Ticktock

by Dean Koontz

  “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 luge 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 minikin hit the window in the passenger door, inches from Tommy’s head.

  Tommy screamed.

  The woman said, “Holy shit.”

  The minikin 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.

  The waitress released the emergency brake. “Knock it off the window.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Knock it off the window!”

  “How, for God’s sake?”

  Although the minikin still had hands, its five digits were half like fingers, half like the spatulate tentacles of a squid. It held fast to the glass with pale suckerpads on both its hands and its feet.

  Tommy wasn’t going to roll down the window and try to knock the thing off. No way.

  The blonde shifted the Ford into drive. She stomped on the accelerator hard enough to punch the van into warp speed and put them on the far side of the galaxy in maybe eighteen seconds.

  As the engine shrieked louder than the minikin, the tires spun furiously on the slick pavement, and the Ford didn’t go across the galaxy or even to the end of the block, but just hung there, kicking up sprays of dirty water from all four wheels.

  The minikin’s mouth was open wide. Its glistening black tongue flickered. Black teeth snapped against the glass.

  The tires found traction, and the van shot forward.

  “Don’t let it in,” she implored.

  “Why would I let it in?”

  “Don’t let it in.”

  “Do you think I’m insane?”

  The Ford van was a rocket, screaming north on Pacific Coast Highway. Tommy felt as if he were pulling enough g’s to distort his face like an astronaut in a space-shuttle launch, and rain was hitting the windshield with a clatter almost as loud as submachine-gun fire, but the stubborn minikin was glued to the glass.

  “It’s trying to get in,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What does it want?”

  He said, “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “For some reason, I just piss it off.”

  The beast was still mostly black mottled with yellow, but its belly was entirely pus yellow, pressed against the glass. A slit opened the length of its underside, and obscenely wriggling tubes with suckerlike mouths slithered out of its guts and attached themselves to the window.

  The light inside the van wasn’t good enough to reveal exactly what was happening, but Tommy saw the glass begin to smoke.

  He said, “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “It’s burning through the glass.”

  “Burning?”

  “Eating.”

  “What?”

  “Acid.”

  Barely braking for the turn, she hung a hard right off the highway into the entrance drive of the Newport Beach Country Club.

  The van canted drastically to the right, and centrifugal force threw Tommy against the door, pressing his face to the window, beyond which the minikin’s extruded guts wriggled on the smoking glass.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Country club,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Truck,” she said.

  She turned sharply to the left, into the parking lot, a maneuver that pulled Tommy away from the door and the dissolving window.

  At that late hour the parking lot was mostly deserted. Only a few vehicles stood on the blacktop. One of them was a deli
very truck.

  Aiming the van at the back of the truck, she accelerated.

  “What’re you doing?” he demanded.

  “Detachment.”

  At the last moment she swung to the left of the parked truck, roaring past it so close that she stripped the elaborate custom paint job off the front fender and tore off the van’s side mirror. Showers of sparks streamed from tortured metal, and the minikin was jammed between the van window and the flank of the big truck. The rocker panel peeled off the side of the van, but the minikin seemed tougher than the Ford—until its suckers abruptly popped loose with a sound Tommy could hear even above all the other noise. The window in the passenger door burst, and tempered glass showered across Tommy, and he thought the beast was falling into his lap, Jesus, but then they were past the parked truck, and he realized that the creature had been torn away from the van.

  “Want to circle back and run over the damn thing a few times?” she shouted over the howling of the wind at the broken-out window.

  He leaned toward her, raising his voice. “Hell, no. That won’t work. It’ll grab the tire as you pass over it, and this time we’ll never shake it loose. It’ll crawl up into the undercarriage, tear through, squeeze through, get at us one way or another.”

  “Then let’s haul ass out of here.”

  At the end of the country-club drive, she turned right onto the highway at such high speed that Tommy expected the Ford to blow a tire or roll, but they came through all right, and she put the pedal to the metal with less respect for the speed limit than she had shown, earlier, for the seatbelt law.

  Tommy half expected the minikin to explode out of the storm again. He didn’t feel safe until they crossed Jamboree Road and began to descend toward the Newport harbor.

  Rain slashed through the missing window and snapped against the side of his head. It didn’t bother him. He couldn’t get any wetter than he already was.

  At the speed they were making, the hooting and gibbering of the wind was so great that neither of them made an effort to engage in conversation.

  As they crossed the bridge over the back-bay channel, a couple of miles from the parking lot where they had left the demon, the blonde finally reduced speed. The noise of the wind abated somewhat.

  She looked at Tommy in a way that no one had ever looked at him before, as though he were green, warty, with a head like a watermelon, and had just stepped out of a flying saucer.

  Well, in fact, his own mother had looked at him that way when he first talked about being a detective-story writer.

  He cleared his throat nervously and said, “You’re a pretty good driver.”

  Surprisingly she smiled. “You really think so?”

  “Actually, you’re terrific.”

  “Thanks. You’re not bad yourself.”

  “Me?”

  “That was some stunt with the Corvette.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You went airborne pretty straight and true, but you just lost control of it in flight.”

  “Sorry about your van.”

  “It comes with the territory,” she said cryptically.

  “I’ll pay for the repairs.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “We should stop and get something to block this window.”

  “You don’t need to go straight to a hospital?”

  “I’m okay,” he assured her. “But the rain’s going to ruin your upholstery.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “But—”

  “It’s blue,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The upholstery.”

  “Yeah, blue. So?”

  “I don’t like blue.”

