Page 350 - The Book Thief

Shed told him to break his neck and leg.

Boys collected themselves on the far side of the circular field. Some stretched,
some focused, and the rest were there because they had to be.

Next to Liesel, Rudys mother, Barbara, sat with her youngest children. A thin
blanket was brimming with kids and loosened grass. Can you see Rudy? she
asked them. Hes the one on the far left. Barbara Steiner was a kind woman
whose hair always looked recently combed.

Where? said one of the girls. Probably Bettina, the youngest. I cant see him at
all.

That last one. No, not there. There.

They were still in the identification process when the starters gun gave off its
smoke and sound. The small Steiners rushed to the fence.

For the first lap, a group of seven boys led the field. On the second, it dropped to
five, and on the next lap, four. Rudy was the fourth runner on every lap until the
last. A man on the right was saying that the boy coming second looked the best.
He was the tallest. You wait, he told his nonplussed wife. With two hundred left,
hell break away. The man was wrong.

A gargantuan brown-shirted official informed the group that there was one lap to
go. He certainly wasnt suffering under the ration system. He called out as the
lead pack crossed the line, and it was not the second boy who accelerated, but
the fourth. And he was two hundred meters early.

Rudy ran.

He did not look back at any stage.

Like an elastic rope, he lengthened his lead until any thought of someone else
winning snapped altogether. He took himself around the track as the three
runners behind him fought each other for the scraps. In the homestretch, there
was nothing but blond hair and space, and when he crossed the line, he didnt
stop. He didnt raise his arm. There wasnt even a bent-over relief. He simply
walked another twenty meters and eventually looked over his shoulder to watch