Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

‘You’ve no right to talk to me that way,’ she said quietly but with visible anger in her crystalline-blue eyes.

Speechless with frustration, Tommy could only sputter. ‘Even if you’re hurt and upset, you can’t talk to me that way. It isn’t nice.’

He glanced out the side window at the vacant lot next to them.

She said, ‘I can’t abide rudeness.’

Forcing himself to speak more calmly, Tommy said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t sound sorry.’

‘Well, I am.’

‘Well, you don’t sound it.’

Tommy thought maybe he would kill her rather than wait for the mini-kin to do it.

‘I’m genuinely sorry,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘I’m truly, truly sorry.’

‘That’s better.’

‘Can you take me to a hospital,’ he asked, merely to get her moving.

‘Sure.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Put on your seatbelt.’

‘What?’

‘It’s the law.’

Her hair was honey-dark and lank with rain, pasted to her face, and her uniform was saturated. He reminded himself that she had gone to some trouble for him.

As he unreeled the shoulder harness and locked it across his chest he said as patiently as possible: ‘Please, miss, please, you don’t understand what’s happening here-’

‘Then explain. I’m neither stupid nor deaf.’

For an instant the improbability of the night left him without words again, but then suddenly they exploded in a long hysterical gush: ‘This thing, this doll, on my doorstep, and then the stitches pulled out and it had a real eye, green eye, rat’s tail, dropped on my head from behind the drape, and it pretty much eats bullets for breakfast which is bad enough, but then it’s also smart, and it’s growing-’

‘What’s growing?’

Frustration pushed him dangerously close to the edge of rudeness once more: ‘The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing! It’s growing.’

‘The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing,’ she repeated, eyeing him suspiciously.

‘Yes!’ he said exasperatedly.

With a wet thunk, the shrieking mini-kin hit the window in the passenger door, inches from Tommy’s head.

Tommy screamed.

The woman said, ‘Holy shit.’

The mini-kin was growing, all right, but it was also changing into something less humanoid than it had been when it first began to emerge from the doll form. Its head was proportionately larger than before, and repulsively misshapen, and the radiant green eyes bulged from deep sockets under an irregular bony brow.

The waitress released the emergency brake. ‘Knock it off the window.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Knock it off the window!’

‘How, for God’s sake?’

Although the mini-kin still had hands, its five digits were half like fingers, half like the spatulate tentacles of a squid. It held fast to the glass with pale sucker pads on both its hands and feet.

Tommy wasn’t going to roll down the window and try to knock the thing off. No way.

The blonde shifted the Ford into drive. She stomped on the accelerator hard enough to punch the van into warp speed and put them on the far side of the galaxy in maybe eighteen seconds.

As the engine shrieked louder than the mini-kin, the tires spun furiously on the slick pavement, and the Ford didn’t go across the galaxy or even to the end of the block, but just hung there, kicking up sprays of dirty water from all four wheels.

The mini-kin’s mouth was open wide. Its glisten-ing black tongue flickered. Black teeth snapped against the glass.

The tires found traction, and the van shot forward.

‘Don’t let it in,’ she implored.

‘Why would I let it in?’

‘Don’t let it in.’

‘Do you think I’m insane?’

The Ford van was a rocket, screaming north on the Pacific Coast Highway, and Tommy felt as if he were pulling enough Gs to distort his face like an astronaut in a space-shuttle launch, and rain was hitting the windshield with a clatter almost as loud as submachine gun fire, but the stubborn mini-kin was glued to the glass.

‘It's trying to get in,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘What does it want?’

He said, ‘Me.’

‘Why?’

‘For some reason, I just piss it off.’

The beast was still mostly black mottled with yellow, but its belly was entirely pus yellow, pressed against the glass. A slit opened the length of its underside, and obscenely wriggling tubes with sucker like mouths slithered out of its guts and attached themselves to the window.

The light inside the van wasn’t good enough to reveal exactly what was happening, but Tommy saw the glass begin to smoke.

He said, ‘Uh-oh.’

‘What?’

‘It’s burning through the glass.’

‘Burning?’

‘Eating.’

‘What?’

‘Acid.’

Barely braking for the turn, she hung a hard right off the highway into the entrance drive of the Newport Beach Country Club.

The van canted drastically to the right and centrifugal force threw Tommy against the door, pressing his face to the window, beyond which the mini-kin’s extruded guts wriggled on the smoking glass.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Country club,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Truck,’ she said.

She turned sharply to the left, into the parking lot a manoeuvre that pulled Tommy away from the door and the dissolving window.

At that late hour the parking lot was mostly deserted. Only a few vehicles stood on the blacktop. One of them was a delivery truck.

Aiming the van at the back of the truck, she accel-erated.

‘What’re you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Detachment.’

At the last moment she swung to the left of the parked truck, roaring past it so close that she stripped the elaborate custom paint job off the front fender and tore off the van’s side mirror. Showers of sparks streamed from tortured metal, and the mini-kin was jammed between the van window and the flank of the big truck. The rocker panel peeled off the side of the van, but the mini-kin seemed tougher than the Ford - until its suckers abruptly popped loose with a sound Tommy could hear even above all the other noise. The window in the passenger door burst, and tempered glass showered across Tommy, and he thought the beast was falling into his lap, Jesus, but then they were past the parked truck, and he realized that the creature had been torn away from the van.

‘Want to circle back and run over the damn thing a few times?’ she shouted over the howling of the wind at the broken-out window.

He leaned toward her, raising his voice, ‘Hell no. That won’t work. It’ll grab the tire as you pass over it, and this time we’ll never shake it loose. It’ll crawl up into the undercarriage, tear through, squeeze through, get at us one way or another.’

‘Then let’s haul ass out of here.’

At the end of the country-club drive, she turned right onto the highway at such high speed that Tommy expected the Ford to blow a tire or roll, but they came through all right, and she put the pedal to the metal with less respect for the speed limit than she had shown, earlier, for the seatbelt law.

Tommy half expected the mini-kin to explode out of the storm again. He didn’t feel safe until they crossed Jam-boree Road and began to descend toward the Newport harbour.

Rain slashed through the missing window and snapped against the side of his head. It didn’t bother him. He couldn’t get any wetter than he already was.

At the speed they were making, the hooting and gibbering of the wind was so great that neither of them made an effort to engage in conversation.

As they crossed the bridge over the back-bay channel, a couple of miles from the parking lot where they had left the demon, the blonde finally reduced speed. The noise of the wind abated somewhat.