Did. Not. Drop.
The hood was no longer over the fat man’s head, but the darkness still masked the side of his face. Then he slowly turned toward Tommy and Del, and though his features remained obscure, his extraordinary eyes fixed on them and on the growling Labrador. They were radiant, green, inhuman eyes.
Scootie’s growl degenerated into a whimper, and Tommy knew exactly how he felt.
With admirable calm, made of sterner stuff than either Tommy or Scootie, Del squeezed off shot after shot with the Desert Eagle. The explosions crashed across the harbour and echoed off the far shore, and they were still echoing back and forth after she had emptied the magazine.
Every round appeared to hit the fat man, because he jerked, twitched, doubled over but then snapped upright as if in response to the impact of another slug, executed a limb-flapping marionette-like spin, and at last went down. He landed on one side, knees drawn up in the foetal position, and the frosty beam of the would-be hero’s flashlight, which lay discarded on the patio, illuminated one of the Samaritan’s white, thick-fingered hands. He seemed to be dead, but certainly was not.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Del said.
Scootie was already leaping across a hedge, into the backyard of the next house to the west.
The roar of the .44 Magnum had been so daunting that most of the barking dogs along the harbour had fallen silent, no longer eager to escape their pens.
In the silvery beam of the flashlight, the Samaritan’s plump white hand lay cupped, palm up, filling with rain. Then it spasmed, and the pale flesh grew mottled and dark.
‘Oh, shit,’ Tommy said.
Impossibly, the fingers metamorphosed into spatulate tentacles and then into spiky insectile digits with wicked chitinous hooks at each knuckle.
The entire shadowed mass of the fallen Samaritan seemed to be shifting, pulsating. Changing.
‘Seen enough, outta here,’ Del declared, and she hurried after Scootie.
Tommy searched for the courage to approach the creature and fire the shotgun point-blank into its brain. By the time that he could reach the beast, however, it might have transformed itself so radically that it would have nothing that was recognizably a head. Besides, intuitively he knew that no number of rounds from the Mossberg -or any other gun – would destroy it.
‘Tommy!’ Del called frantically from the patio of the house next door.
‘Run, get out of here,’ Tommy advised the homeowner who was prone on the concrete deck.
The man seemed traumatized by all the gunfire, con-fused. He started to push on to his knees, but then he must have glimpsed the shotgun, because he pleaded, ‘No, don’t, Jesus, don’t,’ and pressed flat to the deck again.
‘Run, for God’s sake, run, before it recovers from the shots,’ Tommy urged the second man, the tooth-spitter, who continued to sit in a daze. ‘Please, run.’
Heeding his own advice, he followed Del, grateful that he had not broken a leg when he’d been tackled.
In the distance, a siren wailed.
When Tommy, Del, and the dog were two proper-ties away from the scene of the confrontation, one of the would-be heroes screamed in the night behind them.
Tommy skidded to a halt on a slate patio at a Tudor house and looked toward the cries.
Not much could be seen in the rain and murk. Shadows thrashed against the backdrop of security lights from the ultramodern house farther east. Some were decidedly strange shadows, huge and quick, jagged and jittering, but he would have been indulging his fevered imagination if he had claimed to see a monster in the night.
Now two men were screaming. Terrible screams. Blood-freezing. They shrieked as though they were being wrenched limb from limb, slit open, torn apart.
The demon would allow no witnesses.
Perhaps a sound reached Tommy of which he was only subliminally aware, a voracious chewing, or perhaps some quality of the two men’s soul-curdling screams spoke to him on a primitive level and inspired racial memories of a prehistoric age when human beings had been easy prey to larger beasts, but somehow he knew that they were not merely being slaughtered; they were being devoured.