The Breathtaker Read Free

should be thankful.
    “Where’s Bullette?” Danielle suddenly asked.
    “Shh, honey. Cats are smart. He’ll find himself a good hiding place,” Rob told her.
    As if on cue, above the rattling windowpanes, they could hear a plaintive meow.
    “Bullette!” Her eyes filled with hot, terrified tears. “Daddy, go save him!”
    “Shh, we have to stay put.”
    She began to weep convulsively, and Jenna stared at Rob over their daughter’s quaking shoulders, a sodium stain from the flashlight playing across her grim features. “Go get the cat,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Bullette!” Danielle screamed, her fist jerking to her mouth. “Daddy, go help him!”
    Oh great. Just by doing nothing, he’d drawn the full weight of his wife’s displeasure. Before she could get really vehement about it, he gripped the long-handled flashlight and crawled out from underneath their makeshift lean-to.
    Almost instantly, a bitter chill engulfed him. Goose bumps prickled his arms as he swung the flashlight in an arc across the thin-legged mahogany mail table his grandfather had built nearly fifty years ago; past the wooden coat stand choked with rain slickers and the old picture frames clattering against the faded wallpaper. All he could hear was the wind, thunderous and cascading.
    Get the cat.
Ridiculous.
    He crawled along the hardwood floor on his hands and knees, moving like a poorly wired robot toward the kitchen. The thunder sounded strange—no rolling echo, just a thick-throated
boom. Boom.
Abrupt, like bombs dropping. The air was a swift current, hard to maneuver through.
Jesus, help me.
He crawled past the hallway chair with its stout oak legs and shone his light around the corner into the kitchen.
    The calico cat was crouched in the crevice between the stove and cabinet. Rob could see its glowing eyes.
    “Here, kitty…”
    The cat tensed and stared at him.
Blink.
    “Here, kitty!”
    It shuddered.
    “C’mere, you mutt!”
    It arched its back and fled.
    “Fuck.” Rob craned his neck, nerves raw, then heard a crackling sound, distantly sinister, and a thunderous
bang
that made his whole body quake. He covered his head just as glass shattered above him and a violent wind came rushing in. Screaming in his ears. Swirling up into his face. The seconds ticked past heavily. When he finally raised his head again, he could see a massive tree limb sticking in through the kitchen window. “Jesus Christ,” he said, watching the tattered curtains dance. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner, the pressure building in his ears. The wind rocked the refrigerator ever so slightly back and forth, and he aimed his light into the four corners of the room, but the cat had vanished.
Screw the cat.
He turned and noticed a handful of nails embedded in the wall near his head, the sight of it tightening the springs of his tension.
    “Rob?”
came Jenna’s distant cry.
    An unraveling roll of toilet paper skittered across the floor toward him and rose up like a cobra. A long, sinuous strand of it danced in midair above his head, gravity gone. His eyes grew wide as he watched the spectacle. His ears were ready to pop. He crawled back toward the open doorway that led back into the front hall, pressure building in his ears. If they ever got out of this thing alive, he’d put up a storm shelter. Buy one of those “safe rooms” he’d seen advertised. Donate blood. Feed the homeless. Say the Lord’s Prayer every single night. Quit swearing. Whatever it took.
    Please, God, have mercy on my family…
    Crawling back into the hallway on his hands and knees, Rob swept the flashlight beam across the mahogany legs of the mail table, the red and green area rug, a pair of sneakers by the front door… Wait a second. Back up.
Sneakers?
    Brand-new jogging sneakers, white and champagne shelltops, the kind of blinding white that made you want to step all over them. He gaped at those neatly tied laces and the jeans-clad legs attached to them, then gave a