We haggled over price for a while, in a friendly way, which lasted long enough for the first of Gersh’s satay skewers to come out of the oven, the chicken just right, juicy and smelling divine. We had a couple, thanked the Spinkses, and then headed back downstairs.
“They are nice,” said Halyna. “Remind me of Ukrainians.”
“I’ll tell them you said so. I’ve known them awhile. They’re good people, that’s for sure. Cubby used to be in the Navy. I think Gersh was some kind of drug dealer back in the sixties.”
Halyna nodded. She wasn’t the judging type. I liked that.
We had almost reached the expressway when she said, “Oh, I know where this is! The apartment is near. Can you stop there? I want to get something.”
“Our old apartment building? Tierra Green? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It is important. That is the truth, Bobby. Please stop, just for one minute.”
That’s when I made my one, really bad mistake. I was immersed in planning mode, thinking out who should get the phones, where we would go if Caz’s place was compromised, and how I was going to deal with a summons from Heaven if I got one. In other words, I was distracted. “I guess,” I said. “But it has to be fast, and I’m not parking anywhere near the place.”
We stopped two blocks away on Hilton Drive, and I let Halyna out. I stayed with the car, sat low in the seat, and kept my eyes open. Although it was near the end of the working day and lots of people were on the sidewalks and streets, I didn’t see anything that worried me. But when Halyna hadn’t come back in fifteen minutes, I began to feel differently.
I left the car locked, with the new phones under the seat, and walked a casual route through the deepening twilight, back toward my old apartment building. I watched the place for several minutes, but although a few people went in and came out, I didn’t see anything that looked like serious trouble. Even so, I was holding my gun in my coat pocket and was just about to head in when Halyna appeared. She kept looking from side to side as she walked, a worried expression on her face, but she didn’t look hurt. I waited until she was out of sight of the building before I crossed the street to join her.
“Bobby!” she said when she saw me. “I saw one. I saw one man.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Not so loud. What man?”
“A man I saw before. Black Sun, the one with yellow hair. He was in the back of the apartment, I mean downstairs. I saw him from the window!” She looked far more worried than I would have expected from a woman who could probably turn most grown men into hamburger in any fair fight.
“Shit.” I was angry with myself, so worked up about Anaita that I had all but forgotten my neo-Nazi friends. I’d made it clear I wasn’t going to help them, and had probably fucked up their local operation pretty good by calling the police, but even if they just wanted to punish me for that, why were they hanging around an apartment I hadn’t visited for a long time? “We shouldn’t have come here, damn it. What did you have to get that was so important?”
She held up a rumpled brown paper bag, folded into a package the size of a hardcover book. “Letters from my sister.” She looked sad but defiant. “I could not leave these. She is the only one from my home I still care about!”
“Yeah. Well.” I didn’t really know what to say. I was angrier with myself than with her. “Just hop in and let’s get out of here.”
As we pulled out, I saw something skitter along the sidewalk near the car and disappear into the bushes. It might have been a squirrel or a cat, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t either of those things. I cursed, but I decided not to tell Halyna. Instead, I concentrated on making sure we weren’t followed.
It was getting dark and the commute was in full flow, so it took about twenty minutes to escape downtown Jude. I wasn’t going near the freeway at that time of day, so I took the bumper-to-bumper route along the Woodside Expressway until I could turn onto Middlefield. South of the expressway there’s a long belt of industrial buildings before you reach the edges of the Atherton district, and I thought we’d be able to get home faster that way. In most circumstances, I’d have been right.
The sky to the west had been red when we were on the expressway, but the sun had just dropped behind the hills, and in front of us the horizon had cooled to such a dark blue it was nearly black. The streetlights were on, but the sidewalks and buildings seemed largely deserted.
“It is too dark,” Halyna said abruptly.
“This part of town shuts down after five,” I said, but the Amazon had twisted in her seat and was staring into the back of the car.
“Bobby,” she said, “something is on the window.”
I slowed down and looked over my shoulder to see what she was talking about. It took a moment before I realized that the back passenger window on her side had gone black. Totally black, although I could see lights all around us through the other windows.
The wheel of the car bumped up a curb, and I had to look at where I was going, just in time to avoid ramming a soap-scribbled showroom window. I got back onto the road, narrowly avoiding a fire hydrant.
“Something is coming through the window,” she said, her voice shaky. “Like black snakes . . . !”
I looked back in time to see something squeezing through the top of the window, something dark and faintly shiny that had made itself almost as flat as paper to slide through the crack between window and doorframe. An instant later, the questing tendrils became a streaming, rubbery sheet, ribboning into the back seat like someone was pumping in liquid latex.
A tentacle of the dark, rubbery stuff whipped out and grabbed my neck. Another flopped over my eyes. Halyna screamed in surprise and kept screaming. I probably would have too, except the blob around my neck was now blocking my mouth as well. Whatever had crawled into the car seemed to have no shape, no bones or limbs, but I felt something sharp biting at my arm. And I couldn’t see. Did I mention that? Not good when you’re driving.
Still mostly blinded by the thing wrapped around my head, I jerked the wheel to the right and jammed my foot down against the accelerator. The Datsun leaped ahead and hit the curb again, this time so hard that I could hear the tire blow out. Then something like a giant fist rocked the entire car. The Datsun was way too old to have airbags, but the jelly-like substance that was currently smothering me kept me from going through the windshield.
The collision with whatever we’d hit had stunned the rubbery thing just enough for me to get my arm up and yank the slippery tendril loose from my eyes. The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks but still intact. We had smashed into the side of a building; chunks of plaster and brick were piled on the ruined hood. Halyna was still screaming, but she was also struggling with the strands that had grabbed her.
I still didn’t have the slightest idea what we were fighting. It was ridiculously slick, shapeless, and definitely stronger than a human—that is, if it was just one thing. I grabbed at the tentacle or pseudopod or whatever the long, sticky thing was that had snared Halyna, and pulled hard, trying to get her free. Meanwhile, the thing began exerting itself to drag me into the back seat, where the dark, shapeless bulk of it still lay.
I was almost standing on the driver’s seat now: it felt like fighting a giant octopus, something immensely strong and slick, but with no actual shape I could make out. Luckily, my struggle distracted its attention enough that Halyna finally got the passenger door open and fell out onto the pavement. After a moment, she kicked her legs free and rolled a couple of yards away.
“Run!” I yelled just before the thing slapped another slithery arm over my face, but I didn’t have time to see whether Halyna had escaped because now something was also trying to eat its way into my chest. Using my legs as well as my arms, I finally managed to wrench the pseudopod loose from my face.
By this point I was nearly upside down in the driver’s seat. My unwanted passenger started to flow over me, and that didn’t seem like a good or healthy thing. I yanked a hand free, reached down to the floor, and grabbed the first item I could find, the bag of phones, then used it to bash the nearest rubbery arm as hard as I could. It knocked the blob-creature back a little, but didn’t discourage it much. The problem was that I was stuck half under the steering wheel, with no room to maneuver. I pushed myself around and toward the passenger seat until I could finally draw my gun. I fired straight into the thing, silver slugs, four or five as fast as I could pull the trigger. The noise was ear-splitting in the enclosed space but the shots did absolutely fuck-all, making several holes in the jelly-beast that quickly closed right up again, and some in the roof of my Datsun that didn’t.