Chapter Text
"There is absolutely no way on earth that Runner Four is faster than Runner Five!"
I was grabbing on to the wired railing on the side of the track, swinging my legs back and forth as I recalled this episode of Radio Abel.
"Any time, any place, my money’s on Runner Five."
He may have had a chance at getting any money back if we were in my prime years of high school athletics, where I was training five sessions a week and (somehow) medalling at state-level competitions. Believe it or not, those were the easy times of my life. I didn't have to rely on talking to make friends because my legs did that for me. Those were the years before I had to put an end to my Olympic dreams to spend hours studying for a university course which I didn't even like.
Actually, it was probably the whole university experience that I hated. It was probably all those people at College that constantly snickered every time I came within a six-foot radius to them and started whispering to each other, probably something like oh look, here's the kid who can't talk. Or maybe it was that I never got to race again because I had the flu during the trials for the College athletics team.
For the first time in five years, I was racing again. Well technically, it was just a fitness test, which Maxine had reminded us of a solid thirty-one times. But this particular 5000m time trial seemed to be some sort of event that brought the residents of Abel together. The audience stand was packed with restless children and their parents waving banners and posters around. Standing at the opposite end of the track, I could barely make out what any of them said, but together they formed one beauty of a rainbow. Amid the crowd, I saw Ed and Molly with a poster too. From a distance, I recognized the stick-figure running man drawing, looking strikingly similar to the one that Molly drew in a letter they sent me a couple of weeks ago.
I also noticed Janine setting up the automatic timing systems at the finish line. Jody told me that she created these herself to avoid future arguments about the test during missions, which was a consequence of Simon and Sara almost getting bitten by crawlers one mission because they were too caught up in an argument about who won the 5000m last time.
Finally, the Radio Abel guys had set themselves up behind the 100m starting line. Jack was eagerly taking his seat at the commentator's table whilst Eugene was next to him, tampering with the PA system.
I'd call this a race. Watching Abel's best runners (possibly the best in the post-apocalyptic world) compete against each other was probably the closest thing to the Olympics the children could get. It warms my heart to be able to give them a sense of one of my favorite past-times.
The last thing I expected from the apocalypse was to be back in my element again. My life had entirely changed (not for the better) the moment I decided to walk away from athletics in tenth grade. Yet, here I was, doing dynamic stretches and my pre-race routine on the side of the track as if I never left in the first place. And on every other post-apocalyptic day, I'd be running too - just running for my life, instead of on the track. After all, my title at Abel is 'Runner' Five.
The more I ponder this, the more I start to believe that maybe, just maybe, I was destined to run.