PANIC Read Online Free PDF

shirt, already rust-colored from the proof of the murder of the dog. His left eye was closed and his shoulder was hunched, but he rammed himself blind into the man again and they crashed through the door, beating it flat into the ground in the hallway.
    He mounted the man’s stiff body and shot his injured hand into his throat, pinning him.
    His fist thundered down and smacked the man’s face and both groaned with exertion.
    Luis ignored the spots in his eyes, then waited for the raised fist to obscure the light in the hall and and he saw it again, making the boy into a dark shadow.
    He moved again and the fist crashed into the door with a violent knock, too hard to know his own strength. It didn’t break his wrist like Luis hoped but it fractured and the boy bellowed at the hairline crack.
    Spittle mixed with blood flew from the boy’s mouth and Luis reached up to dig his thumb nastily in his eye.
    As soon as the eyes shut to defend themselves, he threw his grasping hand into the big kid’s Adam ’s apple, silencing him. He used both hands to choke, feeling his hands struggle to keep their grip in the slick blood flowing over his fingers.
    “You killed him!” he shouted, broadcasting his position in the hallway.
    He dug his fingers in, not caring that the boy couldn’t feel it. He’d die just the same.
    He felt the arms flop down and he pushed the boy off him and the dead weight rolled over and slumped, even though the boy still breathed, shallowly.

23:27
    HE MADE IT to his feet and contemplated it for a second, putting his boot down on the boy’s throat to wrench the life from him.
    “What do you want?” he shouted down to the yard, loud enough for everyone in the neighborhood to hear. It was silent throughout, in the locked up houses and the abandoned ones beyond, all of them making a ruse to burrow indoors so they wouldn’t be noticed.
    He heard the lone barking of a dog off in the distance and it enraged him.
    “What do you want!?”
    He shouted again and got no answer. No feet crunched on the gravel outside, no feet approached up the stairs that he could hear.

23:30
    HE GAVE OVER far too much effort to carrying the boy over to the window, still unconscious and limp, dragging him by his torn shirt and hoisting it up to the ledge. He let his body go by the shattered glass and it tumbled sickeningly. His shirt and pants caught in jagged debris on the window sill, hanging him from the open window like an effigy.
    He was too heavy and soon ripped loose and hit the ground with a thud, his head bent at an uncomfortable angle.
    Luis stood there in the breach and took in the steaming night air panting, relieved, gloating, ready to shed all the blood in the world if it came to that.
    He didn’t feel the bullet graze his neck. He didn’t even hear the shot. A dark figure moved out of sight, down below.
    He put his hand there and took it away trembling, then ducked away before a second could smack his forehead and rattle around in his skull.
    He got behind the dresser and scrambled to the door on his hands and knees then broke into a pounding jog down the short hallway, bowling over the kid waiting in the hall for him.
    He tripped and fell and made a tripod of himself with two hands to keep running and the boy got up dazed, a few seconds behind to follow him down the stairs. He skidded through the house and made it to the second stairwell, then threw open the door to the basement with another boy on his tail.
    The other one who got his dog came bursting through the side window, with her arm wrapped in a towel to sweep away the glass. He saw her and she saw him and she flung the towel, with its stuck glass shards. He batted it out of the way and she was already inside.
    She missed him by fractions of an inch with a box cutter by sheer luck.
    She recovered and slashed his thigh, too close to the femoral, and he put a stop to that, slamming her elbow into the wall.
    “In here, yo! In here!” she hollered in her