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Outside the Lines copyright ©2009 by Russell C. Connor

All applicable copyrights and other rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, for any purpose, without the express, written permission of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, or as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

This is a work of fiction. While some names, places, and events, are historically correct they are used fictitiously to develop the storyline and should not be considered historically accurate. Any resemblance of the characters in this book to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

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### Also by Russell C. Connor

### NOVELS

### The Jackal Man

### Race the Night

### Whitney

### Finding Misery

### Sargasso

### Good Neighbors

### Between

### COLLECTIONS

### Howling Days

### Killing Time

### THE BOX OFFICE OF TERROR TRILOGY

### Second Unit

### Director's Cut

### EBOOK FORMAT

### Outside the Lines

### Dark World

### Talent Scout

### Endless

### Mr. Buggins

### THE DARK FILAMENT EPHEMERIS

### Volume 1: Through the Deep Forest

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## PRAISE FOR RUSSELL C. CONNOR'S WORK:

### GOOD NEIGHBORS

### Silver Medal Winner: Independent Publisher Awards

### Bronze Medal Winner: Readers' Favorite Awards

"Connor's ability to richly develop each character and plot thread is fascinating even when the horror is reserved...the constricting pressure as the dread piles on makes this book hard to put down and even harder to go to sleep after reading. This is a great novel..."

-David J. Sharp, Horror Underground

### SECOND UNIT

"Intricately plotted and vividly layered with suspense, emotional intensity and strategic violence."

-Michael Price, Fort Worth Business Press

"Drips with eeriness...an enjoyable book by a promising author."

-Kyle White, The Harrow Fantasy and Horror Journal

### FINDING MISERY

"Major-league action, car chases, subterfuge, plot twists, with a smear of rough sex on top. Sublime."

-Arianne "Tex" Thompson, author of Medicine for the Dead and One Night in Sixes

### THE JACKAL MAN

"Connor delivers a brisk, action-packed tale that explores the dark forests of the human—and inhuman—heart. Sure to thrill creature fans everywhere."

-Scott Nicholson, author of They Hunger and The Red Church

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# CONTENTS

THE CHASE

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

THE PEOPLE

THE PROFESSOR

THE CREATURES

THE SCHOOL

THE RITUAL

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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#

The kid with the gun shoved Andrew out of the way in front of the bank teller's window.

Of course, he didn't know the kid had a gun, not then. He was in the act of putting the final flourish of his signature on a check when a hand fell on his shoulder. The world tilted violently, and he had to move fast just to keep from sprawling across the slick tile.

He swung around, ready to let loose a tirade, but when he registered the weapon, the words evaporated on his tongue. A steely cold slipped over him, and he moved Joey behind him, shielding the boy with his body.

With his free hand, the kid tossed a balled up plastic bag over the desk at the teller, a small man with square glasses and an epic comb-over. It smacked him right in the face, but he didn't even flinch. Instead, the teller's mouth swung open like the gaping maw of an airplane hangar as he looked down the barrel of the revolver pointed at his forehead.

"What're you waitin for?" the kid yelled. His voice was shrieky with urgency. "Put the money in it before I give you a closed casket funeral! And if you hit the alarm, you're fuckin dead!"

The teller jumped and nodded quickly, his jaw so loose it waggled independently from the rest of his head. He reached into his cash drawer and drew out fistfuls of money.

The First Regions Bank was a tiny, independent unit off the access road to 280, just before the Steinman exit. Andrew opened his account at the sleepy location a couple of months ago, after he moved into the city, and had never seen more than one teller assisting customers at any given time. If there was anyone else in the bank beyond the open doorway behind the counter, he didn't know.

While the teller finished dumping bills into the plastic bag, Andrew took the opportunity to examine the punk, committing details to memory.

He was young, but only a 'kid' in comparison to Andrew himself. Probably no more than twenty, slightly acne-scarred face, three-day-old scruff along his angular chin and cheeks, stud earring, shoulder-length blond hair. Wearing a ripped Anarchy Club t-shirt, jeans and sneakers, with a gun bigger than he was. The moron hadn't even worn a mask. Even in a small bank like this, the cameras would record every pixel of his face for playback in front of a jury. Then again, Andrew marveled at the fact that anyone tried to rob banks at all anymore; the technology was just too severe, the police response too quick, and only one in twenty actually got away with it.

And the police response today was going to be lightning fast. Record time, in fact.

The kid noticed his scrutiny. He fixed Andrew with the pair of bloodshot marbles in his skull. "What are you lookin at, Jap?"

"Nothing," Andrew said, wanting to say more, or at least correct the little shit stain on his nationality. But now, with his eight-year-old son hidden behind him, was not the time to piss this guy off.

"Daddy, what's goin on?" Joey asked, trying to peer around his father's waist.

"Stay back, son." Andrew pushed his head away so the boy couldn't see the tableau in front of them.

"Cute kid," the bank robber quipped. "Keep him that way and just...mind your own business."

Go for your piece, Andrew's head screeched, but he ground his heel into that impulse like he would a discarded cigarette. The threat, no matter how carelessly tossed out, put him on such a strong defense he was close to losing control. But he could not—would not—make a move, not with Joey anywhere close to danger. With only the three of them in sight, the punk might decide his chances at escape would be better if he just killed them all, or he might want a lightweight and easily manageable hostage. Andrew didn't want to put the idea in his head.

But once he left...it was open season.

~ ~ ~

The goddamn teller was taking so long.

Ronnie Pearson had discovered that people underwent a metamorphosis to rival Kafka when you stuck a gun in their face, and one of two personalities emerged: those that kept their cool, gave you what you wanted, and got you out of their lives, and those that locked up tight with fear, suddenly had trouble thinking about anything other than their pathetic lives and how they never saw Venice, and generally had to be slapped around a few times before they came out of their trance.

The teller was looking to be one of the second variety.

"C'mon, move it, or you're not gonna have to worry about that gaping bald spot anymore." He felt antsy. He wished he'd smoked some pot before walking in here, but there had been little time for anything but a few tears.

The clock in his head was doing laps at warp speed. Every second he spent in here only increased his chances of getting caught. He'd wanted to find a convenience store, a Mickey D's, a Wal-mart, something where the collective IQ of the employees was close to the level of farm animals, but funds from those kinds of establishments were next to nothing. He'd be forced to hit every cash register between here and his brother's place in Tijuana just to get there. Better to make one big score and drive.

He felt eyes crawling on him again.

That was what worried him, the damn muscle-bound Jap beside him. Hard to tell age since all these Asians looked the same, but Ronnie thought he must be in his late-thirties with a kid that old. The guy was thick across the shoulders, beefy arms, mocha skin, black hair shaved practically bald, wearing khakis and a dark blue polo. Big enough to use him as a toothpick, in other words, if circumstances were different.

The thing was, he acted too calm for Ronnie's comfort, like he was used to this sort of situation. Or having notions of being a big American action hero, with his name in the paper and the key to the fucking city.

Maybe Ronnie had the gun on the wrong person. Sometimes it took a little pressure before one of those two reliable personalities surfaced. Might even be fun to see if you can make the guy cry in front of his son.

He opened his mouth to issue another threat, but the teller cut him off by squeaking, "H-here." The man held the bag of cash out for him.

Ronnie grinned. Easy as pumpkin pie with a side of whipped cream.

He snatched the sack and backed away from them, waving the gun from teller to customer. The teller put his hands in the air as soon as he freed them of the cash, his eyes as big around as dime bags. That was good, that was comforting, that was just the way things should be in the world.

The Jap though...he didn't look scared in the least.

Ronnie didn't like it.

His back was against the glass entrance door, and freedom was on the other side. He said, "Don't hit any alarms, don't call any cops, and I won't have to come back in here, okay?"

After this last mandate, he pushed through the door and fled to his ride.

~ ~ ~

Though it seemed interminably longer, the whole ordeal lasted less than two minutes.

The tension whooshed out of the room like a gale force wind as soon as the crook exited, leaving the poor teller as limp as a marionette with no puppeteer. Andrew knelt, pulled his nine-millimeter from the ankle holster he wore when he was off duty, and stood back up.

The teller gave a miniature shriek of terror when he saw it, and shot his hands back up in the air.

"Relax, I'm a cop," Andrew told him. He pulled his wallet and flipped it open, displaying his shield in a flash of silver. "You already hit the alarm?"

The teller took a full five seconds to digest this question and then his hands worked beneath the counter. He nodded so hard, drops of fear sweat flew from his sparse hair. "I d-did it now! I have to call the security company also!"

"When you talk to them, tell them Andrew Horner, officer number 1705 from Glendale PD precinct 15 is in pursuit in plainclothes. I'm driving a black 2004 Ford F-150 pickup. You got all that?" The teller nodded again, but Andrew knew he would be lucky if half the message got relayed with the shock the man was in. It didn't matter; Andrew would call himself once he got to the cell phone charging in his glove compartment. From the hallway door behind them, a scared female voice asked if everything was okay, but both Andrew and the teller ignored it. "I'm leaving my son here with you. I need you to watch him until the police arrive and then turn him over to them."

"Daddy, where are you goin?" Joey demanded, pulling on the pocket of his jeans.

Andrew turned and hunkered in front of the boy. This was all happening so fast, events spinning out of control on what was supposed to be a simple trip to the San Diego zoo with his son on his day off, but that old sense of civic responsibility—what Michelle called his, 'incessant need to balance the world' just before she'd left him—screamed at him not to let this punk get away, to show him he had picked the wrong bank on the wrong day.

"It's gonna be okay," he told Joey, holding the boy by the shoulders at arm's length. No one would ever mistake them for blood relatives; the boy had more of his mother's soft American features than Andrew's rugged mongrel looks.

But this was his son, clutching the latest coloring book he'd been working at for over a week now, carefully filling in each page and getting upset when he made the slightest error. The boy would be an artist someday, but for now he just didn't have the dexterity needed to keep from going outside the lines.

Joey's face fell, already reading everything he needed to know from the avoidant nature of his answer. "We're not goin to the zoo?"

"No, we will, I swear we will. Daddy just has to do one thing real quick. Right now I need you to stay here and go with the policemen that show up until I come to get you. I need you to be brave for me, big man. Can you do that?"

Joey nodded seriously. "Are you gonna get that bad man?"

"Yeah," Andrew said with a grin. "That's exactly what I'm gonna do." He hugged the boy to him, overcome with sudden love. "I love you kiddo, you remember that. And...and you tell Mom that too, okay?" That last part had been blurted, and he had no idea why it slipped from his mouth.

Joey wrapped thin arms around his neck, and Andrew patted him on the back between the shoulder blades.

He released the boy and ran out of the bank with his pistol pointed skyward.

~ ~ ~

The damn car wouldn't start.

It was a 1987 Mustang, the boxy body style that most people hated. One of Ronnie's few legitimate possessions. She looked like a dream, but the cherry red paint job was the best thing about her. He did most of the work on it himself, treated it better than he had any woman in his life. Most of the dollars he'd managed to get his hands on in this miserable world had been poured right into this vehicle, for him to roam the highways of the U.S. of A.

And during her first bank robbery, she decides to crap out on him.

"C'mon baby, c'mon," he muttered through clenched teeth and turned the key again, listening to the inexplicable sputtering beneath the hood. The money and revolver lay in the leather passenger seat where he'd tossed them.

He sensed movement through the passenger window, and looked up to see the doors of the bank flying open and the muscle-bound Jap come running through. There was something different about him this time, and it took his dumbfounded senses—still soaring high on adrenaline—a full three seconds to figure out what it was.

The man had a fucking gun.

He spotted Ronnie, twenty yards away, leveled the pistol in his hand, and shouted something so unmistakable, that even though Ronnie couldn't hear it through the glass, the guy's shooting stance—legs in a perfect vee, free hand supporting the base of the pistol's handle—provided flawless interpretation.

"Freeze, police!"

Suddenly his cool-as-ice demeanor in the bank made perfect sense.

He wasn't just a muscle-bound Jap.

He was a muscle-bound Jap pig.

That's fuckin perfect Ronnie-o. You robbed a bank with a cop already in it. A real time saver, you know? You'll be eating your first shitty meal of many behind bars by lunch.

His eyes rolled in their sockets, and landed on the revolver in the seat next to him. Sun winked off the burnished silver barrel.

He'd had the thing longer than the car and never had to fire it; brandishing was always sufficient. He'd never even fired it for practice.

You kill him, and that ten-to-twenty is gonna be life. Or death.

"Only if I'm caught." He picked up the gun and opened fire right through the rolled-up passenger window.

~ ~ ~

Andrew had never shot at a single person in the line of duty; he certainly had never been shot at. The experience—practiced a hundred times but never undergone for real—did not inspire the terror he was afraid it would. He had more care for Joey's safety than his own.

He'd expected a getaway driver and for the kid to be long gone, but he was alone. He did freeze for a moment in his blindingly red Mustang (congrats, genius, let's you see you elude the cops in that thing), but only to debate if he wanted to risk that Andrew wouldn't just blow him away before he could get his gun up. Andrew considered doing just that, but either his training or his moral compass kept him from squeezing the trigger.

He was already diving to the blacktop when the first shot blew out the passenger window. A microsecond later, one of the doors of the bank shattered as well, dropping shards of tinted glass across the parking lot. Andrew knew a lot of armed robbers used unloaded weapons so they could plea bargain in the event of their capture, but not this guy though; oh no, the punk was packing grade A heat.

No cover anywhere. Andrew kissed sun-heated concrete while a second and third shot rang out. He hit his shoulder hard enough to rattle teeth when he landed, and tore the knee out of his khakis along with a layer of skin, but he ignored the pain. He had to keep moving, keep the guy focused on him and not let any more stray shots go through the bank building's all glass exterior. He rolled toward the vehicle, intending to say out of the line of fire beneath the level of the window. He came to rest with his sore shoulder against the guy's right rear tire.

Silence stretched into infinity.

He gripped his pistol and waited to see what the kid would do.

The engine throttled to life, there was a burst of raucous music, and then the Mustang peeled out of the lot, laying down an inch of rubber beside Andrew's prone body.

~ ~ ~

Ronnie wasn't prepared for the weapon's massive recoil, but the shots gave the pig something to think about. He twisted the key frantically in the ignition until he was sure it would break.

Instead, the engine screamed to throaty life, and the car was filled with the raging voice of the god of metal himself, Mr. James Hetfield, growling about how someone needed to give him fuel, give him fire, and right now the words of the man Ronnie had worshipped since he was old enough to steal CD's had never seemed wiser or more applicable.

He threw the car into gear. The cop got to his feet in the rearview mirror, aiming the pistol again, but the dumb fuck never fired a shot.

Ronnie laughed aloud, and even above the blessed shrieks of Metallica, he could hear a crazed note in it that made him uncomfortable, as if a stranger had borrowed his vocal chords.

~ ~ ~

Andrew's truck was parked in the space closest to the door. He sprinted to the driver's side, jumped behind the wheel, and set his pistol on the passenger seat as he started the engine.

The bank's parking lot opened directly onto the access road for 280 Southbound. Traffic wasn't too heavy for a Saturday, but deep enough that pursuit would be dangerous without sirens and lights. The nearest onramp was a good distance down however; if he could delay the kid long enough, backup should be available to take over within minutes.

But as soon as he jumped the curb, slewing sideways onto the road and pushing his V6 as hard as it would go, he understood what a fantasy this was. The Mustang was a blur, tearing up the pavement as it sped away in a spurt of exhaust. The best he could hope for was to keep the guy in sight.

Andrew reached across the seat, leaning so far that his head slipped below the level of the dashboard, and opened his glove box. His silver Nokia was right on top, nestled among insurance paperwork, receipts for auto repair, and a spare pair of handcuffs. He snagged it with one finger and straightened up, already flipping open the phone so he could dial.

His eyes landed back on the road and he felt something in his bowels loosen.

The Mustang crawled along right in front of him. He was seconds away from ramming it at sixty miles per hour.

He yelped and yanked the wheel to the left while standing on the brake. The cell phone dropped from his hand, bounced off the seat, and disappeared into the passenger floorboard.

He heard a demonic screech. Sparks flew up beside his window as the front end of the truck grinded against the side rail. Andrew cursed. He felt the rear end start to slide around as the vehicle tried to go into a spin. It came to a stop at an angle with his passenger door just short of the Mustang's rear bumper.

Andrew looked out the passenger side window—now facing the suspect—and saw the kid lean out of the car with the revolver.

~ ~ ~

Ronnie smirked as the truck bounced onto the onramp after him. There was no way the pig could catch him in that thing, and, as of yet, there were no sirens, no flashing lights, and no helicopters.

Which meant if he lost this lone Jap pig, this John-McClane-wannabe, he was free.

This is when the Mustang decided to tell him what it thought about the whole shebang, in the voice of an asthmatic old man. Ronnie's mouth flapped in an endless string of obscenities. The steering wheel shook in his hands, all the way down to the base of the column. Thin wisps of smoke curled out from under the hood, and Hetfield's chorus on "Memory Remains" cut out between every other syllable.

He felt the power go out of the gas pedal. The engine fell silent. He was coasting along at a mere thirty miles per hour and dropping speed fast.

"Start, you piece of shit!" he yelled, turning the key. Nothing. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the Ford pickup coming fast.

Too fast. And it didn't even look like there was a driver behind the wheel.

For a split second, Ronnie entertained the action-movie notion that the pig had actually dove out of the truck in order to ram him, but then the fucker sat back up. Surprise passed over his slanty face as he braked and turned to avoid collision, scraping his front driver's side against the metal guardrail hard enough to shower sparks.

The Mustang was almost at a dead standstill. It inched out of the way as the behemoth bore down on him, ultimately stopping short by mere feet.

Ronnie looked over at the revolver lying on the seat beside the cash. That bag looked pretty pathetic now, compared with the trouble he was going through to get it. He felt manic, crazed and out of control.

He picked up the revolver again, rolled down his window this time, twisted in his seat to track the stopped pickup as the Mustang rolled away, and opened fire.

~ ~ ~

Andrew threw himself full length upon the bench seat as his own passenger side window exploded inward. If he'd had his seat belt on, he would've been dead. He heard the weapon report twice more, hitting the hood somewhere and then putting a large bullet hole in his front windshield before thumping into his seatback. He fumbled for his own pistol under him, waited to make sure the ceasefire would hold, and then sat up and thrust his gun through the missing window, prepared, at last, to return fire.

There was nothing to shoot. The Mustang was picking up speed again, and the onramp was just ahead.

But instead of going for it, the guy turned left onto an overpass that spanned the freeway beside them. On the other side was the entrance to a suburban housing development.

"Uh uh, no way," he muttered as he sat back up and brushed Saf-T glass out of his hair. "You're not getting away, motherfucker."

Andrew straightened the truck out, hit the gas, and took off after him.

~ ~ ~

After three shots, it became painfully obvious he wasn't going to hit the cop. Ronnie swiveled back in his seat and tried the key again, got a sickly surge of acknowledgement from the Mustang, and started to pull away from the damaged truck behind him before it could change its mind. The damn engine was probably going to explode any second.

The onramp to the freeway was just ahead, a scant half mile, but it looked a million. He'd lost confidence in his getaway vehicle, and therefore lost confidence in his escape plan. Now the freeway seemed too open, too hard to hide in. He could only imagine this happening on the road, with a platoon of cops on his ass (which were surely coming any minute). He'd be a joke on the next "World's Scariest Police Chases."

Besides the dead-end strip mall parking lots along the onramp to his left, there was only one turn between him and the freeway, one chance to deviate from his present course, and Ronnie took it on impulse. It led to a bridge over the freeway and toward a large sign which read, in stylized, cursive, gold letters on a faded black background, 'Strangewood Homes.'

His only hope.

An incredibly vivid red brick wall flanked the road ahead, one with ornate columns at the ends. It stretched out both ways along the far side of the northbound onramp, encompassing the entire housing edition as far as he could see. He roared through, and then Ronnie found himself in the middle of one and two level modest tract housing, with lawns so green they probably glowed in the dark. If the cars in the driveways had been a little older, it could be the neighborhood where he grew up.

"Suburban hell," he said aloud. The quaint little pastel house fronts made him want to gag.

The cop's truck was visible in the rearview, but Ronnie was scared to push the Mustang's engine much past forty.

He took a left and then a right, weaving into the maze of narrow streets. Trees, sidewalks, and curbside automobiles pressed in on each side, and he knew if the cop had been in a regular, sirened vehicle, people would be wandering out of homes to gander at the excitement.

He checked the mirror. He hadn't lost the cop. The black truck turned onto the street a mere hundred yards back. He needed to face it: the Mustang wasn't going to make it. He had to ditch his pursuer somehow, so he could try and plan his next move.

Ronnie braked, turning the wheel sharply left. He came to a stop blocking the middle of the street.

The truck halted at the other end, its right side a mangled wreck, California sunshine gleaming off the hood. Ronnie could imagine its driver considering this turn of events. "That's right, I'm drawin the line," he shouted.

The truck surged forward suddenly, picking up speed, and Ronnie stuck the gun through his window, taking careful aim at the figure approaching behind the wheel.

"Come and get it, piggy."

He pulled the trigger.

~ ~ ~

Andrew followed the Mustang through the residential streets, gaining ground on each straightaway. He turned a corner next to a one-story yellow stucco house to find the punk waiting for him sideways across the road ahead. He braked and sat with his engine idling.

"Where the hell is my backup?" he wondered aloud. Even if the dispatcher had stopped to have lunch before calling them out, someone should've responded by now. Maybe they really had lost them before they could arrive on scene. If that was the case, he needed to end the chase now, with as little risk to the residents of this community as possible.

The kid was waiting for him to make a move.

He buckled his seat belt and tromped on the gas.

The punk's arm snaked out the window with the revolver, and Andrew felt anger at this kid's homicidal brazenness, the rash way he was willing to extinguish a human life over a few thousand bucks, and he got so lost in that righteous fury that he barely registered the fact that the asshole was jerking the trigger and nothing was happening. He saw the look of surprise on that thin, angular face and realized that he'd used up all six rounds in the gun's cylinder; three at the bank and three more back on the access road.

Andrew was laughing as his front end connected with the Mustang's driver's side at forty miles an hour with a sound like percussion drums in hell, and in the short flash before the airbag exploded in his face and stole his consciousness, he saw the other vehicle shoved away and go up on two wheels from the impact, then roll over onto its top, flinging the guy inside like a rag doll.

* * *

#

Joey was in Andrew's head even before he awoke, caught in the too-bright dream of a memory.

He sat at the big glass table in the kitchen of Andrew's cramped apartment (the 'born-again bachelor's pad'), one of his coloring books open in front of him, holding a crayon as delicately as a feather. Sun streamed in through the window beside him in impossible amounts, a fiery flood that got caught in his son's hair and lay across his work in one great swatch. The boy's body was hunched in concentration, his hand directing the drawing utensil right up to the stark black outline of Diego or Barney or Bugs or whoever he was coloring this week, and crying out as the tip missed its mark and slid over into the vast, uncharted wilderness beyond.

Andrew's eyes fluttered open. Something felt wrong.

He had no idea what that meant. The first explanation that popped into his brain was that he wasn't in the same place anymore, but that was ludicrous. When he could focus his vision, all he had to do is look past the airbag upon which he rested and see the same houses beyond his broken side window, brightly exposed with spring sunlight, to put that to rest.

Andrew tried to move and had to bite down from the agony that ripped through him. Every inch of muscle felt like broken glass, his head sick and heavy. He moved one hand up and gingerly probed the right side of his forehead. He found a knot there the size of half an egg.

He forced himself to lean over and search the cab for his gun. He had no idea how long he'd been out, and if the kid had beat him to consciousness, bullets might start flying any second. He saw the handle sticking out from under the passenger seat, close to where the cell phone ended up.

First things first; neutralize the suspect.

He retrieved the pistol, found his door handle in the folds of the deflating airbag, and stumbled out onto the street on legs that felt like wobbly stilts. His truck sat squarely in the middle of the residential avenue, in a roughly circular cloud of debris across the pavement. The vehicle looked like a giant polka musician had mistaken it for an accordion. Every window was broken besides the rear cab. The engine compartment was about half the length it had been when it started this day, the hood buckled and bent up enough to give him a generous view of the pulverized engine within. It would have to be towed out of here, and would be going straight to the junkyard.

He still owed twenty-something payments on it. The city might be good for some of it, but he wouldn't hold his breath. God, he wished he'd thought this maneuver through a little better. This was going down in history as a prime example of It-Seemed-Like-A-Good-Idea-At-The-Time.

The Mustang rested on its top and hood twenty feet in front of the truck, and it was to this that he turned his full attention now. The vehicle looked in better condition than his own, but the damage would be on the driver's side anyway, which now faced away from him after its 180 degree flip. Streams of thin but steady smoke drifted from the engine.

He looked around for help, but the street was utterly deserted. He couldn't have been out too long if no one from the surrounding houses had emerged to gawk at the accident site. The noise of the collision must've been heard for blocks. He hoped someone would call 911 before coming out to rubberneck.

Andrew pointed his pistol at the passenger window of the Mustang with one hand, and then added the other after observing how badly it shook. The world was still a little swimmy from the bump on his noggin, but he blinked it back into focus.

"Police," he croaked. "Can you hear me in there?"

No reply except the tick of the cooling engine. He circled around the front of the vehicle, keeping his pistol trained downward with each wary step. He peeked around the edge of the car's exposed undercarriage at the driver's side.

If the giant played the accordion with his truck, it used the Mustang as a punching bag. The entire driver's door was crushed inward in a rough crescent shape where the truck had broadsided it, bending the framework and doors entirely out of shape. A pale, limp hand was flopped out of the side window, resting on gummy pieces of window glass.

