Thirty-One Seconds Out

Daylight made the damage look official.

The sun came up flat and white over the retail park, and by twenty to eight Dev could see exactly what he'd done to the front of his own shop. The doors stood a body's width apart, one panel bowed where the pallet bar had bitten. The rubber seal hung in a loop. The umbrella spokes lay on the mat like the bones of a small bird.

The car park was mostly cars. Mostly. Three of the ridged things lay in the shade under a delivery van, flanks going in and out. When a gull landed on the trolley shelter, one lifted its head. The gull did nothing interesting. The head went down.

Behind him the freezers hummed. They'd died at 3:12 and come back by four, frost creeping up the glass with no plug and no generator. The Zone ran them now. He had decided not to have feelings about that.

In aisle three, Margaret was doing inventory.

"Crepe bandages, eleven. Plasters, assorted, forty-four boxes." She wrote on the back of a roll of price labels with a marker from the till. "No butterfly closures, which is a scandal. Paracetamol, loads. If you find anything stronger, you bring it to me."

"Yes, Sister."

"Matron." She checked the watch. "Sister was years ago."

The dog-bed nest in the pet aisle had been straightened, the fleece folded into a square. Dev ate a croissant from bakery. It had gone stale in the way that made it taste like cardboard pretending.

"You've the look of a man doing sums," Margaret said, not turning round.

"Stock rotation."

"Hm." She wrote gauze, 9, and checked the watch again.

* * *

At quarter past eleven she went into the staff room with a camping stove and a pan, saying something about tea being a human right. Dev waited until he heard the gas click.

Then he stepped over the line.

The hook took him under the breastbone, exactly where it had in the dark. The blue square opened. 00:59. 00:58.

"One," he said under his breath. "Two."

He counted to ten and stepped back in. The pull let go. The square vanished. He clicked the price gun and stuck a sixty-pence label on his sleeve.

He went out again. Same hook. Same fresh sixty. Whatever it was counting, it didn't remember the last time. That was something. He took another label.

On the fourth go he paced it. The trolley bay stood at the end of the second row, a steel shelter with a corrugated roof and four abandoned trolleys nose to tail inside. Sixty-two paces from the line. He had never run sixty-two paces in his life without a bus at the end of them.

He walked twenty and turned back. The square said 00:31 when he crossed in, and his legs felt wrong, as though he'd been carrying shopping up stairs.

The fifth time he stood still outside and let it run. At thirty the hook stopped tugging and started pulling. At twenty it was a fist. At fifteen the car park tilted a degree to the left and stayed there. He stepped in at twelve and sat down on the mat without meaning to.

Sixty pence. Sixty pence.

On the seventh go his trainer scuffed the tarmac. Under the van, a ridged head came up and turned toward him, slow as a satellite dish. He went back inside so fast he hit the door frame with his shoulder.

The head stayed up a long time. Then the gull came back, and it lost interest in him.

He sat on the crate with seven labels on his sleeve and thought about distance. The trolley bay was sixty-two paces. The river was a mile. The far bank was another world.

* * *

At half two Margaret sat him down among the tinned peaches again and unwound his hand.

"Seven," she said.

"Seven what?"

"Labels. Sixty pence each. You're wearing four pound twenty on your arm and you look like a man who's given blood twice." She peeled the old strips back. The cut had opened at one end. "Did you think I couldn't see the front from the staff room?"

"I thought the tea had your full attention."

"Fourteen seconds. Twenty. Twenty-two. Then a long one." She dabbed antiseptic into the cut, harder than she needed to. "You came in on that one looking like a dropped trifle."

"It's fresh air. I'm on nights. I never get any."

"You count wrong," she said. "You speed up when you're frightened. Everybody does. That's why I never let a student nurse count a pulse on their own."

He clicked the price gun. She put her hand flat on it until he stopped.

"Whatever's out there," she said, "you're not going to reach it by sneaking out while I boil a kettle."

"There's nothing out there."

"There's a trolley bay. And past it, there's the thing you keep looking at." She laid a fresh strip across his palm and smoothed it with her thumb. "So. Here's what's on offer. Either I time you, properly, out loud, with this." She tapped the steel watch. "Or you stop."

"And if I just go?"

"Then you go." She closed the kit. "And I find out on my own what happens to me if you're wrong."

He looked at the dog beds down the far end of the pet aisle. The folded fleece. The first-aid shelf with its counted plasters.

"Once," he said. "To the bay and back. I need to know what the end of it feels like."

"You need to know." She stood, knees cracking. "All right. Shoes tied. Double knot."

* * *

She stood just inside the gap, feet planted on the lemon-scented floor, the watch held up at chest height the way you'd hold a thermometer to the light.

"I'll call every second," she said. "Don't look at me. Look where you're going."

"What if you lose count?"

"I have never lost count."

Under the van, all three creatures were asleep, or doing whatever they did instead. The gull had gone.

"On my go," Margaret said. "Go."

He went over the line and the hook bit.

"One. Two. Three."

Her voice came after him, flat and even, the same weight on every number, the voice of somebody reading a chart at a bedside at four in the morning. It didn't speed up. It didn't care that he was frightened. It was the most comforting thing he had ever heard.

His trainers slapped the tarmac. Every slap was a bell.

"Nine. Ten. Eleven."

The pull grew with distance. It was like running into a wind that only blew through his chest. By the end of the first row his thighs had gone thick.

"Nineteen. Twenty."

Under the van, a ridged head lifted.

"Twenty-four. Twenty-five."

He reached the trolley bay and slapped his good hand on the cold steel post. It rang. The head under the van swung round, and the creature unfolded itself onto its feet.