  “But the damage—”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “You are?”

  She said, “There’s frequently damage.”

  “There is?”

  “I lead an eventful life.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve learned to roll with it.”

  “You’re a strange woman,” he said.

  She grinned. “Thank you.”

  He felt disoriented again. “What’s your name?”

  “Deliverance,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Deliverance Payne. P-A-Y-N-E. It was a hard birth, and my mom has a weird sense of humor.”

  He didn’t get it. And then he did. “Ah.”

  “People just call me Del.”

  “Del. That’s nice.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tuong Phan.” He startled himself. “I mean Tommy.”

  “Tuong Tommy?”

  “Tuong nothing. My name’s Tommy Phan.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “You’re a strange man,” she said, as if that pleased her, as if returning a compliment.

  “There really is a lot of water coming in this window.”

  “We’ll stop soon.”

  “Where’d you learn to drive like that, Del?”

  “My mom.”

  “Some mother you have.”

  “She’s a hoot. She races stock cars.”

  “Not my mother,” Tommy said.

  “And powerboats. And motorcycles. It has an engine, my mom wants to race it.”

  Del braked at a red traffic light.

  They were silent for a moment.

  Rain poured down as if the sky were a dam that had just broken.

  Finally Del said, “So…back there…That was the doll snake rat-quick little monster thing, huh?”

  FOUR

  As they drove, Tommy told Del about the doll on his doorstep, everything up to the moment when it had shorted out the lights in his office. She never gave the slightest indication that she found his story dubious or even, in fact, particularly astonishing. From time to time she said “uh-huh” and “hmmmm” and “okay,” and—two or three times—“yeah, that makes sense,” as if he were telling her about nothing more incredible than what she might have heard on the nightly TV news.

  Then he paused in his tale when Del stopped at a twenty-four-hour supermarket. She insisted on getting a few things to clean the van and close off the shattered window, and at her request, Tommy went shopping with her. He pushed the cart.

  So few customers prowled the enormous market that it was almost possible for Tommy to believe that he and Del were in one of those 1950’s science-fiction movies, in which all but a handful of people had vanished from the face of the earth as the result of a mysterious apocalypse that had left buildings and all other works of humanity undisturbed. Flooded with glary light from the overhead fluorescent panels, the long wide aisles were uncannily empty and silent but for the ominous low-pitched hum of the compressors for the refrigerated display cases.

  Striding purposefully through these eerie spaces in her white shoes, white uniform, and unzipped black leather jacket, with her wet blond hair slicked straight back and tucked behind her ears, Del Payne looked like a nurse who might also be a Hell’s Angel, equally capable of ministering to a sick man or kicking the ass of a healthy one.

  She selected a box of large plastic garbage bags, a wide roll of plumbing tape, a package containing four rolls of paper towels, a packet of razor blades, a tape measure, a bottle of one-gram tablets of vitamin C, a bottle of vitamin-E capsules, and two twelve-ounce bottles of orange juice. From an early-bird display of Christmas decorations, she snatched up a conical, red flannel Santa hat with a fake white fur trim and white pom-pom.

  As they were passing the dairy-and-deli section, she stopped and pointed at a stack of containers in one of the coolers and said, “Do you eat tofu?”

  Her question seemed so esoteric that Tommy could only repeat it in bafflement: “Do I eat tofu?”

  “I asked first.”

  “No. I don’t like tofu.”

  “You should.”

  “Why,” he asked impatiently, “because I’m Asian? I don’t eat with chopsticks, either.�
��

  “Are you always so sensitive?”

  “I’m not sensitive,” he said defensively.

  “I didn’t even think about your being Asian until you brought it up,” she said.

  Curiously, he believed her. Though he didn’t know her well, he already knew that she was different from other people, and he was willing to believe that she had just now noticed the slant of his eyes and the burnt-brass shade of his skin.

  Chagrined, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I was only asking if you ate tofu because if you eat it five times a week or more, then you’ll never have to worry about prostate cancer. It’s a homeopathic preventative.”

  He had never met anyone whose conversation was as unpredictable as Del Payne’s. “I’m not worried about prostate cancer.”

  “Well, you should be. It’s the third-largest cause of death among men. Or maybe fourth. Anyway, for men, it’s right up there with heart disease and crushing beer cans against the forehead.”

  “I’m only thirty. Men don’t get prostate cancer until they’re in their fifties or sixties.”

  “So one day, when you’re forty-nine, you’ll wake up in the morning, and your prostate will be the size of a basketball, and you’ll realize you’re a statistical anomaly, but by then it’ll be too late.”

  She plucked a carton of tofu from the cooler and dropped it into the shopping cart.

  “I don’t want it,” Tommy said.

  “Don’t be silly. You’re never too young to start taking care of yourself.”

  She grabbed the front of the cart and pulled it along the aisle, forcing him to keep pace with her, so he didn’t have an opportunity to return the tofu to the cooler.

  Hurrying after her, he said, “What do you care whether I wake up twenty years from now with a prostate the size of Cleveland?”

  “We’re both human beings, aren’t we? What kind of person would I be if I didn’t care what happens to you?”

  “You don’t really know me,” he said.

  “Sure I do. You’re Tuong Tommy.”

  “Tommy Phan.”

  “That’s right.”

  At the checkout station, Tommy insisted on paying. “After all, you wouldn’t have a broken window or all the mess in the van if not for me.”

  “Okay,” she said as he took out his wallet, “but just because you’re paying for some plumbing tape and paper towels doesn’t mean I have to sleep with you.”