Andrew moved faster now, keeping the gun aimed at the window and circling out wider from the vehicle so he could get a better line of sight. He could see the slumped form in there now, legs and arms in a tangle.

"Police," he repeated. "Sir, are you conscious?"

Still no reply. What if he'd killed the guy?

Andrew glanced back at the engine. The smoke seeping from the edges of the hood and up through the undercarriage hadn't slackened.

He put away his gun, sticking it in the back of his waistband this time rather than his ankle holster. He moved forward and tried the door handle without much hope. His expectations were met; the handle creaked upward but the door didn't budge.

"Goddamn it, kid," he muttered. "You better appreciate this."

He swept glass out of the way with the side of his hand and lay down on his belly on the concrete, scooting his head and shoulders through the bent window frame to get a better idea of the situation. It was obvious the guy hadn't been wearing his seat belt. Even Joey was trained better than that, but Andrew guessed when you were in the middle of a bank robbery some of the little amenities had to go by the wayside. The kid was on his side facing away from Andrew, one leg stuck straight up in the air and propped against the console, the other twisted forward and disappearing over the other side of the dashboard, arms flung above his head and between the bucket seats. Andrew reached over his torso and found his mouth, and held his fingers there to see if he was breathing.

Warm air met his palm, but when Andrew drew his hand back, the fingers were covered in tacky blood.

Look for the bleeding, try to stop it. No, can't move him, could have spinal injuries. A thousand fragments of half-remembered first aid classes argued in his head. Ironic, considering that he was agonizing over the way to save the life of a person who'd been trying to kill him minutes before. All just so he could be arrested, get some sleaze attorney, and be back on the street in two days.

In the end, it was the strengthening smell of smoke that decided him.

He worked one arm under the unconscious body and wrapped his other over it. The weight was more than he expected. He had to readjust his effort, but the body finally slid sideways. Once Andrew could get to his feet outside and pull by the underarms, the kid popped right out of the crushed window as neatly as though the car was giving birth. He dragged him several more yards away from the vehicle before laying him against the curb.

In the light, he saw the source of the blood. The guy's nose was a wreck. Maroon spilled down his lips, chin, and neck to stain his black t-shirt even darker. Other than that, he appeared to be in good shape, no obviously broken bones or severe bleeding. Andrew's father always insisted God favored drunks and idiots, and he was sure this punk fell somewhere in between.

The kid moaned and tossed his head once, flinging his long hair.

Andrew stood and started back to his truck for his handcuffs.

~ ~ ~

Ronnie hadn't been in this much pain since his father broke his arm when he was twelve.

And in fact, that's what Ronnie was dreaming of before consciousness returned, his father standing over him like a pissed-off Roman god after the cops brought him home that first time. Petty larceny that had been, complete with a court appearance and hefty fine. He'd grabbed Ronnie's left arm and twisted, twisted, twisted, until there was a brittle crack. Ronnie dropped to the ground and stayed there until his mother was given permission to take him to the hospital an hour later.

He thought those arms around him were his mother's at first, as they dragged him over some rough surface before gently laying him down.

Ronnie opened his eyes and stared up at the clear, blue sky.

The injury from his dream relocated to the middle of his face: his nose radiated pain like electrical pulses from a generator. He touched it with one hand and came away with a generous amount of fresh blood on his fingertips. The rest of his body felt bruised and battered, hurting in places he couldn't even identify yet.

He tried to sit up.

"No, you don't," someone said, and strong hands forced him back down and then eased him over onto his stomach. He was too weak to protest. Something heavy pushed into the small of his back, and then his arms were wrenched behind him. A second later came the unmistakable click of handcuffs, a noise he knew intimately.

He turned his head, wincing as his shattered nose brushed the pavement beneath him, and saw the cop looking down at him from his perch on Ronnie's back.

"Oh, you goddamned pig," he groaned, and was amazed at the cartoonish sound of his voice. He paused to spit out blood collecting in the back of his throat. "You broke my fuckin nose, you gook!"

"Shut up," the cop told him coolly.

"You can't tell me that!" Ronnie snapped.

"No, you misunderstood me. That's your first right, you see, to shut the fuck up. It's an invitation, not a command. Right number two..." He went through the perfunctory list while he finished with the handcuffs, making them too tight on Ronnie's aching wrists, and then patted him down for weapons. He had nothing on him except his wallet. He felt better, his head clearing, but he was still in too much pain to struggle.

When he finished, the cop stood up and took the weight off his back. Ronnie pushed through the pain, determined not to show weakness to this bacon-wrapped chink. He flipped over, and caught sight of the upside-down Mustang.

"Oh shit, my CAR! Look what you did to my ride!"

"Yeah, it's a cryin shame."

"It's gonna be when you have to pay for it! I rebuilt that car with my own two hands!"

"Then next time don't use it in an attempted bank robbery. Last I heard, insurance doesn't pay for vehicles used in the perpetration of a crime." The cop squatted down and looked him in the face. "Besides, I'd say we're about even in the ride department." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the crushed remains of the truck.

"Yeah, well you did all that yourself. You're the dumb shit who rammed me. And it looks like you're growin a second head." He gave a vicious grin.

The cop fingered the lump on his forehead and winced in pain. "And I'm sure you'll get a lot of boyfriends in prison with that crooked nose of yours." He smiled in return and started back toward his truck, leaving Ronnie to fume.

~ ~ ~

Where was the cavalry to take this thug off his hands?

He glanced at his watch. Just hitting 10:30. The kid had shoved him away from the teller window nearly thirty minutes ago. By now, the local PD was swarming all over that bank, and spreading out to search for them. He strained his ears, listening for the distant sound of sirens.

Nothing. He and the genius had fallen off the radar. Which meant the little shit had been dangerously close to getting away with it.

"One in twenty," he muttered. "Yeah, right."

Something else bothered him. That same feeling of something being...off. He kept glancing around, hoping whatever it was would jump out at him. It was like looking at one of those pictures in Highlights magazine, another favorite of Joey's, where they gave a pleasant picture of a farm or a city street, and challenged you to find as many things wrong as you could. Usually it was blatant stuff, like spoons in the clouds or cows with arms, but it wasn't so easy here.

He went first to the driver's side of his truck and tried turning the key. The engine gave a sickly bark but wasn't even close to turning over. He walked around to the passenger side and pulled open the door—it creaked loudly as some warped part rubbed against the frame—leaned into the cab, and fished the cell phone out of the floorboard. No apparent damage; they made these things tough nowadays, so everyone above the age of two could have one. The phone turned on when he opened it, but the display informed him he was out of service range.

There were more relay towers in this state than there were trees. He tried dialing 911 anyway and got a continual beeping signal. He tried again and got the same.

"Perfect. Just perfect." Must be damaged after all. He tried once more and got the same beeps, but only for a moment. Then there was a pause...followed by the hiss of an open line...and then...

Andrew took the phone from his ear and stared at the display blankly.

He put it back to his ear and heard only the electronic beeps again.

It had to be his imagination. Or worse yet, a byproduct of that pulsing lump on his forehead. But he could've sworn that, for just a second, there had been the distant sound of...

"Hey pig!" the kid honked from the ground, breaking into his thoughts. "You can't leave me here, it's a violation of my constitutional rights!"

"So what, you're a government expert now? And here I thought you were just a two-bit thief."

"Take these cuffs off and I'll show you two-bit, you Jappy pork rind!"

Andrew didn't take the bait. He'd been called—and threatened with—much worse. Guys like this never ran out of insults. He gave the phone a final look, shook his head, and slipped it into his pocket.

The smoke from the Mustang had slowed after all, so at least he didn't have to worry about a fire or explosion. He turned in a slow circle, looking at the rows of houses on both sides of him, the kind of middle class, bedroom community Michelle wanted them to move to when she found out she was pregnant, and instead he kept them in the dirty little starter house on the east side of L.A.

Yeah, Strangewood Homes was a nice neighborhood.

But where the hell were all the people in this quaint little Norman Rockwell suburbia?

He still could see no one. There should've been people wandering out in robes and sweats by now. It happened at every residential call he ever responded to, be it burglary, domestic violence, or otherwise.

Instead it was just him, Lex Luthor in the handcuffs, and a severely deserted street.

A single cold finger slid from the nape of his neck down to his waist.

He strolled back over to his prone villain. "You have a cell phone in the car somewhere?"

"Fuck you."

"That's what I figured. I have to find someone to call for backup to haul your sorry ass in. I don't want to see you so much as lift your head from the pavement, got it?"

"Whatever," the kid snorted through the remains of his nose and hissed in pain. Fresh blood was still running down his lips and cheeks.

Andrew rubbed at his own injury as he approached the house closest to them, a white with blue trim one-story on the left side of the street, with a manicured lawn and a tiny garden in the front beside the door. For just a moment he imagined a life where this was his home, where Michelle was tending the garden in flip-flops and a sunhat when he came home, and Joey was somewhere inside, coloring frantically. The fantasy was surprising not only for its sudden, gripping poignancy, but its realism as well, as if it were so close he could cross an invisible barrier and enter into it. Maybe the accident scrambled his brain a bit. He had to work to shake off the illusion as he walked up the concrete path that led to the door.

He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the kid was obeying and then rang the doorbell. The tone echoed through the house.

Andrew waited a full minute and tried again.

He banged on the fresh, white paint of the wooden door. Shouted, "Police, I need assistance."

"I don't think anyone's home, you stupid bitch! That's what it means when no one answers the door! That, or they can't stand to look at your slanty face!"

Andrew turned around. The kid sneered up at him from the street, leaning just above the curb, his lower face a ghoulish grimace of blood. He walked back out to the edge of the street and looked at the houses on either side, considering which to try next.

Doesn't matter. There's no one in any of them.

The voice wasn't his own, but it was a ridiculous idea. There was no one home at this one, but there had to be someone here. Had to be. But when he looked up and down the street, he only got an impression of vast loneliness.

He ran to the houses on either side of this one and the one across the street, like a berserk trick-or-treater, and got the same results. This was creeping him out. That feeling of wrongness was like water filling up a closed room with him in it. He considered breaking into one of the houses to find a phone, but the idea felt too drastic. God, if only his thoughts weren't so muddled...

He had a responsibility to get his suspect into custody. They couldn't have driven more than a few blocks into this neighborhood, and the bank was just up the onramp.

"We're gonna have to take a stroll," he told the kid as he crossed the street again, trying not to show how rattled he was.

"Fuck you pig, I ain't goin nowhere."

It was about the response he expected, so Andrew ignored him for now. There was one other problem that needed his attention before they could leave the scene.

He searched through his truck, and finally found a pair of leather gloves behind the seat, a large plastic bag that Joey had eaten cereal from when they started out this morning, and a broken kite with Spider-man on it that he and the boy had flown two weeks ago in the park.

Andrew knelt beside the driver's window of the Mustang again and peered around the interior.

"Hey, what are you doin in my car?" the kid bellowed.

"Collecting enough evidence to make sure your ass stays in prison," he answered without turning around. The other continued to yell at him, but Andrew stopped listening as he pulled on the gloves and wormed back into the car's interior.

He saw the plastic sack full of cash on the ceiling above—now below—the passenger seat. Using the plastic from the kite, he wrapped the entire sack up to preserve threads or fingerprints and tied a knot at the top. Spider-man's face stretched out of proportion and stared up at him with blank, white pupils. It wasn't top forensic methods, but it would have to do.

Andrew had to search a bit harder for the gun. The crash had thrown it in the back seat, where he found it under fast food wrappers. It was a big bore .357, black grip and burnished silver cylinder big enough to roll dough with. He used the cereal bag to preserve the grip, where most of the prints would be, and dropped it in with the money.

"You got any spare ammo for this piece?" he called out. If so, he couldn't leave it here for some kid to find. Or, if the Mustang decided to explode after all, the fire would trigger the bullets in random directions.

"Fuck you."

"You know, that's getting a little repetitive."

"Fuck your mother."

A smile stole across Andrew's face as he opened up the glove compartment, spilling a heap of crap and, sure enough, a box of revolver ammo. He took this, put it in with the rest of the evidence, and slid back out of the car.

When he approached the kid, he made sure his face was set back in a scowl. "Let's go, get up."

"I told you, I'm not goin anywhere with you." His nose was so swollen it looked like a cucumber glued right between his eyes. "How do I even know you're a real cop and not some pervert tryin to kidnap me?"

"Trust me, you're not my type. Now get up."

"I'm hurt here, man! I was just in a car accident!"

"At this point, I don't give a shit. The quicker we get back to civilization, the sooner you can get some medical attention, if you're hurt that bad." He realized how stupid it was to say that in the middle of an American street, but something about this place felt (outside the lines) desolate. He slipped a hand through the handcuff chain and hauled the kid to his feet. His legs wobbled but held him up. Andrew gave him a shove in the direction of the sidewalk, back the way they'd come, resisting the temptation to pull his pistol. He didn't want to force the kid along at gunpoint like a death march unless he was given no other choice.

He thought at first the punk would continue to be stubborn, but then he stepped over the curb and started walking.

They took only a few steps up the street before he had a new complaint. "You can't just leave my ride here! Somebody might steal it!"

"Nobody's gonna steal it while it's upside down. We'll send a truck back for it. By this afternoon it will be nice and snug in a police impound lot."

"If anybody takes anything from it, I'm holdin you responsible!"

Andrew looked around at the silent houses around them. "I don't think you have anything to worry about. Now, let's get you to jail."

~ ~ ~

Trust was a weakness to be exploited.

Lull people into a sense of security, and it just about took a baseball bat to wake them up. They would look the other way while you stole their grandmother. And most people didn't even require too much to make it happen, because trust is not-worrying and not-worrying is comfort and what was the human race except a bunch of over-developed tadpoles looking for a place to get comfortable?

So no matter how much it looked like he was cooperating with Jackie Chan back there, he wasn't. No way on earth would he ever go to jail this quietly; he'd rather die before going back in a cell. The rap for this wouldn't be the standard in-and-out he was accustomed to.

But maybe if he played nice until the oinker let his guard down...

Because, let's face it, this wasn't a typical arrest situation. As long as it was just him and the pig in street clothes, he could get out of this, maybe not with the money (which the cop was carrying in some weird cartoon evidence bag...man, was there anywhere they wouldn't put an ad these days?), but that was okay, because the highest priority right now was staying free. When he heard sirens or saw flashing lights...that was all over.

He tried to glance over his shoulder to see if the cop had his gun out, but the fucker was directly behind him, out of sight. The movement rekindled various pains all over his body.

"Don't suppose you got any aspirin, do ya chink? My nose feels like someone took a blowtorch to it."

"Nope, but I'm sure they'll have some at the station." The cop paused for a moment and then said, "For the record, my father was just as white as you are."

"What?"

"My father. He was white. I'm half-Korean."

Ronnie laughed. He couldn't help it. It made his whole body hurt, from his big toe all the way up to his goddamn hair, however that was possible, but he let it spill out.

"What's so funny?" the cop asked in a defensive, hard-edged voice.

"Just that you think I give a shit how many branches your fucked-up family tree has."

"I'm only trying to show you that some people's parents aren't cousins."

"Oh hardy hardy har." Ronnie started to say more, but they'd reached the first intersection at the end of the street. He noticed a curious thing. There was no street sign, no means of marking one road from the other. He couldn't remember ever having seen a street in a neighborhood like this that wasn't marked. How did they give directions, or even find their own way home after a hard day at the paper clip factory?

He didn't comment on this, but wondered if the cop noticed it too.

They turned left, in the direction of the freeway and the front of the neighborhood. He thought. Everything looked the same, a rainbow row of houses marching all the way to the horizon, some of them originals, but every third one the exact same design, just shat out by a machine like cookie dough on a conveyor belt. The cop directed him right at the next turn, crossing the empty street to reach the far sidewalk. Again, no marker. No one outside either, no cars moving, no sprinklers turned on, so eerily silent it hurt his eardrums.

Not even any freeway traffic, eh kemosabe?

Ronnie faltered a step, jingling his cuffed hands behind him. He hadn't driven more than a few blocks into this subdivision. Even if the place was deserted, like one of those towns they used for nuclear bomb tests, they should've been able to hear the sounds of cars shooting by on the freeway.

"Turn," the cop said, giving him a tap on the shoulder, the way you'd direct a carthorse or a mule. They turned left onto another nameless street and then right once more. Whether they could hear it not, soon they would turn a corner and see that blood-red brick wall at the front of the housing division, and then those sirens and flashing lights would almost be upon them.

Will you? a little voice—a strangely frightened voice—whispered in his head. Will you really?

Of course they would.

So he had to think of something soon.

He stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk and knelt, sliding his cuffed hands over the shelf of his butt and down until he could massage the back of his left calf.

The cop nearly ran into him, and then hurriedly circled around to the left, out of Ronnie's blind spot. "What are you doing?"

"My leg, man. I think it got twisted in that crash. I don't know how much longer I can walk on it."

"If you don't walk, I drag you. Simple as that."

"At least take the cuffs off," he pleaded, injecting as much innocence and misery into each word as he could.

The cop shook his head. "Not on your life."

"Then at least cuff them in front of me so I can walk comfortably."

He considered this. "If you can do it yourself, then do it, but I'm not taking those cuffs off."

Ronnie fell on his back on the hot sidewalk, trying not to let his wicked smile show. Concessions were the first sign of trust. He brought his knees up to his chest, tucked them up under his chin as far as they would go, and then swung the handcuff chains under his legs and past his feet, so his hands were now resting on his belly.

The cop watched him. "Nice trick. Looks like you've had practice."

"Long arms," Ronnie said. He climbed back to his feet and brushed hair out of his eyes.

"Great. Now keep walking."

They continued on, the pig behind him again, and Ronnie weighed his options. The best thing to do was just attack the guy, try to wrestle the gun away. He would do it at the next corner, when the cop would be to his right for just a moment.

The houses cleared, and the next street stood just ahead. Ronnie Pearson's last stand.

They turned the corner in front of a one-story house with plastic ducks waddling across the lawn. He tensed to leap.

What he saw caused all those thoughts to fade. He drifted to a halt.

In front of them was an upside-down Mustang, a crushed Ford truck, and more streets.

~ ~ ~

"That's impossible," Andrew whispered, as he looked over the kid's shoulder at the wrecked vehicles. They'd left this street by the far end, the one on the truck's side; now they were coming back onto it from the opposite direction, closer to the overturned car.

They'd come in a huge, full circle.

The faraway sound he heard (imagined he heard) on the cell phone flitted through his mind like a tiny bird, bringing with it a shudder.

"Great detective work, Cochise," the kid muttered. "You got us lost in Pleasantville."

Andrew moved around him in a daze, walking further up the street to get a better look at the truck and make sure it was actually his. As if there was going to be another set of wrecked vehicles. He knew that was silly...but so was the idea that they somehow ended up back here.

He sensed motion behind him and rounded on his prisoner, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was. The kid wasn't paying him any attention. He seemed just as transfixed by the cars. "I didn't get us lost anywhere!"

"Well, this sure don't look like the way out."

Andrew sighed and put a hand to his sore forehead, brushing against the knot there. "No, but listen! If we're here, we went in a circle, but to go in a circle we would have to make three rights in a row. But we were going left and then right, left and then right. The same way we came in!"

The kid shrugged and looked away...but not before Andrew caught a glimmer of something in his squinty blue eyes. "Hey, you were leading. I wasn't payin attention. For all I know you were jackin off back there." No confidence in the words; they were just autopilot insults.

"What's your name?" Andrew asked.

The punk hesitated, probably trying to think what racial slur to use next, and then finally settled on a classic. "First name's Eat. Last name's Shit."

Andrew walked over to him. The kid flinched when he stuck out the hand not holding the makeshift evidence bag. "I'm Andrew Horner."

The kid looked at the hand for several seconds as if trying to determine where the poison stingers would come from if he touched it, and then finally lifted his cuffed hands and shook it curtly. "Ronnie, okay man?"

"Listen Ronnie, as you probably noticed, we're in kind of a strange situation here. But I just think, whatever happens, it would go a lot smoother if we could ease off one another and get through this civilly, all right?"

"Civilly?" The kid—now Ronnie—smirked, cracking the mask of dried blood on his cheeks. His puffy nose reminded Andrew of those gargantuan schnozzes sported by puppets of Jim Henson pedigree, another favorite of that young Picasso-in-the-making Joseph Horner, but the worst of the bleeding had stopped. "I'm not your friend. I'm not even the guy sitting at the next table in a restaurant passing you my salt shaker." His eyes blazed with sudden hatred. "There is no 'civilly' between the two of us. I'm the crook and you're the cop and you're trying to take me to jail."

"Yeah, and you tried to kill me an hour ago."

Ronnie stepped up to him, put his red-smeared face inches away. Andrew forced himself to meet that burning glare pound for pound. The kid had so much anger in him, but they all did these days. He prayed Joey wouldn't grow up a member of this lost generation. "Get this straight, you piggy little Jap. I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire, unless there was something in it for me. Take these cuffs off, and then we'll talk cooperation. Until then...watch your back."

They stood frozen like that, nose to bloody nose, for a handful of seconds. Then Andrew nodded and looked away, letting his eyes roam the street...

And did a double take at the house on the corner they just turned.

"What?" Ronnie asked, spinning in the same direction.

"I saw someone. In the window, on the second floor. He was watching us." No one there now, just quaint blue curtains over the glass, but when he scanned past he'd seen a staunch figure, with the fleeting impression that it was wearing a full three-piece suit. Like one of those jobs you saw in the faded photographs from the turn of the century, taken by one of those cameras with humongous flashbulbs.

Are you sure Andrew? The question had a patient, probing tone, like a psychiatrist, complete with the condescension. Are you sure, because you also thought the phone...

"Yeah, so what?" Ronnie said. "No law against that, is there?"

"We're never gonna be best buddies, Ronnie, I get that, but haven't you noticed anything about this neighborhood? Besides the fact there are no street signs and apparently all roads lead here?"

"No." Again, an automatic response. He paused, considering, and then said, "I tell you what is weird-o-rama though. Take a look at your watch."

Andrew did and was shocked to see it still said 10:30. He shook it and put it next to his ear. "It stopped. How did you know that?"

"I didn't." Ronnie frowned and raised an eyebrow. "That...wasn't my point. I was just gonna ask you what time it was."

"I don't know. Couldn't be later than 11."

Ronnie nodded. "Right. Basically still morning. So why's it gettin dark, dude?"

Andrew digested the inquiry and snapped his head up.

It was barely noticeable, but Ronnie was right; the clear blue California sky was darkening. The sun was still there, high overhead, but the light from it looked weaker, sort of filtered. He could almost see it happening in gradual degrees as he watched, like an eclipse or a cloud shadow.

"We have stumbled into the Twilight Zone," Ronnie said.

"I've got to find a phone." He would be a laughingstock when the other officers from his district found out he'd gotten lost in the suburbs, but he didn't care. He would welcome the laughter, jokes, and nicknames if it meant he was back in the sane, rational world again.

That icy finger on his back was becoming a whole hand.

"Go ahead man. Find a phone, I'll stay right here. I promise." Ronnie sneered.

"Move. Back to the truck."

"Why?"

Andrew put a hand on the pistol in his waistband. "I said move. I'm all out of patience."

"So much for being civil." Ronnie headed past Andrew, back toward the crippled truck.

Andrew steered him to the passenger side, and opened the door with its blown out window. He tossed the bag with the money across to the driver's seat. "I'm going to undo one of your cuffs. You make any move to run or fight, I'll be forced to shoot you."

Ronnie shook his head and said nothing.

Carefully, Andrew pulled his key ring from his pocket, found the cuff key, and undid Ronnie's left bracelet. "Put your arm through the window," he commanded.

The kid stared at the shattered window until the idea got through. "Oh, give me a fuckin break! You're gonna leash me up?"

"No, I'm gonna handcuff you to this truck so you don't escape. I'm the cop and you're the crook, remember?"

Ronnie's eyes rolled in panic. "C'mon man, there's a few grand at least in that bag! It's yours if you just let me go, I won't tell nobody!"

"Let me say this again for the hearing impaired," Andrew growled through clenched teeth. "I'm the cop and you're the crook. Now do it."

Another split second passed where Andrew thought he might fight anyway, gun or no gun, and he wondered if he would be able to pull the trigger if that happened, but then he raised his uncuffed arm and put it through the broken window. Andrew resnapped the cuff, binding him to the door frame.

"There now, you look great. Very fashionable."

"This is humiliatin. I'm tellin my lawyer."

"You do that," Andrew said, and trotted away from the truck, back toward the house up the street. If they ever got out of this neighborhood, he would find the kid a lawyer himself.

* * *

#

The house where Andrew thought he'd seen the figure was a two-story ranch-style with a wide porch, overhanging eaves, and shutters painted in shades of off-white and green. The front loomed over him in funhouse fashion, threatening for all its hominess. Even the lifeless eyes of the plastic ducks marching across the lawn sized him up. Andrew figured this was how members of the bomb squad felt when opening a package that might contain a life-ending explosion, wondering if they would have time to see and comprehend the horror before it consumed them. He searched each window facing the street for any sign of the half-glimpsed man in the old-fashioned suit.

By the time he reached the yard and crossed to the porch steps, the darkness in the sky was actually noticeable, and showed no sign of slowing. The sun was still high in the sky, but its light no longer reached the earth. It felt like mid-afternoon out here now, and on a short, autumn day.

You're jumping at shadows. Literally. You'll feel stupid when you find a phone and all of this is explained.

That sounded good, sounded cozy, sounded sane, but what the hell kind of explanation could there be for an abandoned neighborhood with no end and darkness falling before lunchtime? Perhaps the bigger danger here would be not getting scared enough, of coddling himself with assurances that everything was hunky-dory. As Ronnie suggested, they were in the Twilight Zone, and the sooner he stopped denying it, the sooner he could figure out the punchline of this episode.

