Chapter 4: 9:03 PM

Chapter 4: 9:03 PM

The red second hand on the wall clock was no longer just a piece of plastic. It was a fuse, burning its way toward a bomb. Each stuttering tick as it approached the twelve was a tremor, a warning from a world losing its grip. Leo stood frozen behind the counter, a dishrag clutched in his hand, his knuckles white. He was no longer a participant in the scene, merely a spectator to the final, terrifying countdown.

He couldn’t look away.

His gaze was locked on the clock face, his entire consciousness narrowed to that single, impending moment. The hum of the refrigerators, the flicker of the faulty fluorescent tube, the distant sigh of traffic from the street outside—all of it faded, subsumed by the agonizingly slow sweep of that red line.

Pendleton sat in his booth, a stone effigy of sorrow. The boy opposite him remained bowed over his cup, lost in his private, scalding ocean. Macy stood sentinel by the condiment bar, a statue of petrified alarm. They were all part of it, anchors holding this strange, terrible moment in place. They were the reason the clock was stuttering. Leo felt it in his bones.

The second hand passed the eleven. It climbed, its movement seeming to thicken the very air.

Fifty-eight seconds.

Fifty-nine.

It reached the twelve. It shuddered, that violent, impossible vibration from before, but this time it didn't lurch forward. It held.

Click.

The minute hand, with a sound like a cracking bone, shifted from the two to the three.

9:03 PM.

And the world broke.

It began not with a bang, but with a deep, silent plunge. The lights didn't go out; they were strangled. The weak fluorescent glow dimmed, yellowing, the light turning thick and viscous like old honey. Shadows in the corners of the shop didn’t just darken, they deepened, congealing into pools of absolute blackness that seemed to suck the very texture from the walls.

Then came the heat. It wasn't a gradual warming, but a sudden, oppressive wave, as if the door to a blast furnace had been thrown open in the center of the room. The air became a physical weight, dry and scorching, cooking the moisture from Leo's eyes and throat. Sweat bloomed instantly on his forehead and the back of his neck, pasting his faded t-shirt to his skin. The cold sweat of fear was immediately baked away by this new, impossible inferno.

And then, the silence. The gentle, ever-present hum of the refrigerators and the freezer in the back room didn't just stop; it was erased. The buzz of the dying light was gone. The faint whisper of the air vents, silenced. It was a profound, vacuum-sealed quiet that was louder than any noise. A thick, cottony pressure clamped down on Leo’s eardrums, the kind you feel in the moments before lightning strikes, making the blood thumping in his own head a deafening drumbeat.

Leo’s terrified gaze snapped from the sickeningly dim lights to the patrons.

They had frozen.

It wasn't the stillness of waiting anymore. This was absolute. It was the stillness of a photograph, of a world paused. Pendleton was captured mid-motion, the black ceramic mug held an inch from his lips, his mournful eyes fixed on a point in space just beyond the grimy window. The boy’s head was still bowed, but his focus was no longer on the water in his cup; it was vacant, his posture rigid, a single drop of condensation clinging to the paper rim like a frozen tear.

And Macy. Macy was the most terrifying of all. Her hand was still outstretched, her long, pale fingers hovering a millimeter above a single packet of raw sugar. Her wide, unblinking eyes were aimed directly at the clock, her expression of constant alarm now locked into a mask of grim, knowing intensity. They weren't breathing. Leo watched their chests, desperate for the slightest rise and fall, and saw nothing. They were living statues, monuments to a moment that had swallowed time itself.

His eyes darted back to the clock. The source of it all. The second hand was no longer ticking. It was vibrating, a frantic, silent scream trapped at the apex of the clock face. It trembled with such a furious, high-frequency energy that its red line blurred into a hazy arc, a wound in the face of time. The clock was fighting, trying to tear itself free from whatever had seized it.

The world had held its breath, and Leo was trapped in its lungs.

Panic, cold and sharp, finally pierced his shock. He had to move. He had to do something. He tried to take a step back, to put the espresso machine between himself and the frozen congregation, but his feet felt like they were encased in concrete. His muscles refused to obey. He was as much a prisoner of this moment as they were, the only difference being that he was horribly, screamingly aware of it.

The minute stretched into an eternity. Sixty seconds of suffocating heat, dim light, and absolute, crushing silence. Sixty seconds of watching three inhuman figures locked in place while the second hand on the clock screamed its silent, vibrating protest. Leo’s mind began to fray at the edges. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. It was a stroke, an aneurysm, a psychotic break brought on by too much caffeine and not enough sleep. He was dying. He was going insane. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to break the spell. Wake up, Leo. Just wake up.

And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.

CLICK.

It was the sound of a universe-sized switch being flipped.

In a single, violent instant, the sound of the world rushed back in. The hum of the refrigerators roared to life, deafeningly loud. The fluorescent tube flickered and buzzed with renewed vigor. The pressure in Leo’s ears vanished with a painful pop. The suffocating heat was gone, replaced by the room’s normal, slightly-too-cold temperature, leaving his skin clammy and cold with sweat. The light snapped back to its usual pallid glare, making him flinch.

His head whipped up to the clock. The red second hand was no longer vibrating. It was ticking. Calmly, steadily, it swept past the one, then the two, as if nothing had ever happened. It now read 9:04.

His wild eyes darted back to the booth.

Pendleton lowered the mug from his lips and took a slow, deliberate sip. He placed the cup back on the table with a soft clink.

Opposite him, the boy blinked, a slow, languid motion. His gaze finally broke from his cup of water as he looked idly around the shop, his expression as flat and empty as before.

And by the condiment bar, Macy’s fingers completed their journey. She pinched the single packet of raw sugar between her thumb and forefinger, lifted it, and began to inspect it with a detached curiosity.

They moved as if the last sixty seconds had never occurred. They acted as if they hadn't just been frozen in time, as if the laws of physics hadn't just been grotesquely violated in front of Leo's eyes. There was no sign of shock, no flicker of surprise. Nothing.

Leo stood behind the counter, shaking, drenched in sweat. He stared at them, his mouth hanging open, a silent scream trapped in his throat. He looked from Pendleton’s placid face, to the boy’s blank stare, to Macy and her sugar packet. He looked at the clock, ticking away the seconds of a world that had, for him, completely shattered.

They were acting like nothing had happened.

And the most terrifying thought of all began to creep into his mind, cold and insidious.

Maybe, for them, it hadn't.

Maybe it had only happened to him.