by J. S. Volpe
26
As Brandon ran, he strained to listen over the sound of his boots clomping on the concrete floor and the chains on his jacket jingling and the faint thwack of Lauren’s sneakers as she ran about thirty feet ahead of him. There was a distant, echoing racket in the direction Donovan and Violet had run, but beyond that, nothing. If the leucrota were following him he ought to be able to hear its hooves clip-clopping behind him. But he didn’t.
He glanced over his shoulder, a risky move since it meant taking his eyes off Lauren’s flashlight, his only guide in the darkness; without that dim but precious light, he could wind up going off-course in the narrow aisle and dashing his brains out against one of the shelving unit’s steel posts.
He didn’t see any big luminous eyes behind him. Which didn’t mean much, of course; like a lot of animals’ eyes, the leucrota’s glowed only with reflected light, and Brandon doubted if the indirect light from Lauren’s flashlight thirty-plus feet away was strong enough to make them light up at all.
More important than the lack of luminous eyes, though, was the fact that he could see the glows of Donovan and Violet’s flashlights rapidly receding toward the far end of the warehouse. That, combined with the ungodly din coming from the same direction and the fact that the leucrota could be chasing only one of the two frantically fleeing duos, made Brandon screech to a halt.
He listened, body tense, suddenly afraid his conclusion was wrong and that the leucrota had found a way to silence its hooves somehow, maybe with little booties or something, and that poor dumb Brandon was about to get his head ignominiously chomped off by a ridiculously implausible monster. But nothing happened except that the two distant flashlights and the din that accompanied them kept growing more and more distant, while on the opposite side of him Lauren’s flashlight and her faint, rapid footfalls likewise kept growing more distant.
“Shit.” He turned back around and hollered, “Lauren! Stop! It’s not after us! It went the other way!”