Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

The guy with the flashlight was forty yards away. He was a heavyset man in a hooded raincoat that flared behind him. Lumbering through the puddles, slipping in the mud, he resembled a cowled monk.

Suddenly Tommy was afraid for the Samaritan’s life. At first he had wanted a witness; but that was when he thought the mini-kin would perish in the flames. Now he sensed that it wouldn’t allow a witness.

He would have shouted at the stranger to stay away, even at the risk of drawing the mini-kin’s attention, but fate intervened when a gunshot cracked through the rainy night, then a second and a third.

Evidently recognizing the distinctive sound, the heavy-set stranger skidded to a halt in the mud. He was still thirty yards away, with the mined car interven-ing, so he couldn’t possibly have seen the blazing demon.

A fourth shot boomed, a fifth.

In the scramble to get out of the Corvette after the crash, Tommy had not remembered the pistol. He wouldn’t have been able to locate it anyway. Now the intense heat was detonating the ammunition.

Reminded that he lacked even the inadequate protec-tion of the Heckler & Koch, Tommy stopped backing away from the demon and stood in tremulous indecision. Although he was drenched by the storm, his mouth was as dry as the sun-scorched sand on an August beach.

The rain washed parching panic through him, and his fear was like a fever burning in his brow, in his eyes, in his joints.

He turned and ran for his life.

He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t know if he had any hope of escaping, but he was propelled by sheer survival instinct. Maybe he could outrun the mini-kin in the short term, but he didn’t have high expectations of being able to stay beyond its reach for the next six or seven hours, until dawn.

It was growing.

Getting stronger.

Becoming a more formidable predator.

Ticktock.

Mud sucked at Tommy’s athletic shoes. Tangles of dead grass and creeping lantana vines almost snared him, almost brought him down. A palm frond like the feather from a giant bird, torn loose by the wind, spun out of the night and lashed his face as it flew past him. Nature herself seemed to be joined in a conspiracy with the mini-kin.

Ticktock.

Tommy glanced over his shoulder and saw that the flames at the Corvette, although brightly whipping the night, were subsiding. The smaller conflagration that marked the burning demon was fading much faster than the blaze at the car, but the beast continued to be entranced and was not yet giving chase.

The deadline is dawn.

Tomorrow’s sunrise hung out there just a few minutes this side of eternity.

Almost to the street Tommy dared to glance back again through the obscuring grey curtains of rain. Flames still sputtered from the mini-kin, but only fitfully. Appar-ently, most of the gasoline saturating the creature had burned off. Too little fire remained - mere wisps of yellow - to allow Tommy to see the thing well: just well enough to be certain that it was on the move again and coming after him.

It was not pursuing as fast as it had been before, maybe because it was still inebriated from its infatuation with the flames. But it was coming nonetheless.

Having crossed the empty lot on the diagonal, Tommy reached the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Avo-cado Street skidded across the last stretch of mud like an ice-skater on a frozen pond, and plunged off the curb into the calf-deep water that overflowed the gutters at the intersection.

A car horn blared. Brakes screeched.

He hadn’t checked oncoming traffic because he had been looking over his shoulder and then watching the treacherous ground ahead of him. When he snapped his head up in surprise, an astonishingly colourful Ford van was there, blazing yellow-red-gold-orange-black-green, as if appearing magically - poof! - from another dimen-sion. The dazzling van stopped an instant before Tommy reached it rocking on its springs, but he couldn’t prevent himself from running into it full tilt. He bounced off the fender, spun around to the front of the vehicle, and fell to the pavement.

Clutching the van, he immediately pulled himself up from the blacktop.

The extravagant paint job wasn’t psychedelic, as it had appeared on first impression, but rather an attempt to transform the van into an Art Deco jukebox: images of leaping gazelles amidst stylised palm fronds, streams of luminous silver bubbles in bands of glossy black, and more luminous gold bubbles in bands of Chinese-red lacquer. As the driver’s door opened, the night swung with Benny Goodman’s big-band classic, ‘One O’clock Jump.’

As Tommy regained his feet again, the driver appeared at his side. She was a young woman in white shoes, what might have been a nurse’s white uniform, and a black leather jacket. ‘Hey, are you all right?’

‘Yeah, okay,’ Tommy wheezed.

‘You’re really okay?’

‘Yeah, sure, leave me alone.’

He squinted at the rain-swept vacant lot.

The mini-kin was no longer afire, and the flashing red emergency lights at the back of the van didn’t penetrate far into the gloom. Tommy couldn’t see where the crea-ture was, but he knew it was closing the gap between them, perhaps moving sluggishly but closing the gap.

‘Go,’ he told her, waving her away with one hand.

The woman insisted, ‘You must be-’

‘Go, hurry.’

‘-hurt. I can’t-’

‘Get out of here!’ he said frantically, not wanting to trap her between him and the demon.

He pushed away from her, intending to continue across all six lanes of Pacific Coast Highway. At the moment, there was no traffic except for a few vehicles that had stopped half a block to the south, where their drivers were watching the burning Corvette.

The woman clutched tenaciously. ‘Was that your car back there?’

‘Jesus, lady, it’s coming!’

‘What’s coming?’

‘It!’

‘What?’

‘It!’ He tried to wrench loose of her.

She said, ‘Was that your new Corvette?’

He realized that he knew her. The blond waitress. She had served cheeseburgers and fries to him earlier this evening. The restaurant was across this highway.

The place had closed for the night. She was on her way home.

Again Tommy had the queer sensation that he was riding the bobsled of fate, rocketing down a huge chute toward some destiny he could not begin to understand.

‘You should see a doctor,’ she persisted.

He wasn’t going to be able to shake her loose. When the mini-kin arrived, it wouldn’t want a wit-ness.

Eighteen inches tall and growing. A spiky crest along the length of its spine. Bigger claws, bigger teeth. It would rip her throat out tear her face off.

Her slender throat.

Her lovely face.

Tommy didn’t have time to argue with her. ‘Okay, a doctor, okay, get me out of here.’

Holding his arm as if he were a doddering old man, she started to walk him around to the passenger door, which was the side of the van closest to the vacant lot.

‘Drive the fucking thing!’ he demanded, and at last he tore loose of her.

Tommy went to the passenger door and yanked it open, but the waitress was still standing in front of her jukebox van, stupefied by his outburst.

‘Move or we’ll both die!’ he shouted in frustration. He glanced back into the vacant lot, expecting the mini-kin to spring at him out of the darkness and rain, but it wasn’t here yet, so he clambered into the Ford.

The woman slid into the driver’s seat and slammed her door an instant after Tommy slammed his.

Switching off ‘One O’clock Jump,’ she said, ‘What happened back there? I saw you come shooting off MacArthur Boulevard-’

‘Are you stupid or deaf or both?’ he demanded, his voice shrill and cracking. ‘We gotta get out of here now!’