And for Creep, whose major sports consisted of marathon sessions of Resident Evil, she was simply out of his league.
He called out to Lex and Soo-Lee, but they were already on the way.
Man, this was just great. Like they didn’t have enough problems already trying to stay alive and keep sane, now they had to babysit this psycho bimbette while she showed them how she ate the turf in the 100-yard dash.
He saw her disappear around a corner ahead and, damn, she did not break stride at all. She leaned into it and zipped around it with incredible grace. The sort of grace that would have put Creep himself right on his ass and twisted an ankle to boot.
He made the corner finally, but he had to slow way down and even so, Christ, he nearly tripped over his own feet like a geriatric monkey. But there she was. Just ahead and pouring on the speed again.
He followed her, hearing Lex and Soo-Lee gaining on him.
He had a feeling they would overtake him any second.
He saw Danielle round another corner and by that point he was starting to think she wasn’t even fucking human. He was ready to give up, call it a day and hang up his cleats, but something pushed him on. He was not the bravest guy in the world—outside of X-box 360, where he was nearly a legend—but he knew that if he didn’t stop her, something really bad would happen to her. Something that might have already happened to Chazz and, gulp, Ramona.
He came around the corner at the precise moment that Danielle skidded to a halt like a sprinting wildebeest that had just run smack dab into a hungry lion.
Only, in this case, a lion would have been preferable.
Creep saw the doll man standing there and he stopped, too. This guy—thing, whatever it was—was a huge form that towered above her like a graveyard angel. It wore a huge dark coat that looked like a moldering tarp. It hobbled closer to her with a see-sawing side to side gait, dragging one leg behind it. Its face was like a fright mask made of burlap or pale gray sackcloth, but yet it was flesh because as it spoke, the thin-lipped, crooked mouth moved as if muscles beneath were in motion.
Creep heard what it said: “Is that you, doll-face?”
Then it swung what it held in one narrow, long-fingered hand… a hatchet. The blade caught Danielle right at the crown of her skull, splitting her head like moist green wood. The sound it made reminded Creep of a cleaved gourd. He was hit by a wet spray of blood and brains and went right down to his knees with a broken cry.
The hulking thing began to drag itself in his direction, stepping over the still-shuddering corpse of Danielle.
Creep just waited for it.
He was speechless and stunned, his mouth hanging open, fingers numbly pawing at the blood and gray matter on his face, which had the consistency of greasy gelatin from a canned ham. He was struck dumb and motionless. It felt like his own blood had drained down into his feet and he was in danger of pitching over face-first to the sidewalk.
The moonlight made the hatchet man’s face look almost luminous.
There were tufts of white hair jutting from his malformed head, the face itself seamed and sutured, one empty eye socket set lower than the other, both filled with the formless blackness of endless nighted catacombs. He had no nose and his mouth was distorted from the stitching that held it together.
Again, Creep was struck by the impression that it was a mask… but as the thing approached him, it grinned with a lopsided, mocking smile. “Is that you, doll-face?” it asked, raising its hatchet to strike. Gore dropped from the blade. Tissue and hair were clotted on it.
Creep waited for it, but then Lex grabbed him and pulled him away, half dragging him and half carrying him out of range of the monster.
“Run!” Soo-Lee said. “Run!”
She was leading them and Creep found his feet and ran at Lex’s side, feeling suddenly that he could have run ten miles if that’s what it took. His fear and horror became vigor and he put it to work.
Behind them, the hatchet man followed.
15
In the brooding silence, Ramona moved up the sidewalk, doing her best to keep out of the direct moonlight and beneath the shadows thrown by the awnings positioned over the storefronts. Each one was striped. Each one antique. Each one out of place and time like the whole goddamn town.
She knew that in the greater scheme of things, or at least the greater scheme of the town specifically, that it meant something if she could only figure out what. Her head was just too full of shit to figure it out. Too much anxiety and stress and terror and apprehension.
It was all masking her ability to think clearly, to reason.
This place was a box, a big black box, but there was a key that opened it if only she could find it and recognize it for what it was.
The alarm had sounded again and that was trouble.
The last time it had sounded, the broken man had come to life and that other thing in the van had attacked Chazz, poor, worthless Chazz. In her way of thinking, that meant if there were other mannequin people around, the alarm probably had activated them.
She had no real proof of that, but she believed it.
For now, she had to find the others.
They had to be here somewhere. But that seemed to be part of the problem. Every street seemed to look alike. The business sections were like repetitions of one another as were the residential districts. She swore she saw the same storefronts, the same houses again and again. That was impossible, of course, because she was moving in a straight line, yet the feeling persisted.
It not only persisted, but it haunted her.
She stopped there beneath one of the awnings, one of the same striped awnings, trying to make sense of things. Yes, reality was distorted here, but just because it was, that did not necessarily mean there wasn’t a rhyme and a reason behind it all.
Oh, quit trying to fucking rationalize everything. Don’t you get tired of it all?
But she didn’t because that’s who and what she was. She had spent her life looking for signs and portents, the systematics and mechanisms behind perfectly ordinary events. Take Chazz, for example. She had known for some time he had been screwing around on her, but she didn’t leave him. She didn’t even broach the subject or sink to his level like many other women might have and start sleeping around. No, not her. She looked for vague clues and hints in conversations and daily activities with him that should have tipped her off that his infidelity was inevitable and wondering what she had done wrong, what she had failed to recognize, and how she must be on guard against minor infractions in their relationship that led to major problems.
And she was doing that now.
She waited there, smoking a cigarette, knowing she had to quit before swim season started… but tonight was just not the night.
She was thinking about that alarm or siren or whatever it had been. She knew the general direction it came from—the east—and she was very tempted to track it to its source because she felt deep inside that if she could do that, she might be able to shut it down, and if she shut it down, she might just shut this whole town down with it.
But that was foolish and dangerous.
The reasonable thing was to give up looking and backtrack to where the van had been. That was the point of entry into this madhouse and probably the escape route.
She turned around, moving faster now in the direction she had come.
The same storefronts, the same houses, the same everything.
She walked and walked and walked and it seemed she was still no closer to where she had been, wherever that was and wherever it could be in the greater scheme of this lunacy.