“I thought for a moment that you were planning to stay.”
“No … I was just thinking … about what a fool I’d been.”
“Well stop thinking for a while,” Tammy said. “It’ll slow us down.” She put her foot down and they sped off down the winding street. About halfway down the Canyon he said: “Do you think she’s going to come after us?”
“No,” Tammy said. “I don’t think her pride would let her.”
She had no sooner spoken than something sprang into the glare of the headlights. Todd let out a yelp of surprise, but Tammy knew in a heartbeat what it was: one of the hybrids she’d encountered on the slopes. It was ugly, even by the standards of its malformed breed: a loping, pasty thing with the flesh missing from the lower half of its face, exposing a sickly rictus.
Tammy made no attempt to avoid striking the beast. Instead she drove straight into it. The moment before it was struck the thing opened its lipless mouth horribly wide, as though it thought it might scare the vehicle off. Then the front of the car struck it, and its body rolled up onto the hood, momentarily sprawling over the windshield. For a few seconds, Tammy was driving blind, with the face of the beast grotesquely plastered against the glass. Then one of her more suicidal swerves threw the thing off, leaving just a smudge of its pale yellow fluids on the glass.
Very quietly Todd said: “What the fuck was that?”
“I’ll tell you some other time,” Tammy said. And leaving the explanation there she proceeded down the winding road in uncontested silence, bringing them finally to some anonymous but lamplit street, and so, out of the entrails of Coldheart Canyon, and back into the City of Angels.