Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

Tommy searched for the courage to approach the creature and fire the shotgun pointblank into its brain. By the time that he could reach the beast, however, it might have transformed itself so radically that it would have nothing that was recognizably a head. Besides, intuitively he knew that no number of rounds from the Mossberg -or any other gun - would destroy it.

‘Tommy!’ Del called frantically from the patio of the house next door.

‘Run, get out of here,’ Tommy advised the homeowner who was prone on the concrete deck.

The man seemed traumatized by all the gunfire, con-fused. He started to push on to his knees, but then he must have glimpsed the shotgun, because he pleaded, ‘No, don’t, Jesus, don’t,’ and pressed flat to the deck again.

‘Run, for God’s sake, run, before it recovers from the shots,’ Tommy urged the second man, the tooth-spitter, who continued to sit in a daze. ‘Please, run.’

Heeding his own advice, he followed Del, grateful that he had not broken a leg when he’d been tackled.

In the distance, a siren wailed.

When Tommy, Del, and the dog were two proper-ties away from the scene of the confrontation, one of the would-be heroes screamed in the night behind them.

Tommy skidded to a halt on a slate patio at a Tudor house and looked toward the cries.

Not much could be seen in the rain and murk. Shadows thrashed against the backdrop of security lights from the ultramodern house farther east. Some were decidedly strange shadows, huge and quick, jagged and jittering, but he would have been indulging his fevered imagina-tion if he had claimed to see a monster in the night.

Now two men were screaming. Terrible screams. Blood-freezing. They shrieked as though they were being wrenched limb from limb, slit open, torn apart.

The demon would allow no witnesses.

Perhaps a sound reached Tommy of which he was only subliminally aware, a voracious chewing, or perhaps some quality of the two men’s soul-curdling screams spoke to him on a primitive level and inspired racial memories of a prehistoric age when human beings had been easy prey to larger beasts, but somehow he knew that they were not merely being slaughtered; they were being devoured.

When the police arrived, they might not find much left of the victims on that patio. Perhaps nothing other than a little blood - and not even blood after a few more minutes of cleansing rain. The two men would seem to have vanished.

Tommy’s stomach twisted with nausea.

If his arm hadn’t still been tingling from the blow to his funny bone, if his muscles and joints hadn’t ached from the fall and burned with fatigue, if he had not been shivering from the cold, he might have thought that he was in a nightmare. But he was suffering enough discomfort and pain that he had no need to pinch himself to determine if he were awake.

More than one siren cleaved the night, and they were rapidly drawing nearer.

Scootie ran, Del ran, Tommy ran once more, as one of the men stopped screaming, stopped being able to scream, and then the second man’s cries choked off as well, and not a single dog was barking any more, all silenced by the scent of something otherworldly, while the harbour gradually filled with an incoming tide and the earth rotated inexorably toward dawn.

Under the roof of the silent and unmoving carousel among the herd of colourful horses frozen in mid-gallop, Tommy and Del found a two-person chariot with carved eagles on the sides. They were glad to be out of the rain and to have a chance, however brief, to rest.

Ordinarily the perimeter of the carousel was covered when it was not in use, but this night it stood open to the elements.

Scootie quietly prowled among the horses, circling the elevated platform, apparently on sentry duty, ready to warn them if the demon approached in either its Samaritan guise or any other.

The Balboa Fun Zone, arguably the heart of the pen-insula’s important tourist business, extended for a few blocks along Edgewater Avenue, a pedestrian mall that did not admit vehicular traffic west of Main Street. Numerous gift shops, Pizza Pete’s, ice-cream stands, restaurants, Balboa Saloon, arcades offering video games and pinball and skee-ball, boat-rental operations, bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, the carousel on which Tommy and Del sat, Lazer Tag, docks for various companies offering guided-tour cruises, and other diversions lined Edgewater, with views of the dazzling harbour and its islands to be glimpsed between the attractions on the north side.

In spring, summer, and autumn - or on any warm day in the winter - tourists and sun lovers strolled this promenade, taking a break from the Pacific surf and from the beaches on the opposite side of the narrow penin-sula. Newlyweds, elderly couples, spectacular-looking young women in bikinis, lean and tanned young men in shorts, and children walked-skated-rollerbladed among veterans in wheelchairs and babies in strollers, enjoying the glitter of sunlight on water, eating ice cream cones, roasted corn from Kountry Corn, popsicles, cookies. Laughter and happy chatter mingled with the music from the carousel, the putter of boat engines, and the ceaseless ring-beep-pong-bop from the game arcades.

At two-thirty, on this stormy November morning, the Fun Zone was deserted. The only sounds were those made by the rain as it drummed hollowly on the carousel roof, pinged off the brass poles on the outer circle of horses, snapped against festoons of limp vinyl pennants, and drizzled through the fronds of the queen palms along the harbour side of the promenade. This was a lonely music, the forlorn and tuneless anthem of desolation.

The shops and other attractions were shuttered and dark but for an occasional security lantern. On summer evenings, when augmented by the neon and the spark-ling Tivoli lights of the arcades and rides, the old bronze lampposts with frosted-glass globes - some round, most in the form of urns with finials - provided an appealing and romantic glow; then everything glimmered, includ-ing the great mirror that was the harbour, and the world was scintillant, effervescent. But now the lamplight was strangely bleak, cold, too feeble to prevent the crushing weight of the November night from pressing low over the Fun Zone.

Extracting a shotgun shell from a pocket in her ski jacket, Del spoke in a murmur that would not carry beyond the carousel: ‘Here. You only fired one round, I think.’

‘Yeah,’ Tommy said, matching her soft tone.

‘Keep it fully loaded.’

‘Those poor damn guys,’ he lamented as he slid the shell into the magazine tube on the Mossberg. ‘What horrible deaths.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.

‘They wouldn’t have been there, the thing wouldn’t have been there, if I hadn’t been there.’

‘It’s upsetting,’ she agreed. ‘But you were only trying to stay alive, running for your life, and they stepped in.’

‘Still.’

‘Obviously, they were marked for an unnatural extrac-tion.’

‘Extraction?’

‘From this world. If the thing in the fat man hadn’t gotten them, then they would have been taken in some other unusual way. Like spontaneous combustion. Or an encounter with a lycanthrope.’

‘Lycanthrope? Werewolf?’ He wasn’t able to deal with her weirdness just now, so he changed the subject. ‘Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that? Your mother again?’

‘Daddy. He taught Mom and me, wanted us to be prepared for anything. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns. I can handle an Uzi as if I was born with it, and-’

‘Uzi?’

‘Yeah. And when it comes to-’

‘Submachine guns?’

‘-when it comes to knife throwing-’

‘Knife throwing?’ Tommy said, and realized that he had raised his voice.