The stink of gasoline was stronger than ever.
Pushing onto his feet, swaying unsteadily, he saw that the car had tumbled across a parcel of bare land that was the site of a future shopping centre at the highly desirable corner of MacArthur Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. In recent years, this field had been used as a Christmas-tree lot every December, sometimes as a pumpkin patch at Halloween, but had served no substantial commercial purpose. He was damn lucky that it was early November and that he had rolled the car through an empty field instead of through happily chattering families in a holiday mood.
Because the Corvette was turned on its side, he was standing next to the undercarriage. From out of the mechanical guts of the machine, the mini-kin issued a shriek of rage and need.
Tommy stumbled back from the car, splashing through another puddle, and nearly fell on his ass.
As the bone-piercing shriek trailed into a snarl and then into an industrious grumble, Tommy heard the demon pounding-straining-clawing, and metal creaked against metal. He couldn’t see into the dark undercarriage, but he sensed that the mini-kin was temporarily trapped in the tangled wreckage and struggling furiously to pry itself free.
The fibreglass body of the Corvette was a mess. His dream car was a total loss.
He was fortunate to have gotten out unscathed. In the morning, of course, he would be crippled by whiplash and a thousand smaller pains – if he lived through the night.
The deadline is dawn.
Ticktock.
Crazily, he wondered what the per-hour cost of his brief ownership had been. Seven thousand dollars. Eight thousand? He looked at his watch, trying to calculate the number of hours since he had made the purchase and been handed the keys, but then he realized that it didn’t matter. It was only money.
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 head-light, 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.