He hadn’t been seriously hurt.
Yet.
His adversary rose to its feet as well.
Although he was seven times taller than the mini-kin and perhaps thirty times its weight, Tommy was so terrified that he felt as though he might pee in his pants.
Chip Nguyen, hardboiled detective, would never lose control of himself in that fashion, humiliate himself to that extent, but Tommy Phan no longer gave a damn what Chip Nguyen would do. Chip Nguyen was an idiot, a whiskey-drinking fool who put too much faith in guns, martial arts, and tough talk. The most precisely executed and powerfully delivered Tae Kwan Do kick wouldn’t stop a supernaturally animated devil doll that could take a 40-caliber round in its guts and keep on ticking.
Now there was an indisputable truth. Not the kind of truth you would hear on the evening news or read in the newspaper. Not a truth they taught in school or church. Not a truth that would be acclaimed by Carl Sagan or the scientific establishment. Truth nonetheless, from Tommy’s point of view, truth even if the only forum that might report it was a rag like the National Enquirer in a story about the ominous rise of demonic presences in our apocalyptic age and the inevitable forthcoming battle between Satan Incarnate and Saint Elvis on the eve of the new millennium.
Pointing the P7 at the mini-kin, Tommy felt a mad laugh swelling in him, but he choked it down. He wasn’t insane. He had gotten past that fear. It was God Himself who must be mad—and the universe a lunatic asylum—if He made room in Creation for something like this predatory gremlin in a rag-doll disguise.
If the mini-kin was a supernatural presence, as it seemed to be, resistance to it might be stupid and pointless, but Tommy couldn’t very well throw the gun aside, bare his throat, and wait for the killing bite. At least the round from the pistol had knocked the thing down and temporarily stunned it. He might not be able to kill it with the gun, but at least he could fend it off.
Until he ran out of ammunition.
He had fired three rounds. One when the thing had dropped from the drapery rod onto his head. Two more when he had been lying on the floor.
Ten rounds remained in the thirteen-shot magazine. And in his bedroom closet was a box of ammunition, which would buy more time if he could get to it.
The doll-thing cocked its rag-swaddled head and regarded him with a fierce green-eyed hunger. The strips of cotton hanging over its face looked like white dreadlocks.
Thus far the gunfire had probably been pretty much masked by the peals of thunder. Eventually, however, the neighbours in this peaceful city of Irvine would realize that a battle was being waged next door, and they would call the cops.
The doll-thing hissed at him.
God in heaven, what is this—Showdown at the Twilight Zone Corral?
When the police arrived, he would have to tell them what was happening, even though he would sound like a poster boy for paranoid dementia. Then the mini-kin would either brazenly reveal itself, and the rest of the world would plummet into this nightmare with Tommy—or the cunning little demon would hide and let the police transfer their raving ward to a windowless but well-lighted room with rubber wallpaper.
At this moment, Tommy almost didn’t care which of the two scenarios played out. In either case, the immediate terror would be over, and he would be able to avoid peeing in his pants. He’d have time to catch his breath, think about this, maybe even puzzle out an explanation for what had happened here—although that seemed no more likely than his arriving at an understanding of the meaning of life.
The fiend hissed again.
A new possibility occurred to Tommy, and it wasn’t a good one. Maybe the hateful little thing would secretly follow him to the psychiatric ward and continue to torment him there for the rest of his tortured life, cleverly avoiding being seen by the physicians and attendants.
Instead of charging again, the mini-kin abruptly darted toward the sofa, which still stood away from the wall where Tommy had left it during the search.