Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Thief

By Tuesday afternoon the bank had its $168,000 and Ezra's grandmother still owned a building with a hole in its roof.

By Tuesday night I was sitting in the dark at the bottom of the cistern stairs.

I had a thermos of chili beside me and the axe across my knees.

Ezra had gone up to bed at nine.

He had stopped on the third step to ask whether I wanted a pillow.

I said no, and he said that was what everyone says before they want one.

I didn't want one.

I wanted to know who had left a spoon in a can of beans.

There was only one other way into the cistern.

I had found it that afternoon, behind a pile of coal sacks, a square iron hatch that ran up to the alley.

It had been oiled recently.

A little after eleven, the hatch scraped open and a thin pair of legs came down the chute backward.

They belonged to a boy in a hoodie with the sleeves cut off, with a duffel bag over one shoulder.

He dropped to the floor and turned on a penlight.

I let him get as far as the shelf before I clicked on mine.

"Hi," I said.

He screamed, which I had not expected, and then pulled a folding knife out of his back pocket.

"Don't," I said. "I'm in a bad mood, and I've had a lot of practice with knives."

That was true.

For six years I had broken down a hundred pounds of chicken a day.

I knew where a blade went and where a wrist bent.

He came at me anyway, because he was nineteen and scared.

I stepped inside the swing and caught his wrist in both hands.

I turned it until his fingers opened.

The knife rang off the brick.

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