I knew I had to get out of the car or I was dead. I didn’t know what this boneless monstrosity would do to me—the word “absorbed” flitted briefly through my imagination—but I knew it wouldn’t be good, so I dropped the gun and reached into the glove compartment, hoping to find something sharp to cut myself out of its grip. I was lying across both seats, gear shift poking my back and open passenger door only a foot away from my head, but the thing had wrapped itself around my legs, hugging like a python, while the rest of it tried to ooze over the seat and smother me, like two hundred pounds of lust-crazed gelatin.
I couldn’t find anything useful in the glove compartment, and every second of fighting one-handed brought me closer to destruction. Maps, a garage-door opener, all kinds of crap came tumbling out, me trying to figure out what they were by distracted touch. Pens, a road flare—a road flare! I tried to pull it toward me, wondering if fire might succeed where bullets failed, but the blob slapped at my head and arm with one of those flapping jelly tentacles and the flare flew out the open passenger door.
Now it was most of the way over the seat, its flabby bulk pressed against the dome light cover, and the only thing holding it away was my kicking legs. I reached out and found the bag of cell phones again. I started to beat the creature as hard as I could with it, over and over, but it was like punching the world’s biggest, nastiest gummy bear. Then it finally got between the driver’s seat and the ceiling and poured slowly down on top of me, the weight pushing my knees back against my chest. Then I saw the great, blunt knob of the nearest jelly arm begin to change.
It hardened, at least that’s how it looked—like ice forming on a windshield. The dark, rubbery material turned paler, almost white, then split. The pale bits were getting longer, sharper, a Moray eel’s mouthful of ragged fangs. I’m so fucked, was all I could think. Because this thing was growing teeth on the end of its arm.
I had just a half a second or so to prepare for getting my face bitten off, when something incredibly bright white and red shoved in from the passenger door. The limb with the new teeth jerked away from the glare, pseudo-mouth gaping. It even hissed. I think it did, anyway, though it might have been the flare that Halyna was holding.
The jelly monster retreated halfway into the back seat as the flare came near, flattening itself into a shape somewhere between a sunflower and a buzzsaw. I scrambled toward the passenger door. My automatic was lost somewhere under the seat, but I grabbed the bag of phones before I tumbled out onto the sidewalk, then kicked the door shut behind me.
We had crashed the car into the side of a big white building that said “Carquinez Auto Repair” in block letters along the top, but I didn’t think a mechanic was going to do us any good. The thing in the car was going crazy, thumping the windows until they were all cracked, making the small vehicle shake like a pudding in an earthquake. Halyna did her best to help me up. Her face was covered with bloody scratches. I grabbed the flare out of her hand.
Crash! A big, purple-black arm knocked a hole in the back seat window. The thing was already starting to ooze out the opening when I tugged open the gas tank cover. Thank God this car was old enough that the cover didn’t lock. I shoved the flare in, grabbed Halyna by the arm, and ran.
A white-yellow jet of flame jumped out of the gas tank, then a second later an immense whump of an explosion knocked us staggering. Pieces of metal and plastic began to rain down around us. When I turned, the Datsun was engulfed in flames, the new black paint bubbling, so that, for a moment, I could see bits of the old green paint beneath, then a second later those bits turned black too. Inside the car, the jelly monster thrashed in the flames for long moments before sinking down out of sight. I had a second or two to breathe, then a dark arm, flat as a ribbon, pushed its way out through the tiny space between door and doorframe, like something shat out of the Devil’s own Play-Doh Fun Factory.
Whoompf! Another explosion sent flames even higher, and the flattened, reaching arm straightened and then began to shrivel. A bit of the end dropped off and fell on the pavement where it lay, twitching. People were running toward us now from several directions, so I hurried forward and held the flare against the fallen piece of awfulness until it turned to greasy char.
“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! My car!”
“Your car is fuck,” said Halyna sadly. She wiped a sweaty ringlet of red hair out of her eyes. Her face was ghost-pale. “Totally fuck. Now how do we get home?”
I could hear sirens in the distance, coming closer. The pyre of ashy black smoke had risen far above the building, and the flames reached almost as high. People could probably see my burning ride from every tall building in downtown Jude.
twenty-two:
fortune’s favorite
BY THE time I’d finished dealing with the police and we got a cab home (or at least close enough to walk home, since cab companies keep records of where they drop you off) I was in about as shitty a mood as you’d expect. It wasn’t the loss of my car so much—well, yes, it was, because cars are expensive, and I was going to run out of money at this rate long before I’d planned—as the feeling that I’d dropped the ball.
While Oxana rushed off to find first aid for Halyna’s scrapes and cuts and bruises, I sat down and examined my own injuries in good light for the first time. Nothing too severe, but a number of weird bite-shaped traumas on my arms and legs.
“Okay,” I said. “Can anybody tell me what that was?”
Halyna and I had tried to discuss it while the police were there, but all she’d been able to whisper to me was that it was a “bug,” which made no sense, unless they were raising bugs in nuclear reactors these days.
“Black Sun gets them,” said Oxana on her way past with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Bird bug.”
“There is no such thing as a bird bug.”
“Not bird. Bear bug.” Halyna separated herself from Oxana’s ministrations. “That is the name. I have heard it. Bear bug.”
I stared at her for a long moment, then it clicked. “Bugbear. Not bear bug—bugbear. I’ve heard of those, too. But they’re not easy to summon.”
“Black Sun is very bad,” Halyna said. “We telled you. Told you. They have things like this they can call.”
I groaned. “Great. So not only do I have an angry goddess after me, the Black Sun Faction is now trying to kill me with vicious pudding monsters.” But it did seem strange. I’d never seen one of the four-limbed Nightmare Children before or even heard of them, but I knew a little about bugbears, and they were no small potatoes in the Monsters of Ancient Darkness category. How could a bunch of idiots like Baldur von Ridiculous and his merry band of racists call on something like that? And if they thought I had Eligor’s horn stashed somewhere, or just knew how to find it, why were they sending monsters to kill me instead of just following me?
I set my gun down, then opened the bag of cellphones, which rattled ominously. But when I set them out on the table I discovered to my immense joy that nothing worse had happened than the backs had popped off a couple of them. My coat, though, smelled like burnt oil and burnt bugbear (which was much worse). I wanted that stench gone, which meant I’d have to hang it in the garage until I could get it to the dry cleaners, so I started emptying the pockets. As I did, my fingers found something in the bottom of one of them.