ZerOes Read Online Free

“You, uh, you hang here for a minute. I gotta run out, meet the real estate agent for, ah, a quick thing at the corner diner.”
    He ducks into the bathroom. Travertine tile. Shower big enough to have a party inside. A shower with a window . A window that looks out over the neighbor’s house.

    DeAndre thinks, I can do this . He can jump. Like they do in the video games. Free running. Parkour. Whatever they call it.
    He climbs up, crouches in the bathroom window like a gargoyle. He’s tall but lean, and can close himself up like a folding chair if needbe. He looks down at the stone wall separating his moms’s new house from the neighbor’s place. The wall is as wide as DeAndre’s foot is long, and just ten feet away. Beyond it is the neighbor’s house, with a sloped roof. If he can make it to the wall, he’s free.
    The trick is, he’s got to run—but they’ve got to follow his ass , too. He runs and they go kicking down the door to this house, what will Moms think? If she doesn’t have a heart attack, she’ll know his job is a lie, the house is a lie.
    She’ll know he’s a lie.
    He swallows hard. Catches movement down below, up past the little shed along the side of the house, near the birdbath.
    He jumps. His feet plant hard on the flat top of the wall—the shock goes up through his knees, into his hips, a javelin of straight pain, and he knows he should have crouched more as he hit to absorb the shock, but no time to worry about that now.
    Now he’s landing on the neighbor’s roof, cracking a terracotta tile and sending it spinning to the ground. He hears another radio squelch and mumbled police chatter. Just to make sure, he calls out, “Up here, homies.”
    Someone calls out in alarm from below. The cops. Good. He scrambles to stand, spits blood, jumps to another roof. He slams his shoulder hard against a window—it’s just a screen, and it pops out as he tumbles inside, pitching forward against what is mercifully plush carpet. He hears a high-pitched shriek and realizes it’s his own.
    He hurries through the house. Carpet on his feet, air in his teeth, no time to think. He runs through the hall, sees a woman in frumpy pink panties throwing clothes into an over-under laundry machine. DeAndre gives her a panicked look— sorry, lady— and a little wave. She screams. He runs into a master bedroom the color of Caribbean waters. He flings open the window and—
    Long jump. Ignoring the pain now. Adoring the freedom. His hands catch the ledge of another house’s roof—and here he has it all played out in his head. He’ll plant his feet. Kick off like a swimmer. Wrap his arms around a palm tree like a stripper at her pole and then he’ll be up on another roof with some kickin’ Assassin’s Creed moves—
    The gutter he’s holding onto shifts downward. It makes a gonk sound, then rips out of its moorings and breaks away from the roof.
    DeAndre lands hard on his ass bone and feels firecrackers of pain popping up his spine, into his neck, to the base of his skull.
    He hears the crackle of shrubs and hedge. Incoming .
    He wants to lie down and whimper, but that ain’t an option. So he’s up. Running toward the sounds of traffic, past a little swing set, past a hibachi grill, to a breach between two tall bougainvillea hedges. That breach means freedom. He sees the road beyond it. Cars and trucks whipping past. Once he hits the street, that’s it. He can go anywhere—lose himself in the park, disappear into traffic, grab a golf cart.
    He charges hard for the breach in the hedge.
    Someone steps in his path.
    He cries out, “No, no, no, no!”
    A shotgun goes up, then off.
    DeAndre drops. Gasping. He can’t breathe. He can barely see. Everything is a strobing white light of pain, up and down, left and right, wheeze, cough, whine. He feels around his midsection for the hole.