‘Tweaking me?’
‘You’re a hoot,’ she said, putting the van in gear and driving away from the supermarket.
He looked down glumly at the pair of plastic sacks on the floor between his legs. ‘I can’t believe I paid for the damn tofu.’
‘You’ll like it.’
A few blocks from the market, in a district of warehouses and industrial buildings, Del parked the van under a free-way overpass, where it was sheltered from the rain.
‘Bring the stuff we bought,’ she said.
‘It looks awful lonely here.’
‘Most of the world is lonely corners.’
‘I’m not sure it’s safe.’
‘Nowhere is safe unless you want it to be,’ she said, having entered her cryptic mode once more.
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘What doesn’t it mean?’
‘You’re putting me on again.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
She was not grinning now. The merriness that had brightened her when she had conducted the tofu torture was gone.
Leaving the engine running, she got out from behind the wheel and went around to the back of the Ford -which wasn’t a recreational vehicle, but a delivery van of the kind commonly used by florists and other small businesses – and she opened the rear door. She took the supermarket bags from Tommy and emptied the contents on the floor of the cargo hold.
Tommy stood watching her, shivering. He was wet through and through, and the temperature, as midnight approached, must be in the low fifties.
She said, ‘I’ll put together a cover for the broken window. While I’m doing that, you use the paper towels to soak up as much water as you can from the front seat and the floor, get rid of the glass.’
With no residential or commercial structures in the area to draw traffic, the street seemed to be another set from that same science-fiction movie about a depopulated, post-apocalyptic world that Tommy had remembered in the supermarket. A rumble overhead was the sound of trucks on the freeway above, but because those vehicles could not be seen from here, it was easy to imagine that the source of the noise was colossal machinery of an alien nature engaged in the fulfilment of a meticulously planned holocaust.
Considering his overactive imagination, he probably should have tried writing a type of fiction more colourful than detective stories.
In the cargo hold was a cardboard carton full of smaller boxes of dog biscuits. ‘I went shopping this afternoon for Scootie,’ she explained as she removed the packages of biscuits from the larger container.
‘Your dog, huh?’
‘Not just my dog. The dog. The essence of all dogginess. The coolest canine on the planet. No doubt in his last incarnation before Nirvana. That’s my Scootie.’
With the new tape measure, she got the accurate dimensions of the broken-out window, and then she used one of the razor blades to cut a rectangle of that precise size from the cardboard carton. She slid the panel of cardboard into one of the plastic garbage bags, folded the bag tightly around that insert, and sealed it with lengths of the waterproof plumbing tape. More tape secured the rectangle, inside and out, to the glassless window frame in the passenger’s door.
While Del made the rain shield, Tommy worked around her to purge the front seat of water and sparkling fragments of tempered glass. As he worked, he told her what had happened from the moment when the mini-kin had shorted-out the office lights until it had erupted from the burning Corvette.
‘Bigger?’ she asked. ‘How much bigger?’
‘Almost double its original size. And different. The thing you saw clinging to the van window . . . that’s a hell of a lot weirder than it was when it first began to emerge from the doll.’
Not one vehicle drove through the underpass as they worked, and Tommy was increasingly concerned about their isolation. Repeatedly he glanced toward the open ends of the concrete shelter, where heavy rain continued to crash down by the ton weight, bracketing the dry space in which they had taken refuge. He expected to see the radiant-eyed demon – swollen to greater and stranger dimensions – approaching menacingly through the storm.