Free Breaking the Fall by Michael Cadnum Page A

said without looking at me. “My father will be ending a plague. At least, that’s the way he looks at it.”
    The Biblical turn of her phrase, and the fact that it didn’t really make any sense, stopped me.
    She laughed. “Not you,” she said. “You aren’t a plague.”
    Then she added, enjoying, I think, the fact that I didn’t quite understand her, “I don’t like killing.”

18
    The gray water shifted and surged around a man who swam in a circle, dog-paddling.
    He splashed in a bewildered panic. Then he found it.
    The floating object tossed in the water. It seemed to seek him. The severed leg floated toward his hand, bobbing, as another crocodile plunged into the water, and the beast that had taken his leg returned, torpedoing through the current to the man’s splashes.
    Jared switched it off. The screen went blank.
    â€œYou always wonder why the cameraman doesn’t do something,” I said after a while.
    Jared was red-eyed, and my homework papers were scattered at his feet. “No,” he said. “I don’t wonder.”
    He wore a very old T-shirt featuring Fred Flintstone on a surfboard. Fred Flinstone was faded, and there were little holes worn in the fabric of the shirt. Sometimes Jared bought old clothes at Goodwill and wore them just to communicate something.
    He was smoking yet another cigarette. Beside him, the ashtray on the pile of magazines held cigarette butts, charred seeds, and the remnants of stems.
    On other evenings, Jared watched the death tape with interest. It was a collection of actual deaths, beheadings, firing squads, and in the one sequence that I hated most of all, the bewildered man who lost his leg to a crocodile.
    Tonight Jared leaned on his elbow and made no move to turn on the screen, although the VCR was still running, and the tape must have reached the electrocution by now.
    The marijuana taste was in my mouth, sticky and weedy, and my eyes burned from the smoke. I hadn’t smoked very much, just enough to be polite—I had to finish my homework. The lampshade was turned to the wall, spilling an oblong of light behind Jared.
    His mother had ushered me up the stairs, saying that she hoped I’d get him to feel better. There was a dinner party in progress, long white candles and long, narrow candle flames reflected off black bottles of wine.
    â€œIf you get shot, you have time to get downstairs,” said Jared.
    I laced my fingers together.
    â€œJust a little nightstand gun.” His nostrils flared with a yawn. “No kind of stopping power.”
    â€œI don’t know what kind of gun it was. I never saw it.”
    â€œMaybe there wasn’t a gun at all.”
    â€œI think there was.”
    â€œYou probably imagined it.” He said this almost sadly.
    â€œMaybe he went and bought a gun, to go with his security system.”
    Jared shrugged. “I hope so.”
    His words made me turn slightly in my chair, so I did not face him so squarely. “I’m not going.”
    These words shocked me. I had no idea where they came from. I was almost able to convince myself that I hadn’t spoken them, except for Jared’s response.
    He half smiled, brushing an ash off his T-shirt without looking. “You have to.”
    â€œI’m quitting the game.”
    He closed his eyes briefly in his silent laugh. “You can’t quit.”
    â€œI can’t do it anymore.”
    He pulled hard on his cigarette, then lowered his chin to his chest. “I won’t let you quit.”
    I made a breathy exclamation, a whispered syllable of frustration.
    â€œI want to get him to use his gun,” he said. “I want to risk everything, right up to the edge.”
    I said something I had been thinking about for a long time. Not the words so much, but the thought. “It’s sick.”
    â€œWhat?” His voice was hard, even though quiet. I knew he had heard me quite