands on his knees and a stitch in his side like a knife, wheezing, listening to his heart. It was humiliating. It was also, he realized, weirdly less humiliating than he had expected. He was winded, but he was not dying. He had a body that tired and, after a minute, forgave him. He tried again on Tuesday, and on Wednesday he lasted nine minutes. By the end of the week he could finish a full lap without stopping and a second lap with his mouth open. His legs ached in a bright honest way. He slept better. When he ate, he was hungrier than before, deeply and steadily, and the cheap chicken and rice he cooked on Wednesday night disappeared in one sitting and left him wanting more. He did not connect any of it to the stone. He was too busy being tired and sad and sure that none of it counted.

On Friday evening he saw Megan.

He had jogged the full length of the path and was standing at the edge of the park with his hands on his hips, breathing through his nose, when a car turned onto the street in front of him. It was a dark gray sedan, clean and low, the kind that did not rattle. It stopped at the curb, and Tyler got out of the driver's side, walked around the front, and opened the passenger door. Megan stepped out of the building across the street in a long camel coat Caleb had never seen, her hair down, laughing at something. She said something to Tyler. Tyler touched the small of her back as she slid into the seat.

Caleb stood perfectly still behind a maple. He should have felt pain, and he did, a little, a dull ache like a bruise pressed with a thumb. But something else lay beneath it that surprised him, and it took him a full minute to name it. He was measuring. The car. The coat. The way Tyler put a hand on a door as though doors were things that happened to other people. The key fob on the dash, the shine on the paint, the easy way the two of them moved around each other, not like people at the start of something, but like people who already had a place.

He's got money, Caleb thought. Real money.

It was an obvious thing to notice, and not a comfortable one. For three weeks he had been telling himself that she had cheated for no reason, that she was shallow, that she had thrown him away for a gray hoodie and a nice beard. She had left a man who could not afford a new refrigerator for a man who could afford a new car. It was not noble. It was not even especially cruel. It was arithmetic. The sedan pulled away and rolled down the street, its brake lights bright as a pair of coals, and he stood there until they were gone.

Then, without quite deciding to, he took out his phone. He did not text her, and he did not look at her photos. He opened a browser and searched, with thumbs that moved before he could talk himself out of it, for a studio apartment. Not a nicer one, only a cheaper one, closer to the bus line, in a building where the refrigerators did not scream. Move out. Get away from the crack in the wall. It was not a plan. It was barely a direction. But it felt like the first thing in three weeks that had weight.

He kept thinking about Megan, of course. He imagined an elaborate version of the future in which he showed up at her door richer and taller and happier, with a story that would make her put a hand to her mouth. He imagined her saying I was wrong and himself saying I know. He ran through it twice, and both times the picture curdled halfway. It was not guilt, and it was not even doubt. It was something nearer to embarrassment, a small bright hot feeling in the center of his chest, as if someone had walked in on him rehearsing a speech to a mirror. Why does that feel so pathetic? he thought. He did not have an answer.

He did not mean to go.

That would be his excuse later, in the shower, with the water running cold. He had been standing at the edge of the park with his heart still pounding from the run and his mind still full of a black sedan, and the rage had come up from somewhere so low and so deep that he had not known it was there. It was not hot, the way the afternoon with Megan had been hot. It was a cold wide thing, like a lake. He wanted to hit something, and he wanted to hit something that would not hit back with a lawyer.

Take me to the apocalypse.

The thought was out before he could stop it, and the park went white.

The smell reached him first. He landed on his hands and knees in a drainage ditch beside a road, in a shallow pool of something black, and the first breath of that air made him retch so hard his eyes burned. He was wearing gym shorts and a thin T-shirt. He had no machete and no hatchet. He had no knife, no backpack, no gloves. He had a pair of boots and the skin on his hands.

Oh no. The thought was very clear and very calm. What did I just do?

System message: Arrival confirmed.

