"PENELOPE!"
She pressed harder against the door, as if that would I make her more invisible.
She had never been scared by Godzilla or Rodan or any § of those oversize Japanese monsters. They were so large| as to be comical, their threat so grossly magnified that it was entirely impersonal. She had always found quieter,^ more intimate horror more frightening. She could identify I with unseen whispers in a haunted house. She could not identify with a resurrected nuclear-radiated dinosaur that stomped on houses.
But this was like one of those outrageously exaggerated Japanese things, a ridiculous, parodic manhunt. And she was utterly terrified.
"PENELOPE!"
His voice echoed off the walls of the buildings, caused^ windows to shake in their frames.
Could he sense her? He obviously wasn't omniscient, I but perhaps he could feel her presence. Perhaps he had] the power to locate where she was. How else could he have gotten so close to her so fast?
"PENELOPE!"
He was moving away.
He did not know where she was! He could not pinpoint her location using some godlike power. He was flying blind, guessing, trying to anticipate where she'd go, what she'd do.
He might know that she'd go to Vella's house, might try to meet her there, but she didn't mink so. She was pretty sure he didn't know where it was, and she could not see the great god Dionysus stopping by a phone booth to look up an address in die white pages.
She grinned at the image, imagining all of his drunken disciples waiting around while he looked up an address. The smile grew broader and gave her confidence. Where there was humor there was hope, and she took a tentative peek around the side of the doorway, saw only the tail end of his contingent lurching and staggering around the corner of Jefferson.
She moved out of the doorway and hurried across the street, intending to take Vernon to Sandalwood, and Sandalwood to Vella's.
Her mouth was even drier than it had been earlier. God, she was thirsty.
She quietly cleared her throat. A glass of chilled wine sounded good.
A bottle sounded even better.
She had to get a grip. She couldn't let herself be influenced by any of this shit that her mothers had brought about. She had to keep a clear head, maintain her reason amidst this chaos. It was the only way of getting out.
She sprinted down Vernon. To her right, adjacent to the sidewalk in a small neighborhood park barely bigger than a yard, was a picnic table and a drinking fountain, and she ran over to the fountain and took a long drink of cool water. It bubbled up from the faucet, flowed smoothly down her throat, soothing, and she drank until she could feel her stomach sloshing. Water had never been so welcome or tasted so good, and she felt instantly stronger, revitalized. She straightened up and started running again. She had to take it slower since her stomach was full, but that was just as well. She didn't want to tire herself out unnecessarily. She might need her strength later.
Once again the street seemed deserted. She was jogging through a residential neighborhood now, and the houses around her were dark, the only illumination offered by the moon and the evenly spaced streetlights. There were no cars, no other pedestrians.
Again she wondered: where had everyone gone?
Three blocks later, she stopped jogging, slowed to a walk, then finally stopped to catch her breath. She glanced uneasily around. The emptiness of the street suddenly seemed much more threatening. Running, she had not had time to notice the pockets of shadow around trees and bushes, the unsettling blackness of the windows looked onto the street. But now she was no longer passir by, traveling through the neighborhood. She was in neighborhood, and it gave her a creepy feeling.
She was still breathing loudly, tired from running, bu she forced herself to start walking again. Underneath he exaggerated breath and the overloud slaps of her sneake on the concrete, she thought she heard other sounds,! cracking, snapping sounds that could have been boot!
steps, could have been twigs snapping. She quickened her J pace. She could see in front of her and there was nothing! there, but she was afraid to look behind her, afraid she! would see someone or something creeping through the-* shadows toward her.
Once again she broke into a jog. Her heart might burst from the exertion, but she'd rather take a^ chance on that;*; than on being attacked.
She heard no more sounds, felt no hands on her shoulders, saw no one leap at her from the darkness, and two streets later, she reached Sandalwood.
Here there were people. Students mostly. Kids from school. Several of them appeared to be drag-racing at the far end of the street, but the competition was haphazard, disorderly, with no apparent rules, and she saw Wade 5 Neth's red Mustang sideswipe a white Corvette and careen onto a house's lawn while a blue '57 Chevy crashed^ into a parked Jeep.
The onlookers lining the street cheered wildly. Bottles were thrown onto the asphalt, smashing into irregular shards. Someone set off a string of firecrackers.
Directly in front of her, four drunken members of the school's football team were having a pissing contest-- with Mrs. Plume, the band teacher, as the target.
Mrs. Plume didn't seem to mind.
Penelope turned away in disgust, looking down the street in the opposite direction. There were people here, but fewer, and the school a block away appeared to be deserted.
Vella's street was only a few blocks down.
She started walking quickly.
There was a scream behind her, a sudden earsplitting screech that made her jump. She whirled around to see a topless girl attack a young man with an ax in the middle of the street. The wedged blade lodged in his chest, and then he began screaming as the blood spurted and she pulled the weapon out and swung again. In an instant everyone was screaming, members of the crowd, dozens of them, converging as one on the combatants. Penelope saw other weapons, saw splashing blood.
She ran, away from the melee, toward the school. There were a few people here, on the sidewalk, on the street, on the lawns of the houses, but not many. Again, most of them were kids from her school. She recognized some, but they did not seem to recognize her and for that she was grateful. She sped past them, hoping to make it to Vella's without incident.
"Penelope!"
She stopped cold at the sound of the voice, glancing quickly around. It was a human voice--it was not his voice--but the fact that someone was calling her name at all jolted her.
"Penelope!"
She recognized the voice now. Kevin Harte. But where was he?
There. Across the street, in the shadow of a tree, kicking an old woman who was lying on the sidewalk, clawing at his ankles. He looked over at Penelope. "Over here! Help!"
She paused only for a moment, then ran across the street to where he struggled to free himself from the woman's clutches.
"Grab something!" he said. "Hit her!"
The woman looked like a zombie. She was naked save for torn, dirty panties, and she was drooling, cackling crazily as her nails dug into Kevin's legs. Penelope looked around for a branch or a stick or a broom, something she could use as a weapon, but there was nothing in the street, on the sidewalk, or on the lawn of the adjacent house. She wasn't sure she'd be able to hit the woman anyway, but at least she could provide Kevin with a weapon he could use.
"Kick her!" Kevin yelled.
But at that moment he broke free from her grip kicked her hard in the chest. Her cackle turned into wheeze, and he grabbed Penelope's hand and pulled with him down the sidewalk.
"What the fuck's going on?" he said. "The whole < world seems to have snapped."
"It's a long story," she told him.
He turned toward her, though his pace did not slow "You know what's going on?"
"I'm part of it."
He stopped, his hand tightening on her wrist. "Wait minute. You're--"