He checked over his shoulder and saw the kid watching him intently over the hood of the truck.

Andrew approached the door. The mat in front was plain brown with 'CHILDRESS' written across it in white capitals. He rang the doorbell.

Once again he heard the chimes ring on the other side; once again there was no response. He peered through the frosted glass set into the door, but could see nothing.

"All right, here we go." Technically, in an emergency situation, he was given authority to commandeer or break-and-enter. He just didn't know if this qualified as an emergency situation.

He would just have to answer to charges later, if they came. Daylight was actually wasting, and he didn't want to still be here when it got dark.

Andrew stood back a few paces and made ready to kick the lock, when it suddenly occurred to him to try the handle.

The door swung open.

Mean-spirited laughter drifted up the street behind him. Andrew ignored it and stepped inside.

~ ~ ~

As soon as the cop (oh wait, 'Andrew,' wasn't it? Jappy little Officer Andrew, as if introductions would turn them into the very bosomest of buddies) disappeared into the house, Ronnie strained against the cuffs. As soon as he saw that wasn't going anywhere, he turned his attention to the door instead.

Most of the devastation to the truck was localized at the front end and driver's side. Besides the window he shot out, there was no damage over here. Therefore, no hope of ripping the door off its hinges and carrying it with him either.

He caught sight of his sweaty, blood-covered face in the side mirror. He tucked his hair back and used the bottom of his t-shirt to gently clean the blood away from his nose and out of the cracks of his face. When he was mostly clean, he stared at the unfamiliar topography. His entire nose was crooked to the right now and grossly swollen. It would shrink again, but never properly set.

And all because of that cop, all because of his good friend 'Andrew.' The sooner he left this guy in the dust, the better. He looked over at the driver's seat, where the bag of cash sat tantalizingly within reach, if only his hands weren't bound. The idea of being arrested and then escaping with the stolen dough was enough to make him drool.

Ronnie-o, you're like a goddamned retard. Look around you, and get it through your blunt skull that something's going on here, something bigger than cops and crooks. And you may just need him to get out of it.

Ronnie straightened and did as the voice suggested, looking around at the silent houses, at the weirdly darkening sky. "I don't need anybody," he growled, pulling and straining against the cuffs and the door anyway.

He was still trying when he heard the shuffling footsteps behind him.

~ ~ ~

The interior of the house was decorated in an overpowering Southwest motif. A large Mexican mural of a lonely vaquero covered the far wall facing the door, just before one had to turn right to head upstairs or left to go deeper into the house, flanked on both sides by paintings of desolate western landscapes. The living room had matching black leather furniture, an end table with a cowboy boot lamp, and a 50-inch widescreen. The fireplace was on the wall to the left, and on the mantel above it he could see pictures—presumably the Childress family—in various frames themed with things like chili peppers and barbed wire.

Everything looked neat and tidy and normal.

Save for the large puddle of blood across the entryway, which Andrew would be forced to step in or over to reach the rest of the living room. He knelt to stare, ripping his pants a little more. His own red-tinged reflection stared back. He reached a hand out and touched the edge of the puddle.

It was still wet.

It was still warm.

Andrew wiped the blood unconsciously on the hem of his khaki pant leg and pulled the pistol from his waistband. He crouched perfectly still, listening to the noises of the house. He wanted to yell out, identify himself as a cop, but was afraid of who might be listening to receive that information. Everything in him, all the instinct he was born with and those that he'd developed since, told him to march back out the door and try a different house.

And what if they all have blood puddles? Or worse? What then?

Deal with that if it happened.

Then what if someone needs help right here? This blood didn't get here by osmosis.

Andrew stood and hopped over the stain, one leg in front of the other. He moved across the living room, walking by the fireplace and mantel as he did. He paused to take in a family portrait in the middle: middle-aged white father, mother aging but still attractive, two girls, the oldest probably close to seventeen, and one boy that could be Joey given another year of growth spurt, all gathered together in their Sunday best in front of one of those blue smudged backgrounds that professional photographers loved. He memorized those faces, both as practicality and motivator, and kept moving. The logical place to look for someone would be upstairs, where the man in the suit had been, but he wanted to clear the ground floor first and try to find a phone. He glanced up the stairs once and then headed toward the opposite hallway.

He poked his head into the kitchen, found nothing amiss and saw no phone. The shadows in here were deep, the light from the two windows above the sink dwindling in the unnatural eclipse. He turned to the hall behind him.

It was short, a door on the left and a door on the right, an end table in the nook at the end with more cowboy and Mexican crap. He reached out to the door on the right, pulled it open without hesitation, and almost opened fire at the shape that came leaping out.

He managed to hold off, but emitted a strangled bark of a scream before realizing it was a fold-out ironing board. The interior was nothing more than utility closet, sandwiched in the wall space between kitchen and hall. After his heart slid back down out of his throat, he closed the door.

Andrew turned to the door on the left and, with a hand that felt like a lump of congealed grease at the end of his arm, gave it a shove. He gripped the pistol as it swung open.

The master bedroom lay within. The door opened from a corner and he leaned in, sweeping the weapon from side-to-side. In the waning light from the large, curtained window, he could see a desk against the wall to the left of the door, and a king-size bed with side tables at the head, the one on the left with an actual cradled phone, not a cordless. But Andrew could only let his eyes linger greedily on it for a second before they rolled to the figure slumped across that desk beside him.

"Sir?" he asked. His words were swallowed by the infected silence of the house. The profiled figure didn't stir.

He moved across the threshold and gasped at the change in temperature that washed over him with the brutality of an avalanche. The interior of this room was as hot and arid as the afternoon Sahara. He paused, almost breathless, and then stepped back into the living room.

The delightful coolness of central air-conditioning soothed his assaulted nerves.

He knew certain rooms in houses could be hotter than others, but the difference in temperature was too extreme for it to be a mere fluke of the house's construction. And the barrier between the two was so defined it could be cut with a razor.

Andrew stepped back in and didn't stop this time, pushing through the uncomfortably warm air. The first trickles of sweat coursed down his face by the time he crossed half the distance to the small desk. He held the gun up, not quite covering the person at the desk but ready to do so. It was hard for that icy hand on his back to get a hold on him in this kind of heat, but it was still there, clinging as tenaciously as fungal rot.

The figure sat in a leather writing chair pushed all the way up to the desk's edge, upper half slumped across the wooden surface so that he rested face down with hands at each ear. He didn't think it was the figure from the window. Judging from the size and the haircut, it was most likely Mr. Childress, the man of the house himself, wearing jeans and a brown shirt, ready to go out and mow the lawn on Saturday morning.

The desk was clear around him except for one plain, unlined sheet of white paper above where his head rested. There was writing on it, and something told him it wasn't the grocery list for the day. Andrew leaned far enough over his shoulder—careful not to touch the prone form—to read it.

The sheet contained only one word in an all capital, blocky script, written over and over again in Shining fashion. They were large enough that he didn't have to squint in the dimming light to read them.

STRANGER, it said, in nice, neat, even rows, crammed together from edge to edge. Andrew stared at it blankly.

"Sir?" he asked again. His mouth was so dry; the single word rasped over sandpaper lips and croaked out. The heat in this wilting room seemed to be increasing just as the light from the windows was fading. His hands involuntarily tightened their grip on his piece, squelching out sweat against the gun's grip. "Sir, are you all right?"

He put one hand on the man's shoulder.

The body leapt into the floor as if it was spring loaded, and Andrew jumped away, again almost unloading his clip. It landed on its side and rolled onto its back. Andrew's eyes bulged in horror.

Mr. Childress had no face.

From his forehead to his chin was a gaping, blood-crusted hole, as though someone had taken an industrial size ice cream scoop and run it through skin, bone, and brain alike, coring the center of the head like an apple. Andrew could see all the way to the red stained flesh at the back of his head, because all of the gore and brain matter that should have been occupying the space was missing. Not just gone, but removed with such surgical precision that there wasn't so much as a drop of blood on the carpet or the writing desk. It looked more like he'd been born that way, and somehow made it through life this far without two-thirds of his head.

Andrew's thoughts went dizzy. This was a murder, murder most foul, murder in quaint Strangewood Homes, which meant there was someone else here, someone bigger than his current captive, and why was Andrew here, if he hadn't chased that damn kid he'd be at the fucking zoo right now, and once again that image of Joey at the kitchen table occurred to him, coloring with the attention and focus of Michelangelo...

He could feel his breath increasing, lungs choking in the searing heat, and knew if he didn't calm down he was going to pass out.

Andrew forced himself to look away from the gruesome discovery and turned to the phone. He hurried across the room to it, put his pistol on the nightstand and snatched the handset off the cradle. He dialed 911 on the base without checking for a dial tone, and put the phone to his ear.

No connection, no tones, just the droning hiss of an open line. But it was heavy with potential, like the silence of an open canyon, and he moved to put his finger down on the cutoff button when he heard something in that void.

It was oh-so-faint, but growing louder. Even so, he knew it was the same sound he thought he heard when he tried the cell phone that was now in his back pocket.

The giggle of a child.

It kept growing in volume until it would be impossible to write off as imagination, high and lilting, the pitch and timber making it hard to place as male or female.

"H-hello?" he rasped. He was shaking now, his hand stuttering the phone across the surface of his ear, and he pressed the plastic hard to his flesh to make it stop. He was terrified suddenly, his heart pounding in his chest and blood roaring in his ears and the heat in this room was making him so sick...

"Hi," the child said, in a voice whose innocence did its best to belie the malice stuck to the bottom of each word like gum under a table. "Would you like to hear a song?"

"Who are you?" Andrew asked. He had the surest thought he was dreaming, that this whole surreal experience would fragment any moment when he was jolted awake by the electronic wail of his alarm clock. "What is this, what's going on?"

"Little Andrew Horner, sat in the corner, looking at aaaaall the blood," the voice began.

"I...How do you...?" he choked out. The air in here had warmed past the breathable threshold, and he couldn't afford to waste the dribble he pulled into his lungs.

"He picked up his gun, said 'Let's have some fun,' and went out to join the flood!"

"No," Andrew said, and his own voice was the one that sounded distant now. His eyes rolled back in his head, lids fluttering.

The voice was snarling now, malicious and deep. "Little Joey Horner, dead in the corner, a feast to feed The One; when He arrives, the Sedoc and Nod, will amount to nothing and none!"

"STOP IT!" Andrew screamed, and flung the phone away. It bounced against the carpet and landed earpiece up, and the sound of that awful giggling drifted out.

And, God help him, he wanted to put it back to his ear.

He raised a foot and stomped on the plastic, again and again until the housing cracked under his foot and the electronics shredded and that laughter was still coming out...

Ultimately, it was a shout outside that snapped him back to reality.

He blinked and looked around. The phone lay in jagged shards on the carpet, and for the smallest of seconds he honestly couldn't remember why he was bashing it to pieces. The room was no longer sweltering, and that feeling that he was in a dream world was gone.

Another shout came from outside, followed by the honking of the horn in his truck.

Andrew snatched his gun from the nightstand, jumped over the body in the floor, and ran for the front door.

~ ~ ~

Ronnie spun when he heard movement behind him, the motion too violent for the leeway he was given by the handcuff chains. His arms jerked in their sockets. He tried a different approach, sliding his right arm through the window of the truck and turning his entire body.

A man staggered up the gutter toward Ronnie with dogged determination, several yards beyond the truck's bed. He was old, late sixties, and looked like somebody's grandfather ready for retirement in Florida, wearing slip-on corduroy shoes, white pants belted nearly up to his nipples, and a button-up Hawaiian print. A crown of thinning white hair stood up in listless tufts on top of his gaunt skull. So the neighborhood wasn't deserted after all.

"Goddamn old man," he said. "You scared the shit out of me."

The guy didn't answer. His face was nothing but slack, no expression whatsoever, his mouth swinging open and eyes rolling like marbles. Even so, there was something anguished in his face, in the barely drawn corners of his wrinkled lips.

He took another halting step forward, almost losing his balance, and then another, reaching the truck's bed. His shambling movements set Ronnie's hair on end, but he wasn't about to waste this opportunity.

"Listen, you gotta help me!" he cried, putting as much desperation in his voice as he could muster. "This guy hit my car and...and he's crazy! He pulled out a pair of handcuffs and locked me to his truck! Can you run and, like, get a hacksaw or something?"

The geezer's rolling eyes looked everywhere but at him. He lurched forward, just a few steps from Ronnie now, and stood there, swaying slightly as the late afternoon sunlight faded toward dusk.

"Hey! Hey man, did you hear me? I said I needed help!"

Those roaming eyes stopped bouncing and fastened onto him like an eagle's talon. His lips peeled back from age-yellowed teeth, and he snarled. Before Ronnie could respond, the old guy leapt at him, hands encircling Ronnie's head and neck, open mouth moving toward his face.

"What the fuck?" Ronnie yelped. With one arm through the truck's window and the other shackled to it, he couldn't bring them up enough to defend himself. As it was, he twisted in the old man's grip, turning his head away. A smell like rancid pickles filled his nostrils. One of the hands clawed at his broken nose, setting his face on fire, but then he felt teeth sink into the cartilage of his ear, just above his earring. His attacker reared back, taking a hunk of flesh and the metal stud with him. Ronnie bellowed in pain as the man leaned in for another bite.

This time he thrashed, throwing his whole body back against the crumpled front side panel of the truck. He managed to get a knee up between him and the old man and shoved to break contact. Once there was room, he kicked out and caught the guy in the stomach with his boot heel.

The old man tumbled backward, sprawling across the curb, but sat up again almost immediately. Ronnie's blood was smeared across his lips and dripping down his liver-spotted neck. He gnashed his teeth, a dumb, feral expression.

"COP!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "CO-uh, ANDREW!"

Even if the chow-mein motherfucker heard him, there was no way he could make it in time. The old man was almost on his feet. Ronnie circled the edge of the doorframe, swinging around to the inside and avoiding a swipe of the old man's hand at the same time. He hopped up into the passenger seat backward, positioned his hands so the chain was in the gap between door and frame, and jerked with all his might. The door slammed closed with a crash, but couldn't latch with the chain blocking it. He held it closed anyway.

Of course, it didn't prevent the old man from just leaning in the shattered window to grab at him.

Ronnie yelled again. His wrists and hands were vulnerable trapped so close to the door and with such little room to move, and that's what the bastard went for, bending his neck to snap at them. He pushed the door open again, flinging him away, and then pulled it back closed. Before the old man could get at him, he lay down on his stomach on the seat, stretched his legs out, and used his foot to press down on the horn in the middle of the deflated air bag flowing out of the steering wheel. The high-pitched blat rolled up and down the street.

The old man lunged back through the window, squirming inside almost on top of him, and Ronnie could only thrash as merciless teeth snapped at his exposed back and neck.

~ ~ ~

Andrew almost slipped in the blood in the entryway, but then he was hurdling the threshold (the mat on the stoop now said 'CHILDRENS,' he noticed, bright and bold, and how could it've ever said anything different?) and running across the darkening lawn toward his truck. He came around the far end with the gun at his side.

At first he thought his prisoner had gotten himself stuck through the window of the truck trying to get free. Then he saw the handcuff chain and flailing hands and realized the legs sticking out the open window weren't Ronnie's.

"Hey, what's going on!" he shouted.

The legs stopped their kicking. The body slid in reverse out of the window and wobbled to face him.

It was a blood-stained old man, his eyes rolled up to the whites.

"Jesus Christ kid, what did you do to him?"

Ronnie's head popped up below the level of the window in the cab. "It wasn't me, man, he's fuckin crazy! He bit my ear off!"

Andrew looked back to the newcomer. The old man staggered forward, arms out like a silver screen mummy, a look halfway between crazed and mentally challenged caught on his face.

"Sir, I need you to stand back," he said authoritatively.

"Shoot him! Shoot the son of a bitch!"

The old man didn't stop. He was just a few yards away, gnashing his teeth and wheezing. As Andrew watched, he gave a shiver, and then a dark stain spread across the front of his groin and down his pants leg.

Andrew raised the gun. "Stand back, or I will open fire!"

"Quit givin him warnings and SHOOT HIM!"

The old man broke into a sudden burst of speed, his hooked fingers reaching.

Andrew pulled the trigger.

The pistol discharged directly into the middle of his chest. He staggered back, drool and blood running from his mouth, then charged again. Andrew fired once more, the report rolling across the street. The old man fell full out backward on the pavement—his head made a brittle crunch against the concrete that set Andrew's hair on end—and lay still.

"Thank Christ," Ronnie panted from the truck. "I thought he was gonna kill you and come back to finish me!"

"What the hell happened out here, Ronnie?" Andrew demanded.

"I don't know, I'm sittin here, handcuffed to your truck, he just walks up starts attackin me!"

"Where did he come from?"

"I didn't see, man, he was behind me! He bit my ear off, I'm bleedin all over the place again! Fucker prob'ly had rabies or A.I.D.S. or some shit!"

Andrew took a few steps forward with the gun trained on the old man's prone form. He knelt slowly, extended two fingers, and placed them against his throat. "Ah God. No pulse. He's dead. Shit!" That opened up a whole new can of worms. Jesus, this was probably someone's medicated grandfather that had wandered off, and now he'd ended the man's life. For a dizzy moment, nothing else mattered, none of what he'd seen in that house, just that fact that he'd killed another human being, that they were going to take his badge if he didn't end up in jail himself.

"What happened in the house?" Ronnie asked, breaking his panic. "Did you find a phone?

"No," he lied. "I mean, yeah, but...it was out."

"Well then what are we gonna do? You can't leave me tied to this thing forever!"

He opened his mouth to answer, but a new noise cut him off. There was no wind here, not the slightest flutter of breeze, and sound carried far. This one was unmistakably human, a distant, lamentable moan.

"Hey. Hey, man. Uncuff me," Ronnie said quietly, opening the truck door and hopping out.

"Hold on. Be quiet a sec." Andrew stepped around the truck. That moaning continued, drifting to them, getting steadily louder. He stared up the street in the direction they'd walked the first time. It was now dark enough for the lamps lining the sidewalk to begin kicking on one at a time. The sun was gone above them, lost in the starless black that was slipping over the world.

"C'mon man, set me loose."

"I said, shut up!"

He saw the first few as they careened around the corner of the next intersection: hunched, deformed figures that stopped to goggle at their surroundings like cavemen dropped into the modern world. By the time these early arrivals had caught sight of the two smashed vehicles half a football field away, they were joined by more shufflers with the same broken gait as the old man; first five, then ten, then a crowd too big to count. Most had something wrong with them; shriveled arms, backward legs, kinked spines. He saw a lady that appeared to have the stump of a head growing out of her abdomen and a wriggling hand on the end of her neck. The few that spotted him pointed and roared, capering like monkeys to get the other's attention. The entire group broke into a shambling run en masse, jogging toward them, a marathon from hell.

"GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRUCK!" Ronnie roared.

Andrew tore his gaze away from the ravening, twisted horde of suburbanites descending upon them and ran to his prisoner. He jammed his hand in his pocket to get the keys while Ronnie yelled and the pounding footfalls and gibberish of the mob got closer. He spared only one glance back before he leaned over the lock and saw there were dozens of them coming, and the first would be upon them in seconds. He found the key he wanted and slid it into the lock on the cuff around the kid's left wrist.

As soon as it fell away, the kid jerked his arm back through the window, turned and ran.

~ ~ ~

Ronnie watched those things coming while the cop tried to unlock him. All of them had the same vacant, rattled expression on their faces (wherever those faces happened to be on their mutated bodies) as the old man. As strong as that fucker had been, there were more than enough of them now to tear the two of them apart barehanded.

So when he was finally free, he didn't waste breath or seconds. He pounded pavement, with the handcuffs still dangling from one wrist.

He looked back to find Andrew hot on his heels. Those freaks reached the truck and swarmed around it. Andrew pulled his pistol, shouted a warning, and opened fire into their midst. Ronnie saw a couple go down from well-placed torso or limb shots, but the rest kept lurching after them without hesitation.

Nothing around except more houses. The next intersection was far ahead, but if they couldn't gain any ground, then turning corners wouldn't help them lose their pursuers. They needed to put obstacles between them, and fast.

From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of movement. He looked in time to see a figure in an old-timey suit step back into the growing shadows of a narrow gap between a lime green Colonial and a blue one-story next door. No way to be sure, but he thought the movement he'd seen was a beckoning wave.

Moving on nothing but instinct, Ronnie veered sharply in that direction. The cop continued a few paces along the street before realizing he was alone, and then changed his course to follow. The mindless crowd curved its path like a flock of birds, coming up onto the curb and cutting across the lawn to head them off.

Ronnie reached the side of the house. It was fully night now. There was no moon in the sky (not even any stars, some back part of his brain noted), yet somehow there was still enough light for him to see the tall picket fence that ran between these houses. The wooden gate into the backyard of the Colonial hung wide open. He rushed through and halted, reached to pull it shut. Andrew slid inside just before it banged closed. Something hit the other side of the wood a split second later, hard enough to shake the whole length of the fence. Ronnie held the inside of the lever in place. There was no lock of any kind, but after a few seconds it become obvious the things were too stupid to just lift the latch.

Andrew had sprinted forward, crossing the backyard and heading toward the fence that bounded the opposite side. Ronnie went after him as the gate cracked down the middle from dozens of misshapen fists pounding at the other side. He moved down the alley between fence and house, out into the open part of the backyard. The figure that had brought them here was nowhere in sight.

The cop reached the back fence that separated this yard from the house that backed up to it. He snagged the top, pulled himself up, swung a leg over, and disappeared on the far side. Ronnie never had the upper body strength for chin-ups, but he sprinted after him.

Wood splintered with a rough sound. Ronnie looked back as he reached the fence. Two or three of their brainless pursuers tried to slither through the small hole they'd created at the same time, and ended up getting stuck. Ronnie saw one little kid with cloven hands get his torso punctured by a jagged board, and still he clawed and reached after them, making a snarling, squealing noise. The others went back to pounding and tearing, widening the entrance.

Ronnie jumped and grabbed the top of the fence. He kicked and struggled, tried to find purchase for his knees or feet against the boards, but just couldn't pull himself over. He was fucking trapped.

A hand lowered in front of his face. Andrew clung to the fence top, leaning over precariously, sweat dripping from his forehead. Ronnie took the offered assistance, and together they manhandled him up and over the top just as the entire gate came down with a crash.

They ran. Around the pool in this backyard, out through the gate along the side, closing it behind them. They were on another dark street now, and they ran a block, turned one corner, ran three more, and made another turn. Finally, after both were panting and exhausted, Andrew waved him over to a large, brick house with a "WE SUPPORT STRANGEWOOD HIGH GIRL'S VOLLEYBALL" sign in the lawn. The front door was secured, but the cop busted a small window next to it with the butt of his pistol, reached through, and unlocked it.

In the gloomy entrance hallway, they passed a side table with an elegant centerpiece and brass candlestick holders. Ronnie snatched one of these.

When they reached the living room, Andrew turned to him. "I think we're okay for now," he panted.

"Good," Ronnie answered, and hit him right between the eyes with the heavy base of the candlestick.

* * *

#

Andrew's second trip from the land of unconsciousness was even more unpleasant than the first. The knot on his head was a throbbing Vesuvius ready to erupt. This pain was coupled with the almost immediate realization that his hands were bound behind him.

He opened his eyes. It was pitch black, but he was already as adjusted to it as he could get. He lay on an unfamiliar couch in what he thought was the living room of the house he'd dashed into. He could see only the lumpy silhouettes of furniture, and the banister of a staircase rising up from the far side of the room. His last few minutes of memory were hazy, but he could recall that prick bashing him.

A tiny flame flared across the room in the darkness, startling him. It floated up and lit the tip of a cigarette. A curl of smoke drifted up. In the glow, he could see his former-prisoner's face watching him from a recliner. The blood was off his face now, but his nose was still ruined.

The kid waggled Andrew's gun. "Hope you don't mind."

"Let me go," Andrew said.

"I don't think so."

"I'm a police officer. Do you know how much trouble you could get in for this?"

"Probably about as much as I could for robbin a bank." The kid grinned toothily, but it only lasted a second. "Besides, I'm a little more concerned with what just happened than I am with how bad my wrist is gonna get slapped when this is over."

"If that's true, why bother knocking me out at all?"

"Well...gotta take those opportunities when they come, Officer Andrew."

Andrew sat up on the couch and leaned over in case the vomit in the back of his throat decided to go for the gold. His head was woefully sore, but it was just a miracle he didn't have a concussion. "How long was I out?"

"Just long enough for me to cuff you, throw you on the couch, clean up what's left of my ear and nose, and find some smokes in the kitchen. Course, you gotta ask yourself, how long is long in a place where night fuckin falls before noon?" He jabbed a finger at the blinded window. "How is that possible out there, man? What was wrong with those people?"

Andrew recalled the mob of freakish residents. Those rearranged bodies...they looked like something from a B-grade horror movie, monsters you would laugh at unless they were chasing you down the street to tear you apart. "Maybe there was...some kind of accident, like a toxic spill or a disease."

"Do you realize you're quoting, like, every zombie movie ever? Besides, that theory don't explain all the other weirdness. I mean, is it just this neighborhood or has something happened to the entire world?"

"Oh God, I hope not." The idea had yet to occur to him. The thought of Joey involved in this mess was sickening. Jesus, why had he left the boy to get involved?

They were silent, during which Andrew had time to think about what he'd found at the only other house he'd entered. "Did you...did you see anything in here? Anything unusual happen?"

"Again, the word 'unusual' has been redefined for me. You gotta be more specific than that."

Andrew shrugged and leaned back against the couch cushions. "Okay, so...you've got me fair and square. You're in control now. What happens next?"

