Tick Tock

by Dean Koontz

  Scootie growled, and Del said, “It’s coming back.”

  For an instant Tommy didn’t understand what she meant, and then he understood too well. Bringing up the shotgun, he spun around to face east. The promenade was deserted as far as he could see, and even at night in the rain he could see past the carousel and as far as the Balboa Pavilion at the entrance to the Fun Zone.

  “It doesn’t know exactly where we are yet,” she said, “but it’s coming back this way.”

  “Intuition again?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Or whatever. And I don’t think we can outrun it.”

  “So we’ve got to find a car,” he said, still keeping a watch on the east end of the Fun Zone, expecting the Samaritan-thing to come racing toward them, birdless and furious.

  “Car, no. That’s too dangerous. That means going out toward the boulevard where a cop might pass by and see us and think we’re suspicious.”

  “Suspicious? What’s suspicious about two heavily armed people and a big strange black dog on the street at three in the morning in the middle of a storm?”

  “We’ll steal a boat,” Del said.

  Her announcement drew his attention away from the promenade. “A boat?”

  “It’ll be fun,” she said.

  Already she and Scootie were on the move, and Tommy glanced east along the deserted amusement area once more before scrambling after the woman and the dog.

  Past the entrance ramp to the ferry was Balboa Boat Rentals, a business that offered a variety of sailing skiffs, small motorboats, and kayaks to the tourist trade.

  Tommy didn’t know how to sail, wasn’t sure that he would be able to operate a motorboat, and didn’t relish paddling out onto the rain-lashed harbor in a kayak. “I’d prefer a car.”

  Del and Scootie ran past the shuttered rental facility and departed the open promenade. They passed between a couple of dark buildings and went to the sea wall.

  Tommy followed them through a gate and along a pier. Though he wore rubber-soled shoes, the rain-soaked planks were slippery.

  They were in what appeared to be a small marina area where docking space could be rented, though some of the docks to the west were evidently private. A line of boats—some commercial party boats, some charter-fishing craft, and a few private craft big enough to be classified as full-blown yachts—were tied up side by side in the pounding rain, dimly revealed by the pier security lamps.

  Del and Scootie hurried along a dock head serving several slips and moorings, looking over ten boats before stopping at a sleek white double-deck cruiser. “This is good,” she said as Tommy joined them.

  “Are you kidding? You’re going to take this? It’s huge!”

  “Not so big. Bluewater 563, fifty-six-foot length, fourteen-foot beam.”

  “We can’t handle this—how could we ever handle this?—we need a whole crew to handle this,” Tommy babbled, wishing that he didn’t sound so panicky.

  “I can handle it just swell,” she assured him with her usual ebullience. “These Bluewater yachts are sweet, really sweet, about as easy as driving a car.”

  “I can drive a car, but I can’t drive one of these.”

  “Hold this.” She handed him the .44 Magnum and moved out along the finger of the dock to which the Bluewater was tied.

  Following her, he said, “Del, wait.”

  Pausing briefly to untie the bowline from a dock cleat, she said, “Don’t worry. This baby’s got less than two feet of draft, a windage-reducing profile, and the hull’s after sections are virtually flat—”

  “You might as well be talking alien abductions again.”

  “—two deep, wide-spaced propeller pockets give it a whole lot more turning leverage,” she continued as she passed three smaller lines and went to the back of the craft, where she untied the stern line from another dock cleat, coiled it, and tossed it aboard. “You have real shaft-angle efficiency with this sweetheart. Twenty-one tons, but I’ll make it pirouette.”

  “Twenty-one tons,” he worried, following her back to midships. “Where are you planning on taking this—Japan?”

  “No, it’s a coastal cruiser. You wouldn’t want to take this too far out on the open sea. Anyway, we’re just going across the harbor to Balboa Island, where the police aren’t all agitated. We can get a car there without being spotted.”

  As Del unzipped her ski jacket and stripped out of it, Tommy said, “Is this piracy?”

  “Not if no one’s aboard. Ordinary theft,” she assured him brightly, handing her jacket to him.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I’m going to have my hands full with the boat, so you’re our only line of defense. The jacket pockets are full of spare ammo. You might need it. Position yourself on the bow deck, and if the damn thing shows up, do what’s necessary to keep it from getting aboard.”

