Dunc Breaks the Record Read Free Page B

for us by now.”
    There was another
whoosh
—something like a whale blowing—as Amos held his breath and went under water to get rid of the mosquitoes around his head. He came up in fifteen seconds. “It’s like the book.”
    “What book?”
    “I read this book—
Hatchet
. About a kid who crashes in the wilderness. He had trouble with mosquitoes too.”
    “What did he do?”
    “He made a fire. The smoke scared them away or something.”
    “How can we make a fire? We don’t have any matches. And if we had them, they’d be wet.”
    “He had this hatchet, see, and this porcupine attacked him and he threw the hatchet, and it hit some rocks and made sparks.…” Amos trailed off and went under, then came up again. “So he beat on a rock with the hatchet until he got a fire. Then he ate raw turtle eggs and berries and puked a lot.”
    “And this is supposed to help us?”
    “Well. It worked for him—Brian, his name was—and he made it all right. He went fifty-four days.”
    “Amos, we don’t have a hatchet. We don’thave anything except our clothes and a busted-up hang glider and just about every mosquito in the world.”
    Amos sighed, went under, came up. “I’m just trying to help.”
    There was a soft rustling sound in the brush, a scuffle, then quiet.
    “Dunc?”
    Dunc didn’t answer.
    “Come on, Dunc, this is no time to fool around.”
    Silence, except for the whine of mosquitoes.
    Amos crawled out of the river and felt around in the darkness. “Dunc?”
    He swung his hands, then moved across and back across the clearing along the river where Dunc had been sitting.
    “Dunc?”
    There was no answer. It took him a full five minutes of searching, running back and forth in his underwear, to realize that not only was Dunc gone, but so was everything else—the hang glider and his clothes.
    Everything.
    “Dunc?”

.6
    It was the second-longest night in Amos’s entire life. (The longest was the night he turned into a werepuppy and had to fight two pit bulls, a werewolf, and a volleyball net and nearly ate his own foot.)
    The mosquitoes did not let up. In fact, they seemed to be mad that Dunc was gone, and twice as many homed in on Amos’s bare skin.
    Amos moved back into the river and crouched under water. He rolled on his back and put everything under except his nose and mouth—which the mosquitoes quickly found and tore into. Periodically he ducked under water or sloshed water in his face. He spent thenight ducking, sloshing, and spitting out dead mosquitoes, then repeating the process in the cold water for a time that seemed longer than the history of the human race. Finally, finally, the sky began to turn gray, and the sun at last crawled up.
    With daylight the mosquitoes went back to wherever they hid and Amos pulled himself out of the river. He was nearly blue, so cold his teeth chattered. He found a rock above the river where the sun could get at him, and he pulled himself up to sit in the warmth.
    He lay back and thought of what to do, thinking out loud. “It’s all pretty simple—just like the book. First I’ve got to take stock. So—I’ve got a pair of underwear shorts, a body that looks like a prune, and—”
    He looked around, down at his body. “And that’s it. Underwear and prune body, and Dunc is gone.”
    He knew he would have to start looking for Dunc, and he fully intended to stand and do that very thing, but the sun was so warm, so comforting, that it seemed to bake the wet and cold out of his body. His eyes closed, opened once, closed again, and he was sound asleep.
    Another phone dream took him.
    This time he was just about to leave the front door of the house when the phone rang.
    He wheeled and dropped into a leaping run in one smooth motion with absolutely flawless form—an easy ten, if anybody had been keeping form score—but Scruff, his dog, was lying there. If somebody was being kind, they would say Amos and Scruff weren’t compatible—if they were being honest