Ronnie stood up, the cigarette bobbing from his lips as he spoke. "What happens next is, I find the keys to the car that's in the garage, and get the fuck outta this nuthouse."

"What about me?"

He stuck one index finger in the barrel of Andrew's gun and mimed pulling the trigger with the other.

"Don't do that. Please."

"One less witness. And, like you said, I could get in a lot more trouble for everything I did to you."

"I saved your life earlier! Twice!"

"Maybe, maybe not. Either way, that's your problem."

Panic suffocated him. He didn't want to die at all, but certainly not like this. He latched on to the last straw in mental reach. "Ronnie...I have a son. Joey. He's eight-years-old. You saw him at the bank. Don't take away his father."

"I grew up with a father, and look at me." The kid shrugged and snuffled blood through his crooked nose. "Trust me, sometimes you're better off without 'em."

Ronnie pointed the gun at him. Andrew closed his eyes and pressed back into the couch cushions. The silence in the house deepened until they could be at the bottom of a forgotten chasm.

"I ain't gonna kill you," Ronnie said finally. "I just want you to remember that I coulda, in case we're ever facin one another across the courtroom. What I am gonna do, is chain you to somethin while I make my getaway."

"Okay. All right, fine." Andrew was too thankful and breathless to ask for anything more.

Ronnie stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the couch. "C'mon, get up."

Andrew wiggled down on the couch until he could stand.

From outside, a blast of noise hit the house, hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames.

"What the hell was that?" Ronnie whispered.

Dull thuds came from the street. They looked at one another a second longer, and then leapt for the window. Ronnie pulled the blinds far enough apart for them to see outside.

A monstrous shadow, cast by the still blazing streetlights, moved up the street away from them. The side of the house next door blocked the source, but judging from its silhouette, it looked big enough to be a dinosaur. That roar came again, more distant this time.

"Jesus," Ronnie whispered.

"Maybe we could see it better from another window."

They pelted down the hallway that ran beneath the staircase and into a room on the far end of the house. Ronnie threw open a door to reveal a bedroom the owners had converted to a hobby and display area. One of the streetlights shone almost directly through the room's only window, revealing shelves upon shelves of antique baby dolls lining the walls, some of them fancy Chinas with frilly dresses, others no more than plastic babies with wisps of hair and only diapers for clothing. Their dull eyes stared, unblinking.

The window had a workbench table beneath it, so anyone sitting at it could look out. The remains of several dolls rested on top, in the process of cleaning and refinishing. They looked out, Andrew having to lean awkwardly over the table with his hands still behind him.

This view had a better angle on the street, but whatever unspooled that deformed shadow was too far gone to see. Andrew caught one last glimpse of chitinous legs and an elongated spine, the shape more foreign even than those prehistoric lizards Joey got so excited about.

"That ain't real," Ronnie whispered. "It can't be."

Andrew started to answer, but one of the baby dolls on the table in front of him caught his eye. It lay on its back, a foot long from hairless head to plastic toe, with cherubic cheeks and those weighted eyes that closed when laid prone. It wore nothing but a diaper; impossible to tell if its creators had intended it to be male or female. Its arm was detached next to it, its head partially turned away on the neck joint.

As he watched, it swiveled to face him.

Its eyes slid open.

Andrew jumped away from the table.

~ ~ ~

At first Ronnie thought the cop was trying to run, but then he heard the yelp and turned in time to see the man skipping backward halfway across the room, his handcuff chain jingling behind him. He wore a look of surprised disgust.

"What?" Ronnie demanded. He was already keyed up about that thing outside, as jumpy as a two-day clean heroine addict. "What is it?"

"That doll! It moved!"

Ronnie looked down at the table. The three dolls in pieces on it stared back at him, but none of them so much as twitched. He finally managed to get enough of a breath to ease his tense lungs. "What, you think that's funny? Cause I gotta tell ya--"

He trailed. On the shelves behind Andrew, there was movement. The other dolls stirred. They stood and raised their glass and plastic arms above their heads. Andrew spun.

The menagerie of dolls lining both walls hopped up and down like excited kindergarteners, bending at joints they shouldn't have. Their tiny feet thumped down against the wood of the shelves, creating a miniature rumble. Ronnie could see their blank-eyed smiling faces, and a severe terror filled up his stomach like ice water.

Then they were all speaking at the same time in chittering voices, one word overlapping a hundred times.

"Trofonag!" they squealed. "Trofonag, Trofonag, Trofonag!"

The word made him feel unutterably filthy, and sick to his stomach. Images flashed through his head, surfacing from his subconscious without permission, horrible things he'd seen, terrible things he'd done.

Yet it was so hypnotic.

Ronnie slapped hands over his ears. Andrew, not having the benefit, shouted, "STOP!"

At his command, the chanting quieted. All at once the dolls rushed forward off their shelves, tumbling down in an avalanche of silk dresses and cloth diapers. They crashed to the carpet, falling all over one another, then got up and trotted toward them with hands outstretched, like children begging to be held. Ronnie and Andrew backed away in unison.

Scrabbling behind them. Ronnie turned to find more dolls of all sizes marching out of the closet, an entire army. They spread out in a rough semicircle, moving to form a ring around them with their brothers and sisters.

"Get back!" he shouted, raising the gun. "Leave us alone!" It didn't faze them.

"Just run!" Andrew told him.

They charged the door, Ronnie in the lead. The dolls covered nearly the entire floor now, and he was forced to step on some and kick others. Their squirming bodies felt disgusting underfoot. The ones that weren't trodden snatched at his legs as he ran, a few of them gaining handholds on his jeans. He ripped them off and flung them away.

In the hallway, dolls poured out of every other doorway in impossible numbers, climbing over one another in their haste to get to them.

And now they were singing.

"Calling all lost souls, calling all lost souls," they crooned, to the time-tested, multi-purpose theme of "Nanny-Nanny-Boo-Boo." "Trofonag is here...to bathe in your fear..."

"Stop it!" Ronnie screamed. He fired the pistol this time as they closed in. The bullets punched through several dolls at a whack, shattering porcelain limbs, lopping off plastic heads, but for every one he incapacitated, three more came forward to take its place.

"...Where did He come from, where did He go?" they continued. "Took the Filament for a ride and now its open wiiiiiide..."

Ronnie waded into them in a frenzy, kicking and stomping like Godzilla in the middle of Tokyo. They grabbed and clutched, their collective weight bogging down each step as though he were wading through a mud pit. He kept moving, pushing through their growing masses and knocking them from his legs until he reached the dim living room. The front door was open, letting in enough light to see more of the little bastards come running in from outside, into the already packed floor space. The stairs were the only open avenue. He scrambled up them.

"Ronnie!"

In his frantic terror, he'd forgotten about Andrew. The cop made it through the living room, to the base of the stairs, but then the armada of fake babies overwhelmed him, probably because he had no hands to use for defense. He went to his knees with his arms still behind him. The dolls swarmed over his waist and shoulders, trying to pull him back into their midst. His face was a study in wide-eyed horror.

Ronnie hesitated, looked up the remaining stairs at the relative safety of the landing...and then turned and leapt down toward Andrew.

He grabbed the man's shirt front—dolls instantly leaping for his arm and dangling from his wrist—and hauled. Andrew fell forward, landing full out on his stomach against the stairs. He got his feet under him and shoved. With Ronnie pulling too, they freed him from the clutches of the glassy-eyes monsters. They were both on their butts now, climbing upward a step at a time, kicking at the dolls that tried to follow.

The delay gave the ones in the living room time to mount the side of the stairwell. Their cute little limbs dragged them through the bars of the banister. Ronnie pushed Andrew ahead and started punching them with his free hand, knocking them into the teeming mass filling up the living room like the middle of an ant hill. He put the barrel of the gun right up against the face of one with painted Kabuki features and saw its microscopic black eyebrows draw up in surprise just before he pulled the trigger, turning it into melted plastic. When he saw Andrew was at the top and on his feet again, he crawled up after him.

"Here, c'mon!" Andrew shouted. He stood in a doorway just ahead. Ronnie ran through and slammed the door shut, then put his back against it. This was another dark bedroom, a kid's room judging from the cartoon posters, but at least there were no dolls.

Within seconds, tiny fists beat and clawed at the other side of the door, just like at the fence. It shuddered from their sheer volume. And these things were smarter than the zombie mutants; the knob rattled as they tried to turn it.

"What now? There's no lock on this door!"

"Get me out of these cuffs!"

Ronnie shook his head. "No way!"

Andrew nodded toward the room's window. "We have to go out on the roof. I can't do it with my hands tied behind me."

Ronnie gritted his teeth, then reached in his pocket for the handcuff keys he'd taken off the cop. "Fine, come here!"

Andrew backed up to him, and Ronnie undid both bracelets. When the cop turned to face him, he expected to get punched—and knew he probably deserved it—but Andrew only said, "Give me a chance to get the window up."

He crossed the room, pulled the latch, and raised the glass. The fake night outside rushed into the room. Andrew slid out feet first and disappeared momentarily, then his hand came back to wave Ronnie out.

As soon as his weight was off the door, it swung open. The dolls had formed a ladder with their bodies to reach the knob. They rushed after him as he climbed out onto the narrow, shingled ledge beyond the window.

Andrew was to his left, at the edge of a jutting eave over the backyard porch. "We can jump to the next house from here!"

Ronnie came up next to him and looked over. There was a gap of two yards from the edge of this roof to that of the next, with a wickedly-sharp fence below. "No way, we can't make that!"

"It's either jump, or stay here!" He pointed at the dolls already crawling onto the roof. Without another word, he backed up for a running start and jumped across the distance, not even stumbling on the far side. Andrew stood on the slanted surface and waved for him to follow.

Ronnie gave himself the same running room. He took off, pelting down the slope, but as first one foot and then the other left the safety of the roof, he could tell it wasn't enough, he wasn't going to make it.

He hit the other side on his stomach, legs dangling off the edge. Andrew grabbed his wrists and dragged him the rest of the way up. He flipped over on his back and watched as the dolls lined up along the edge of the roof they'd just come from, all of them still bouncing and holding their arms out. It reminded him of the mosh pit at a metal concert, with less Goth clothing and metal studs.

"Yeah motherfuckers, whatcha think about that?" he taunted.

"I believe that's mine." Andrew plucked the pistol out of his hand during his distraction.

"Aw, shit." Ronnie looked up at him. "So what, you gonna put me back in the cuffs?"

"I think we're beyond that by now."

There were howls from the direction of the street.

Ronnie got up. "Jesus, what now?"

The crowd of freakish suburbanites raced up the sidewalk toward them, at least fifty of them now, clawing at the air in their direction.

"Goddamn it, they must've heard the gunshots!" Andrew said. "We gotta get out of this house before they catch us!"

But it was too late. They raced across the roof to the nearest second floor window, which Andrew kicked out. Ronnie sliced his hands on a few shards as they rolled through onto a neatly made bed. By the time they could get out of the room and into the hallway beyond, the entire house was alive with the sounds of glass breaking on the lower floor and pounding at the doors.

"What do we do?" Ronnie demanded. He couldn't figure out if the shrieks and growls of the mob tearing its way into the house was worse than the singing of the dolls.

"I don't know!"

There was a rusted squeal behind them. They spun and clutched at each other in horror.

At the other end of the hallway, the wide air-conditioning vent in the base of the wall was raised. A gray-haired man in a tweed suit had his head poked out through the opening, staring up at them with calm clarity.

"Step this way, if you would gentlemen," he said, with the most snobbish non-British accent Ronnie ever heard.

They looked at one another, still holding each other like schoolgirls.

"I would recommend haste," the man added, withdrawing into the dark depths of the vent shaft. "As you may have realized, time is something of a factor."

~ ~ ~

After a few minutes of slithering on elbows and stomach, with Ronnie practically up his ass and the older man's Oxford shoe soles in his face (and the pistol ready to be whipped up at a moment's notice, in case either of them should try something he deemed threatening), Andrew began to suspect the air vent was no longer an air vent. He didn't know when they'd crossed the line in the dark tunnel, but the narrow metal walls had turned to rough stone and widened until they had room to crawl on hands and knees with room to spare. The sounds of the horde diminished behind them, and ahead was a clean, white light.

Finally, there was a squeal of hinges and the man in the brown tweed suit climbed out into another room. Andrew followed, ready for anything.

They were in what appeared to be a basement, an L-shaped room with cinderblock walls, concrete floor, low wooden ceiling, and a staircase in front of them that led up to a closed door. Coleman electric lanterns hung at regular intervals from the rafters, casting a soft but thorough glow around the room. The place was lined with mounted shelves of tools and other junk, a few pieces of dusty exercise equipment in the far corner, and a bicycle leaned against the stairwell.

Ronnie crawled out beside him and got to his feet while the man who led them here hurried across the basement to the far wall. He was a few inches shorter than Andrew, average build, with silver hair and a neatly cropped mustache and full-beard to match. He placed his palms flat against the cinderblock thumb-to-thumb with fingers splayed and paced to the right, crossing one hand over the other, like someone taking approximate measurements.

"Is this...is this the same house?" Ronnie gawked at their new surroundings.

"And if it is, how did that vent shaft get us down to...the..." The wall they'd just come from was solid cinderblock, not so much as a chip missing. The vent or hole or tunnel or whatever got them here was gone. Why this should surprise him after everything else was a mystery, but Andrew could feel his brain stretching like Silly Putty to encompass the contradiction of yet another physical law it depended on.

"It's actually a rather stately Victorian Gingerbread from three streets over," their savior said, while still continuing that odd hand-over-hand appraisal of the basement wall. "One of the nicer houses in this suburb, but I daresay the owners paid far too much over market."

"H-how—?"

"I shifted us between the two locations." The man had a voice that screamed upper crust, the kind of cadence and diction Andrew would've expected from a New England prep school graduate. He stopped his inspection long enough to turn his head and tell them, "Time and space have little meaning here, gentlemen."

Ronnie glanced at Andrew, and hooked a thumb at the older man.

"Time and fuckin space?" the kid asked. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Ah yes, the profanity." The other man's lip curled peevishly as he reached the corner of the basement and turned to the wall that ran to their right. "Never a challenge to tell when one is from the twenty-first century."

"Hey old man, I've had my nose broken, my ear bit off, and just nearly got torn apart by a bunch of Cabbage Patch rejects! It's been a helluva day, so I'll cuss if I want! And what's with the wall anyway? You two wanna be alone?"

"I'm checking for weaknesses."

"Jesus, he's as nuts as everything else around here!"

"Ronnie, cool it for a second," Andrew told him. He waited till the older man had finished up his examination and faced them with hands clasped behind him. "I saw you earlier. You were in the house I went in after the accident, weren't you?"

"Yes. I was hoping you would both come in. I couldn't afford to risk making contact with only one of you."

"And you opened the gate," Ronnie said. "When we were running from those messed-up people, you waved us into that backyard."

"Correct. I was attempting to keep you safe until I could approach you unseen, in order to bring you to this haven I prepared."

Andrew nodded. "Well, thanks for helping us out. I'm—."

"I'm aware of your names, Mr. Horner."

"Okay then, how about telling us who you are? Do you know something about what's going on?"

The older man nodded crisply and rubbed at his thick, gray beard, cupping his entire chin as he did so. "My name is Edward Manners, if such titles really apply anymore. No one has called me that in...well, eons, I suppose. As to your second question, yes, I know a bit about what's going on. I am, after all, the one that set it in motion."

"You did this?" Ronnie was back across the room in a flash, in Manner's face. "Then undo it, put things back the way they were!"

"Perhaps I should clarify. My research and preparation made this staging dock possible, but I had nothing to do with its actual execution, and I have no means of curtailing events at this juncture."

"What?" Ronnie cocked a fist. "Speak English you old fuck, or I swear to Christ, I'll cave your face in!"

Manners cast a blithe eye on him, not flinching from the aggression. "Young man, if you think anything you could threaten me with will make a difference, or even frighten me in the least, be my guest. But we have only minutes, so I suggest you listen to what I have to tell you about your present predicament."

"Ronnie, step away from him." Andrew clicked the hammer back on his pistol without raising it. "Right now."

Ronnie's fist hovered another few seconds before he let it fall. He snorted through his clogged nose and plopped down on one of the bottom steps in defeat.

"I have a son out there," Andrew told Manners. "So, please, just tell us what happened to the world."

"I assure you, nothing has happened to 'the world,' as you put it. It's still ticking along with the same callous indifference it always has. You are just no longer in it."

The silence was so deep in the wake of this offhand statement Andrew felt like he might've gone deaf. "What does that mean? We're on another planet?"

"Not anything quite so easy to explain, I'm afraid. This is more of an alternate reality. An engineered, imperfect, and very limited parallel universe." When they continued to stare, Manners sighed exasperatedly. "Think of your dimension, of everything you know and accept as reality, as occupying a finite space. And everything that is finite, must have a boundary, yes? A skin, so to speak. We are currently within a bubble on that skin, a sort of...cancerous growth. And, just as with a cancer, everything appears sane and orderly on the surface—the same way this might look like a common neighborhood—because the cells that make up the cancer are, for the most part, nothing but clones of other healthy cells. But beneath that surface is disease and rot, an area that does not follow the established set of rules governing the rest of the body. Does that make sense?"

"Not really, dude," Ronnie chimed in. "What about all those freaks? They cancer, too?"

"Absolutely. They're not the real residents that inhabited this neighborhood, but defective—and quite dangerous—copies."

Andrew considered the senselessly constructed people, sprouting hands from elbows and growing feet out of their backs. And Mr. Childress, dead at his desk with a head that was almost inside-out. Now that Andrew thought about it in this new light, the man's bloodless wound had seemed more like a severe birth defect than an injury.

They're all just Xerox copies, he thought, except the toner's out and the picture is all...fuzzy.

Ronnie was still asking questions. "So then how'd we get into this 'parallel universe,' huh?"

"That question has, in my opinion, a quite philosophical answer, but for sake of time, I'll give you the mechanical one: you entered the affected zone just as the boundaries which define it were sealed off."

"We colored outside the lines," Andrew murmured. The words were out of his mouth before he even realized he'd said them. That image of Joey at the kitchen table burned like a lighthouse in the center of his forehead, the crayons sliding over those fat, black lines that marked the edges of Donald Duck's shirt or Barney Rubble's hair, out into those empty planes where formlessness ruled.

Ronnie arched an eyebrow, but Manner beamed, lighting up his dreary face. "Yes! That's an excellent analogy, I'll have to remember it!"

"You talk like a goddamn college professor," Ronnie said.

"That's because I was a college professor. Long ago."

"Yeah, 'eons,' right?" The kid rolled his eyes. "So you're telling us that's why all this crazy shit is happenin? Cause we're in some other universe?"

"This 'crazy shit,'" Manners said, wrinkling his nose, "is nothing but proof that reality as you know it has been suspended in this place. A side effect of its very creation. Madness and chaos reign here, brought about by potent and unpredictable forces."

"Okay, so we're in this reality, universe, whatever." Andrew held his hands in front of his chest, as though gripping an invisible box. "One where dolls can talk and Tyrannosaurus Rex is walking around in suburbia. I don't understand it, but I get the concept. But how did it get here?"

Manners held up a single finger. "Now we're getting to the important questions. Unfortunately, they will have to wait until my return." He moved toward the staircase.

Andrew rushed over to grab the man's arm. At the same time, Ronnie jumped to his feet, blocking the stairs.

"No way, dude, you're not goin anywhere!"

"You can't just leave us, what are we supposed to do?"

Manners looked from one of them to the other with clinical detachment. "I afraid I must get back, gentlemen, otherwise the Incarnates will find me here and then we'll all be in a mess. When I am able, I will return for you and attempt to secure a passage back to your own world. In the meantime, if I have calculated correctly—which I am positive I have—as long as you stay within the boundaries of this room, you should remain invisible."

Andrew frowned and ran a tongue over dry lips. "Can I...can I talk to you for a second? Privately?"

Manners sighed, removed a highly polished pocket watch from an inside pocket of his suit coat to check the time, and nodded. Andrew led the man over to a corner of the basement. Ronnie watched them from the stairs with a scowl.

"This is kind of awkward," Andrew whispered, "but I'm a cop. This kid is my prisoner. He robbed a bank."

Manners blinked. "And why should this concern me?"

"Well...you know...he's a criminal."

"Again, Mr. Horner, I fail to see the connection."

"He needs to be contained someplace! Locked up! He tried to kill me just a few hours ago!"

Manners shrugged, already starting away from him. "That is something you will have to sort out for yourselves. The forces at work here don't care who you are, or what you are, so I suggest settling your differences and staying put until I can return."

He climbed the staircase, waited patiently for Ronnie to raise an arm and allow him room to slide by. At the top of the stairs he paused in the basement doorway and called down, "I put some medical supplies in the cupboard beneath the staircase. I didn't know what you might need, but I believe there are, at the very least, a supply of painkillers."

The door closed, and they were alone.

~ ~ ~

The old guy had to be crazy. Nuttier than a Snickers. Talking about 'alternate realities' and 'parallel universes'. It had all the ingredients of a Sci Fi Channel original movie.

Ronnie wanted to say all these things to Andrew, but didn't.

Partly because he was afraid it would come out too much like he was trying to convince himself of those claims, but also because he didn't want to answer the inevitable question: if the story was crap, then how were they supposed to explain what the hell was going on?

So instead, in the few minutes after Edward Manners left them, and Andrew slid into the floor of the basement next to the stairs to bury his face in his hands (and put the gun on the floor between his legs, oh yes, you better believe he had a constant eye on where that game-changer was at all times), Ronnie went around to open the half door beneath the staircase. A leather satchel sat inside. He pulled it out to the middle of the floor, sorting through bandages and iodine until he found what he was looking for.

The bottle's label said "Percocet," right next to a little caricature of a sneering, cross-eyed devil. Below that was "Strangewood Pharmacy," and the address was listed as "666 Filament Drive, Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Further down, he caught sight of the prescribing doctor's name.

Trofonag.

Just reading the word was like taking a skinny dip in raw sewage. He popped the top, shook one pill into his hand, then added another after a moment's thought, and dry-swallowed. His nose and ear would thank him once they took affect.

"Any aspirin in there?" Andrew asked.

Ronnie fished another bottle off the bottom of the case and tossed it across the room. The cop frowned at something on the label before opening it. After taking a handful, he rested his head back in his hands.

"What was with that 'outside the lines' crap?"

Andrew didn't look up; his response was filtered through his hands from the cave formed by his knees. "My kid. He likes to color. Gonna be an artist. It was the only thing I could relate all this to."

"Ohhhh. Outside the lines. I get it now. Cute."

Andrew didn't respond. The only sound in the room was the barely audible buzzing of the electric lanterns.

"So...how long are we gonna sit here waiting?"

"Until he comes back, I guess."

"And what if he never comes back?"

Andrew shrugged wearily. "We'll cross that bridge when we have no other choice."

"I'm just sayin, it's been a while since breakfast. Sure would be nice to get some food up in us, right? We could go check out the kitchen in this place..."

The cop finally raised his head. "Manners said to stay down here, so that's where we're staying. Just because you're not in handcuffs anymore, don't start thinking you're not under arrest."

"I know. I heard what you said to him."

"Good."

"I also heard what he said back, that we're supposed to work it out."

Andrew put a hand on the pistol between his feet. "Fine. This is me working it out. Cops and crooks, remember? Not a democracy."

Ronnie kicked at the case on the floor in front of him, tossing the contents across the room. It made him feel childish, but he was too angry to care. "This is bullshit! I get it, you're a cop, you take guys like me to jail, that's the natural order of things! But you didn't take me to jail, man, and this ain't the natural order! This stopped bein about cops and crooks when my life got put in danger!"

"Says the guy who beaned me in the brainpan the first chance he got."

"Okay, that was wrong, I'm sorry. All I'm sayin is, this shit is happenin to both of us, and it ain't fair that you're makin all the decisions!"

He sat there after his unprepared speech ran out, the rattling of that many words through his skull making his broken nose throb. Andrew sat across the room for a long second.

"You know what? You're right."

"...I am?"

"Yeah. This bust stopped being worth it a long time ago. As usual, I was just too stubborn to see it. You want to go, there's the door."

"What, seriously?"

"Yes, Ronnie, you're free. Get out of here, I don't care."

No way was he going to look this gift horse in the mouth or anywhere else. Ronnie jumped to his feet, started up the stairs, and stopped halfway, staring up at the door. Thinking about the world beyond. It was easy to discount talking dolls and mutated 'burbers down in this safe—sane—basement, but probably not so much once he went back out there.

He turned back. Andrew had his head down again. "Um...sure you don't wanna come?"

"No. I'm staying here."

Ronnie still hesitated. This was his chance to get away scott-free, an offer that could expire if Officer Andrew changed his mind. Hell, if he left now, maybe he could even find his way back to the cars and get the money.

And do what with it, Ronnie-o? You think the stores around here are still takin cash?

Defeated, he came back downstairs. He went to the opposite direction from Andrew, strolling around the perimeter of the basement, poking into the junk on the shelves, and asked, "I guess that means you believe him?"

"You're still here?"

"Where else am I gonna go?"

Andrew leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. "I don't know what I believe. I knew all along that something was off about this place, but I kept denying my instincts. Hell, I think I knew something was off before we even got here. What Manners told us, it's absolutely insane, but...so is everything we've seen with our own two eyes. Until I have some better way to rationalize that, I'm going to listen to the one person who hasn't tried to rip our heads off."

"I got a way to rationalize it, dude. We're both in the hospital after that mondo car accident, on the hardest morphine trip in history."

Andrew cracked a half-smile, and nodded. "Believe it or not, that's kind of comforting."

"And what happens if the good professor don't exactly have our best interests at heart? He already said he's responsible for all this."