  As the skin crawled on the nape of his neck, Tommy looked back across the dock, along the pier and east to the gate through which they had come from the Fun Zone. The Samaritan-thing was not yet in sight.

  “It’s getting close,” she assured him.

  Her voice was no longer at his side, and when he turned to her, he saw that she had already climbed aboard the yacht through the gap in the port railing.

  Scootie was also aboard, ascending the port-side steps to the open upper deck.

  “What about these lines?” Tommy asked, indicating the three dock ties that she had not cast off.

  “Forward spring, after spring, and breast line. I’ll take care of them. You just get in position on the bow.”

  He shoved the Desert Eagle under the waistband of his jeans, praying to God he wouldn’t stumble and fall and accidentally blow off his manhood. Draping Del’s jacket over the shotgun in his left hand, he grabbed the railing with his right hand, and pulled himself aboard.

  As he started forward, another worry occurred to him, and he turned to Del. “Hey, don’t you need keys or something to start it?”

  “No.”

  “For God’s sake, it can’t be like an outboard motor with a pull cord.”

  “I have my ways,” she assured him.

  In spite of the deep gloom, he could see that her smile was even more enigmatic than any with which she had previously favored him.

  She leaned toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and then said, “Hurry.”

  He went forward to the open bow deck. At the foremost point of the yacht, he stepped into the slightly depressed well in which the anchor winch was mounted. He dropped the jacket, which wasn’t going anywhere because it weighed about ten pounds with all the ammo in its pockets.

  With a sigh of relief at not having been neutered, he gingerly withdrew the pistol from his waistband and placed it on top of the jacket, where he could easily get hold of it if the need arose.

  The rain-swept docks were still deserted.

  A halyard rattled mutedly against a mast on a sailboat. Dock rollers creaked and rasped over concrete pilings, and jammed rubber fenders squeaked between a boat hull and a dock.

  The water was oil black and had a faint briny smell. In the detective novels he wrote, this was the cold, murky, secret-keeping water into which villains sometimes dropped chain-wrapped victims in concrete boots. In other writers’ books, such water was home to great white sharks, giant killer squid, and sea serpents.

  He looked back at the dark windows of the enclosed lower deck, immediately behind him, wondering where Del had gone.

  The smaller top deck began farther aft, and as he raised his gaze to it, soft amber light appeared at the windshield of what might have been an upper helm station. Then he glimpsed Del as she slipped behind the wheel and looked over the instrumentation.

  When Tommy checked the docks again, nothing moved on them, although he wouldn’t have been surprised to see policemen, harbor policemen, Coast Guardsmen, FBI agents, and so many other officers of one law-enforcement agency or another that the Samaritan-thing, if it showed up, would be unable to shou
lder its way through the crowd. He had probably broken more laws tonight than in his entire previous thirty years combined.

  The Bluewater’s twin diesel engines chugged, coughed, and then turned over with a hard rumble of power. The foredeck vibrated under Tommy’s shoes.

  He looked toward the top-deck helm again and saw, beside Del, Scootie’s head, ears pricked. The Labrador was apparently standing with his forepaws on the instrument board, and Del was patting his big head as if to say, Good dog.

  For some reason he couldn’t grasp, Tommy was reminded of the swarming birds. He flashed back, as well, to the courtyard of Del’s house, when they had entered from the street with the Samaritan in pursuit of them, and the previously locked front door had seemed to be open before she could have reached it. Abruptly he felt poised on the brink of a satori again, but then the moment passed without bringing him enlightenment.

  This time, when he turned his attention to the docks, he saw the Samaritan-thing hurtling through the gate at the sea wall, no more than two hundred feet away, raincoat billowing like a cape behind it, no longer dazzled by birds, its eyes on the prize.

  “Go, go!” Tommy urged Del as the yacht began to ease backward out of its slip.

  The demon descended to the dock head and raced westward along the base of the sea wall, passing all of the boats that Del had rejected.

  Standing in the anchor well, Tommy held the Mossberg in both hands, hoping the creature would never get close enough to require the use of the shotgun.

  The yacht was halfway out of the slip and moving faster by the second.

  Tommy heard the thudding of his own heart, and then he heard an even louder pounding: the hollow booming of the demon’s footfalls on the dock planks.

