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.
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.