"Then we're not much worse off than we were before. But he helped us out back there. If there's a chance he can get me out of this, I have to trust him. I've got to get back to my son."

Ronnie wheeled the bicycle leaning against the staircase out to the middle of the floor, turned it to face Andrew, and straddled the seat. "You know, you keep talkin about your-kid-this and your-kid-that, but no mention of a wife. She dead or what?"

"No. We're divorced. I get Joey every other week."

"Yeah, I remember the little dude. So, if you're half-Chinese, that's make him a quarter, right?"

"Korean. I'm half-Korean."

"Right, whatever. I'm just sayin, he didn't look, you know, chinky."

Andrew made a hissing sound between his teeth. "From you, I'll take that as a compliment. He looks like his mother."

"Gotcha. Do you miss her and shit?"

Andrew sighed. "Look, if I'm stuck with you, I'd rather not give out my life story, all right?"

Ronnie shrugged and looked away. The room blurred a bit when he moved his head. Those Percs must be taking effect. "Fine, whatever. Just makin conversation."

"I'm fine with conversation. But if we're getting personal, I think a much more interesting question would be, how'd you know you'd get away with it?"

"With what?"

"Robbing the bank."

"You call this gettin away with it?"

Andrew waved a negation. "No, I mean if we hadn't crossed over into Oz, and I didn't just happen to be there. You were practically safe even with me on your tail. Did you case the joint, test reaction times?"

"Naw, I'm no pro. It was just the first place I saw, man."

"Wow. Talk about getting by on stupid, blind luck."

"Again, I don't know if I'd call endin up here instead of jail 'luck.'"

"Point taken." Andrew grunted. "But why? Why'd you do it? You're a young guy, you've got a long life ahead of you, and something like this could get you put behind bars for the rest of it."

Ronnie frowned. Cleared his throat. "I needed some travelin money. And I didn't have time to apply for a loan."

"Traveling money? To go where?"

"South. I was...headin down to my brother's place in Tijuana."

"That's perfect." Andrew raised his hands and slapped both knees simultaneously. "You tried to kill me just so you could go to Mexico and party with your deadbeat brother. Why am I even surprised?"

"He's not deadbeat," Ronnie said flatly. "He's just dead."

"Oh."

The Percs were definitely hitting the bloodstream. He could feel goddamn tears welling up in his eyes again, but he didn't want to wipe at them and call attention. So he rubbed at his freezing cold, goose-pimpled arms instead. "He was pretty bad as a kid, sellin drugs and whatnot. We were always close, but my parents—or really just my dad—ran him out of the house when he turned seventeen. He straightened up, got some job with this American logging company and followed it south. I hadn't seen him in, like, six years. Meantime, I got into some shit of my own. A lot of theft, but nothing like this, you see. My dad disowned me too, only it wasn't quite the...the slap in the face it was for Mark. Then I get the word yesterday, he was killed in some accident. I just...I wanted to be there, ya know? To see him one last time before they put him in the ground..."

Andrew's breath plumed in front of his face in a white cloud as he spoke. "Look Ronnie, I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"No biggie, man." He wanted to stay with that pain, the grief he'd been keeping at arm's length, but he was too far gone on the meds. Ronnie grinned sleepily. "Hey...is it just me, or did this place get a lot more sub-zero all of a sudden?"

* * *

#

It happened so fast, Andrew didn't notice until Ronnie called his attention to it.

The temperature in the basement had dropped...fifty degrees? Sixty? The place felt like a meat locker. Each breath hung in the air in front of him, freezing so hard and fast that the moisture droplets in it grew heavy and dropped into his lap, like crystalline confetti.

It was the exact opposite of that other room he'd been in, the one with Mr. Childress' hollow head.

And the phone with that awful voice on the other end.

Andrew was too numb to even be scared.

One of the floorboards above them gave a long, sighing creak.

"What the fuck is that?" Ronnie asked hoarsely, his voice slurred from the painkillers he'd taken. He jumped off the bike he was still straddling, letting it crash to the floor.

"Shhhh!"

A series of sliding, slithery noises drifted down from the house above. They moved across the basement, toward the door at the top of the stairs.

"N-no way, man!" Ronnie said, teeth chattering from the cold. "The P-Professor said we'd be hidden if we stayed d-down here!"

Andrew jumped up, clutching the gun in both hands, and pressed back into the corner. From this angle, he could see most of the way up the stairs. If anything came down them, it was going to get blasted as soon as it came into his line of sight.

Ronnie took a few steps in his direction. At the same time, the knob at the top of the stairs rustled and the latch clicked. If the kid tried to come to him now, he'd have to cross the foot of the staircase, in full view. Andrew waved him back. He nodded and moved around to the far side of the room, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled into the shadows beneath the shelves.

Andrew waited, shivering and tense.

The door squealed open, and those squelchy sounds got louder as they descended. A voice preceded them, one high-pitched and burbly, with elongated S's, the way snakes always talked in fiction.

"Yesss, yesss, here it issss. Thisss isss what Marglo sssensssed. Sssee the lightsss?"

Andrew aimed the pistol and held his breath, trying to steady himself enough to fire at whatever was coming.

But even with as broad a definition as he was giving the term 'whatever,' he still wasn't mentally prepared for the creature that entered the basement.

He saw its pitch black tentacles first, a plethora of short, eel-ish appendages as thick as his flexed bicep that boiled over one another, propelling the thing down each step. Its body was nothing but a protoplasmic blob of dark, squishy, glistening flesh, adorned with several crablike pinchers on stalks, and a bloated head the color of a rotted plum that came up no higher than Andrew's waist. Two beady eyes glared out from the depths of a fold in it. It might've been cute if it was a creature on a cartoon, but there was a repugnance inherent to it, a vileness in its very structure that he could only liken to the gut reaction people had been conditioned to feel when they saw a swastika. He was so horrified by the abomination he completely forgot to pull the trigger.

A second voice spoke up. Their visitor wasn't alone.

"Never mind the lights!" it demanded, rough and deep compared to the monster now on the concrete floor of the basement. "What do you sense, maggot?"

The owner of this voice was much less interesting than the first. He was a large, broad-shouldered man, the type of hulking workout drone for whom steroids were a way of life. Andrew might've been inclined to believe he was just another of the rabid, Xerox copies if not for the fact that all his parts seemed to be in the right places, he was speaking coherently, and, whereas their clothing had still been new and clean for the most part, this person was filthy and dressed in discolored rags that looked like they'd been sweatpants and a t-shirt long, long ago. He also wore the thickest pair of sunglasses Andrew had ever seen, and even with these on, he raised a hand to further shield his eyes against the lamplight. A rash of black boils stippled his face and exposed biceps, the kind of skin condition that would've sent Andrew to the nearest chemotherapy facility. Still, he was far more identifiable than his companion, and the recognizable form and gender was a strange comfort.

He stepped onto the floor in his disintegrating shoes—the Nike swoosh was barely visible on their worn sides—and stood behind the squid-thing, scanning the basement with his hand still over his eyes in a salute. Andrew tensed as those black lenses moved to him...

And kept moving without a pause.

He frowned. There was no way to miss him, he was just a few yards away, right out in the open.

A dull ache in his chest made him realize he was still holding the breath he'd taken earlier. He let it out in a visible cloud and lowered the gun, afraid the movements would snag their attention, but they remained oblivious.

"It'sss...a protection field," the gelatinous creature finally answered, its pinchers clicking excitedly. There was no mouth; Andrew couldn't even tell where it's gurgling voice came from. "Ringsss the room, it doesss! Yesss, powerful artcraftsss here, Marglo knowsss, Marglo ssseess!"

"Protecting what?" Sunglasses growled. "If you have brought me away from the hunt for the mortals for a trifle, I will make sure the Fires of Magdemnon are stoked to their fullest before I toss your wormy hide in." Again he glanced right over Andrew, and suddenly he understood.

Manners hadn't said they would be hidden; he'd said they would be invisible, and apparently they were. The only problem was, it hadn't stopped these beings from detecting whatever Manners had done to the room itself.

The squid—Marglo—shied away from the man and made a series of tweeting, whistling noises. Sunglasses raised a foot and stomped it in the side, causing the thing to bleat in what was either terror or ecstasy. "I told you, speak English, maggot, it's all this body understands!"

"Marglo doesssn't know itsss function, Massster!"

"Then figure it out!"

The cold was bitter, numbing and burning his skin all at the same time. Each breath hurt. Andrew raised a hand to the side cautiously, directly in front of them, and waved to get Ronnie's attention. He could see the kid across the room on the floor around the writhing bulge of Marglo's tentacles, watching them with his lip curled up in disgust. His gaze flicked up, and Andrew pantomimed as best he could that these things couldn't see them. He wasn't sure if 'invisible' also meant 'unable to be heard,' but he wasn't going to risk opening his mouth to find out. Ronnie seemed to get the gist anyway.

Marglo was on the move, heading into the middle of the room, away from Andrew. The case of medical supplies was still scattered across the floor next to the overturned bicycle, and the creature squatted on its tentacled-haunches over it. "Massster, look here!"

Sunglasses came to him and examined the case's contents for a long moment. Then he looked up at the nearest lantern, as though reconsidering their significance. "Can you bring this field down?"

"Yesss, of courssse, Marglo can do it!"

"Then be quick about it!" He cast a suspicious look over his shoulder. "I suspect we are not alone."

Marglo began emitting a high-pitched humming sound as he (or she) turned in a circle in the middle of the room. His master stood aside, taking in the rest of the basement from behind his thick lenses.

Again, Andrew contemplated shooting them. Would they even hear the shots or see the muzzle flash, or did this cloak Manners put around them extend that far? Even if not, he could still probably be fast enough to gun them both down before they could get a bead on his location.

And what if bullets don't even do the job? Or what if you kill them and something worse comes looking for them?

He took his finger off the trigger as Marglo's buzzing reached higher ranges. On the other hand, if they just waited until this squid undid Manner's spell or field or whatever, they would be completely revealed.

Escape was the most viable option. To either find another place to hide or stay on the run until Manners could find them again.

He beckoned to Ronnie. The kid crawled out from the shadows. He stood, but a dizzy look crossed his face, and Andrew cursed his stupidity for letting him take the medication. He wobbled on his feet, and threw out a hand to grab the mounted shelf next to him to keep from falling. The violent motion caused the assembly to shift over a few inches, rattling everything on it. Ronnie closed his eyes and grimaced.

Sunglasses spun to face that side of the room, his back now to Andrew. "You're here, aren't you, little humans?" he asked aloud, over Marglo's noises. Taunting undercut each word. He took measured steps forward, arms up at the elbows, cocked and waiting for further confirmation of his quarry. "I don't know how you managed this, but we have seen through your magics. Come to me. Trofonag wants His keys, and He's getting impatient."

That word. Trofonag. Andrew thought he could scrub his skin with a wire brush and acid soap and he would never get the feel of those three syllables off him.

Ronnie stood against the wall, watching as Sunglasses closed in and narrowed his avenue of escape. Andrew signaled him to edge around the still-humming Marglo before he was trapped.

"You only try my patience, sin cow." Sunglasses flashed an arm out, sweeping junk off the nearest shelf. Ronnie jumped away, narrowly avoiding getting hit by a glass jar full of nuts and bolts that shattered against the wall where he'd been standing. Sunglasses pressed on, arms held out wide now in a bear hug, grasping at the air like a blind man, driving the kid back into the corner.

There was no way to help him. He would be caught in a matter of seconds.

So let him. He's nothing to you. You have Joey to think about.

It was true, but it did nothing to assuage his guilt. Andrew started up the stairs, taking each step slow and silent. He could see through the narrowing crack between stairs and ceiling as he worked his way up that Ronnie was watching him over Sunglasses' shoulder, his face caught between a silent plead and a scowl.

God, he couldn't do it.

Andrew fired his pistol down into the basement.

~ ~ ~

That Jappy pig was leaving him. To serve and protect. What a crock. Ronnie gave him the blackest look he could muster over the broad shoulder of the man closing in on him.

Andrew paused on the last stair before he would move out of view entirely. Their eyes locked. He hesitated before pointing his pistol down at them and shooting a round.

If he intended to hit this linebacker, he was way off target; the concrete floor chipped a good two feet behind the behemoth in the sunglasses. The man spun, forgetting all about whoever he might have trapped in front of him, and bolted for the stairs. Andrew ran—Ronnie heard the sound of his footsteps overhead—and then the man with the ultra-dark sunglasses was in hot pursuit, leaving him alone in the basement with the thing called Marglo.

The gunshot and subsequent departure of his master hadn't phased the slimy creature. Its eyes remained closed, those irritatingly high-pitched tones still drifting from what passed for its face. Ronnie was freezing cold and only getting woozier from the pain meds, but he had to move. He circled to the far side of the room, wanting to sneak by and go after Andrew. He got as far as the door leading to the closet beneath the stairs when the humming cut out. There was a whoosh in the room, an invisible rush of wind, and Ronnie got the idea of something suddenly deflating, like a popped balloon. The sensation was gossamer, only detectable on the outermost layer of his skin, but the room began to heat up immediately afterward.

Marglo's eyes opened.

And focused on Ronnie.

"There you are," Marglo purred, with a newfound slyness its previous subservient tone had lacked. It squelched around on its tentacle legs to cut him off, dangling claws clacking in anticipation.

"Yeah, here I am." Ronnie puffed out his chest and stood on his toes to look as intimidating as possible. His height advantage gave him a good two or three feet over the creature, but it carried its mass wide and low enough that their weights were probably the same. Even so, he didn't anticipate a problem if he showed some dominance; this thing had turned bootlicking into an art form. "And if you thought your pansy-ass 'master' was bad Squidward, just wait and see what I'm gonna do to ya."

Marglo's eyes narrowed. "Do not threaten Marglo, human."

"Oh yeah, you gonna squirt ink on me?" He moved forward, whapping the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other.

That bulbous lump that formed its head rippled. Its gelatinous flesh peeled back, taking those beady eyes with it. Its whole body was changing and unfolding, expanding and rearing up, like Play-Dough flattened out into a sheet for wider surface area, revealing a dark black, impossibly big gullet lined with razor-sharp incisors in a spiral pattern. That pit was big enough to swallow him without even chewing.

"Goddamn it," Ronnie moaned.

The giant mouth came at him, the hole in the middle contracting in great, hungry swallows. Ronnie dodged away, backing into the corner of the basement again. Marglo followed. When he reached the shelves, Ronnie scooped up everything he could lay his hands on—in this case, a metal child's fire truck, something that looked like a Thighmaster, and a heavy wrench—and chucked them all at the creature, one after the other. The wide fan of its bruised lips caught each one in midair and sucked them down with a slurp.

Before he could find a better weapon, Marglo darted forward and wrapped tentacles around his left leg in a vice grip. It yanked, pulling his foot out from under him. Ronnie grabbed the shelf to stay upright and ended up bringing the whole thing down with him. The world spun and blurred. He landed on his back amid an avalanche of tools and junk, knocking the air from his lungs. Marglo stuffed the appendage into his mouth, shoe and all, and Ronnie's leg disappeared up to the shin. Those little needle teeth sliced through his jeans and into his flesh in a 360 degree bear trap.

Ronnie found his breath and screamed as Marglo sucked him in. He thrashed, digging at the floor, and his hand found the rubberized handle of another tool. He lifted it.

A hatchet.

Marglo was up to his knee now, the entire lower half of his leg somewhere down inside that disgusting tentacle body, and Ronnie sat up to swing the weapon, aiming for the fleshy circle of teeth above his leg. The hatchet blade sank through mottled flesh, and a black ichor spewed from the wound.

The creature shrieked and spit him back out. His leg was bleeding, he was missing the lower third of his jeans, and his foot was covered in yellowish bile, but other than that, he was intact. Ronnie scrambled to his knees and hacked at the tangled knot of tentacles like he was Paul Bunyan. Rubbery flesh split. More of its putrid blood flowed. Sometime during the assault Marglo transformed back into his previous form, and Ronnie buried the hatchet right between its beady eyes.

It made a pitiful mewling noise and sank to the concrete in a bleeding heap.

He got up, ignoring the way his brain sloshed inside his skull. He was streaked with gore, but he wiped at only the worst chunks of it and ran for the basement stairs.

~ ~ ~

Andrew fled the basement and heard the 'roid freak pounding up the steps behind him.

The cold ended at the threshold, just as the heat had in the other house. He didn't stop to marvel this time. Beyond the basement doorway was a lightless corridor leading to his right. He charged down it, and passed a branching hallway on the left before he even knew it was there. Not only was he navigating unfamiliar terrain again, but he was doing it in the dark. No time to turn around and explore though; when he looked back, he saw Sunglasses hurtle through the basement door. The big guy honed in on him like a guided missile. Before taking flight, Andrew saw him remove the huge sunglasses and caught a glint of something stark red beneath, glittering deep in his eye sockets.

The hallway ended, and Andrew careened into a larger room filled with the low shadows of furniture. Here he did stop to goggle. This had to be a living room, but there were no windows in here, no doors, no other way out. The construction felt forced, unnatural, designed specifically to halt his progress, but that wasn't the source of his amazement.

Along the walls of this room were glowing handprints. They were small, the slender digits those of a child, placed at random angles in a haphazard line about waist high. A soft, white radiance poured out of each one, bright enough to cast a gloomy pall across the entire room, like the Batman nightlight in Joey's room.

But there was nothing comforting about this illumination. It made him feel disgusted and diseased.

From all around came the laughter of children.

He thought of the voice on the phone, the one that sang those awful lyrics. These high-pitched giggles turned his muscles to stone. They came from everywhere at once, from inside his skull like a metal plate picking up radio stations, a blend of a hundred, a thousand, an infinite number of merry childish peals invading his thoughts, throwing him out of his own head, and worst of all, even in that miasma of laughter, he thought he could hear one that sounded like Joey...

He was hit hard from behind. The laughter cut off, and Andrew realized he'd been distracted just long enough for his pursuer to catch up. A shoulder slammed into his lower back with the force of a linebacker moving to not only sack the quarterback, but break bones. He flew forward. His ankle hit the edge of a recliner and zipped out from under him. He fell, arms pinwheeling with the pistol, and landed face down on a glass coffee table in the middle of the room. The surface shattered under the weight of his stomach, dropping him to the floor through the metal frame with his feet still in the air.

Andrew twisted around onto his back, shards of glass cutting his arms and chest. Sunglasses no longer wore his namesake; those pitch-black lenses had been covering two ovals of fiery red that burned in his face like hot coals. The man came for him, hands outstretched and kneading the air.

"Stop! Get back!" Andrew raised the gun. When the guy didn't slow, he squeezed off a round. In the combined light of the muzzle flash and the wan glow from the handprints, he saw the bullet strike home high on the chest. Blood flowed, but it did little to faze his target.

The man reached him and grabbed his wrist. He held the gun away while he pummeled at Andrew with his free hand.

"It's...OUR...time!" he screamed, each word in rhythm with his blows. His eyes burned so hard they generated actual heat. "We will take your world and you...will...LET US!"

Andrew was caught in the table and couldn't get into a position to fight back. The pistol fell out of his grip. One of the guy's punches struck the lump in his temple, knocking him woozy.

His free hand landed on a piece of glass still stuck to the frame. He snatched it up and jabbed it into his opponent's throat. It sank deep.

The flesh around the wound sizzled momentarily, and then crimson spurted over Andrew. The creature with the red-eyes let go and stumbled back, clutching the glittering triangle jutting from his neck.

Andrew climbed out of the table frame. The room was back to its original construction, with a big picture window, a front door, and no radioactive finger paint. He watched his adversary collapse against a nearby ottoman and grow still, the fire in his skull dimming as smoke dribbled out.

He knew he should see if Ronnie needed help, but claustrophobia swept over him. Andrew wanted out of this house, this neighborhood, this universe—at least into some fresh air—or he was going to hyperventilate. He left the pistol behind and ran to the door, found a lock and threw it open, then went onto the porch outside.

It was still unnatural night—a night without moon or stars or any kind of interruption in the bluish-black void above—but at least it was open space and breathing room. As he pelted onto the lawn, an arm came out from behind one of the wide columns that flanked the porch's entrance and clotheslined him.

Andrew went down hard enough this time to knock the wind out of him. As he gasped for air, he saw another burning-eyed man step out from his hiding spot. Except this one's skin condition was more advanced than the last one; huge, cancerous stretches across his skin appeared to be eating him from the inside out, making him look halfway dead.

And there were others closing in, crossing the lawn to surround him.

"Go and find the other," he heard the newcomer lean over him and growl. "I'll get this one to the Facilitator."

~ ~ ~

Ronnie had time to make it to the back door on the opposite side of the house just as he heard the front crash open. Heavy feet stomped inside and spread out, like the Gestapo sweeping for Jews. He limped along the outside of the house to where the fence line met a decorative row of tall, thorny bushes and pushed into the small space behind them. From there, he was able to shimmy through the dirt down to the front yard without being seen.

By now, the medication was in full swing, turning his muscles to jelly and urging him to fall into the sweet arms of sleep. He shook it off and watched from the shadows as a group of men with glowing eyes milled about the lawn, standing guard over Andrew, one of them with a foot planted on his chest to keep him down. Whatever these things were, there were more arriving all the time; ranks of filthy men dressed in ancient rags made their way up the dark streets. Various parts of their bodies looked rotted, and some of them had creatures like Marglo on leashes, like hunting dogs. Ronnie was afraid they might sniff him out as the squid had done with Manners' magic spell or whatever the hell it was, but they remained oblivious.

More of the red-eyed men came from the front of the house a few minutes later, carrying the bodies of Marglo and his master and dumping them both unceremoniously on the porch. When Ronnie saw the big guy from the basement covered in blood, he gave a silent cheer for Andrew.

The ones that had run through the house reported him missing. A search party was quickly organized, and a large chunk of this Nuclear Brethren were sent to look for him.

After that, he did fall asleep. The sound of a revving engine startled him awake, and he opened his eyes to find a huge tire rolling toward his head on the other side of the bushes. Ronnie's lips clamped shut just before a scream could escape.

It was a school bus looming over him. He recognized the shape and color even in the perpetual twilight of this insane place. They backed it up over the curb and onto the lawn, the tires digging furrows through the lush grass. The back bumper was inches above his head.

The remaining thugs lifted Andrew under the arms and carried him, feet dragging, through the side door. The engine revved as they prepared to pull away.

Ronnie knew this was where he and Officer Andrew parted ways. Probably forever. The man was caught, and Ronnie could do nothing to change that. Besides, he would likely want Ronnie to go and tell his one-fourth Jap kid that he died bravely, saved his life, all that heroic, line-of-duty shit.

There was absolutely no need to go through with the insanity his brain was pushing him toward.

But he slithered under the bus anyway, working his way to the middle section where the wide metal struts gave support to the vehicle's heavy interior. He'd done this before, on a field trip in the fourth grade that the school had banned him from. Of course, he was a hell of a lot smaller and a hundred pounds lighter back then, but que sera, se-motherfucking-ra.

Ronnie squeezed into the guts of the vehicle and stretched himself across several supports just before it rolled away. He was almost unconscious now, his eyes drifting shut every few seconds. He managed to get in a snug position almost like a hammock that kept him from being pitched out when the bus bounced back over the curb.

"Fuck, fuck, what is wrong with me?" he muttered. Ronnie let sleep take him as the bus roared up empty Strangewood streets.

* * *

#

Andrew's forehead leaned against a pane of glass.

On the other side, nighttime scenery rushed by: houses and lawns and cars, all fake somehow in the eternal twilight, more like cardboard cutouts than actual items. Manner's 'imperfect' universe. He could understand now why he'd had that feeling of vague wrongness when he first awoke here. If you accepted it at face value, it might fool you, but when you stepped back and tried to take it all in at once, it all looked rickety, like you could poke holes right through it with your finger.

He looked away from it all before the dizzy panic in his chest could spread.

He'd passed out sometime after being carried onto this bus, but now he could examine it at his leisure. It was a long, metal tube. Brown, imitation leather-covered seats marched away from him in rows, some of them with pen-scrawled graffiti. Several were occupied, the backs of scruffy heads the only thing visible to Andrew as they faced the driver. The person at the wheel was obscured by a padded wall and the overhanging mirror was too cracked and shattered for a reflection. A sign right next to the driver's seat had a picture of a menacing, shadowed figure holding out a fistful of candy to some cartoon children that looked eager to take it.

Below this, the caption read, "Always talk to Strangers."

In the seat directly across the narrow aisle from him was the gaunt, shirtless, almost skeletal figure that had knocked him on his ass outside the house where Manners hid them. He was a complete contrast to the hulk Andrew just fought, but he had those same burning eyes. They were bright enough to light up a muted halo around his face.

He turned them on Andrew. No pupils in there, nothing but a shifting sheen of blood red and burnt orange, like staring into a volcano. The man displayed chipped teeth in a grin. Part of his lip on the bottom was blackened and rotted away down to the gum line. "Wakey, wakey, little sin cow."

Andrew said nothing.

"Too bad." He gave a forlorn shake of his head. "I would have enjoyed removing parts of your body until you regained consciousness."

"Where's Ronnie?"

"You mean the other mortal? He has eluded us, for now. But it matters not."

"Who are you people? What are you?"

"You really wish to know?"

Andrew nodded.

"Very well. We are the--" A tangle of syllables spilled out of his mouth that caused something right in the center of Andrew's forehead to seize up, like the painful spike of a cold headache. At first he thought it was his multiple head injuries finally catching up to him, an aneurysm or blood clot popping to kill him, but then he realized his new friend was grinning even wider as he waited for the echo of his words to fade away.

"Did you get that? Should I repeat it?"

"Please." Andrew coughed miserably. Coppery blood filled his mouth. "Please, don't."