  The yacht was three-quarters of the way out of the slip, and waves of black water rolled in where it had been, slapping the dock.

  Skidding on the wet planks, the fat-man-that-wasn’t-a-fat-man reached the head of the slip and sprinted onto the port-side finger, desperately trying to catch them before they reversed all the way into the channel.

  The beast was close enough for Tommy to see its radiant green eyes, as improbable and frightening in the pale face of the Samaritan as in that of the rag doll.

  The Bluewater reversed all the way out of the slip, churning hard through water now festooned with garlands of phosphorescent foam.

  The demon sprinted to the end of the port-side finger of the slip just as the yacht pulled away. It didn’t stop, but leaped across the six-foot gap between the end of the dock and the boat, slammed into the pulpit only three feet in front of Tommy, and seized the railing with both hands.

  As the thing tried to pull itself over the railing and aboard, Tommy squeezed off a round from the shotgun, point-blank in its face, flinching at the roar and at the gout of flame that spurted from the muzzle of the Mossberg.

  In the pearlescent glow of the running lights, he saw the fat man’s face vanish in the blast, and he gagged in revulsion at the grisly spectacle.

  But the Samaritan-thing didn’t let go of the pulpit railing. It should have been torn loose by the powerful hit that it had taken, but the relentless beast still hung from the bow and continued trying to drag-heave-roll itself onto the foredeck.

  Out of the raw, oozing mass of torn flesh left by the shotgun blast, the fat man’s glistening white face at once miraculously re-formed, utterly undamaged, and the green serpent eyes blinked open, radiant and vicious.

  The thick-lipped mouth yawned wide, gaping silently for a moment, and then the Samaritan-thing screamed at Tommy. The piercing voice was not remotely human, less like an animal sound than like an electronic shriek.

  Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breach, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.

  The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature’s grip.

  Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger, pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry-firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.

  Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.

  Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.

  The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn’t drop the weapon when he landed.

  Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it weren’t a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.

  Two, four, five, seven times Tommy fired the .44 Magnum. The pistol bucked in his hands and the recoil slammed through him hard enough to rattle his vertebrae. At such close quarters, he didn’t have to be as first-rate a marksman as Del was, and every round seemed to strike home.

  The creature shuddered with the impact of the shots and pitched backward over the pulpit railing. Pincers flailed, grabbed, and one of them locked tightly on the steel tubing. Then the eighth and ninth rounds found their mark, and simultaneously a section of railing gave way with a gonglike clang, and the beast plunged backward into the harbor.

  Tommy scrambled to the damaged railing, slipped, almost pitched through the gap, clutched a firmly anchored section tightly with one hand, and searched the black water for some sign of the creature. It had vanished.

  He didn’t believe that it was really gone. He anxiously scanned the water, waiting for the Samaritan-thing to surface.

  The yacht was cruising forward now, east along the channel, past the other boats in the moorings and the small marina. A speed limit was in effect in the harbor, but Del wasn’t obeying it.

  Moving aft along the short bow deck, clutching at the starboard railing, Tommy searched the waters on that side, but soon the area where the creature had disappeared was well behind them and receding rapidly.

  The crisis wasn’t over. The threat wasn’t gone. He was not going to make the mistake of taking another breather. He wasn’t safe until dawn.

  If then.

  He returned to the pulpit to retrieve the shotgun and the ski jacket full of ammunition. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the Mossberg twice.

  The yacht was cruising fast enough to stir up a wind of its own in the windless night. Although the skeins of rain still fell as straight as the strands of a glass-bead curtain, the speed at which the boat surged forward made it seem as if the droplets were being flung at Tommy by the fury of the storm.

  Carrying both of the guns and the ski jacket, he retreated along the narrow port-side passway and hurriedly climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck.

  The aft portion of the open-air top deck contained a built-in table for alfresco dining and an enormous elevated sunbathing pad across the entire stern. Toward starboard, an enclosed stairwell led to the lower deck.

  Scootie was standing on the sunbathing pad, gazing down at the foaming wake that trailed away from the stern. He was as focused on the churning water as he might have been on a taunting cat, and he didn’t look up at Tommy.

