Friday
So Barry tilted his head to frame the door of the bar as his main aim, managed to contort himself between it and one of the waiters who was holding it half open, the expression on the face of the man blocked mid-smile, then he found himself in the large dining hall full of customers. They had all been reached by the ripple of his time freeze so Barry had to be very careful, not to proceed too brutally and turn the place into a human bowling alley with all the people and chairs and table flying around. One slight twitch of his hand and every obstacle inanimate or human, would be swatted away at savage speed. Everyone’s hair in the hall was floating as if underwater between the flares of blue electricity in quite a beautiful scene, and Barry thought that it had been a while since last time he bolted through such an ample crowd.
Bolting was such a rebirth, if done well, and Barry’s organism sucked avidly on the blue juice, orienting its use towards hyper-focus, his senses sharpened to cut through a massive flow of information and data, angles of movements, positions of people around him, aborted gestures to be able to identify the best course. His eyes landed on a black hooded sweatshirt neatly folded at the back of a chair where a very big man was sitting, his glass of beer suspended in its trip from the table to his mouth. Barry swiftly grabbed it and stuck it under his arm, then helped himself to the two towels at the side of the man.
He had to be particularly cautious with his feet, any sudden turn or braking able to cause substantial damage in the flooring, and he was thinking about that when his ears intercepted the very faint slow-motion rubbing of something made of plastic, behind him. You are going TOO FAST, too fast, however, moved by the urgency of the situation, he set out to spin and U-turn. That was a spectacular move in such a tight space, equivalent to a train going 180 inside a closet and the heels of his feet dug into the floor, unfortunately projecting one or two tiles from the crust of it in the air. Could be worse. He would have shrugged if he had been able to, but every movement had to be considered with parsimony here.
He kept following the feeble sound of plastic squeaking, for he knew exactly what it was: tape. A bartender was using it, transfixed while rolling it around a pipe behind the counter at the back of a huge coffee machine. Barry shook his head, he didn’t have a choice, he needed that tape. The jump he performed over the counter, followed by a graceful glide, was a masterpiece of bolting manoeuvre and he smoothly seized the tape from the man’s hand while miraculously sparing all of his fingers from getting pulverized, but then, redirecting his course, he dropped it. It was a thick roll and cascaded in the air before landing in a row of wine glasses, tossing them into a circular glass halo which would, at the end of the bolt, probably send some of them to hook into the ceiling. Someone could walk in following such event and comment on the originality of the decoration.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
OH SHIT, Barry deplored, he had lost the tape! A multicolored spool of string caught his eye at the end of the bar, which was not as useful as tape but could be of assistance, so he seized it, unable to back down at this point. The restrooms were located at the bottom of a very narrow flight of stairs and Barry didn’t have any time or angle for that, so he held his breath and leaped it, once more causing some destruction to the concrete floor that welcomed him underground, I’m so sorry, he thought, unable to process his guilt about the property damage he was inflicting on this innocent bar and its people but, still in the race, he made a surgically precise intrusion into the women’s bathroom, one lady halted in the middle of the task of washing her hands. There, he banged against the dispenser for menstruation products.
He was running dangerously low on adrenaline and bolting power and, inside his entrails, the pain was menacing to overcome everything again, so he gave up on gentleness, I’m so incredibly sorry, for fuck’s sake, punching against the dispenser to unhinge it from the wall. His exit from the women’s bathroom created a mini tornado from the spinning, lifting the woman’s dress. If anyone exited the stalls after time resumed at this moment, the details of her panties would be visible to all for a brief second.
At last he braked in front of the toilet for handicapped users and straightened his spine, coming to a stop. He couldn’t risk damaging this door, it was his door, and the place where he wished to be was behind it. With the bolt finally coming to a close and shutting around him, retracting from the bar and its surroundings, a cacophony of glass breaking, tile hitting one another, the resuming of the loud music blasting from the place’s radio, shouts such as “where the fuck is my tape?” burst from the floor above him. Several women he had left behind in the ladies’ room screamed briefly.
Resolved to ignore everything until later when he’d come back and possibly find a way to compensate the bar owners for all the wreck, Barry carefully opened the door of the handicapped quarters using his elbow on the handle to avoid leaving any trace of blood on his passage, slid into the room, praying no one with a handicap needed to use the toilet at the moment, locked the door behind him. He disintegrated against the wall and dropped on the ground with all his supplies like he was a rock to the sea.