The other man—if this thing was a man—laughed. It was a gruff sound. "We wouldn't want to damage you. Not yet. Since before time began, your kind has called us Incarnates. I see no reason why that will not suit our purposes now."

The name rang the dullest of bells for Andrew. Manners. Manners had mentioned these things. He'd been afraid they were going to find him.

"What do you want from me?"

"We are the emissaries. The hands, eyes, and mouth of Trofonag the Depraved, the Outer Terror, He who, in turn, serves the whim and will of the Stranger."

Trofonag. That word dove into his mind—he imagined it in there thumbing through the ridges of his brain like a prospector panning for gold—and what it unearthed was a painful memory: the time he'd blackmailed another student in the second grade, threatening to tell that the boy had been the one to break the drinking fountain if he didn't give up half his lunch money for the week. Christ, he hadn't thought about that in nearly thirty years. "I...I don't understand."

"Of course you don't. But your understanding is inconsequential. The Dark Filament brought us, its armies are massed, and after we breach the thin wall that separates us, your world will be but a footnote in our conquest."

"Outside the lines," Andrew stated, almost robotically. "You want to break through. To get from this universe...to mine."

The Incarnate's eyes narrowed, those blast furnaces slitting. "How do you know that? Who have you spoken with? Who crafted the magics that hid you and the other human during our search?"

"I don't know what you mean," he said, too quickly. "What do you want with my world? What's going to happen if you get through?"

"Chaos, death, and darkness. A return to the old ways, when your kind was sludge on our boot heels. And do you know how we will start, sin cow? Do you know the first thing we will do when we enter your reality?" He leaned across the aisle as though telling a secret, that rotted smile combining with his glowing eyes to make a skin-covered jack-o-lantern. He held up a picture of Joey, taken from Andrew's own wallet. "We will spill the guts of every...single...child your world has to offer."

The anger swept out of nowhere, burning through every cell in Andrew's body, coating his thoughts in red haze. He screamed wordlessly, pure rage expressed in sound, and surged out of his seat to pound at this hideous creature.

His attack was fruitless. The Incarnate grabbed him by the throat and forced him back into his seat with more strength than a normal person his size could possibly have. His air supply vanished, and Andrew had no choice but to go slack until he was released.

As he fought for breath, the Incarnate stood over him without a shred of sympathy. His ribs poked at his pale skin, forming a ladder up to his scrawny neck. "And the best part is," he continued, "You're going to make it happen."

There was a squeal as the bus brakes engaged, and a lurch when it stopped. Andrew was still recovering from his throttling when two of the Incarnates yanked him up by the arms and carried him from the vehicle so roughly he couldn't get his feet under him. One of their hands was nothing but a skeleton with a few scraps of muscle clinging to it.

The bus sat in front of a school. Arthur J. Filament Elementary, according to the sign out front. The name was circumspect, but, if he had the right understanding of this place now, then the school itself actually existed back in the real world. Just another perk for the residents of Strangewood. The building was two-stories, lots of windows, a flagpole with the American flag in front. It only had one star on it, but still. The place should've been cheerful and inviting for the kids—most of them around Joey's age—that attended class here everyday, but the pollution of this world made it more terrifying than any haunted house or dreary forest. The brick exterior was infected with the same darkness that had taken over the sky.

Andrew didn't want to go in there. His stomach clenched at the thought, his testicles drawing up.

But his captors weren't asking permission. The one that had choked him led the way as they carried him up the paved walkway and in through the front doors as he squirmed. Inside, the hallways were dark and silent on the surface, but buzzed with an undercurrent of energy that he imagined he could only feel in his bones. There was potential here, expectation, and when they passed over the threshold he drew in a sharp breath as though he'd just put his hand in fire.

But that was okay, he decided. As long as there were no glowing handprints or impish voices that spoke madness, he could bare it.

They took him deep into the building's interior, into a maze of lockers and closed classroom doors. His head throbbed, pulsing in sync with that latent power bleeding from the walls. He slipped in and out of consciousness, and only one moment in the journey stood out enough for him to recall.

They approached a door on the left that said, "FURNACE."

It was black. Blacker than night, blacker than outer space, blacker than any color ever conceived by man. It gulped at the little bit of light in the hall, sucking it in, forming an aura of darkness that bulged in front of it.

And here those licks of energy peaked into a jangled disharmony that set his hair on end.

"Nooo," he moaned, and then screamed, "Please, no, dontakemeinthere!"

The two Incarnates holding him were as distressed as he was. They quivered and halted, unwilling to go past. The one leading waltzed by, then turned and spat, "Keep moving you wastes of flesh, or what's behind that door will be a paradise compared to what I do to you!"

They crossed to the far side of the hallway and moved on.

Finally, when Andrew's arms ached and he was sure this would never end, they turned into an open door and dropped him on the threshold.

It was a classroom with multiple desks. There were more electric lanterns around the entrance, on the teacher's desk and several of the students', casting steep shadows from their sphere of weak radiance. The Incarnates shielded their eyes from the light.

In the middle of the room a figure stood with its back to him, speaking to a group of six or seven more Incarnates. The figure was giving orders. It pointed angrily and the mass disbanded, filing out of another door on the far end of the room.

"Facilitator!" Andrew's tormentor from the bus barked. "Here is one of the mortals! Let us begin!"

The figure turned and crossed the linoleum, entering the circle of light cast by the lanterns. Andrew looked up at the face above him.

"Well," Edward Manners said. "You certainly gave us quite a chase, sir."

~ ~ ~

Ronnie wasn't sure how long he napped beneath the bus, but he came aware when it stopped. The Percocet had worn off enough for him to not feel woozy, but his nose and ear once more throbbed in tune with his heartbeat, and now his ankle was joining the chorus where Marglo bit him. He waited until he was sure the passengers had all filed off before lowering himself to the pavement, and then crawled cautiously out.

He was alone. The bus was parked at the curb of an elementary school from hell. That wasn't exaggeration; he'd seen less ominous buildings in Freddy Krueger movies. So of course, with his current streak of luck, he had no doubt this was where the Nuclear Brethren had taken Officer Andrew.

Any direction he went from here would expose him. The closest cover was a low brick wall that started at the edge of the school lawn about ten yards away and then led up past the left side of the school. He hesitated, still not sure if he wanted to risk his neck any further for the cop, but the point was moot. He'd come too far to turn back now.

He crawled across the lawn on his belly, thinking about when he and Mark used to play 'army men' in the backyard as kids, and then shying away from that memory just as fast. His ankle radiated waves of heat up his entire leg, but he didn't stop to check it until he'd covered the sixty or so yards to the building.

The anklet of wounds just above the shredded top of his sock was angry red and swollen. Perfect. Who knew what diseases were in that thing's saliva?

"Now what, Ronnie-o?" he muttered. "What's the brilliant plan?"

He was flying by the seat of his pants, and that was what had gotten him in this mess in the first place. He needed to think. Well, step one was get into the building. No, scratch that. Step one, above all else, was to not get himself caught. Step two was get into the building.

Ronnie crept along the exterior. All of the doors he found were locked. Near the rear, he found a maintenance ladder bolted to the brick, high up so it would be out reach of young hands. He had no trouble leaping to grab the last rung, hauling himself up, and then climbing to the black-tarred roof of the school.

An access door next to an HVAC unit was unlocked. He slipped inside and sealed it back. Utter darkness greeted him in the stairwell down to the second floor. He waited for his eyes to adjust, but they never did. He finally limped down a stair at a time, until he came out into a main hallway almost as pitch.

A full body shiver worked its way through him. This place was not right, in a cosmic, back-of-the-eyeballs sort of way. He was never a big fan of the educational institution, but the walls here felt alive and watching. They buzzed beneath his fingertips, like the vibration of distant machinery. He moved on, listening for voices, but the school's silence was so thick it was claustrophobic.

By the dim evening light coming through windows at either end, he found a door labeled 'CUSTODIAL.' After tripping over a mop bucket and almost severing his pinky on a disassembled paper shredder, he found a working flashlight whose bulb wattage was high enough to be used as a prison guard tower search beam.

There was also a fire axe in a wall-mounted glass box. He thought of the hatchet he'd used to kill Marglo and mentally gagged. As little as he wanted to perform any more wet works, he needed a weapon. He unsealed the case and hefted the weapon in one hand.

Then it was back out into the hallway, the flashlight kept off and shoved in his waistband. Now he only had to check every room in the school until he found Andrew. He turned the corner into the next dark cross hall...

And almost ran into the broad, rotting back of one of the Nuclear Brethren.

The guy spun at the sound of either Ronnie's approach or his mad scramble to back away. Those deep red orbs drilled into him, scattering shards of light in all direction like a prism. The man wore an NHL hockey jersey for the New York Americans, which, if Ronnie remembered his favorite sport worth a damn, had disbanded sometime in the early forties.

"Little mortal came to us," Jersey growled. He gaped in surprise for only a moment before recovering his wits. "How convenient."

Ronnie brandished the axe. "Let's see how convenient it is when I chop you into firewood, asshole! Now where's Andrew?"

Jersey came at him with spooky silence. Ronnie swung the axe blind. The blade thunked into the other man's upper chest, releasing a dribble of brackish, partially-coagulated blood. He grinned and wrenched the handle out of Ronnie's grasp, then pulled the weapon from the wound with a wet, sucking shhhhluck!

"We have the other human. I don't think Almighty Trofonag will be too angered if I turn your body into a flesh sculpture in honor of his greatness."

The only other thing he had that was even close to a weapon was the heavy-duty flashlight. Ronnie pulled it out just in time for the creature to knock it away, then plant a hand on his chest and shove. He flew back against the corridor wall, hitting hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and then rebounded into the floor. Jersey moved in, axe raised.

When the flashlight hit the tile floor, it switched on, throwing a shaft of pure white radiance back at them. Jersey screamed, dropped the axe and threw up a hand to cover his eyes. The reaction was so violent it could've been acid thrown in his face.

Ronnie scrambled for the flashlight as it rolled away down the hall. Jersey shook off the blow and came after him. Ronnie got in one good kick at the creature's chest—a few ribs snapped like kindling—and then it landed on him.

Luckily, he already had the flashlight by then.

He shone the beam right in the thing's face. Jersey cursed and flailed away. He followed with the beam, chasing him into the corner of the nearest locker, where he buried his head in his hands. Ronnie kept him pinned there, blind and writhing, while he retrieved the axe.

"All right, let's try this again, dickhead."

A few minutes later and Jersey was a bloody mess on the floor. The fire in his eyes extinguished, and Ronnie thought he saw black smoke wafting from the empty sockets in its skull just before he turned away.

He suddenly had a much better idea for how to go about this.

~ ~ ~

Andrew stared up into Manners face for a full twenty seconds. The professor gave no indication he even recognized him as he looked down his nose.

"Where was he?" Manners asked the Incarnate from the bus. The other two still stood on either side of Andrew, ready to grab him if he made a move.

The creature lowered his hand, but still squinted in the pale lamplight. "Cowering in a basement like the vermin he is."

"And the other one?"

"He...escaped. My men are searching the area for him even now."

Manners glanced once more at Andrew. He couldn't figure out what was going on, and his exhausted brain was throwing suggestions at him half-heartedly, that this man had been duping them all along, or that this wasn't even the same person. Anything was possible in this insanity; hadn't that been proven time and time again? He opened his mouth to just ask for an explanation—it probably couldn't make things worse than they already were—but Manners rushed to cut him off.

"Good. Take this one somewhere and guard him until you've found the other."

"No. We'll continue the search, but we don't need the other. Begin the ritual with this one immediately."

"We should wait."

"We've waited long enough!" the Incarnate snarled. "Open the doorway so we can feast on their world!"

Manners turned a stern gaze on the creature, a look that could probably freeze any poor undergrad student in their tracks. "Who is the Facilitator, demon, you or I?"

"You are, but don't forget your place. You hold no dominion over us. Your part in this is all but finished. Open the doorway or I'll do it for you."

Manners glared for another few seconds before relenting. "Fine. Let me collect my things and we will go downstairs." He turned away from Andrew and started across the room to a satchel on the windowsill.

"There is...one more thing," the Incarnate said, a sly touch to his words, and Manners froze with his back turned. "These cows had help."

"Help? What do you mean?"

"Powerful artcrafts protected them; magics far stronger than they would ever be capable of. That's why they eluded us for so long."

Manners froze with his hand on the strap of the leather bag. "What are you suggesting?" he asked over his shoulder.

The Incarnate crossed the room, coming up close enough behind him to speak directly into the professor's ear. Andrew leaned forward to listen to what was whispered, but there was no need; the creature spoke at the same barking level.

"I'm suggesting that there's a rogue force at play in this reality you constructed," he said, "because if I thought for even a second your leash had grown long enough to allow such duplicity, I would tear your puling guts out."

The moment stretched, and just as Andrew thought he was beginning to grasp the situation, a new sound filled the room: a brief, high-pitched whine, followed by a rustling.

Everyone in the room raised their heads and stared around in confusion, but Andrew recognized the noise.

The open hum of a PA system.

"Attention faculty and students," a familiar voice boomed over them. Andrew grinned. "This is Principal Pearson."

"The other human is here!" the Incarnate screeched. He pointed at the two guarding Andrew. "He's in the headmaster quarters! Go now! Gather the others! FIND HIM!" They tromped out of the classroom.

"Officer Andrew, if you can hear this," Ronnie continued over the loudspeaker, "would you please meet me in the place where your son would do that thing he likes to do? And just in case you need some assistance..."

The room blazed as the overhead fluorescents came on, both here and the hallway outside, unnaturally bright after so long in the dark. The kid must've used the master override; since Columbine, all schools had them in case the police needed to search the premises fast. The bony Incarnate screamed and clutched at his face, stumbling backward into the first row of desks like a man trying to get away from a swarm of bees.

Andrew didn't waste the opportunity. He swayed on his jelly legs as he got up. The creature thrashed, throwing wild punches while hiding his eyes in the crook of his other elbow. That anger from the bus came back. Andrew dove into him, throwing them both over a desktop and into the floor. They fell in a pile with Andrew on top, and he straddled the hideous thing, pulling its arm away so he could pound that rotten face with both fists. He could feel bones snapping beneath its mushy skin.

"Stop!" Manners pleaded. "You'll kill him!"

Andrew got in a hit that made his knuckles ache. "I hope I do!"

"Yes, but you don't want to be that close to him when he dies, believe me! Run, while you have the chance!"

Andrew reached into the pocket of the creature's faded jeans and pulled Joey's picture out. The Incarnate coughed and twitched, reaching weakly for him as he got up. Andrew kicked him in the head. The left side of its putrid face collapsed beneath the toe of his sneaker. "Let's go, you're coming with me!"

"What? I-I can't, I have to stay!"

Andrew grabbed the professor around the back of the neck and shoved him toward the door of the classroom. "I don't remember giving you a choice!"

"You have no idea what you're doing!"

"No kidding. That's been par for the course since the beginning of this whole mess."

In the hall, Andrew saw that all the lights in the entire school were on. It made the place much less terrifying. Several yards away, the other two Incarnates writhed on the ground.

"Do you know this school?" Andrew asked.

"I built this entire universe from the ground up. I assure you, I know every inch of it."

"Good. Then take me to the art classrooms."

~ ~ ~

The art room Ronnie waited in was rectangular, with long windows and cabinets of art supplies along one side, and children's pictures covering the other in a collage of the damned. They were full of the glopped-on paint and primitive characters indicative of any kindergartener, but the kids that created these needed serious help. Beasts of all shapes and sizes were depicted as they tore human beings apart by the handful. Red and black seemed to be the predominant colors. He resolved to wait only another minute before he declared that he'd done the best he could and make a run for it, but Andrew came running in before he counted to thirty, shoving the good Professor ahead of him.

"Holy shit, it worked?"

"Yeah, thanks. That was some damn good thinking, but I'm sure those things will find a way to come after us any minute." Andrew forced Manners into the closest desk with a hand on his shoulder.

"How'd he get here?"

"He was already here, giving out orders to these things." Andrew's eye was caught by the collection of nightmare-inducing art. He scanned across them as he continued talking. "He's their 'Facilitator,' whatever that means."

"Oh, you old douchebag fuck," Ronnie spat. "I knew you were in on this, I just knew it."

"I told you to stay put!" Manner snapped. "All you had to do was sit there and wait for me, and you incompetents couldn't do that correctly!"

"Yeah, well I got news for you, genius! Your spell or whatever didn't work! It led them right to us!"

"It...it did? Oh, I didn't compensate for..." His reserved face twitched with emotion warring beneath the surface. "I apologize, I don't normally perform that kind of work. In any case, you have to let me go back! They can't know I tried to help you!"

"Not this time." Andrew crossed his arms. "We want answers. Right now."

"Uh, right now?" Ronnie went to the doorway of the classroom and glanced up and down the bright hallway. "Andrew, don't you think we oughta be, uh, hittin the ol dusty trail?"

"I'm not moving another inch until I understand what's going on." He leaned over Manners. "Tell us everything. What this place is, how it got here, what those Incarnates want with us...everything."

"And about this Trofo—!"

"SHHHHH!" Manners pushed past Andrew and leapt up from his desk chair, wagging a finger at Ronnie. Absolute panic filled his face. "Do NOT say that name! He will know, he will hear it, and then whatever time you might have bought yourselves will be wasted!"

Ronnie blinked. Even just the two syllables he'd gotten out were enough to make him dizzy, and sent the time when he'd stolen fifty dollars of his mom's grocery money shooting to the surface of his consciousness. Saying the word was even worse than seeing it or hearing it.

"Explain," Andrew bade the old man softly. "And if you convince me fast enough, we might let you go."

Manners threw up a hand and paced away from them. "Believe me when I say, there are forces at work here so grand you couldn't imagine them. It would be like trying to explain quantum physics to a golden retriever."

"These things want our universe. That son of a bitch said he wanted to kill my son. That's not too hard for me to understand."

"Start talkin!" Ronnie shouted.

"All right!" Manners thundered, and launched into his scholarly teaching voice. "The theory of multiple parallel dimensions should be familiar to you. There is an infinite chain of universes just like yours, each with its own alternate earth and alternate timeline, many of them containing their own versions of Mr. Horner and Mr. Pearson, although they are, most likely, radically different from either of you. So it has been, since the beginning of whatever concept of time you subscribe to."

Ronnie found himself nodding along. Other versions. Maybe a version where he'd made something of himself. Or one where his father hadn't been such a dick.

Or one where Mark was still alive.

The idea actually gave him some comfort.

Manners was still talking. "But now...they're being plundered. Extinguished like candle flames. As I said earlier, your world is safe for now, but it may not be for much longer. This place is what's known as a 'staging dock,' a preparation for...well, an invasion, to put things bluntly, which is all we really have time for. Going back to my cancer example, just as the cells within that growth want nothing more than to spread and infect the rest of the body, the forces contained within this small growth clinging to your plane of existence intend to breach the boundary separating them and claim your world as their own. As they have done countless times before."

"Who?" Andrew pressed. "Who has done it countless times before?"

Manner's next answer was longer in coming, and he swallowed several times before saying it. "Evil. The purest, most distilled form of the concept you could ever want. He goes by many names. The Dowser Beast. The Great Obligath. The Dark Stranger."

"I've seen that written all over the place here. That Incarnate mentioned it."

"I imagine so. This dock is built to His specifications, in His image. You are not dealing with Him directly, but your dimension will be claimed in His unholy name. If they succeed, it will be written across the sky in fire."

"Then who are we dealin with?"

"The taking of your world was delegated to one of His generals, the name which you so carelessly almost blurted out, Mr. Pearson. And trust me, that creature is almost as bad."

"You're the one that makes all this possible," Andrew said suddenly. His face reminded Ronnie of this borderline retarded kid that had been in his high school chemistry class, the day he finally understood what a milliliter was. "You're the Facilitator. You said you built this place."

Now Manners looked downright miserable for the first time, and as ancient and exhausted as a desiccated Egyptian mummy. "I was a man once, long ago, on another world much like yours. I learned something terrible, dug too deep behind the fabric of things, and I was taken forcibly into His service, along with several of my colleagues. We were given more knowledge and life than any being should ever have. He needs men like me, you see. Men who...who understand the codes, can see the...ways. We open these staging docks, to prepare the way for His conquest."

Before Ronnie was even aware of what was happening, Andrew grabbed the professor by his jacket lapels and drove him across the room, smashing him against that wall full of hideous drawings.

"And you just do it?" he shouted. "You help them take over entire worlds?"

"Please understand, I have no choice--!"

"Yes, you do, you always have a choice! How many people—how many children?—have died because of you? In my book, that makes you no better than this Stranger!"

Manners looked haunted by the accusation. He remained pinned in Andrew's grip as he said, "I've sat by so many times and watched as world after world after universe after universe fell to the armies of the Dark Filament, and this time, this one time, I saw an opportunity to stop it."

"Look, I don't care about your life story," Andrew growled. "Just tell us how we fit into this whole mess, and how we can stop it."

Before Manners could speak, the lights went out. Or rather exploded out, hard enough to pierce the plastic coverings over them and spray florescent bulb glass in all directions. As they plunged back into darkness, Ronnie felt a thousand tiny daggers slash at him, and covered his face.

"Andrew," he said. "I think we better save that one for another time."

~ ~ ~

Andrew released Manners, grabbed him by the back of the neck instead, and slung him toward the door. "C'mon, let's go."

"No, you said you would let me go back!"

"I said if you convinced me, and the only thing you've convinced me of is that you have to be kept out of their hands."

They entered the hallway, now in total darkness. For the first time, Andrew realized Ronnie had an axe. He held the shaft in both hands out in front of him.

"But, b-but--!" Manners sputtered.

"Shut up, Professor, or so help me, I'm going to pull your tongue out."

"C'mon!" Ronnie hissed.

He led the way down several corridors by the light of a cannon-sized flashlight, limping badly. Andrew didn't even try and navigate mentally or count how many turns they made, he just concentrated on keeping his hand clamped on Manner's wrist, dragging him along.

At last the younger man stopped and glanced around one more corner. "There's a fire exit way at the end of the next hallway," he whispered. "Don't know what we'll do after that, but at least it'll get us outta the building."

"That's all I can ask for right now," Andrew said, thinking about that power in the walls, emanating from that door labeled FURNACE.

The three of them eased into the next hallway. Andrew could see the doors at the end, visible only as a slightly less dark rectangle. They looked a football field's length away.

From behind them, came the clang of a door, and the scurrying of feet.

All of them stopped and looked back.

"Oh God," Manners moaned. "They released the Elohaman."

Coming down the corridor after them was an unending pack of children. Ages anywhere between four and seven, all hairless, all naked and sexless, all so pale and white they glowed in the dim light. They spilled out of a doorway just up the hall and came at them with uncanny speed, filling the passage from side to side, some of them on all fours, some almost floating, some defying gravity outright and scurrying up the walls. Claws stretched from their delicate fingers and fangs lined their smiling mouths. None of them made a single sound, but he heard their laughter in his head all the same.

These were the creatures that sang to him on the phone. The ones that tried to distract him in the living room where he'd fought that first Incarnate with their handprints. The ones that had painted those terrible images in the art room.

A terror as he had never known bashed its way into Andrew's brain, leaving him a quivering shell.

"RUN!" Manners bellowed. Now it was him tugging at Andrew as he sprinted away from the ghastly monsters. Andrew felt his feet start to move, but it was like someone else behind the controls.

They passed Ronnie, who was sweeping his flashlight beam along the faces of their tiny pursuers.

"That won't work! They're not Incarnates, they're Elohaman!" Manners called over his shoulder. The pronunciation of the word sounded like something from the Torah. "Nothing more than vampires! We have to get outside!"

Andrew pulled his hand out of Manner's and pumped his legs. He couldn't be caught by those things, he couldn't bare to be touched by them, because he knew, he knew there would be one in that pack of innocent-looking demons that looked just like Joey and if that happened, his mind would break.

The length of hallway to the doors had tripled. He and Manners were just about dead even with Ronnie a few steps behind, and the sound of their pursuers was like a muted thunder.

He put his arms out and hit the metal of the fire door with his palms, shoving it open, and ran into the unnatural night. Manners did the same with the other door.

Ronnie screamed.

Andrew turned in time to see him go down, one of the white creatures clinging to his hurt leg.

The axe flew out of his grip and hit one of the doors as it started to swing back closed. Andrew leapt forward and grabbed it. The creature that tripped Ronnie was towing him back down the corridor, and Andrew swung the blade of the axe into its skull. The entire top half of its bald head tore away. It fell back, caterwauling.

"SHIT, GET 'EM OFF ME!"

The others had reached them. Tiny hands latched around Ronnie's feet and ankles. Andrew dropped the axe and snatched up his arms, trying to yank the kid out of their grasp and through the double doors. The tug-of-war lifted Ronnie completely off the ground.

Something scrabbled at Andrew's waist. He looked down to find one of the monsters had slunk underneath Ronnie to grab at him. He pulled his stomach away, over the threshold of the door, and when the thing tried to follow him, smoke poured from its pale skin. It screeched and jerked the appendage away.

"They can't enter nature, not even one as false as this!" Manners yelled.

"Professor, get over here and help me!"

Manners grabbed one of Ronnie's arms and helped Andrew pull, but they were swarmed. There must be twenty of the impish creatures hauling at the kid, and more crowding around the doorframe to swipe at them.

And then one of them jumped atop Ronnie's back and thrust its face almost into Andrew's.

It was Joey. Just as he predicted. Joey with no hair, a little albino chemo patient, Joey with more malicious glee in his face than Andrew had ever seen, but unmistakably Joey. It hissed at him through incisors as long and narrow as toothpicks.