He never read the line. He was already looking at the road. There were three of them standing in it: a man in the tatters of a delivery uniform, a woman in a hospital gown, and a heavy bearded figure he could not classify. They were turning now, slow as sunflowers, their heads swiveling toward him with a dry, sticky sound like Velcro coming apart.

I'll just hit them, he thought stupidly.

He climbed out of the ditch and hit the first one before he had decided to. It was the delivery man. Caleb's fist caught him on the side of the jaw, and the jaw came apart with a wet unpleasant crunch, and the man staggered. It was the eleven percent, and it was not enough. The man's head rocked back and forward, and his hands came up with the fingers hooked, and Caleb realized with a cold, slow horror that hitting a thing that did not feel pain had no effect on it whatsoever. The woman in the gown reached him next, and her hand closed on his T-shirt. He tore free, and the shirt came apart, and he stumbled backwards into the third one, which wrapped two arms around him from behind like a bad hug and pulled. Teeth closed on the fabric of his shoulder. Not the skin. The fabric. A hair's width.

Take me home, he thought, with all the force in his body. Take me home, take me home—

The world went white again.

He appeared on a gravel path, ten feet from where he had left. There was no thunder and no blast of light, only a small wet pop like a cork being pulled, and then he was on his knees in the dusk with a torn shirt and black fluid in his hair and a smell coming off him so thick that a passing couple stopped dead. They were about thirty, in matching running jackets, the man holding a water bottle and the woman wearing a ponytail. They stared at him, and then at the empty space where a moment ago there had been nothing at all.

"Did he just—" the man began.

The woman put a hand over her nose. "Oh my God," she said, to nobody and to everyone. "He smells like shit."

Caleb got up. His legs had gone liquid, and he held his arms around himself as if that would hide the shirt. He met the woman's eyes and was aware, with an exquisite total clarity, of exactly what he looked like: a man in torn shorts, covered in something black, kneeling on a path in a public park and smelling like a corpse.

"Sorry," he said, in a voice that did not sound like his. Then he ran.

He ran the whole way home, nearly a mile, with his lungs on fire and tears in his eyes, past a bus stop where two teenagers laughed at him and a convenience store where the clerk wrinkled his nose and looked away, up three flights of stairs and into the apartment and into the shower, still wearing the boots. He turned the water on cold because he could not wait for it to warm. He stood there with his whole body shaking. I'm so stupid, he thought. I'm so stupid. I went to fight zombies in gym shorts. He started to laugh, a wet, scraping, helpless laugh, and then he was crying, and then he sat down in the tub and hugged his knees while the freezing water ran over the top of his head.

What exactly is your goal?

Caleb did not move. The panel hung in front of him, white against the steam, whilst the voice from the system rang. It was the first thing it had said in twenty-one days. He had imagined this moment a hundred times, and in none of them had he been sitting in a bathtub with his boots on.

System message: You have learned the functions I permit. You have seen what I am, and what you are. You were given something no other person in your world has, something whole populations would kill for, and you have now used it to run out of a park in gym shorts to strike at corpses.

You are less capable than you were on the night you packed a machete and a jar of peanut butter. Your decisions are worse. Your fear is greater. Your purpose is not visible.

I will ask once. What do you want?

He opened his mouth, and it took him a while to realize that he did not have an answer. He had a list. He could have produced it in his sleep: revenge on Megan, money, a better apartment, the power to make people look at him. But none of it was a want. They were complaints turned inside out, things he was angry about, rearranged into a shape that sounded like a plan. If someone had taken all of it away, if there had been no Megan and no Tyler and no Dale and no Bill and no sedan, he would not have known what to do with a Saturday.

I don't know, he thought, and it frightened him. I really don't know.

The system waited. It did not seem disappointed. It did not seem anything. It was only there, large and still, like a locked door.

System message: You have wondered, since the day we met, why I have not issued missions. Here is one.

MISSION: Develop a solid plan for your life.

Time limit: 24 hours (Earth).

Failure: ?

The text sat there, blank at the end of the third line, a small, cold question mark. It did not explain. It did not need to.