"Thirty. Turn round, Devon."

He turned. The car park had tilted again, and this time it kept going. He ran down a slope that wasn't there.

"Thirty-six. Thirty-seven."

The creature came out from the van, clicking, low, turning its head to find the noise of him. It was between him and the doors. Then it wasn't. It was beside him, and it was fast, and the fist in his chest closed so hard he couldn't feel his own feet.

"Forty-five. Forty-six."

He could see her. Dressing gown, wellies, watch held up, mouth moving. She had not stepped back from the gap. She did not raise her voice.

"Fifty-three. Fifty-four."

His legs went first. He ran on knees that belonged to someone else.

"Fifty-six. Fifty-seven."

He went through the gap on his face.

The blue square said 00:03 and closed. Behind him, claws scraped and stopped. The creature stood at the blue line with one foot raised, nose an inch from the threshold, breathing its clicking breath into the shop.

Margaret didn't look at it. She looked at him.

Something warm ran over his lip and dripped onto the floor. Red on yellow lino. His legs were shaking with a fine, steady tremor, like a fridge motor. The hook had let go, but it had left a bruise in his chest, deep and hollow.

[Bond strain. Recovery incomplete.]

"Head forward," Margaret said, kneeling. "Not back. Forward. Pinch here." She put his own fingers on the bridge of his nose and held them there. "Fifty-seven seconds to go a hundred and twenty-four paces. What did you learn?"

"That it's a long way," he said thickly.

"No. You learned three seconds." She pressed a wad of gauze into his free hand. Outside, a can rolled somewhere in the wind, and the creature turned away to find it. "Who's on the other side of the river?"

He looked at the blood on the floor. He thought about saying nobody. He thought about her voice counting, never once going faster.

"My brother," he said. "Kayode. Halsey Street. Third floor."

"Older or younger?"

"Younger. Twenty-one." He pressed the gauze. "Our mum died last year. I didn't go to the funeral. He hasn't spoken to me since."

Margaret said nothing for a while. She checked the watch, which he had stopped noticing she did, and then he noticed it again.

"Why didn't you go?"

"Because I'd have had to stand there," he said. "With everyone looking at me. Like I was the one who should know what to do next."

"And now you're standing here."

"I'm sitting, technically."

She almost smiled. She got up with a hand on his shoulder for balance and left it there a second longer than balance needed.

"Here's the rule," she said. "My rule, not your System's. No run without my watch. And not without a reason I'll take. Fifty-seven seconds isn't a reason. It's a near miss."

"Is that a nurse thing?"

"It's a me thing." She wound the watch, three precise turns of the crown, though it didn't need it. "I've counted down before. I don't care to do it badly."

* * *

At dusk the gap rattled.

Dev had the pallet bar up before he knew he'd stood. Margaret came out of aisle three holding a crepe bandage like a weapon.

A bicycle front wheel was jammed in the doors. Behind it, someone was swearing quietly and with real range.

"Hold on," Dev said, "I'll pull the..."

"Don't touch it."

A girl's voice. The wheel twisted, stuck, twisted again. Then she let go of the bike entirely. It fell outside with a crash of spokes and pedals, and across the car park every ridged head in the dusk swung toward the noise.

She turned sideways and slid through the gap like posting a letter.

She was small, brown, wet to the knees, in a hoodie three sizes too big with the cords chewed flat at the ends. A rucksack. Cracked trainers. She landed on the mat, straightened, and looked at the two of them as if they were a disappointing loading screen.

Outside, claws reached the bike. It scraped across the tarmac and stopped at the blue line.

"You're freezing," Margaret said. "Come here, let me look at you."

"I'm fine."

"You're soaked."

"I'm aware I'm soaked. I was there." She put a hood cord in her mouth and chewed it. Her eyes went to a point in the air just in front of her face and moved left to right, fast, reading. They flicked once. She snorted.

"Oh, that's grim," she said.

"What is?" Dev asked.

"Mine says I'm an occupant. Unit Four. Rest bonus active." She looked at him over the cord. "You're the one getting paid, aren't you? Somebody sleeps in here, you get a coin. This isn't a shelter. It's a bank, and we're the deposits."

Margaret's mouth thinned. Dev found he couldn't argue with it, which was worse.

"What's your name, love?" Margaret said.

"Priya." A beat of chewing. "Don't call me love."

"Priya. Sit down before you fall down. Where've you come from in that state?"

"Over the weir." She dropped the rucksack and sat on it rather than the crate Dev pushed toward her. "There's a footpath along the top. It's wet. Obviously."

Dev's hand stopped on the price gun.

"The weir's across the river," he said.

"Yeah. That's usually where they keep them." She peeled off a sock and wrung it out onto the lino, next to the brown smear of his nosebleed. "Four minutes if you run and don't fall in. Five if you're being dramatic about it."

Four minutes. He felt the bruise in his chest as if she had pressed on it.

"What were you doing over there?" Margaret asked.

"Stuff." The cord went back in. "I'm here now, aren't I."

Margaret checked the watch, and let it go. Dev didn't.

"Halsey Street," he said. "The flats. Did you pass them?"

"The ugly ones by the bus garage?" Priya shrugged. "Cut through the back of them. Everything's dead over there. Doors open. Nobody."

"Nobody," he repeated.

"Nobody on the ground." She pulled off the other sock. "Third floor, though. Someone's up there with a torch. Walking back and forth past the windows, end to end, like they're looking for something they put down."

Dev's glasses slid off the top of his head and hit the floor, and he didn't pick them up.