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!’
‘You’ve no right to talk to me that way,’ she said quietly but with visible anger in her crystalline-blue eyes.
Speechless with frustration, Tommy could only sputter. ‘Even if you’re hurt and upset, you can’t talk to me that way. It isn’t nice.’
He glanced out the side window at the vacant lot next to them.
She said, ‘I can’t abide rudeness.’
Forcing himself to speak more calmly, Tommy said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t sound sorry.’
‘Well, I am.’
‘Well, you don’t sound it.’
Tommy thought maybe he would kill her rather than wait for the mini-kin to do it.
‘I’m genuinely sorry,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘I’m truly, truly sorry.’
‘That’s better.’
‘Can you take me to a hospital,’ he asked, merely to get her moving.
‘Sure.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Put on your seatbelt.’
‘What?’
‘It’s the law.’
Her hair was honey-dark and lank with rain, pasted to her face, and her uniform was saturated. He reminded himself that she had gone to some trouble for him.
As he unreeled the shoulder harness and locked it across his chest he said as patiently as possible: ‘Please, miss, please, you don’t understand what’s happening here-’
‘Then explain. I’m neither stupid nor deaf.’
For an instant the improbability of the night left him without words again, but then suddenly they exploded in a long hysterical gush: ‘This thing, this doll, on my doorstep, and then the stitches pulled out and it had a real eye, green eye, rat’s tail, dropped on my head from behind the drape, and it pretty much eats bullets for breakfast which is bad enough, but then it’s also smart, and it’s growing-’
‘What’s growing?’
Frustration pushed him dangerously close to the edge of rudeness once more: ‘The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing! It’s growing.’
‘The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing,’ she repeated, eyeing him suspiciously.
‘Yes!’ he said exasperatedly.
With a wet thunk, the shrieking mini-kin hit the window in the passenger door, inches from Tommy’s head.
Tommy screamed.
The woman said, ‘Holy shit.’
The mini-kin was growing, all right, but it was also changing into something less humanoid than it had been when it first began to emerge from the doll form. Its head was proportionately larger than before, and repulsively misshapen, and the radiant green eyes bulged from deep sockets under an irregular bony brow.