Andrew screamed and pushed away, letting go of Ronnie, falling back on his ass outside the doors of the school. Without his strength, the kid was yanked from Manner's hands.

"ANDREEEEEEW!"

He watched as Ronnie was dragged down the hallway, carried on a pale tide of small bodies, receding into darkness. His face was the last thing to disappear, mouth stretched open and still screaming Andrew's name.

The doors of Arthur J. Filament Elementary School swung closed.

* * *

#

Andrew stayed where he landed, staring at the smooth metal of the school's fire door. His brain felt sluggish, confused and disbelieving. Seconds became soupy. He could still feel Ronnie's hands in his, just before he'd let go and the kid had been pulled into the mass of those...things.

Manners backed away quickly and then spouted a string of gibberish. The world rotated around Andrew with the precision of a clock gear, and then he was no longer sitting on the walkway outside the school. He was on the concrete in the middle of the street, staring at his and Ronnie's ruined vehicles. The change of scenery only added to his mental disarray.

"I still have a few tricks up my sleeve," the professor muttered.

"What were those things?" Andrew gasped.

"I told you, they are called Elohaman. I've rarely seen them in the flesh. They're mostly used to play mental tricks on enemies of the Filament, distractions, that sort of thing. The Incarnates had them looking for you the whole time, trying to keep you off balance long enough for you to be captured."

"Then...they're not really children?"

"Oh no, they certainly are. Or were, once. Children tend to be the only ones that survive the...process." He turned and hurried toward the cars. "Come, Mr. Horner. It won't take the Incarnates long to get organized and come after us again."

Andrew got up. He was so exhausted, in every sense of the word. And he couldn't tear his thoughts away from that awful look on Ronnie's face as he'd been dragged back into the darkness of that terrible school. He ran after Manners. "But they have Ronnie!"

"I know. That's unfortunate."

Andrew reached out and grabbed the man's shoulder, forcing him to turn. "We have to go back!" Even as he said it, a more primitive part of him recoiled. The thought of seeing those pale creatures again curdled his blood.

Especially the one wearing Joey's face.

Manner spun and pushed his hand roughly away. "Unhand me, sir! I regret ever laying eyes on either of you! I hoarded what little power He gave me for close to a millennia just to hide you two cretins from His all-seeing eye, and look what it brought me!" He clutched great handfuls of his hair and pulled at them. "Good Lord, even though I failed here, I could have tried again another time! I could have worked from the inside to save even an infinitesimal number of universes! But now that He knows what I've done, I'm no better off than you! You're a selfish ingrate!"

Andrew slapped the man across one bearded cheek. His head rocked to the side and then swiveled back with a look of shock. "To be honest, I don't really care anymore about your problems, Professor Manners. Just tell me what they want with him. What they wanted with me."

Manners gently touched the place where Andrew's hand struck flesh, but when he spoke, his voice was still full of disdain. "I thought you might figure that out yourself by now. You're the keys."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that armies of the Dark Filament need permission to enter your world, acquiescence from a representative. The cosmos is in great upheaval, but it still holds to some rules. An effort to keep balance, I suppose."

"So they need us...to tell them...it's okay to wipe out our planet?"

"Correct. They only need it from one of you, and now that they have Mr. Pearson...I imagine they'll start trying to get it."

"Oh my God." Finally it all made sense, an order in this chaos. "What will they do to him? That Incarnate mentioned something about a ritual."

"Ritual. Ha!" Manners shook his head. "No need to pretty it up. It's nothing but a glorified torture session. They'll take him apart piece-by-piece to get what they want and then put him back together to start all over again if necessary."

Manners sighed heavily and let his gaze fall to the ground. "Make no mistake. That young man is going to be in unimaginable torment in the very near future."

~ ~ ~

All was darkness.

Ronnie could feel their small hands on him, carrying him above their heads like a champion quarterback after a winning game, but he could see nothing. The corridors of the school (if that's even where he was anymore, and he wasn't entirely sure) had become choked with blackness.

He struggled and squirmed, but their grip was absolute. He couldn't hear their impish giggles anymore, could hear nothing at all but the sound of his own panicked breaths. They moved along for an undetermined length of time before he felt a different surface under his back, cool and flat. Those hands pulled his arms above his head and held his legs down while they bound him to whatever he now lay on.

And then, all at once, the darkness was gone. Whisked away from his eyes, like a veil thrown aside. He raised his head and looked around.

He was in a room that brought to mind medieval dungeons. The walls were dark, stained brick with shackles bolted into them. Ronnie was bound tight to a table made of white stone or marble by more of the steel bracelets by wrists and ankles. No windows; the only light came from a roaring fire in a round pit beyond the foot of the table. The flames produced no smoke; so there wasn't even a chimney to break the solid façade of the walls. The place was long and rectangular; to his left was a flat wall with a door, but on the right it stretched beyond the limits of the flickering firelight into a cauldron of darkness.

Except it really didn't feel like his right, not in the spatial sense of the word. What he actually thought, looking into it, was that it lead down somehow, deep into the bowels of the earth, either on a steep slant or by some quirk of physics that twisted direction.

The creatures that brought him here—Manner's Aloha Men, or whatever they were called—were gone. Disappeared along with the darkness. Instead, one of the guys that Andrew had been calling 'Incarnates' leaned casually against the far wall on the other side of the fire pit with one leg up. Part of his face was crushed in, bone poking through the black, flaky skin. His eyes glittered even brighter than the flames illuminating him.

"Welcome," he said, and started around the fire.

"What's up?" Ronnie replied. He coughed. The noise echoed away from him for what sounded like miles. "Did Andrew and the Professor get away?"

"For now. We'll find them. Manners will pay for his deceit. His rebellion amounted to nothing, considering one of you is still strapped to that table."

"What about your little friends?" Ronnie asked. "What happened to them?"

The Incarnate reached his side and raised a gangrenous eyebrow. The dent in his face was sickening. He wore no shirt, and the skin along his narrow chest was riddled with black boils. "Little friends?"

"Yeah, the bald kids with the bad teeth."

He shone a smirking grin down on Ronnie. "The Elohaman are back in their confinements. Their minds reach far, but their physical forms are exhausted so quickly."

"Well, whatever, dude. Where I come from, running around with a pack of naked kids'll get you lynched."

Now the Incarnate was really beaming, both through his smile and his eyes. "I'm so glad it's you. I think you'll turn out to be so much more fun than the other mortal, in the end."

Before Ronnie could inquire or quip, the man's spidery hand flashed out. It latched onto his calf, where the bite mark from Marglo still pulsed below the torn him of his jeans leg. Fingers found the puffy, infected holes and squeezed.

The pain was indescribable. An acid that shot through his nervous system. It wracked his body, arched his spine so hard his butt lifted off the table. And just when he didn't think it could get any worse, the fucker's fingers slid into the holes, digging at warm underflesh. White tracers shot through the blackness behind his eyelids.

He thought he blacked out, but if so, it was only for seconds. When he came around, the Incarnate still leered down at him, and the heat in his leg was dying down.

"That hurt, yes?"

"No, it was better than a hand job." Ronnie heard tears in the hoarse retort and hated himself for it. "What the fuck do you think it felt like, asshole?"

"There will be more of that," the Incarnate told him matter-of-factly. "So much more. Unless..."

Ronnie refused to give him the satisfaction of asking for the rest of the sentence.

"Unless you say one word. Just one."

"And then you'll let me go?"

"Of course."

"That was said waaaay too fast to be anything but a lie."

The Incarnate shrugged. "Why wouldn't we? Once you say this word, you're of no further concern to us. Do you want to know what it is?"

"I hope it's not your boss's name, cause that shit gives me diarrhea."

The Incarnate reached for his leg.

"Okay, yes, yes, I wanna know!"

"There!" He clapped his hands together. A flake of blackened skin landed on Ronnie's cheek. "You just said it! The word is 'yes!' See how simple that was?"

"All right then, I said it, now lemme the fuck outta here!"

"You have to wait for the question."

"Then ask me if you're an uncircumcised cock, and I'll be glad to give you your yes!"

The Incarnate's eyes flashed. Literally; the red centers pulsed angrily. He leaned in until his crumbling nose was almost touching Ronnie's. The stench that hung around him was a torture all its own. "Little sin cow..." he whispered. "May we enter your realm of existence?"

Ronnie swallowed. He had no doubt his days of cruising in the Mustang and living off his wiles were over no matter what this talking corpse said, so he'd been prepared to give an affirmative to just about anything as long as it meant going out painlessly.

But this question stopped him cold.

He wasn't even sure he heard it correctly, but he understood it was important. More important than anything he'd ever been asked in his whole miserable life. The image of his mother came to him for some reason, and Mark, and even his father.

The Incarnate waited.

"No." The word was more a quivering sigh than anything. He suddenly didn't have the strength for anything else.

"I knew you wouldn't disappoint me." The Incarnate turned and looked into the dark hole to Ronnie's left. Ronnie did the same. He could discern nothing in that nest of shadows, but he could feel. It pulsed with energy that made him want to tear at his flesh, like an alcoholic with DT-induced bugs on their skin. The Incarnate seemed to get what the answer he sought. He walked to the fire, bent, and picked up a sharp metal rod that had been roasting in the embers. The tip glowed the same hideous red as his eyes.

"Feel free to stop me at any time," he said.

Ronnie laid his head back against the table and tried not to cry.

~ ~ ~

Andrew heard glass break behind him. He jumped and wheeled around, ready for whatever nightmare this place wanted to throw at him next.

No one was there. It looked like the front window of the house right behind them—the first one Andrew tried knocking at when they woke up here, where he'd imagined another life—had fallen right out of its frame, hit the lawn and shattered.

"It's unraveling," Manners told him. "This universe is unstable. They weren't meant to last forever. The Incarnates wasted a lot of time looking for the two of you after my little trick."

Andrew peered closer in the gloom. He could actually see the house frame sagging under its own weight, like a giant, invisible hand was pressing down on it. The walls looked even more worn and thin, almost fading out of reality. "What will happen to it?"

"It will keep falling apart until it collapses in on itself. The pressures outside are massive."

Andrew faced him again and jumped back into their previous conversation. "Why didn't the Incarnates just grab one of those deformed people and get them to agree?"

Manners waved a hand impatiently. "Because they don't represent your dimension. As I said before, those are just twisted duplicates of the people that actually lived here. The only beings currently within the boundaries of this staging dock that are from your world are you and Mr. Pearson."

"And once Ronnie gives them permission, that's it, they can just waltz right in like they own the place?"

"There's a bit more to it than that, but yes. Once the path is open, your dimension will fall."

"And if he doesn't give them the okay?"

One of Manner's bushy silver eyebrows took a hike up his forehead. "Do you really think someone of his social standing would give the slightest hesitation?"

Andrew grimaced. For some reason, the aspersion on Ronnie aggravated him, especially coming from Manners, whom he now equated on a level with Nazi officers in charge of concentration camps. "But if he doesn't?"

"He will. I've seen it happen more times than you can count. They'll torture him until there's hardly enough brain function left to resist."

"Yeah, I guess you would know," Andrew snapped. "You're their Facilitator after all, right? You were in charge of the torturing."

Manner said nothing. A dark ghost of truth and memory flitted through his eyes.

"What if this place collapses before then?"

"First of all, don't hang your hopes on that. They have more than enough time to coerce him. But...if he could hold out...then that would be that. Your universe remains safe. They move on to the next one."

"Couldn't they just build another one of these things, these 'staging docks?'"

"Absolutely not. That's another balancing measure the cosmos enforces. The same way they need permission from a representative, they can also only try each link on the dimensio-axial chain one time."

Andrew brought his arms up and let them drop back to his sides. "Jesus Christ. One time. Why us, huh? Why did this responsibility fall to us?"

Manners clenched his jaw. "Because God determined it should. Or Buddha. Or Fate. Bad luck. Take your choice, Mr. Horner."

The curb was a few feet away. Andrew barely made it over before his legs gave way. He sat and stared at Ronnie's overturned Mustang in front of him and then at the rest of this godforsaken world. Without stars, the night was more of a smothering blanket than a natural occurrence. The streetlamp illumination looked more sickly yellow than the last time he'd been here, the houses more broken and dilapidated by the second. But there were more noises now. From all over. The sound of the buildings crunching and cracking was almost a constant mutter. It reminded him of a documentary about Antarctica in summer he'd watched: the brittle sound of melting ice rubbing together.

It all made him feel numb, and unimaginably far from home.

Manners softened. "Listen, the building of these docks is by no means an exact science. Or science at all, really. They are just a net that is cast, and we see what we reel in. Sometimes it's a movie star. Sometimes it's an entire religious congregation. Sometimes it's no one, and in that case, the builders are punished severely. This time, it just happened to be the two of you. I tried to help you escape before the Incarnates got a hold on you, and I failed." He took a few paces across the street and squatted in front of Andrew, plucking at the hems of his tweed pants to keep them from touching the concrete. "But we can still escape, my friend. Back into your world. I know how to do that much."

"What good will that do? If what you say is true, won't they be coming in right behind us, after Ronnie gives them the okay?"

"Yes," Manners agreed. "But we can run. We'll have plenty of time for me to gather the necessary elements for another jump. For you to find your son, if you want. Then we can all flee to the next dimension. And keep fleeing, if need be. But we must...go...now."

Andrew considered that. At first, the urge to get back to Joey—to see the boy with his own two eyes and make sure he was all right—was so strong he wanted to demand Manners do it immediately. But what then? A life full of running across worlds that weren't even his sounded more like hell than this place. He just couldn't reconcile himself to the fact that this morning he had a future—maybe not a great one without Michelle, but there was still Joey, and his job, and hope—but now, no matter what he decided, that future—everyone's future—was gone.

"So just leave Ronnie to the Incarnates? Not to mention the rest of my world?"

Manners nodded slowly.

"No. I can't do that."

"Be reasonable and save yourself. There's nothing you can do."

"We can get Ronnie back."

Manners sprang up, guffawing all the way. Andrew did the same. The professor jabbed a finger into his chest. "You listen to me, Mr. Horner, and you listen good! Here's another natural law: two beings entered this staging dock, and only two can leave it. At the moment, that's you and myself. Even if you were to somehow reach Mr. Pearson and safely extricate him from their clutches, I would be unable to transport all three of us across the barrier."

"Then send both of us, like you were going to anyway!"

"That was before you revealed my rebellion and made me a hunted man! If I send the two of you back, your world is safe, but what about the rest of the cosmos? I'm one of the few beings in all existence that knows of the invasion being perpetrated, and that makes my life far more important in the long scope than either of yours! I can still do a lot of good by spreading a warning to the right people! Look beyond your own petty concerns and realize that!"

"Okay, fine! But there must be some other way!"

Manners didn't speak. He squinted at Andrew, and then cupped his chin in that scholarly way of his. Andrew wondered if being a professor was half about imparting knowledge and half about theatrics.

"What?"

"Suppose..." he began, holding it out with the pomp and poise of a gifted lecturer, "You were to reach Mr. Pearson. I could get you as close as possible, and then the rest would be up to you."

"That's pretty much my plan so far."

"Yes, but let me finish. Suppose you were to reach Mr. Pearson and then...well...the Incarnates couldn't very well coerce him if he were dead, could they?"

The words made the pit of Andrew's stomach feel even heavier than it already was. "You mean...kill him? Me?"

"One life to save many; it's a concept as old as time. We leave him here, and your world dies. Mr. Pearson can't have given them anything yet or I would know it, so there's still time. If you can get within striking distance..."

Andrew didn't answer. He stepped around Manners and walked across the street to the driver's side door. As he opened it, a familiar moaning came from somewhere up the street, but he ignored it. On the driver's seat was his makeshift Spider-man evidence bag, filled with cash, Ronnie's gigantic revolver and a box full of ammunition. He snapped open the cylinder, loaded it, and held the gun sideways in his hands.

Manners came up behind him. "I could shift you back there. I can't guarantee what kind of resistance you'll meet, but I can get you as close as possible. They'll have him—"

"In the Furnace room," Andrew finished for him. "I know."

"You understand, of course, that you can't allow yourself to be captured either."

Andrew turned around with the gun still clutched tightly in his fist. "One of those vampire things...it looked just like Joey. That was another version of him from some other universe...wasn't it?"

"Undoubtedly."

"If they take my world, will that happen to the children?"

"Only to the most unfortunate."

Andrew nodded. "Then take me to Ronnie."

A whole chorus of pathetic moans drifted up the street this time. The Xerox people were back.

"We'd better move fast," Manners told him, drawing away.

"Wait a minute." Andrew looked over the truck bed at the crowd of mutated fiends in bathrobes and housedresses headed their way once more. "How many things can you shift at one time?"

~ ~ ~

"NO! OW, FUCK OWWW! OH GOD, PLEASE, STOOOOOOP!"

Ronnie's screams felt loud enough to pierce his own eardrums. He was stripped down to nothing more than his underwear, his clothes shredded in a game with razors that left his torso a bloody mess.

The Incarnate removed the superheated clamps away from the pinky toe he'd been so loving reducing to a burnt stump. His eyes blazed. "May we enter your dimension?"

Ronnie screamed with laughter. Or wept. He was having a hard time discerning what was coming out of his mouth anymore. "Mother may I take three baby steps forward?" he screeched. "No, you may not! May I take eight giant leaps forward and tear this maggoty, shit-eater's head off? Yes, you can fuckin well d-do thaaaaaaat!"

The Incarnate took down a new device from the wall, something with a narrow scoop on one end and a spike on the other.

"Bring it on, bitch! I've done a lot of shitty things in my life, but I don't want 'Ended the World' on my resumé!"

But he would. He knew it. His mind felt like squashed Play-Do. He couldn't take this forever, and he thought the Incarnate probably knew it too. Fact is, he didn't know why he hadn't already given in before now. It's not like he owed the world anything. It certainly hadn't done any favors for him.

So why not just give them what they wanted?

Because you believe Officer Andrew is coming for you...don't you?

He is. I came for him, and he's gonna remember that.

Then that makes you the stupidest high school dropout that ever lived. Why would Andrew risk his ass coming back for you? He and Manners are probably halfway to Hawaii by now, sipping coconut drinks and laughing at you for taking the fall.

Ronnie knew he probably should believe that—past experience had given him no reason to trust in others, that was for damn sure—but he didn't. Not even a little bit.

He just hoped the Jappy son of a bitch got here fast.

His torturer cranked some kind of wench below the table. The chains on Ronnie's ankles pulled, opening his legs an inch at a time.

The Incarnate pointed the scoop end of the device at the exposed crevice. "I'm told this one is especially uncomfortable."

Ronnie giggled, and he thought something in the darkness to his right laughed along with him.

* * *

#

Three Incarnates had been designated to guard the front doors of the mortal education facility which the Almighty Trofonag had chosen as his mainstay. One of them paced back and forth across the entrance in front of the others, so fuming mad his eyes had turned to a pulsing blood-red.

"We are missing the hunt," this one said.

"There will be no bloodshed," another answered. The words were a bit mangled due to his loose jawbone; he expected this body to give out any time now. "You heard the orders. Manners and the other human are to be found and brought here unharmed."

"We should kill them both," the first growled. "There is no reason to leave them alive."

"The human is insurance, in case the mortal now in our custody does not break fast enough. Manners however...Manners will be sent back to stand before the Stranger for his actions. He will pay for his betrayal."

"And what if escapes across the barrier?" the third asked.

"Then finding him in the mortal world will be our first priority once we secure a connection between universes."

The pacing Incarnate turned and started back across the paved walkway. He pulled the ragged blade from the sheath at his side and waved it over his head. "I tire of this place! This endless boredom! I want to be back in a sinning world again, I want to rend children with my bare hands and watch the Light drain out of their accursed eyes—!"

"Freeze, all three of you!"

The Incarnate was so surprised by the sudden intrusion, for a second he actually did halt. When he looked up, he was shocked to see the human all the way at the end of the school's pathway, wielding one of the projectile weapons they loved so much. Manners cowered behind him.

The other two drew their own weapons. None of them paused to wonder at this turn of events or the mortal's stupidity for coming here; their ways were brute force and immediate gratification over thoughtful consideration. They started forward. "Fire that, if you think you can hit all three of us before we reach you. You will only bring a hundred more of us down on your head."

The human lowered its weapon. "Then I guess we better try something else."

Manners spoke the Old Language. Artcrafts beyond the Incarnates' understanding. There was a shift in the air between the two groups, a rush of displaced air, and suddenly a crowd of thirty deformed mortals appeared on the lawn.

~ ~ ~

The first thing the Xerox mutants saw were the Incarnates. Manners had been careful to make sure they appeared turned the right direction, so the murderous rampage didn't backfire. The assemblage shrieked and ran to meet the three decaying demons, crooked limbs reaching.

The two forces clashed. The Incarnates waded into the fray, swinging their long daggers and hacking apart the mindless men and women, but there were just too many. Once they got their hands on the red-eyed fiends, they tore at them, pulled in different direction until rotted limbs separated, and then threw themselves on the ground to feast on the decayed flesh. The grisly sight was enough to make Andrew gag.

"C'mon!" He grabbed at the professor while the Xerox suburbanites remained distracted.

"Oh no, I never said I would accompany you!"

"Tough! Now move!"

Manner planted his loafered feet. "Shoot me if you must, but I'll not walk willingly back into their arms on this addle-brained mission of yours! If they get their hands on me, I'll suffer far more than Mr. Pearson, I assure you!"

Andrew paused. Manners had called him selfish before, and maybe that wasn't far from the truth. The intent of returning here had been to save his world—to secure a future for Joey and Michelle even if he didn't make it back—but if these creatures took possession of the professor again and put him back to work making these staging docks, then all worlds would be in danger.

A trillion other Joeys and Michelles on a trillion other worlds, if he understood the situation.

He released the man and looked into his eyes. "Don't you leave me, Professor Manners. Don't you go back without me."

"I can only promise to give you as long as possible. Mr. Pearson's resolve won't hold forever; frankly, I'm surprised he lasted this long. And, as I said, this staging dock is collapsing."

He pointed. Andrew looked past the still feasting clones at the school. Stress fractures stretched across the brick and concrete front of the school. The whole midnight sky felt heavy above them, like it was squeezing in, to such a degree that Andrew imagined he could even feel the pressure change in his eardrums.

"Those Elohaman...you're sure they won't be around?"

"No, they couldn't. Their influence on the physical world will be exhausted for a while."

"And there's not any other nasty surprises waiting for me in there?"

Manners flinched. It was barely perceptible, but as someone trained to watch for lies on the faces of drunks and criminals, it could've been a neon sign. "No. Just whatever Incarnates were left behind. But once they're aware of your presence, the others will probably come running."

What aren't you telling me, Professor? Andrew thought. He gave no outward indication of his suspicion. There wasn't enough time to coerce information the man wasn't willing to give.

Manners straightened his suit coat. "I must set about preparing for our exit. I'll shift back and collect you once the deed is done."

"How..." He swallowed to wet a suddenly bone-dry throat, brought about by the thought of 'the deed' in question. "How will you know?"

"Trust me," Manners said, and rattled off a string of those guttural words. He disappeared, not all at once, or with a puff of smoke, but more like a door had been closed in front of him; the term 'shifting' made complete sense. He took the deformed cannibals with him, leaving only Andrew and a collection of gnawed Incarnate body parts strewn across the school lawn.

He hurried to the front doors, taking no great pains to be quiet. He could hear the place creaking and groaning as he entered, slowly being crushed. One of the interiors walls buckled beside him.

An Incarnate raced down the hallway to the left at him, presumably drawn by the noise of the battle on the lawn. Andrew took careful aim with Ronnie's huge revolver and squeezed off a round when the creature was just a few yards away. The bullet hit it square in the forehead. A few dribbles of sluggish blood came out, and he went down. These things were tough, able to take a lot of punishment, but their bodies (and Andrew got the idea the flesh and blood was the equivalent of a cheap suit) could be killed. A wisp of black smoke wafted out from its eyes as the fire in them died. Andrew was careful to stay away.

He ran. Down the cracking hallways, killing two other Incarnates along the way with well-placed shots and then reloading. His memories of being carried through the school before were vague, but in order to find his destination, he only had to keep his palm against the wall and trace the titanic flow of power beneath its surface. Before he knew it, he was standing in front of a door marked FURNACE.

The black aura still surrounded it. A dark halo that ebbed and grew in waves, pulsing outward from the door's surface. The murk reached out for him when it was at the height of each cycle, with wispy hands made of a substance like the smoke that came from the dead Incarnates' eyes. A fountain of ill thoughts sprang up in his head as he regarded it, awful memories and hidden desires he'd never told a soul and base, vile fantasies dredged from the deepest depths of his Id. He had trouble believing such things could even originate in a human mind, let alone his own.

Andrew's heart squeezed up into his throat, where its frantic pulse threatened to choke him.

He couldn't open that door. To reach into that oily mass and turn that knob was lunacy. Doors were made for a reason, and whatever was on the other side of this one needed to stay here. His instincts—not just those honed by his cop background, but the ones that came with being human—urged him to run from here, find Manners, and beg the man to lead him out of this hell. And something told him that once his resolve broke, there would be no second try.

He wished he could say that it was the thought of Ronnie that stopped his flight—the punk had come back for him, after all, and Andrew believed in returning favors—but if he was being honest, he would have to admit it was Joey. God, he loved that boy so much. From the second he held him in the delivery room, Andrew knew there was nothing he wouldn't give up for him. All he wanted in that second was to hold his son again, to kiss those slender, artist fingers of his, and tell him it was all right to color outside the lines once in a while.

But in order to do that, Andrew had to get himself back inside the lines.

And ensure there was still an inside-the-lines to go back to.

Andrew reached into the layer of smog covering the door, wincing at the slimy feel against his skin, found the knob, and pulled it open, waiting for whatever lay behind it to pounce.

