Breakdown by Joseph Monninger

Author:Joseph Monninger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-11-12T22:00:00+00:00

What was that?” Olivia asked, her voice like a hiss. “What exactly was that?”

Tock didn’t know. His mind had suddenly flushed white and empty. He lifted the tire iron in front of him like a samurai sword and stood ready to combat whatever came at them.

“That sounded like …” Preston whispered.

Tock cut him off. “Those were human steps,” he said.

Because they were. He would have bet money on it.

“Okay, we’re going to go into the kitchen to check for food and then we’ll go straight out. Everyone on board with that?” Tock asked.

No one answered, so he figured they were.

He turned and went quickly down the remainder of the hallway. His ears strained to hear whatever had made the footsteps, but they had stopped. For now. They had been quick and soft, like someone moving without wanting to be heard. It was a little freaky, Tock admitted to himself.

“Let’s go,” he said when they arrived at what he took to be the kitchen door. “Ready?”

“You first,” Olivia said.

He kicked open the door.

And something ran at him.

It happened so fast that he didn’t have a chance to react. It was on him, just like that, just like nothing. He swung his tire iron at whatever it was, but the tire iron bounced on the doorjamb and clanged out of his hand. He screamed, and it was a timid, babyish scream that immediately embarrassed him. But whatever it was — it was too dark to make out anything clearly — kept whining and hissing and sputtering down by his legs.

“Get it off me!” he yelled. “Get it off me!”

He felt Olivia slide next to him and kick at something with all her might.

“Run!” she yelled. “Close the door on it and run!”

Tock fell outside the door and came up onto his feet as fast as he could. He saw Preston scrambling down the hallway, running like a spider monkey, all wild and apish. Tock took off after him. He heard Olivia behind him.

And he heard it, the thing in the kitchen, coming after them all.

“Go, go, go, go,” he said.

He felt crazy scared. He felt as though he could run through a wall.

But when he came through the front door onto the porch and began to run down the steps, he realized in that last instant that he had forgotten about the missing step.

First he felt air under his foot. Under his left foot. His right foot pushed off from the porch, and he had gone down so many stairs — had leaped down a million of them — that he had entirely forgotten that this set of steps lacked a single riser. So his right foot went down, and the rest of his body weight surged awkwardly to that side. His left foot found nothing to support it, so he fell and careered to port, and he felt himself going down. He heard a snap and realized something had broken, some part of him had broken, and he screamed again, for the second time, he realized.

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