Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

‘What?’

‘You said fire distracted it.’

He remembered the enraptured mini-kin at the blazing Corvette, lost to all sensation except the dancing flames. ‘How’re you going to start a fire?’

‘Trust me.’

‘But-’

Below, the recuperated Samaritan-thing shrieked and entered the bottom of the stairwell.

‘Give me the damn gun!’ she snarled, and virtually tore it out of Tommy’s grip.

The Desert Eagle bucked in her hands - once, twice, three times, four times - and the roar echoed back at them out of the stairwell, like cannon fire.

Squealing, spitting, hissing, the creature crashed down to the afterdeck again.

To Tommy, Del shouted, ‘Go, damn it, go!’

He stumbled across the open top deck to the port stairs farther forward, beside the helm station.

More gunfire erupted behind him. The beast had come back at her faster this time than before.

Clutching at the railing, he descended the open port-side stairs, up which he had climbed earlier. At the bottom, the narrow railed passway led forward to the bow but didn’t lead back toward the stern, so there was no easy route by which the Samaritan-thing could make its way to him directly from the afterdeck - unless it broke into the enclosed lower deck, rampaged forward through the staterooms, and smashed out at him through a window.

More gunfire crashed above and aft, and the hard sound slapped across the black water, so it seemed as though Newport had gone to war with neighbouring Corona Del Mar.

Tommy reached the bow deck, where only a few min-utes ago he’d taken a stand against the Samaritan-thing when it had first tried to board the vessel.

In the night ahead, Balboa Island loomed.

‘Holy shit,’ Tommy said, horrified by what was about to happen.

They were approaching Balboa Island at considerable speed, on a line as direct and true as if they were being guided by a laser beam. With the wheel locked and the throttles set, they would pass between two large private docks and ram the sea wall that surrounded the island.

He turned, intending to go back to the helm and make Del change course, but he halted in astonishment when he saw that the aft end of the yacht was already ablaze. Orange and blue flames leaped into the night. Shimmering with reflections of the fire, the falling rain looked like showers of embers from a celestial blaze.

Scootie padded along the port-side pass way and onto the bow deck.

Del was right behind the Labrador. ‘The damn thing’s in the stairwell, burning in ecstasy, like you said. Creepy as hell.’

‘How did you set it on fire so quick?’ Tommy demanded, half shouting to be heard above the drum-ming rain and the engines.

‘Diesel fuel,’ she said, raising her voice as well.

‘Where’d you get diesel fuel?’

‘There’s six hundred gallons aboard.’ ‘But in tanks somewhere.’

‘Not any more.’

‘And diesel fuel doesn’t burn that fiercely.’

‘So I used gasoline.’

‘Huh?’

‘Or napalm.’

‘You’re lying to me again!’ he fumed.

‘You’re making it necessary.’

‘I hate this crap.’

‘Sit on the deck,’ she instructed.

‘This is so nuts!’

‘Sit down, grab hold of the railing.’

‘You’re some crazy gonzo Amazon witch or some-thing.’

‘Whatever you say. Just brace yourself, ‘cause we’re going to crash, and you don’t want to be thrown over-board.’

Tommy looked toward Balboa Island, which was clearly defined by the streetlamps along the seawall and the dark shapes of houses beyond. ‘Dear God.’

‘As soon as we run aground,’ she said, ‘get up, get off the boat, and follow me.’

She crossed to the starboard flank of the bow deck, sat with her legs splayed in front of her, and grabbed hold of the railing with her right hand. Scootie clam-bered into her lap, and she put her left arm around him.

Following Del’s example, Tommy sat on the deck, facing forward. He didn’t have a dog to hug, so he gripped the port railing with both hands.

Sleek and swift, the yacht cruised through the rainy darkness toward doom.

If Del had set the fuel tanks on fire, the engines wouldn’t be running. Would they?

Don’t think, just hold on.

Maybe the fire had come from the same place as the seething flock of birds. Which was - where?

Just hold on.

He expected the boat to explode under him.

He expected the flaming Samaritan-thing to shake off its rapture and, still ablaze, leap upon him.

He closed his eyes.

Just hold on.

If he had just gone home to his mother’s for corn tay cam and stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mam sauce, he might not have been home when the doorbell rang, might never have found the doll, might now be in bed, sleeping peacefully, dreaming about the Land of Bliss at the peak of fabled Mount Phi Lai, where everyone was immortal and beautiful and deliriously happy twenty-four hours every day, where everyone lived in perfect harmony and never said one cross word to anyone else and never suffered an identity crisis. But, nooooo, that wasn’t good enough for him. Nooooo, he had to offend his mother and make a statement about his independence by going instead to a diner for cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers and French fries, cheeseburgers and French fries and onion rings and a chocolate milkshake, Mr. Big Shot with his own car phone and his new Corvette, intrigued by the blond waitress, flirting with her, when the world was filled with beautiful and intelligent and charming Vietnamese girls - who were perhaps the most lovely women in the world - who never called you ‘tofu boy,’ never hot-wired cars, didn’t think they had been abducted by aliens, didn’t threaten to blow your head off when you wanted to look at their paintings, never stole yachts and set them on fire, gorgeous Vietnamese women who never talked in riddles, never said things like ‘reality is what you think it is,’ didn’t have any exper-tise with throwing knives, hadn’t been taught by their fathers to use high explosives, didn’t wear father-killing bullets as necklace pendants, didn’t run around with big black smart assed hounds from hell with farting rubber hotdogs. He couldn’t go home and eat corn tay cam, had to write stupid detective novels instead of becoming a doctor or a baker, and now as payment for his selfishness and his arrogance and his bull-headed determination to be what he could never be, he was going to die.

Just hold on.

He was going to die.

Just hold.

Here came the big sleep, the long goodbye.

Hold.

He opened his eyes.

Shouldn’t have done that.

Balboa Island, where no structure was taller than three stories, where half of the houses were bungalows and cottages, seemed as large as Manhattan, towering.

Screws turning furiously, the fifty-six-foot, merrily blazing Bluewater yacht came into the island at extreme high tide, drawing less than two feet, virtually skimming like a cigarette racing boat, for God’s sake, in spite of its size, came in between two docks (one of which was already decorated for Christmas), and struck the massive steel-reinforced concrete sea wall with a colossal shattering-ripping-screeching-booming noise that made Tommy cry out in fear and that would have awakened the dead if perhaps any of the islanders had perished in their sleep this night. At the water line, the hull, although as strong as any, was crushed and torn open at the bow. The impact dramatically slowed the yacht, but the diesel engines were so powerful and the screws provided such enormous thrust that the vessel surged forward, striving to climb the sea wall, heaving across the top of it, angling up at the bow, up, over the wide public promenade that ringed the island, up, as though it might churn all the way out of the harbour and sail through the front of one of the large houses that lined the island’s waterfront. Then at last it shuddered to a halt, securely hung up on the sea wall and badly weighed down by the tons of seawater pouring through the broken hull into the lower holds.