Breaking the Fall by Michael Cadnum Read Free Book Online

gasping, to the sill.
    A flashlight worked the dark. The beam swung toward me and missed. It pooled on the brilliant blades of grass, then swung from tight circle to oblong. It pulled back toward me where I squirmed, dangling from the window.
    I fell.
    What you have to do, Jared had said, is roll, lowering your shoulder, tumbling into the fall. That way you can’t get hurt. I have injured myself before. I lost time as a sophomore, having to study at home because I stepped funny on second base.
    My mouth filled with warm water. I was all over the grass, one arm far away, by the fence, the other hand squashing an ice plant. My skull was in fragments, all wet and leaking, the crushed bits of it rasping as I jerked my head.
    Jerked, and then woke.
    I plunged upward, onto my feet, and staggered. I tasted blood, and ran a ragged, drunken course to the back fence, barely aware of what my legs and arms were doing as they fought the back fence, punched it, kicked it, found some purchase in a knothole, a splintery grip at the top edge.
    I windmilled over the top of the fence, and half stumbled to the gritty pavement. I lunged onward through the dark, and then I saw it.
    It was the distinctive shape of a police car, that brute-vehicle menace that means: power.
    I stopped myself, bent double, and knelt. The ground swung back and forth around me. Nausea flashed on and off.
    Jared was nowhere.
    I had left him behind.
    I put my hands to my hair, feeling above my ear for the stuff that had leaked from inside my head. It was wet and gluey. My fingers moved gingerly, and I knew that a brain infection was what I deserved for abandoning my friend.
    Back. I have to go back.
    I stood up slowly. My hand felt for support, and found a cinderblock wall. I was going to throw up, and then, just as surely, I wasn’t.
    I knew where I had to go.
    I sprinted back toward the fence, one of my knees so weak I ran with a crazy limp. But I was fast.
    Until I realized that my body had grown heavy. I was slow and fighting something. I was struggling to overcome a strange, ungainly weight. I was struggling against a shadow that clung.
    It was a human being.
    My adversary’s grip was on my shoulder, and pulling me back by one arm.
    I went down.
    Caught.

12
    So this is what happens.
    The law had me, the law and all it involved, things I could imagine only as blank-faced authority, loveless and without mercy. I saw it now. How could I have forgotten? The gray world, adult and without life, was always going to catch me. It catches everyone.
    There was the splash of a thought, a pain more than a memory: my parents. This will be an ugly surprise for them.
    I tried to stir, and I was, to my amazement, able to move my arms and legs. The arms that held me were not strong at all, not nearly as strong as I was. They trembled.
    He was laughing.
    â€œYou ran like a crab, Stanley.”
    I tossed myself free and stood. I spat blood, panting.
    â€œLike a crab,” he said. “All bent over.”
    â€œWhat happened to you?” I asked before I was aware of being able to speak.
    His foot splashed a puddle. He was gone, and I followed, over another fence, and across a pile of rattling boards, dim and warped in the darkness. A dog was upon us, wagging its tail and growling, exposing its teeth and leaping around us, wanting to kill us and play with us at the same time.
    Jared spoke to it, ran a hand over its back. The dog continued to growl, but pranced away as we flung ourselves over a gate and out across another dew-slick lawn.
    He ran much better than I did. My own legs had grown new joints, which swiveled as I ran. There was a numbness in my skull that would, I knew from experience, ripen into pain very soon.
    Jared vanished through a tangle of fennel, down into a culvert beside an electricity substation surrounded by a chain-link fence with barely visible HIGH VOLTAGE signs. The equipment within made a quiet sound, a sneaky, galactic hum.
    I crouched,