Dunc Breaks the Record Read Free Page A

as a suggestion, Amos did thesame. The two boys sat in their underwear on a large, flat rock overlooking the river and let the sun bake them. The glider, or what was left of it, lay in a crumpled mass to their rear.
    “Well?” Amos said.
    “Well what?” The sun was warm, and Dunc felt a strange urge to just close his eyes and sleep.
Maybe
, he thought,
it will all go away if I sleep—maybe it’s all a dream
.
    “Well, what are we going to do?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
    “Stop it, Dunc—you always have ideas. That’s how it works. Your beady little brain is always cooking. That’s why we get into all the trouble we get into—because you’re all the time having ideas.”
    “Not this time. It’s like my brain stopped when we hit the water. I remember seeing you head off downstream, and I was scared you would drown, and somehow I got to shore and ran after you—but there wasn’t any thinking going on.”
    “Dunc …”
    “Honest. And it doesn’t seem to be happening now, either. It’s just a blank in there.” He scratched his stomach where a tree limb hadbruised him while he was swimming to shore. “Isn’t it nice, just sprawling out in the sun? Kind of like being a lizard or something.”
    “Are you out of your mind?” Amos sat up and looked down at Dunc. “We have crashed in the middle of a wilderness with no kind of survival gear or food. Nobody knows where we are. We could die. In fact, we probably
will
die. So think of something!”
    Dunc opened one eye and studied Amos. “You make it sound worse than it is.”
    “The heck I do!” Amos looked at his digital watch, which amazingly was still working. “We’ve got two, maybe three hours until dark. Dark is when things happen out here in the wilderness. Bad things. Big things move around and eat little things when it gets dark. I saw that on the Discovery Channel. And we definitely classify as little things.”
    Dunc sighed. “Really, Amos—it’ll all work out. Mr. Meserman saw us go and probably went for help. They’ll start searching for us pretty soon. I’ll bet there are planes and helicopters starting up right now—we’ll probably be home in half an hour. So just lay back and enjoy the sun.”
    “You really think so?”
    “No problem—you’ll be home watching television and eating chips and dip in a couple of hours.”
    It was the second-wrongest thing Dunc had ever said.

.5
    Dark didn’t come gradually, the way it does in movies and on television.
    One moment it was light and sunny, and the boys were relaxing on the rock drying their clothes. Then it seemed the next minute it was stone dark, so dark they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.
    Amos had been wrong about big things coming to eat them. No big things bothered them at all. What came to eat them were small things. Millions of them.
    Mosquitoes.
    And they didn’t come slowly.
    All in one motion, it seemed, it became dark.Amos turned to Dunc and said, “Didn’t it get dark fas—”
    That was as far as he got before the air was filled with the shrill whine of clouds of mosquitoes. And each and every little one of them was hungry.
    Dunc tried slapping them. He killed ten or twenty, but then another eight or nine thousand took their places. He put his jacket on and pulled it up over his ears.
    Amos went completely crazy. “They’re after me, they’re after me—little vampires!” he screamed, and ran into the river.
    Dunc heard the splash and pulled his jacket down, but it was so dark, he couldn’t see anything. “Amos?”
    He heard a bubbling sound, then a
whoosh
. “I’m here—in the shallow part next to the bank. They can’t get you under water.”
    “You can’t stay in the river all night.”
    “Watch me! If I stay up there, I wouldn’t have enough blood for a blood test by morning.”
    Dunc pulled his jacket back up, zipped it over his head, and talked through the cloth. “I can’t understand it—they should have come