“Ow!” Darish cried out in pain when his prosthesis chafed against his leg.
“We really didn’t want to ditch this town, cuz we were making a killing,” the pasty man said, “but we’re done now. We’ll get the capital from this kid so we can scram and hit up another town. Hey, tie these two up together.” The pasty man jerked his chin, which prompted the large man to shove Winry from behind.
“Git. You get on over there too!”
“Ahh!”
When Winry was sent flying into the shop and away from the door, she fell right into the stack of crates next to Darish. They’d broken her fall, but she had taken a nasty hit and groaned in pain.
After a moment, she managed to pick herself up from the pile of collapsed crates. As though underestimating Winry and Darish by assuming they couldn’t run, the pasty man and the bald man had faced away from them and were whispering to each other a short distance away. She caught some unsettling phrases like “hostage” and “blackmail their parents.”
Meanwhile, the large man had sat down in front of a large box near the door and was pulling out a cord to bind Winry and Darish.
Winry’s eyes quickly darted to the darkened rear of the warehouse.
This would be her only chance.
Making sure the men didn’t notice, she grabbed Darish’s arm. He had been looking worriedly at her.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said in a clear, authoritative whisper, then she swung Darish’s arm around her shoulder.
“Hey!” the pasty man cried out when he heard the commotion, but by that time, Winry and Darish were climbing over the mountain of boxes and headed deeper into the warehouse.
the warehouse was even larger than she had expected. Apparently the men had only been using the very front of it as their store. Lights hung from the ceiling near the entrance, but their illumination didn’t reach the back of the building.
In the past, the warehouse might have been a parts storage facility for some wholesaler. It was packed with rows of shelves over two meters in height made from interlocked iron rods. The shelves within reach were occupied by prosthetics fittings and automail parts, but the rest were filled with cables, machine fixtures, and other such things.
Winry wove through the cramped passages between the shelves while lending her shoulder to Darish and muffling their footsteps. While the men were trying to clamber over the collapsed crates, she veered to the right or left whenever there was a break in the rows. As the pair fled deeper into the warehouse, its darkness concealed them more fully. The men shouted behind them.
“Damn it, where’d they go?! Hey, where are the lights?”
“The ones in the back are broken!”
“We can’t let ’em get away!”
After getting past the crates, the men started to pursue Winry and Darish in earnest. However, they couldn’t find their quarry in the dark, obstructed rear of the warehouse. All the men could hear was the sound of the pair’s footfalls.
Relying only on the moonlight that filtered through the window, Winry clutched Darish’s arm and kept walking toward a remembered destination.
“It’s small, but I’m pretty sure there’s a door at the back,” Winry said.
Relying on the information that the men had been soliciting people off a road in the western district, Winry had run through the neighborhood and had passed by the back of what she believed to be this warehouse. She had vague memories of seeing something like a door next to piles of discarded materials.
“Hey, how’s it looking over there?”
Winry heard the pasty man’s voice a slight distance away. She went faster, crouching down with bated breath. The men continued to shout.
“Damn it! They ain’t here either!”
“Think those twerps are convinced the military police’ll come along while they’re hiding?”
“We’d be in trouble if that girl already called ’em in before coming here,” the bald man said, irritated, from a way off. The pursuers’ footsteps became more rushed.
If the men had known about the back exit, they probably would have gone to close it from the start, but their haphazard search didn’t indicate they were aware of it. That, or the door was unusable or nonexistent, but Winry drove those thoughts from her mind and pressed forward. After a while, she heard the front door of the shop open and the sound of new men’s voices.
“Hey, what’s going on?” they said.
“We’ve got ourselves a little problem. Come help out,” called the original men.
It seemed that there were others in their group. Suddenly, the sound of footsteps increased all at once, signaling an intensification of the manhunt in the warehouse.
“What are we gonna do?” Winry, who hadn’t expected there to be others, wiped the sweat that had formed on her palms onto her clothes, her mind racing.
She saw a candlelit lamp making its way into the back of the warehouse. It seemed the men had nothing else, since she didn’t see any other lights. That was the one stroke of luck Winry and Darish had, but their situation had still deteriorated, seeing as they had even more people to run from.
“At this rate, they’ll find us,” Winry said. “Darish, you’ve got your crutch, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Winry stopped and made Darish sit. She got on all fours and started to poke her head into the shelves around her, scavenging parts as she went.