Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

Although dizzy, Tommy found the release button for the safety harness. Holding on to the steering wheel with one hand to avoid dropping down into the passenger’s seat, he disentangled himself from the straps.

Tommy located the door handle, which seemed to work well enough. But the lock was shattered or the door was torqued, and no matter how he strained against it, the damn thing wouldn’t open.

The side window had broken out in the crash, leaving not even a fragment of glass stuck in the frame. Cold rain poured through the hole, soaking Tommy.

After pulling his legs out from under the dashboard, he squirmed around to brace his feet against the gear console between the seats. He thrust his head through the window, then his shoulders and arms, and levered himself out of the wreckage.

He rolled off the side of the tipped Corvette into matted brown grass soaked with rain, into a cold puddle, into mud.

The stink of gasoline was stronger than ever.

Pushing onto his feet, swaying unsteadily, he saw that the car had tumbled across a parcel of bare land that was the site of a future shopping centre at the highly desirable corner of MacArthur Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. In recent years, this field had been used as a Christmas-tree lot every December, sometimes as a pumpkin patch at Halloween, but had served no substantial commercial purpose. He was damn lucky that it was early November and that he had rolled the car through an empty field instead of through happily chattering families in a holiday mood.

Because the Corvette was turned on its side, he was standing next to the undercarriage. From out of the mechanical guts of the machine, the mini-kin issued a shriek of rage and need.

Tommy stumbled back from the car, splashing through another puddle, and nearly fell on his ass.

As the bone-piercing shriek trailed into a snarl and then into an industrious grumble, Tommy heard the demon pounding-straining-clawing, and metal creaked against metal. He couldn’t see into the dark undercarriage, but he sensed that the mini-kin was temporarily trapped in the tangled wreckage and struggling furiously to pry itself free.

The fibreglass body of the Corvette was a mess. His dream car was a total loss.

He was fortunate to have gotten out unscathed. In the morning, of course, he would be crippled by whiplash and a thousand smaller pains - if he lived through the night.

The deadline is dawn.

Ticktock.

Crazily, he wondered what the per-hour cost of his brief ownership had been. Seven thousand dollars. Eight thousand? He looked at his watch, trying to calculate the number of hours since he had made the purchase and been handed the keys, but then he realized that it didn’t matter. It was only money.

What mattered was survival.

Ticktock.

Get moving.

Keep moving.

When he circled around the front of the tipped car, passing through the beam of the sole functioning head-light, he couldn’t see the engine compartment, either, for the hood had compacted into it. But he could hear the demon battering frantically against the walls of its prison.

‘Die, damn you,’ Tommy demanded.

In the distance, someone shouted.

Shaking his head to cast off his remaining dizziness, blinking through the rain, Tommy saw that two cars had stopped along MacArthur Boulevard to the south, near the place where he had run the Corvette off the roadway.

A man with a flashlight was standing at the top of the low embankment about eighty yards away. The guy called again, but the meaning of his words was swallowed by the wind.

Traffic had slowed and a few vehicles were even stopped on Pacific Coast Highway, as well, although no one had gotten out of them yet.

The guy with the flashlight started to descend the embankment, coming to offer assistance.

Tommy raised one arm and waved vigorously, encour-aging the good Samaritan to hurry, to come hear the squawking demon trapped in the smashed machinery, to see the impossible doll-thing with his own eyes if it managed to break loose, to marvel at its existence, to be a witness.

Gasoline, which was evidently pooled under the length of the Corvette, ignited. Blue and orange flames geysered high into the night, vaporizing the falling rain.

The great hot hand of the fire slapped Tommy with such fury that his face stung, and he was staggered backward by the force of the blow. There had been no explosion, but the heat was so intense that he surely would have been set afire in that instant if his hair and his clothes had not been thoroughly soaked.

An unearthly squealing rose from the trapped mini-kin.

At the foot of the embankment, the good Samaritan had halted, startled by the fire.

‘Hurry! Hurry!’ Tommy shouted, although he knew that the roar of rain and wind prevented the man with the flashlight from hearing either him or the demon.

With a boom and a splintery crack like bone breaking, the battered and burning hood exploded off the engine compartment and tumbled past Tommy, spewing sparks and smoke as it clattered toward the stand of phoe-nix palms.

Like a malevolent genie freed from a lamp, the mini-kin flung itself out of the inferno and landed upright in the mud, no more than ten feet from Tommy. It was ablaze, but the streaming cloaks of fire that had replaced its white fabric shroud did not seem to dis-turb it.

Indeed, the creature was no longer shrieking in mind-less rage but appeared to be exhilarated by the blaze. Raising its arms over its head as if joyfully exclaiming hallelujah, swaying almost as if in a state of rapture, it fixed its attention not on Tommy but on its own hands which, like tallow tapers on some dark altar, streamed blue fire.

‘Bigger,’ Tommy gasped in disbelief.

Incredibly, the thing had grown. The doll on his doorstep had been about ten inches long. This demon swaying rapturously before him was approximately eighteen inches tall, nearly twice the size that it had been when he had last seen it streaking across his foyer into the living room to short-circuit the lights. Furthermore, its legs and arms were thicker and its body heavier than they had been earlier.

Because of the masking fire, Tommy could not see details of the creature’s form, although he thought he detected wickedly spiky protrusions extending the length of its spine, which had not been there before. Its back seemed to be more hunched than it had been previously, and perhaps its hands were becoming disproportionately large for the length of its arms. Whether he perceived these details correctly or not, Tommy was certain that he could not be mistaken about the beast’s greater size.

Having expected the mini-kin to wither and collapse in the consuming flames, Tommy was dangerously mes-merized by the sight of it thriving instead.

‘This is nuts,’ he muttered.

The falling rain captured the light of the wildly leaping fire, carrying it into puddles on the ground, which glim-mered like pools of melting doubloons and flickered with the shadow of the capering mini-kin.

How could it possibly have grown so fast? And to add this much body weight, it would have required nourishment, fuel to feed the feverish growth.

What had it eaten?

The good Samaritan was approaching again, behind the bobbling beam of his flashlight, but he was still more than sixty yards away. The burning Corvette was between him and the demon, which he wouldn’t be able to see until he had come virtually to Tommy’s side.

What had it eaten?

Impossibly, the rhapsodic mini-kin appeared to swell larger even as the flames seethed from it.

Tommy began to back slowly away, overcome by the urgent need to flee but reluctant to turn and run. Any too-sudden movement on his part might shatter the demon’s ecstatic fascination with the fire and remind it that its prey was nearby.