Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

You Again? - (Nov 30, Saturday)

Morning Sunlight.

* * *

Jakob's breath was coming quickly, in gasps. It felt so very loud in his ears that he snapped his mouth closed and tried to breathe through his nose. However, even that seemed like a roaring thing in the dead, quiet dark of the PATH. He tried to hold his breath; using all his will to be silent, until his lungs felt like they would tear apart from the burning pain of needing breath. He tried to breath in slowly, shallowly, trying to make as little noise as he could, and he made made a shuddering sound as he did.

If Benedict was still beside him, he had no idea. The man seemed to be so much better at keeping quiet than Jakob was, and Jakob felt like his every shuddering breath was a betrayal of his friend: a call for those things in the dark to come, to take him. He reached out his hand and found Benedict; and Benedict enfolded Jakob's shaking hand in his own, much larger, much more solid-feeling grasp.

Jakob took another shuddering breath, except he felt like the fear that was expanding in his chest had begun to infect his breathing; giving a wheezing edge to it. The sound only served to panic him further, and he started breathing quicker and more deeply. Benedict heard and squeezed Jakob's hand tighter, pulling the boy into him and whispering in a voice that was only a hair more than a sigh "Shhhh..."

"I think we're okay," Benedict said into his ear, with a voice that was very little more than breath.

They had been running for so long down the barely-lit tunnels that they must have lost the shambling raccoon things. Jakob held his breath again and tried to listen in the utter silence. There were no scrabbling noises. There were no dragging sounds. There were no disturbingly human screeches. Could they really be safe?

Jakob swallowed hard, trying to summon the courage to speak, the control to make his voice as small as it could be. Finally, he put the question to Benedict.

"Are we safe?"

In the dim light, so dim that Jakob couldn't be convinced that he wasn't imagining it, he thought he could see Benedict looking around, scanning the gloom for a way out of the PATH. He stopped looking, his eyes seizing on something, and he smiled, looking down to Jakob, who was no encircled in his arms.

"Yes."

He shifted his grip on the boy and took him by the hand, and they started running again further down the hallway. Benedicts boots were striking the tile as they hurried through the darkness, and in that cavernous place, they made far more noise than Jakob was comfortable with. No Benedict! he thought. It's too loud!

An other worldly screech tore through the stillness, as if in support of Jakob's thought. It screamed like an infant being tortured, and it just kept on screaming. When Benedcit hoisted Jakob from the ground, and his hand clamped over the boy's mouth, only then did Jakob realize that it had been him who drawn out the end of that scream. He stopped, even though there wasn't much point with the end of Benedict's scarf shoved into his mouth, but above the sound of the man's footfalls, he could already hear the chorus starting up somewhere that was getting ever closer: one screech, and then another, and then two more. He could hear the sounds of their progress now as well: the scrabbling of claws on tile; the dragging sounds of their bloated, furry bodies slithering across the floor. They were close—oh, so close.

Benedict had come to a hard stop, with an impact that would have jarred Jakob's teeth into one another, had his mouth not been full of scarf. The fact that Benedict had stopped, that the monster raccoon things were getting closer all the time, made Jakob want to scream again, and he started hyperventilating through his nose. There was another jarring impact, and then another, and he wondered if this was it, if the raccoon things had Benedict and were in the process of tearing him apart. There was another impact, and Benedict grunted, but this time there was also light: a grey sliver of the outside that burned like a sun in this darkness. Again and again Benedict threw himself into what Jakob now realized was a door, each impact pushing the door further outwards and letting in more of the grey light. It was starting to spill into the PATH way, and it was glinting greenly off something off in the dark.