Breed Read online

  “Are we sitting together?” Alice asks.

  Leslie looks at her.

  “On the plane,” Alice says. “On our tickets.”

  “I think so,” Leslie says. She pulls their boarding passes out of her purse and hands them to Alice.

  “You worry so much,” Leslie says. “You worry about everything.”

  “Not really,” Alice says, nervously.

  “Mom,” Adam says. He gestures with his eyes and Leslie follows his gaze and sees a police car racing silently across the runways, its light bar a frenzy of blue and white.

  “Listen to me,” Leslie says.

  They stare at her, afraid to speak.

  “Kids have a way of blaming themselves for things that are not their fault. Can you just remember this? You never did anything wrong. You were always really good kids, I mean, really, really good. Everything that turned so awful, it was never your fault. You understand me? It was never your fault. Ever.”

  “Mom…” Adam’s voice cracks.

  “Whose fault was it?” Leslie asks. “I want you to tell me. I want you to say. Whose fault was it?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom. We just want to stay together.”

  It’s Adam who says this. Or is it Alice? Suddenly, Leslie cannot be sure. Her mind is starting to break into pieces. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. One of them said it, and it’s not going to happen, they are not going to stay together.

  She thinks of it. The corkscrew. The pathetic little knives. It might be the worst thing yet. Yet they point a way. They do, they do.…

  “Don’t forget your aunt Cynthia,” she tells the children.

  They look at her, confused. But they won’t be for long.…

  The police car has made a sharp turn and now it is heading directly toward the bus. Every thought in Leslie’s mind is eclipsed by the overwhelming imperatives of freedom and escape. The bus is starting to slow as they approach the Adria flight to Munich, but before it comes to a full stop Leslie hops off it. Waving her last good-bye to her children with her back to them, she starts to run.

  For a few moments she runs with no one chasing her. But when the police car sees the figure of a woman racing between the idling jets, it sets off in pursuit of her, and a moment or two after that a mechanic, and after the mechanic a baggage handler, and then a security guard are also chasing after her.

  There really is no possibility of escape. There are simply too many people in this airport whose primary job is to protect the integrity of the airport. But there are more ways of eluding your pursuers than outrunning them. You can also disappear. But how to disappear? Can you clap your hands and become invisible? Can you chant a magic spell and turn into a bird and fly away? Leslie cannot do these things.

  But she has another idea, one that has been with her since the hour they arrived in Ljubljana and the bus brought them past the whirling turbine engines of the jumbo jets, with their lethal titanium honeycombs.

  When she is beneath the engine attached to the right wing of the Delta 757 she is at first surprised and discouraged by how much higher off the ground it is than she had realized. From a distance, it had looked as if you could just reach up and touch the engine, but now that she is right next to it, it looks to be fifty feet above her. The plane itself seems immense, impossibly so. Fumes of burning fuel ripple through the air. She looks up, and through the smudgy glass of the cockpit she sees a pilot with headphones over his ears. He seems to be looking down at her.

  She hears voices behind her, shouts. She imagines they are crying out for her to stop, to turn around, to give herself up.…

  She feels strong. She feels the tension in her legs. She takes a deep breath. Air fills her lungs like helium, and she leaps. It is almost as if she has taken flight. She rises up and up and when she can rise no farther she reaches out and clasps the lip of the turbine’s wide-open mouth. She can feel it wanting to suck her in, to consume her. Her hair is streaming toward it. The noise is deafening. It feels as if her eyes want to pop right out of their sockets. With one more burst of energy, she hoists herself up, and that is all it takes. In less time than it takes for her heart to contract and expand, she is sucked into the jet, like a goose, like debris, like something of no account, and the engine has its way with her. It eats her as if it were ravenous, and in moments there is nothing recognizable left of her.

  Everyone on the bus taking the passengers to the Adria flight to Munich sees what happens to Leslie. There are no screams, no shouts, no words. Every last person just stares in a complete stunned silence, and the silence persists until it is broken by a strange keening noise. The passengers look to the left and to the right, trying to locate the source of those long, lonesome howls. The winds have blown the last of the clouds out of the cold night sky, and it really does sound as if a wolf—no, it’s two wolves!—two wolves baying brokenheartedly at the big orange moon, so close, so bright and round that it looks as if someone has punched a hole out of heaven.

  About the Author

  Chase Novak is the pseudonym for Scott Spencer. Spencer is the author of ten novels, including Endless Love, which has sold over two million copies to date, and the National Book Award finalist A Ship Made of Paper. He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s. Breed is his debut novel as Chase Novak.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2: Ten Years Later

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2012 by Chase Novak

  Cover design by Kapo Ng; cover photograph by Laurence Monneret/ Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First e-book edition: September 2012

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  ISBN 978-0-316-19859-2