But even so, the mannequin woman was not whole.
Not entirely.
Her broken arm hung from its socket by cords as did her hand and leg, her head slumped forward on her neck.
Ramona screamed.
She wasn’t and had never been a screamer, but what she saw was like ice water thrown in her face and everything inside her vented itself.
The mannequin woman dangled there, loose and boneless like some limp marionette… and then she jumped away into the darkness above. Or was towed away.
Regardless, she was just gone.
That’s when Ramona heard the van start up.
Chazz?
The headlights came on, spearing into her. They were so bright that she had to squint her eyes and hold her hand up. The engine was revved again and again. Slowly, cautiously, she walked over in its direction, stepping very carefully and expecting trouble. She could see a shape in the driver’s seat.
A shape with a broken neck, head drooping limply to one shoulder.
Shit!
The van roared forward, laying rubber. It came right at her, picking up momentum. It was going to run her down. As it vaulted forward, jumping the curb, she threw herself to the side and it missed her by inches, plowing right through the plate glass windows of a little barbershop in a spray of glass. The engine revved again. The driver—and she knew very fucking well who or what that was—was trying to pull back out. The rear wheels were spinning and smoking. The van was lodged on something.
She broke into a run, heading in the direction she thought Lex and the others had gone.
Behind her, the van pulled free and squealed out into the street.
Headlights framed her again as it bore down on her.
8
“Now what?” Creep said when they finally came to a stop and caught their breath. “Now what the hell do we do?”
“We just try and mellow out,” Lex told him.
“Oh, wonderful plan.”
Soo-Lee shook her head. “Just shut up. We need to get a grip here and quit panicking so we can figure things out.”
“I just want to go home,” Danielle said.
Which was about the tenth time now that she had said that. The sound of her voice was starting to go right up Creep’s spine. He had a mad desire to slap her right across the face. He would never do such a thing, at least he didn’t think so, but he wanted to real bad. And that was partially out of rage, frustration, and annoyance, but mostly because her insipid weakness reminded him so much of his own.
They had taken off in a blind run after that shit came down with the crazy man. Creep still wasn’t sure what to make of that. Had he really seen it? Yes, yes, of course he had. It had taken something real ugly to get them all running in the first place and it had been ugly all right. But where were they now? He wasn’t even sure. They had run down the street and around the corner and kept running. They were two or three streets away from the van now.
Away from Chazz. No loss there.
But also away from Ramona and Creep had a real thing for her. He hadn’t known her before tonight. He knew Chazz. Christ, he was the guy who fixed Chazz’s laptop after the idiot locked it up downloading porn. Creep did a lot of work for the boys on the team and that’s how he had hooked up with Chazz. Ramona was Chazz’s squeeze, but they barely tolerated each other and he knew for a fact that Chazz was sleeping with at least three other girls. And he was almost sure that Ramona knew it, too.
What was her thing? Did she dig abusive relationships? Maybe. Some girls were like that.
Chazz had thrown the whole thing together. Lex and Soo-Lee, he and Ramona, and Creep. They caught Green Day at the Garden. Danielle was some chick Ramona knew, so they brought her along as Creep’s blind date. It hadn’t worked so well. She gave him the cold shoulder and he thought she was an idiot. She was strictly the girly cheerleader type that you had to treat like a princess just to get a freaking hand-job on the fifth date.
Not like Ramona.
Ramona was petite with long black hair, great cheekbones and big dark eyes. Kind of olive-skinned like a Native American. And fierce. God, she was fierce and smart and in-charge. She made his blood boil.
“Let’s just wait here a bit,” Lex said. “If things are cool, we’ll go back and look for Ramona and Chazz. My guess is that they’re hiding out, though. They probably won’t come up for air until the police get here.”
“Shouldn’t they have been here by now?” Danielle said.
Score one for the dizzy blonde, Creep thought.
“Soon,” Lex said.
“Sure,” Soo-Lee agreed, although it was obvious she didn’t believe it for a minute.
“They’re not here because they don’t know where here is,” Creep said, which only got him stony silence.
He peered down the street and saw only darkness.
The glass fronts of shops reflected back cool moonlight. Shadows spilled out over the walk in murky puddles. He had no reason to believe there was any immediate danger down there, hiding and waiting to leap out at them… yet, he was certain of it. He could feel that dread certainty crawling inside his guts like looping worms.
They were in danger.
Incredible danger.
He could feel it moving around them in the darkness like the cold coils of a snake. It was circling them, pressing in ever closer, grinning with long white teeth and watching them with hungry, ebon eyes.
Just stop it. Just stop that shit.
He swallowed it down before he lost it, before he really lost it, and did something stupid like running again.
But Christ, whatever was out there—and he figured the broken man was but a finger of it—it was almost like he could feel it reaching out for him, wanting to wrap bony digits around his throat.
“I don’t like this shit,” he said. “We’re like sitting targets or something.”
Soo-Lee sighed. “Calm down. We called 911. The police and ambulance should be here soon. We should be hearing their sirens anytime now.”
Creep just rolled his eyes.
He didn’t like this shit.
Soo-Lee was easy on the eyes, exotic and Asian and all that, but she was like some extension of Lex and he didn’t like that at all. They could pretend there wasn’t something very messed-up about this situation, but they were wrong. They could try and rationalize it all they wanted, but Creep’s fucking Spidey-Sense was tingling. In fact, it felt positively electrical. His stomach was hollow and his scalp felt like it wanted to crawl right off the back of his head. He had the most disturbing feeling that they had now entered the Twilight Zone.
And if he needed more evidence, then that man… that mannequin… that thing they had run down pretty much clinched it.
Danielle had pressed herself up against the plate glass windows of a coffee shop now like a spider flattening itself on a brick to suck up some heat.
Her entire body was shaking.
She isn’t goddamn helping, he thought. She isn’t helping at all.
And again, he knew it was because she was acting on the outside the way he was feeling on the inside.
“Danielle,” Soo-Lee said in a very relaxed, calming voice. “It’s going to be okay. The police will be coming soon. Then we can get out of here. Just try to take it easy.”
But she wasn’t taking it easy.
She was shaking so bad she was rattling the window.
“It’s gonna come for us. It’s gonna find us. It’s gonna kill us,” she said, her voice high and squeaking like she was eight years old again. And maybe she was at that.