Priceless

Chapter One - The Catch-Up Act

    He slammed through the door of the empty shell of what used to be the alternative high school. With his fists clenched and his shoelace untied he defeatedly fell to the floor. He finally had a moment to breathe, a moment to look behind himself. Though he had been running for god knows how long, the six blocks between his house and his new hideaway had only slammed him into the ground the moment he stopped running. Nonetheless, he found a place where she wasn't, and maybe a place she wouldn't look. He found a hideaway, but the safety he begged to cling to was only fleeting, passing with the realization that he was sitting in the sore thumb of the surrounding suburbs. The big, mortar-covered thumb, fit with all the broken glass and cracked bricks anyone could ever dream of breaking through. This was it. This was his dead end.

     She'd get there soon, and she wasn't the kind to be stopped by barricades and boarded windows. If she would follow him home on any other day, god knew how far she'd go when he was so close she could almost taste him. His cologne. His sweat. His nerve. She wanted to taste him, and now she had him holed into a little spot where he couldn't run anymore. The cat had her mouse in check, and now he only had so many more moves to make. 

    With his shoe tied and his head back on straight he ran through the dusty, almost thick air. The results of half-hearted demolition and abandonment had left him struggling to breathe, but nonetheless he ran. He ran for whatever hope he could find, maybe behind a door or maybe in an empty corner. Maybe there was none. His head was running faster than he could, filling his ears with auditory hallucinations of her footsteps on the pavement behind him, how they'd sound when she found him hiding on the wood floors of the desolate, cold web of rooms surrounding him. The boards would be creaking. All he could hear was how they'd creak. He was done.

    Running dead into the door to the stairwell, his mediocre, leather grip couldn't pull apart the locks holding the the two wooden slabs inside their frame. He ran back, checking door after door.

Locked. 

Locked. 

Locked. 

Open.

    He slammed the door open and shut as he ran through, looking for somewhere in the soulless, suffocated room to hide. Where students once sat staring towards a single teacher were now empty desks and disheveled, dusty chairs, loosely pointed towards a heavily scratched chalkboard. There had to be somewhere to hide in here. With his heart running through his veins and his head suffocating in adrenaline he ran to the far corner of the room, his eyes set on the table where a teacher would've sat years ago, drifting between the separate lives of a caretaker and an educator.  

    With the last of his strength failing him he collapsed behind the desk, dragging what was about to become his corpse into the foot space under the desk. That was all he could do. The only barrier between him and the rest of the world left to protect him was his eyelids. Pitch encapsulated him, more so than it already had in the darkness behind the boarded windows surrounding him. It was left to time to relieve the lump in his throat and the false creaking blasting through his head. It was left to chance whether she could find him now.

_____

    A bit of time had passed before the echoes of his hallucinations had dissipated. He couldn't hear the creaking anymore, but this came with a cost, as the end of his madness was punctuated with the slamming of a door. Somebody else was inside the building.

    He began to hear the creaking again, but this time it cut through his head worse. This time it was coming from the hallway, as opposed to the inside of his skull. Despite how it hurt he still had hope. Maybe someone called the cops when they saw him bust in, and maybe soon an officer would find him and he could just explain that this girl from the library was-