  Forward on the top deck, the upper helm station had a hardtop roof and a windshield, but the back of it was meant to be open in good cruising weather. Currently a custom-sewn vinyl enclosure was snugged
to the supporting rear framework of the hardtop, forming a weatherproofed cabin of sorts, but Del had unsnapped the center vent to gain access to the wheel.

  Tommy pushed through the loose flaps, into the dim light beyond, which arose only from the control board.

  Del was in the captain’s seat. She glanced away from the rain-streaked windshield. “Nice job.”

  “I don’t know,” he said worriedly, putting the guns down on the console behind her. He began to unzip pockets on the ski jacket. “It’s still out there somewhere.”

  “But we’re outrunning it now, on the move and safe.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said as he added nine rounds of ammo to the Desert Eagle magazine, replenishing the thirteen-shot capacity as quickly as his trembling hands could cope with the cartridges. “How long to cross the harbor?”

  Bringing the Bluewater sharply and expertly around to port, she said, “We’re starting the run right now. Going so fast, I’ll have to throttle back just a little, but it should still take like maybe two minutes.”

  At various points down the center of the broad harbor, clusters of boats bobbled at permanent moorings, gray shapes in the gloom that effectively divided the expanse of water into channels. But as far as could be seen in the rain, theirs was the only craft currently making way.

  Del said, “Problem is—when we get to Balboa Island, I need to find an empty slip, a suitable dock to tie up to, and that might take some time. Thank God, it’s high tide and this baby has such a low draft, ’cause we can slide in almost anywhere.”

  Reloading the Mossberg, he said, “How’d you start the engines without keys?”

  “Hot-wired the sucker.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Found a key.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Well,” she said airily, “those are your choices.”

  Outside on the open top deck, Scootie began to bark ferociously.

  Tommy’s stomach fluttered nervously, and his heart swelled with dread. “Jesus, here we go already.”

  Armed with both the shotgun and the pistol, he pushed through the vinyl flaps, into the night and rain.

  Scootie still stood vigilant on the sunbathing pad, staring down at the churning wake.

  Balboa Peninsula was swiftly receding.

  Tommy stepped quickly past the dining table and the upholstered horseshoe bench that encircled it, to the platform on which the dog stood.

  No railing encircled the outer edge of the sunbathing pad, only a low wall, and Tommy didn’t want to risk standing on it and perhaps pitching over the stern. He wriggled forward on his belly, across the wet canvas-upholstered pad, beside the Labrador, where he peered down at the turbulent wake.

  In the murk, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  The dog barked more savagely than ever.

  “What is it, fella?”

  Scootie glanced at him and whined.

  He could see the wake but nothing of the boat’s stern, which was recessed beneath the top deck. Easing forward, his upper body extended over the low sun-deck wall, Tommy squinted down and back at the lower portion of the yacht.

  Under Tommy, behind the enclosed first deck, was a back-porch-type afterdeck. It was overhung by the sunbathing platform on which he lay, and was therefore largely concealed.

  Sans raincoat, the fat man was climbing out of the harbor and over the afterdeck railing. He disappeared under the overhang before Tommy could take a shot at him.

  The dog scrambled to a closed stairhead hatch immediately starboard of the sunbathing platform.

  Joining the Labrador, Tommy put down the pistol. Holding the Mossberg in one hand, he opened the hatch.

  A small light glowed at the bottom of molded-fiberglass steps, revealing that the Samaritan-thing was already clambering upward. Its serpent eyes flashed, and it shrieked at Tommy.

  Grasping the shotgun with both hands, Tommy pumped the entire magazine into the beast.

  It grasped at a rail and held on tenaciously, but the last two blasts tore it loose and hurled it to the bottom of the steps. The thing rolled out of the stairwell, onto the afterdeck again, out of sight.

  The indomitable creature would be stunned, as before. Judging by experience, however, it wouldn’t be out of action for long. There wasn’t even any blood on the steps. It seemed to absorb the buckshot and bullets without sustaining any real wounds.

  Dropping the shotgun, Tommy retrieved the .44 pistol. Thirteen rounds. That might be enough ammunition to knock the beast back down the stairs twice more, but then there would be no time to reload.

  Del appeared at his side, looking gaunt and more worried than she had been before. “Give me the gun,” she said urgently.

  “Who’s driving?”