The Breeders Read Online Free PDF

fur.
    She shuffles and blinks.
    I squeeze her once more, then hop on the quad before I change my mind. The engine’s roar echoes through the barn, sending Bounty careening to the back of her stall. I don’t look back. I hit the gas.
    I peal into the hot morning air and fly across the yard. My eyes mark the patch of dust where I taught Ethan to ride the old ten-speed we found in the barn. I rush past my mother’s little garden with the carrot tops just poking from the dry soil. I trundle over the spot where just three days ago Arn lay fixing his Jeep. I blink back tears. I look away.
    The quad’s tires crunch the gravel as I hit the main road. Auntie jumps up as I pass by the porch, her mouth formed into an O. She looks beautiful in her long cotton shift, her hair billowing around her. I raise a hand in passing. Then I turn my eyes away so her pleading eyes don’t make me turn this quad around.
    When I allow myself a look back, three people stand side by side on the porch. They lean into each other, their forms blur into one shape, a wall of mourning watching me go. Tears blear the lenses of my goggles. They think I’m foolish, rash, crazy. I hope to God they’re wrong.
    * * *
    The open road stretches like a never-ending sea of busted blacktop. On either side, the scraggly hardpan and endless flat dirt never change. The sun has crept to her zenith and bores like a hot poker into my leather jacket. My shoulders and arms ache. My butt feel like someone’s spent the afternoon kicking it. Three hours down. Two to go.
    I crest a small hill and spot a splash of color on the horizon. A few more seconds and I make out a car. It’s some snazzy thing, Camero or Viper, gone to rusty Swiss cheese on the side of the road. My shoulders tighten. Abandoned cars should be the state mascot there’s so many, but this one looks drivable—odd since anything that moves is snatched up by somebody. I swallow past the tightness in my throat, let up on the gas and run my eyes over the car.
    The hairs on my arms go up as my eyes fix on the lump cresting above the steering wheel. Someone’s in the driver seat. Dead or alive? My insides go liquid. Most of me wants to let off the gas and turn around. Or crank the gas and fly past. But what if it’s Arn? Arn, Arn, Arn, I think. I slow to fifteen miles an hour, my heart jackrabbiting beneath my leather jacket.
    Wispy tufts of hair stir in the breeze, thin corn silk strands, white and fine. When I’m level with the car, I can see the dead man’s face, blue and bloated. It slumps like a sack of grain as his forehead slowly fuses with the steering wheel. My eyes drag over the shriveled lips, curled back on a set of yellow teeth in a ghoulish grin. The only thing moving are the flies darting around his eye sockets.
    Dead. So dead. I can’t crank the gas fast enough. For an hour I see his shrunken face at the backs of my eyes.
    As the sun marks four o’clock, a dark brown slash appears on the horizon. The town’s outer wall blocks the road ahead. Arn’s told me the battered wooden barricade is heavily guarded. I’ll have to talk to a man and surrender my weapons before I can enter. If they’re feeling generous, they’ll give my gun back when I leave. If they’re having a bad day, well, I might not make it out alive.
    I pull up to the gate and squeeze the brake. The wall itself is enough to make me want to give up this whole plan. The thick wooden beams are topped with rusty nails, coils of razor-sharp barbed wire and broken glass that winks in the sunlight. The guard tower is twenty-foot wooden enclosure with a platform at the top. As I kill the engine, a burly man leans out of the tower and aims an assault rifle at my head. I throw my hands up.
    “State your business!” he yells.
    My voice catches in my throat and nothing comes out but a muted squeak.
    The man shouts out again, his tone dangerous. “State your business or I’ll blow off that foot!”
    In the last second before I speak,