A car horn blared. Brakes screeched.
He hadn’t checked oncoming traffic because he had been looking over his shoulder and then watching the treacherous ground ahead of him. When he snapped his head up in surprise, an astonishingly colourful Ford van was there, blazing yellow-red-gold-orange-black-green, as if appearing magically—poof!—from another dimension. The dazzling van stopped an instant before Tommy reached it rocking on its springs, but he couldn’t prevent himself from running into it full tilt. He bounced off the fender, spun around to the front of the vehicle, and fell to the pavement.
Clutching the van, he immediately pulled himself up from the blacktop.
The extravagant paint job wasn’t psychedelic, as it had appeared on first impression, but rather an attempt to transform the van into an Art Deco jukebox: images of leaping gazelles amidst stylised palm fronds, streams of luminous silver bubbles in bands of glossy black, and more luminous gold bubbles in bands of Chinese-red lacquer. As the driver’s door opened, the night swung with Benny Goodman’s big-band classic, “One O’clock Jump.”
As Tommy regained his feet again, the driver appeared at his side. She was a young woman in white shoes, what might have been a nurse’s white uniform, and a black leather jacket. “Hey, are you all right?”
“Yeah, okay,” Tommy wheezed.
“You’re really okay?”
“Yeah, sure, leave me alone.”
He squinted at the rain-swept vacant lot.
The mini-kin was no longer afire, and the flashing red emergency lights at the back of the van didn’t penetrate far into the gloom. Tommy couldn’t see where the creature was, but he knew it was closing the gap between them, perhaps moving sluggishly but closing the gap.
“Go,” he told her, waving her away with one hand.
The woman insisted, “You must be—”
“Go, hurry.”
“—hurt. I can’t—”
“Get out of here!” he said frantically, not wanting to trap her between him and the demon.
He pushed away from her, intending to continue across all six lanes of Pacific Coast Highway. At the moment, there was no traffic except for a few vehicles that had stopped half a block to the south, where their drivers were watching the burning Corvette.
The woman clutched tenaciously. “Was that your car back there?”
“Jesus, lady, it’s coming!”
“What’s coming?”
“It!”
“What?”
“It!” He tried to wrench loose of her.
She said, “Was that your new Corvette?”
He realized that he knew her. The blond waitress. She had served cheeseburgers and fries to him earlier this evening. The restaurant was across this highway.
The place had closed for the night. She was on her way home.
Again Tommy had the queer sensation that he was riding the bobsled of fate, rocketing down a huge chute toward some destiny he could not begin to understand.
“You should see a doctor,” she persisted.
He wasn’t going to be able to shake her loose. When the mini-kin arrived, it wouldn’t want a witness.
Eighteen inches tall and growing. A spiky crest along the length of its spine. Bigger claws, bigger teeth. It would rip her throat out tear her face off.
Her slender throat.
Her lovely face.
Tommy didn’t have time to argue with her. “Okay, a doctor, okay, get me out of here.”
Holding his arm as if he were a doddering old man, she started to walk him around to the passenger door, which was the side of the van closest to the vacant lot.
“Drive the fucking thing!” he demanded, and at last he tore loose of her.
Tommy went to the passenger door and yanked it open, but the waitress was still standing in front of her jukebox van, stupefied by his outburst.
“Move or we’ll both die!” he shouted in frustration. He glanced back into the vacant lot, expecting the mini-kin to spring at him out of the darkness and rain, but it wasn’t here yet, so he clambered into the Ford.
The woman slid into the driver’s seat and slammed her door an instant after Tommy slammed his.
Switching off “One O’clock Jump,” she said, “What happened back there? I saw you come shooting off MacArthur Boulevard—”
“Are you stupid or deaf or both?” he demanded, his voice shrill and cracking. “We gotta get out of here now!”