What mattered was survival.
Ticktock.
Get moving.
Keep moving.
When he circled around the front of the tipped car, passing through the beam of the sole functioning headlight, he couldn’t see the engine compartment, either, for the hood had compacted into it. But he could hear the demon battering frantically against the walls of its prison.
“Die, damn you,” Tommy demanded.
In the distance, someone shouted.
Shaking his head to cast off his remaining dizziness, blinking through the rain, Tommy saw that two cars had stopped along MacArthur Boulevard to the south, near the place where he had run the Corvette off the roadway.
A man with a flashlight was standing at the top of the low embankment about eighty yards away. The guy called again, but the meaning of his words was swallowed by the wind.
Traffic had slowed and a few vehicles were even stopped on Pacific Coast Highway, as well, although no one had gotten out of them yet.
The guy with the flashlight started to descend the embankment, coming to offer assistance.
Tommy raised one arm and waved vigorously, encouraging the good Samaritan to hurry, to come hear the squawking demon trapped in the smashed machinery, to see the impossible doll-thing with his own eyes if it managed to break loose, to marvel at its existence, to be a witness.
Gasoline, which was evidently pooled under the length of the Corvette, ignited. Blue and orange flames geysered high into the night, vaporizing the falling rain.
The great hot hand of the fire slapped Tommy with such fury that his face stung, and he was staggered backward by the force of the blow. There had been no explosion, but the heat was so intense that he surely would have been set afire in that instant if his hair and his clothes had not been thoroughly soaked.
An unearthly squealing rose from the trapped mini-kin.
At the foot of the embankment, the good Samaritan had halted, startled by the fire.
“Hurry! Hurry!” Tommy shouted, although he knew that the roar of rain and wind prevented the man with the flashlight from hearing either him or the demon.
With a boom and a splintery crack like bone breaking, the battered and burning hood exploded off the engine compartment and tumbled past Tommy, spewing sparks and smoke as it clattered toward the stand of phoenix palms.
Like a malevolent genie freed from a lamp, the mini-kin flung itself out of the inferno and landed upright in the mud, no more than ten feet from Tommy. It was ablaze, but the streaming cloaks of fire that had replaced its white fabric shroud did not seem to disturb it.
Indeed, the creature was no longer shrieking in mindless rage but appeared to be exhilarated by the blaze. Raising its arms over its head as if joyfully exclaiming hallelujah, swaying almost as if in a state of rapture, it fixed its attention not on Tommy but on its own hands which, like tallow tapers on some dark altar, streamed blue fire.
“Bigger,” Tommy gasped in disbelief.
Incredibly, the thing had grown. The doll on his doorstep had been about ten inches long. This demon swaying rapturously before him was approximately eighteen inches tall, nearly twice the size that it had been when he had last seen it streaking across his foyer into the living room to short-circuit the lights. Furthermore, its legs and arms were thicker and its body heavier than they had been earlier.
Because of the masking fire, Tommy could not see details of the creature’s form, although he thought he detected wickedly spiky protrusions extending the length of its spine, which had not been there before. Its back seemed to be more hunched than it had been previously, and perhaps its hands were becoming disproportionately large for the length of its arms. Whether he perceived these details correctly or not, Tommy was certain that he could not be mistaken about the beast’s greater size.
Having expected the mini-kin to wither and collapse in the consuming flames, Tommy was dangerously mesmerized by the sight of it thriving instead.
“This is nuts,” he muttered.
The falling rain captured the light of the wildly leaping fire, carrying it into puddles on the ground, which glimmered like pools of melting doubloons and flickered with the shadow of the capering mini-kin.