How could it possibly have grown so fast? And to add this much body weight, it would have required nourishment, fuel to feed the feverish growth.
What had it eaten?
The good Samaritan was approaching again, behind the bobbling beam of his flashlight, but he was still more than sixty yards away. The burning Corvette was between him and the demon, which he wouldn’t be able to see until he had come virtually to Tommy’s side.
What had it eaten?
Impossibly, the rhapsodic mini-kin appeared to swell larger even as the flames seethed from it.
Tommy began to back slowly away, overcome by the urgent need to flee but reluctant to turn and run. Any too-sudden movement on his part might shatter the demon’s ecstatic fascination with the fire and remind it that its prey was nearby.
The guy with the flashlight was forty yards away. He was a heavyset man in a hooded raincoat that flared behind him. Lumbering through the puddles, slipping in the mud, he resembled a cowled monk.
Suddenly Tommy was afraid for the Samaritan’s life. At first he had wanted a witness; but that was when he thought the mini-kin would perish in the flames. Now he sensed that it wouldn’t allow a witness.
He would have shouted at the stranger to stay away, even at the risk of drawing the mini-kin’s attention, but fate intervened when a gunshot cracked through the rainy night, then a second and a third.
Evidently recognizing the distinctive sound, the heavyset stranger skidded to a halt in the mud. He was still thirty yards away, with the mined car intervening, so he couldn’t possibly have seen the blazing demon.
A fourth shot boomed, a fifth.
In the scramble to get out of the Corvette after the crash, Tommy had not remembered the pistol. He wouldn’t have been able to locate it anyway. Now the intense heat was detonating the ammunition.
Reminded that he lacked even the inadequate protection of the Heckler & Koch, Tommy stopped backing away from the demon and stood in tremulous indecision. Although he was drenched by the storm, his mouth was as dry as the sun-scorched sand on an August beach.
The rain washed parching panic through him, and his fear was like a fever burning in his brow, in his eyes, in his joints.
He turned and ran for his life.
He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t know if he had any hope of escaping, but he was propelled by sheer survival instinct. Maybe he could outrun the mini-kin in the short term, but he didn’t have high expectations of being able to stay beyond its reach for the next six or seven hours, until dawn.
It was growing.
Getting stronger.
Becoming a more formidable predator.
Ticktock.
Mud sucked at Tommy’s athletic shoes. Tangles of dead grass and creeping lantana vines almost snared him, almost brought him down. A palm frond like the feather from a giant bird, torn loose by the wind, spun out of the night and lashed his face as it flew past him. Nature herself seemed to be joined in a conspiracy with the mini-kin.
Ticktock.
Tommy glanced over his shoulder and saw that the flames at the Corvette, although brightly whipping the night, were subsiding. The smaller conflagration that marked the burning demon was fading much faster than the blaze at the car, but the beast continued to be entranced and was not yet giving chase.
The deadline is dawn.
Tomorrow’s sunrise hung out there just a few minutes this side of eternity.
Almost to the street Tommy dared to glance back again through the obscuring grey curtains of rain. Flames still sputtered from the mini-kin, but only fitfully. Apparently, most of the gasoline saturating the creature had burned off. Too little fire remained—mere wisps of yellow—to allow Tommy to see the thing well: just well enough to be certain that it was on the move again and coming after him.
It was not pursuing as fast as it had been before, maybe because it was still inebriated from its infatuation with the flames. But it was coming nonetheless.
Having crossed the empty lot on the diagonal, Tommy reached the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Avocado Street skidded across the last stretch of mud like an ice-skater on a frozen pond, and plunged off the curb into the calf-deep water that overflowed the gutters at the intersection.