No monsters. Nothing lay in wait. Only a staircase leading down into darkness. He started down them, knowing that it couldn't be this easy.

~ ~ ~

The pain.

The pain was.

The pain was all consuming. Everywhere. Around him and in him. The past, the future, and the present coming together in one mind-blowing mental cataclysm.

Inescapable.

His mind was a blank. An empty landscape colored a screaming shade of red. He couldn't even remember his own name anymore, let alone why this was happening.

And then it stopped. Something swam through the haze of his vision. He (wait, Ronnie, that was his name) blinked away tears and stared up into the leering, cancer-ridden face hovering over him.

"Plea...se..." he rasped. His lips had forgotten how to form words. Each breath made him shudder. "N. No m-more."

"Only you can make that happen, human."

He couldn't remember what, exactly, the Incarnate had done to him during this last session, but it had involved a pair of gardening shears, thumbscrews, and a toilet brush. Ninety percent of his body was either contused or burned, with several small wounds along his extremities cut down to the muscle and one on his right side exposing ribs. A puddle of his own blood squelched beneath him on the table.

What he wouldn't give for the days when the only things hurting him were that piddly broken nose and chomped ear.

"Your species is so sensitive," the Incarnate rasped. "So delicate. You haven't learned to ignore the sensations of the flesh. I have seen pain do fascinating—and amusing—things to your kind. Unlocking long dormant abilities. Devolving into all manner of lower life. Agreeing to absolutely anything. All just to escape that which your pathetic minds should be capable of blocking out."

Ronnie didn't respond. No strength left in him to crack jokes. He used his tongue to raise the blood in the back of his mouth up and let it dribble down the side of his cheek.

The Incarnate went to the wall of torture implements and selected a new tool. He held it up where Ronnie could see. It was a steel rod with a crank on one end, and a metal bulb on the other, several inches in diameter.

"Do you know this, mortal? It is called a Pear of Anguish. Another instrument from the medieval period of your history. Exquisite era; torture, religious persecution, plagues by the dozen. It exists across almost all dimensions, no matter how different the timeline. Which I believe just proves you humans are as eager to be rid of each other as the rest of the cosmos is." He held the bulb over Ronnie's face. "If you do not tell me what I want to hear, I am going to insert this down your throat. Then..."

The Incarnate turned the crank at the other end. The bulb separated into four pieces, opening wider with each turn of the handle until it became a shiny blossom of sharp metal.

Ronnie wept. Blubbered as never before in his life.

His torturer leaned closer and crooned, "The internal damage will be massive, but it is not likely to kill you. You should even be able to speak enough to proceed."

"Don't. Oh God, please don't."

"Then TELL ME!"

"I don't remember what I'm supposed to say!"

"TELL ME I MAY RIP YOUR WORLD ASUNDER!"

Ronnie opened his mouth to give this creature what it wanted. He couldn't remember why he'd held out so long in the first place. It seemed like he'd been waiting for something, hoping for something, but whatever it was obviously wasn't going to happen.

He got as far as the letter Y when the door set into the brick wall to his left flew open. A man burst into the room. Ronnie didn't recognize him.

But he surely looked Jappy.

~ ~ ~

It took Andrew several moments to realize the bloody, beaten, burnt sack of meat in front of him was Ronnie. The kid was chained to an ornate little pedestal in his underwear, shaking like a palsy victim.

He couldn't see the opposite wall; this room stretched away (or was it down? Looking over there gave the impression of depth, like staring over the lip of a tall building) into impenetrable shadow. But on the far side of the table was Andrew's old friend, his seatmate for the bus ride. The last time Andrew saw this particular Incarnate was when he caved in the demon's skull with his shoe in the classroom where they brought him to Manners. Even with those smoldering eyes and the dent along the side of his head, the surprise on the creature's face was obvious when saw Andrew bursting into the room.

"YOU!" he screeched, coming around the table with a metal pole in his hand held up and back to swing.

"This is what you get for threatening my son," Andrew told him coolly. He raised the gun and fired, emptying an entire cylinder into the Incarnate. The flesh was so necrotic, so eaten up by whatever cancerous disease ravaged them, the large-caliber bullets tore gaping holes right through his torso. He didn't so much crumple as he disintegrated, splattering wet, blackish chunks across the cobblestone floor. The remains of his face released that puff of smoke which, Andrew suspected, were these things' true form.

From the darkness across the room came a roar of purest fury. He couldn't tell if he actually heard it or if it was only in his head, but he felt it all the way to his bones. It seemed to come from an impossible distance away, echoing across miles, oceans, light-years; distances so far they didn't have measurements. After it faded, he could feel a slight breeze against his skin, a wave of displaced air with a fetid under stench.

Something was coming. Something large and fast, hurtling up the brick-lined tunnel toward them. He could feel the power crackling from it, the source of all that latent energy running through the school.

And he did not want to be here when it arrived.

Ronnie looked the same direction when the blast of sound came, but now he twisted his head back around. The Incarnate had done a real number on him. He bled from more wounds than Andrew could count, but even more startling, the punk attitude was gone, wrung out of him like blood from a rag, leaving only a terrified, hurting young man. "Andrew," he gasped, as though recognizing him for the first time. "Help. Please."

Help. There was only way to help him now, one way to help both of them, and no time to waste talking, not even with himself. Especially with himself.

Andrew opened the cylinder of the revolver, fed in more bullets with a shaking hand, then snapped it closed. He crossed to the table quickly and pressed the barrel against Ronnie's forehead. The least he could do was make this quick and painless.

Ronnie gaped, crossing his eyes to stare up at the revolver. The confusion on his face smoothed out into understanding and, even worse, acceptance.

"I'm sorry," Andrew said, feeling moisture on his cheeks. "This is the only way."

Ronnie nodded beneath the gun. "D-do it. Put me outta my fuckin misery."

Andrew looked away. Squeezed the trigger. Felt the tension in the metal as the hammer pulled back. Wondered if he could ever face Joey again.

A few seconds later, the gun went off.

And the chain holding Ronnie's arms over his head was blasted apart.

"You don't get out of this that easy, you little shit," Andrew murmured. He turned and shot the chains holding the kid's feet, leaving steel bands around both his ankles. "C'mon, can you walk?"

"Walk? Man, I don't even know if I can move." Ronnie leaned up on the table and cried out, clutching a gaping wound in his side. Blood seeped between his fingers.

A crash swept out of the horizontal hole, the sound of smashed brick and collapsing mortar, definitely auditory rather than mental this time.

It was hollow and dull with distance, but much closer than the roar.

"We gotta go," Andrew said. "Right now."

~ ~ ~

Ronnie struggled up and swung his legs off the table. Andrew tossed him the shredded remains of his t-shirt from the floor by the fire-pit and he slipped it over his head, hissing through his teeth when the material touched his tender skin. Every movement fired pain up somewhere on his body as working muscles reopened fresh wounds. Two of his toes on his right foot were gone; one by heat, the other by blade. His Marglo bite pulsed heat.

But he didn't slow down. Not for a second. A chewing, grinding noise came from that darkness behind him, like a freight train was barreling at them and crashing through anything in its path. Ronnie remembered the Incarnate looking into those shadows as though seeking guidance just before starting his torment. There was increasing vibration in the floor and the walls as whatever had been at the other end of the— tunnel? hole?—approached at tremendous speed, a worm tunneling up from hell.

Oh, c'mon Ronnie-o, you know what's comin just like I do, his name starts with T, ends with G, and makes you feel like you just masturbated in the middle of an orphanage when you hear it. And he ain't gonna fit inside this tiny room when he gets here; this motherfucker is BIG.

He hopped off the torture table and his feet almost went out from under him. Andrew caught him before he went down. Ronnie put an arm over the man's shoulder and hawked a monstro loogie on the remains of the Incarnate. "There's your permission, bitch," he wheezed.

Andrew half-led, half-carried him through the door and up the dark staircase beyond. He ignored the screaming aches and sharp pains from all over his body as best he could. By the time they emerged into the hallway of the school again, the entire building quaked hard enough to drop plaster ceiling tiles from above. And Ronnie didn't think it was all because of whatever was burrowing up beneath them either. The place was flattening out like a pancake, the walls scrunching up like an accordion. The roof seemed at least a foot lower than the last time he'd been through here.

"It's collapsing!" Andrew yelled over the constant, unnatural grind. "The whole place, the entire universe!"

"It's like the trash compactor from Star Wars!"

"We have to find Manners!"

They moved as fast as they could toward the front doors, Ronnie in his t-shirt and underwear and Andrew supporting him while keeping the gun ready. The vibration beneath them continued to grow all the time.

Outside, the night sky was threaded with cracks. Cracks. Ronnie felt like he could go mad staring at that sight. Something bled through those chinks in the very air, an inky black that made the false night feel as bright as high noon in the desert. He imagined this world as a giant bubble suddenly, a delicate boundary of soap separating them from whatever lay beyond.

What would happen when the stress became too much, and the bubble finally burst?

He shivered, wincing when something in his side flared.

"Manners!" Andrew screamed, wandering out toward the where the school property met the street. Ronnie hobbled after him. "Where are you?"

"What do we do, man, what's the plan?" Time seemed to be slipping away like water through a breaking dam. Ronnie only knew one thing: he would rather die than go back into their custody.

"I don't know, he said he'd be here!" From the panic in Andrew's voice, Ronnie figured he probably felt the same.

The front doors of the school banged open again. A throng of Incarnates came sprinting out through them.

"Then we better think of something fast."

~ ~ ~

Too many to fight. All they could do is run. Andrew urged Ronnie across the lawn of the school, but the kid's injuries were slowing him down so much. Andrew took a few potshots into the closest members of the mob on their heels, giving him time to get a little further. Everywhere the ground shook, like the few earthquakes he'd been in, making them wobble as they moved.

When he turned back to sprint, he saw his truck shift into existence at the curb, the front end complete and undamaged once more. Even the bullet holes and shattered windows were repaired, all as new as the day he drove it off the lot. Manners appeared beside it, hurrying over to meet them, but stopped when his eyes landed on Ronnie.

"What is he doing here?" he cried.

"He's escaping, just like us!" Andrew shouted as they reached the professor and continued past to the truck. "We'll just have to find another way!"

"I told you, there is no other way! You weak fool, you've doomed us all!"

The Incarnates were still coming, a forest of red eyes and snarling mouths. Andrew yanked open the driver's door of his truck and let Ronnie slide in first. "Worry about that later, and let's get out of here!"

Manners ran, skirting around the hood and hurtling into the passenger door. Andrew dove behind the wheel and twisted the keys that were already dangling from the ignition.

"Go, go, go!" Ronnie screeched.

Andrew put the car in gear, floored the gas, and rolled all of two yards before the street in front of them cracked violently open.

The pavement rippled and thrust upward in a rough circle approximately thirty feet in diameter. Chunks of dirt and concrete—some of them the size of small automobiles—rocketed into the air, leaving a dark, round pit. At the same time, the trembling underneath them stopped.

And from the hole climbed...something.

Andrew coasted to a stop and stared in awe. Two gigantic, spider-like appendages rose up and found purchase to either side of the hole. They heaved, and, like a slow-motion jack-in-the-box, up came a head as big as his truck, a conglomeration of disgusting creatures, parts from rats, snakes, bugs, and more all jammed together in a Frankensteinian stew. It had pincers on either side of a mouth filled with grimy fangs, any of which was longer than a human body. Two iridescent green eyes—orbs that looked like they should be staring out of a forgotten swamp—regarded them as it roared, emitting the same sound Andrew had heard in the furnace room of the school. That mashed, misshapen face kept rising as it climbed from the hole, towering over them, revealing the eel body it was attached to, from which a thousand wiggly legs dangled in twin rows.

Andrew suspected this was the source of the shadow they'd seen, just before the doll attack. The king surveying his dock before nestling back into his putrid nest beneath the school to watch the torture show.

"Uh, maybe we don't go this way," Ronnie whispered.

"That's Trofonag, isn't it?" Andrew asked. The word twisted his stomach into knots.

"Yes," Manners answered.

"And you knew he was down there all along. You were going to let him take me, too."

"You insisted on going back. I never expected you to make it all the way in, much less out. And certainly not with Mr. Pearson in tow. I assumed, one way or another, that your world was finished."

Andrew didn't have time to get angry. He stomped the gas and twisted the wheel, swinging the truck away from the three-story tall Lovecraftian monstrosity in the road. From the edge of his vision, he saw one giant limb take a lumbering swipe at them and miss. Trofonag bellowed.

Before he could get the truck up to speed, the group of Incarnates reached them and swarmed over the vehicle. A body climbed the hood, obstructing his vision momentarily before sliding off. Glass shattered as the truck windows broke for the second time this day. They pulled away fast, but not before several of the demons climbed into the truck bed.

In the sideview mirror, Andrew saw the beast destroy the school with one swing of its jointed leg, before wriggling the last of its bulk out of the ground.

~ ~ ~

There was hardly time to breathe, let alone think. No sooner had they left Trofonag behind than the back window of the truck rained down glass on Ronnie's head. Rotting hands reached through and hauled at him. They yanked him out of his seat and had his head and shoulder through the window and hanging over the truck bed before he could grab onto anything. The remaining chunks of glass in the frame tore at his back.

Three Incarnates stared down at him. One moved to put a rusted blade against his vulnerable throat.

The truck swerved. All three of them stumbled sideways, one so much that it flew over the side. Ronnie thrashed in the grip of the other two, his tortured body screaming at the effort, and tried to worm his way back into the cab.

Gunshots blasted next to him. Andrew had one arm twisted backward out the window while he drove, firing the revolver over Ronnie's chest. One of the Incarnates let go of him after a bullet hit it in the shoulder and knocked it away. It crashed against the tailgate, which popped open and spilled the demon into the road.

That just left one. Andrew would have a hard time hitting it from his angle. Ronnie reached out, grabbed it around the head, and sank his thumbs into those glowing red ovals in its face.

The Incarnate howled. Ronnie expected blood or liquid of some sort, but got smoke instead. Like a miniature tornado, it funneled out of the creatures eyes...

And headed straight for his.

The movement was unnatural, denying the direction of the wind whipping around them. He shoved the dying Incarnate away, which sent it tumbling off the back of the truck with its brethren. The first wisp of smoke brushed against him, and, for just a moment, he felt a presence in his head, something clawing at the insides of his brain for purchase like a man about to fall off a cliff.

Then it was gone, and he slid dazedly back down into his seat just in time for the front windshield to be filled with the monstrous form of Trofonag.

~ ~ ~

Andrew drove as fast as he could while trying to help Ronnie with the Incarnates in the back. Since leaving the school, the streets had been empty, so he didn't have to worry about weaving. But no sooner was the kid safe than a giant shadow swept over them from the right, and suddenly Trofonag scuttled into the street, trampling an entire row of houses along the way.

All three occupants of the vehicle screamed.

Andrew had no idea how the monster had gotten in front of them. Probably the same way he and Ronnie had ended up back at their vehicles after taking a stroll this morning. One of its huge legs smashed into the pavement right in front of them, and he yanked the wheel to swerve around it at the last second.

Then they were sweeping under its reptilian belly, staring up at mottled flesh. Trofonag moved fast, turning in a circle to stomp them. Andrew flew around a corner fast enough to lean them up on two wheels. They sideswiped a car that deflated like a popped balloon before the truck shot back into the open. This time, Trofonag gave chase, the ground and car jumping every time one of its limbs thudded down.

Andrew leaned around Ronnie and shouted, "Where do we go?"

"THERE ISN'T ANYWHERE TO GO!" Manner screamed back at him. "Not for all three of us! This vehicle is bonded to take us back to your world, but I told you, only two can cross the barrier!"

"He's gaining!" Ronnie yelled, twisting around to look behind them.

"That's only one of our worries! This dock is dying!"

Andrew glanced at the suburban houses running alongside the street. The ones that hadn't faded away were badly crushed out of shape, that invisible hand steadily mashing down on them. Even these looked more like cartoon drawings than reality now. The sky seemed right on top of them, claustrophobically close. For the first time, he realized even Trofonag was keeping his head low as he scrambled after them.

"It isn't too late! One of us has to die or stay behind!"

"Definitely die," Ronnie said softly. "You don't wanna be alive if they get their hands on you, believe me."

Andrew coaxed a little more speed from the truck, bringing the odometer up to 90 miles per hour, an insane speed for streets designed for no more than 30. "What do you suggest then, Professor? Draw straws?"

"There's no need for that! I already told you, I'm too important, and you have a child!" Manners jabbed a finger at Ronnie. "Eliminate this thug! He's nothing to us, nothing to your world! Shoot him and be done with it!"

Ronnie turned to Andrew. The kid's eyes looked clearer than the entire time Andrew had known him. He wasn't sure where or how the metamorphosis had occurred, but this wasn't the same bankrobbing punk he'd chased down a scant few hours before. "He's right, man. If that's the only way, you gotta do it. Prob'ly be quicker than what ol' Red Eyes started."

Andrew made the hardest decision of his life in less than a second. "No. I didn't shoot you before, and I'm not going to now."

"Think about your world!" Manners screeched, absolute desperation on his face now. "Think about your SON!"

"I am," Andrew said, and stuck the barrel of the revolver in his own mouth.

He intended to pull the trigger immediately, no hesitation, but Ronnie moved fast, pulling his wrist away and knocking the gun out of his hand with an elbow. It hit the seat and rolled into the floorboard. "It ain't happenin like that, Andrew!"

Behind them, Trofonag roared and snapped at the back of the truck. Andrew could hear the beast in his head, speaking an alien gibberish that tore at the anchors of his sanity.

"I'll not die like this!" Manners declared. "If either of you are too weak to do what needs to be done, then by God, I WILL!"

He leaned down and retrieved the weapon.

"Look out!" Andrew yelled.

Manners fumbled the revolver, trying to get it turned correctly in his hand. He might be comfortable with quantum mechanics and the laws of the cosmos, but he was a ditz when it came to firearms.

Ronnie leapt on him. Manners snarled and fought with the kid. One of them must've hit the handle in the struggle, because the passenger door popped open, forcing the professor to grab at the seatback with one hand to keep from falling out. Andrew reached over, trying to get a grip on him while keeping his eyes on the road and the titan in their wake. The passenger seat became one big tangle of bodies.

The revolver went off.

Ronnie fell back in his seat, covered in fresh blood.

But Andrew saw immediately that it wasn't his. Manners sat up in the open truck door, looking down at a hole in his tweed suit vest the size of a quarter, from which a maroon flood gushed. The gun was backward in one limp hand, and Andrew plucked it away.

The professor's bewildered eyes came up to them. He muttered, "But I was going to save worlds..."

"Sometimes you can only save your own," Andrew said, "And let the rest worry about itself."

He fired the revolver again.

The bullet pushed most of Edward Manner's face through the back of his head. He flopped over backward and fell out of the vehicle. Andrew saw his corpse roll in the street before Trofonag crushed it flat with a careless step.

He and Ronnie said nothing to each other as the kid leaned over and pulled the door closed. The monster was almost on top of them, but so was everything else. The sky was falling, those cracks widening and black slime running through in steady streams. The houses on either side were disappearing, the street beneath them losing definition, becoming one big, black, featureless plane and even that was squeezing in around them...

And suddenly the road ahead was awash with light. Pure light, clean light, sunlight. It came from nowhere and everywhere, brightening so hard and fast that it blinded him, made the truck glow at every angle where it kicked up sparks of light. He felt the tires leave the ground, and then they were travelling toward the light at incredible speed.

The last thing Andrew saw before his vision blotted out entirely was the neighborhood behind them shrinking to a pinprick in the rearview mirror, an island in the middle of rich, deep darkness, and Trofonag screaming as it closed in around him.

~ ~ ~

The sunlight was too bright. Ronnie covered his face and peered out through his fingers.

The truck sat diagonally across the access road, the freeway just ahead and below them. Cars whizzed by without taking any notice.

"Are...are we back?" Ronnie asked.

A horn blatted from his left, and an angry driver edged through the narrow space between truck hood and guard rail, shaking his fist at them as he passed.

"Yeah, we're back," Andrew answered.

He opened his door and stepped out. Ronnie did the same, leaning against the side of the vehicle for support.

Behind them sat the red brick wall that flanked the entrance to Strangewood Homes. Except it wasn't called Strangewood Homes anymore; now the sign read 'Sternwood Homes.' People drifted out of the houses closest to the entrance—real people this time, limbs all numbered correctly and in the right location, folks in bathrobes who peered curiously at their stopped vehicle.

Ronnie imagined what they were seeing—two bloody men, one of whom was in his underwear—and began to laugh.

~ ~ ~

Andrew pulled the truck over against the curb, out of the way of the minimal traffic. Far down on the opposite side of the freeway, right about where the bank would be, he could see an ocean of flashing red and blue lights.

Joey would be down there. Andrew wanted to see him so much.

But first things first.

He left the door of the cab open and stood outside, loving the feel of sun on his face. He knew what the Beatles meant now: it did feel like years, in his heart. And though his head told him it had at least been hours, as near as he could tell they'd only been physically gone for a few minutes, if even that.

Ronnie was a few yards away, sitting on one of the wooden guard rail posts with arms wrapped around his own torso. His bare legs and arms were caked in dried blood and filth, but his face—aside from his lumpy nose—looked surprising clean. Andrew went over and sat down beside him.

"I would ask if that really happened, but I'm still in too much pain for it not to've," the kid said.

"We have to get you to a hospital."

"It's all good, dude. None of what that fucker did was designed to kill me, so there ain't no rush." Even so, he winced when he removed his arms and put his hands in his lap. "So you think...it's okay? They're not gonna get through or whatever?"

Andrew turned to look across the street. The Sternwood residents were gathering at the mouth of the housing edition, staring down the street at the cavalcade of cops around the bank, more arriving all the time, glancing warily at the two of them every few minutes. He didn't know what it would be like if Trofonag and the Incarnates breached the boundary between worlds—if it would be immediate chaos or a far more subtle infiltration—but the feeling in his gut told him they were safe.

"I think it's all right," he said.

A wistful smile crossed Ronnie's face as he whispered, "We saved the world. Awesome."

"No, not we. You." Andrew held out a hand, the way he had when this whole mess was first getting started. "I don't know a lot of men who could've held out during what you went through. So...thank you. Thank you for giving my son a chance."

"Yeah, yeah, just be sure to tell the judge that. I'm sure they'll let me out in a couple of decades." Ronnie accepted the hand with a roll of his eyes. Then a cloud seemed to move over his disposition. "Back at the school...or even in the truck... Why didn't you do it, Andrew?"

He didn't have to ask what the kid meant. He also didn't have an answer ready.

"I would say you didn't have the balls, but you blew away Manners when it came down to the wire."

Andrew frowned at the mention of the professor. He could already feel guilt gnawing at him, and he only expected it to get worse in the days, months, and years ahead. The man was a monster—a different kind of monster—but his death was a further tragedy.

How many worlds had Andrew doomed by killing him? How many universes?

He answered, "You didn't shoot me when you had the chance. And you came back for me when they had me in the school."

"Yeah, but that's different. We didn't understand the stakes yet. But you knew you had to kill me to stop them from gettin through. You knew you had to do it if you ever wanted to go home again."

"But I didn't kill you, and yet here we sit."

"Goddamn it, you know what I mean." Ronnie spun on the post to face him, and Andrew saw the stark need to understand in his eyes. "Manners was right. I ain't nuthin to you. I ain't nuthin to anybody. Nobody here would shed a fuckin tear if I was the sacrifice needed to make sure the world kept on tickin. To make sure the Sternwoods of the world got to keep watchin bad Michael Bay movies and eatin themselves to a heart attack. So why were you ready to throw your life away for me?"

Andrew grabbed Ronnie's wrist and pressed the truck keys into his open palm.

"Because everyone deserves a second chance to color inside the lines, Ronnie."

The kid stared at the key ring for several seconds. "Does this mean you're not arrestin me, Officer Andrew?"

"Can't have the savior of the world rotting in prison. Just go. Fast. They're going to come looking for us any minute. I'll buy you as much time as I can."

"Sure you won't get in trouble?"

"Not looking like this, I won't. Just don't get caught, because I'm going to have to tell them you did all this to me. In the glove box, there's $200 I keep for emergencies. Find someplace to clean yourself up, then ditch the truck and grab some new wheels. I hope I don't have to tell you—"

"—not to try this again. Yeah, I'm way ahead of you."

Ronnie got up and hobbled for the truck.

~ ~ ~

He backed up, intending to go the wrong way on the access road for the short distance it would take to get to the overpass. His body still hurt, but besides the toes, the ear, and the nose, he didn't think it was anything permanent. Even his Marglo infection felt better; apparently germs couldn't cross the barrier either.

Mark's funeral. He probably still had time. But after that, he had no idea where he was going. Usually that realization thrilled him, but at the moment it just made him very, very sad.

Andrew stood at the open passenger window. "Take care of yourself."

"You too." He grinned. "Thanks, Jap."

"Thank you, shithead."

Ronnie pulled away. A glance in the rearview showed Andrew waving his arms and running after him. He braked.

Andrew yanked open the passenger door, leaned into the floorboard, and came up with a plastic bag with Spider-man's face on it.

"Everyone deserves a second chance," he said, "but not this much of a second chance."

Ronnie laughed, and drove toward the dazzling California sun.

* * *

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# ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Russell C. Connor has been writing horror since the age of five, and is the author of two short story collections, five eNovellas, and ten novels. His books have won two Independent Publisher Awards and a Readers' Favorite Award. He has been a member of the DFW Writers' Workshop since 2006, and served as president for two years. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his rabid dogs, demented film collection, mistress of the dark, and demonspawn daughter.

His next novel—Predator—will be available in the fall of 2018.

