He is surprised. He was so sure. All of them together like in the sleep world.
He scratches at the door. Scratches, scratches.
The fat man doesn’t come. The door stays closed.
He barks. Waits. Barks.
Nothing.
Well. So. Now what?
He is still excited, but not as much as before. Not so excited that he has to pee, but too excited to be still. He paces in front of the door, back and forth across the alley, whining in frustration and confusion, beginning to be a little sad.
Voices echo to him from the far end of the alley, and he knows one of them belongs to the stinky man who smells like everything bad at once, including like the touch of the thing-that-will-kill-you. He can smell the stinky man really well even from a distance. He doesn’t know who the other voices belong to, can’t smell those people so much because the stinky man’s odor covers them.
Maybe one is the fat man, looking for his Fella.
Could be.
Wagging his tail, he hurries to the end of the alley, but when he gets there he finds no fat man, so he stops wagging. Only a man and a woman he’s never seen before, standing near a car in front of the people food place with the stinky man, all of them talking.
You really cops? says the stinky man.
What’d you do to the car? says the woman.
Nothing. I didn’t do anything to the car.
There’s any crap in this car.; you’re a dead man.
No, listen, for God’s sake.
Forced detox, you scumbag.
How could I get in the car, with it locked?
So you tried, huh?
I just wanted to nose around, see were you really cops.
I’ll show you are we really cops or not, you hairball.
Hey, let go of me!
Jesus, you stink!
Let me go, let me go!
Come on, let him go. All right, easy now, says the man who isn’t so stinky.
Sniffing, sniffing, he smells something on this new man that he smells on the stinky man, too, and it surprises him. The touch of the thing-that-will-kill you. This man has been around the bad thing not long ago.
You smell like a walking toxic waste dump, says the woman.
She also has on her the smell of the thing-that-will-kill-you. All. three of them. Stinky man, man, and woman. Interesting.
He moves closer, sniffing.
Listen, please, I’ve got to talk to a cop, says the stinky man.
So talk, says the woman.
My name’s Sammy Shamroe. I got a crime to report.
Let me guess — somebody stole your new Mercedes.
I need help!
So do we, pal.
All three of them not only have the touch of the bad thing on them, but they smell of fear, the same fear he has smelled on the woman and the boy who call him Woofer. They are afraid of the bad thing, all of them.
Someone’s going to kill me, says the stinky man.
Yeah, it’s gonna be me if you don’t get out of my face.
Easy. Easy now.
The stinky man says, And he’s not human, either. I call him the ratman.
Maybe these people should meet the woman and the boy in the car. All of them afraid separately. Together, maybe not afraid. Together, all of them, they might live in a warm place, play all the time, feed him every day, all of them go places in a car — except the stinky man would have to run behind unless he stopped being stinky enough to make you sneeze.
I call him the ratman ‘cause he’s made out of rats, he falls apart and he’s just a bunch of rats running everywhichway.
But how? How to get them together with the woman and the boy? How to make them understand, people being so slow sometimes?
9
When the dog came sniffing around their feet, Harry didn’t know if it was with the bum, Sammy, or if it was just a stray on its own. Depending on how obstreperous the vagrant became, if they had to use force with him, the dog might take sides. It didn’t look dangerous, but you never could tell.
As for Sammy, he appeared to be more of a threat than the dog. He was wasted from life on the street and from whatever had put him there, worse than skinny, spindly, Salvation Army giveaway clothes hanging so loosely on him that you expected to hear bones rattling together when he moved, but that didn’t mean he was weak. He was twitchy with excess energy. His eyes were so wide open, the lids seemed to have been stretched back and pinned out of the way. His face was tight with tension lines, and his lips repeatedly skinned back from his bad teeth in a feral snarl that might have been meant to be an ingratiating smile but was alarming instead.
“The ratman, see, is what I call him, not what he calls himself. Never heard him call himself anything. Don’t know where the hell he comes from, where he’s hiding his ship, he’s just all of a sudden there, just there, the sadistic bastard, one scary son of a bitch—”
In spite of how weak he appeared to be, Sammy might be like a robotic mechanism receiving too much power, circuits overloading, on the trembling verge of exploding, disintegrating into a shrapnel of gears and springs and burst pneumatic tubes that would kill everyone within a block. He might have a knife, knives, even a gun. Harry had seen shaky little guys like this who looked as if a strong gust of wind would blow them all the way to China; then it turned out that they were stoned on PCP, which could transform kittens into tigers, and three strong men were required to disarm and subdue them.
“—see, maybe I don’t care if he kills me, maybe that would be a blessing, just get totally drunk and let him kill me, so wasted I’d hardly notice when he does me,” Sammy said, crowding them, moving to the left when they moved in that direction, to the right when they tried that way, insisting on a confrontation. “But then tonight, when I was deep in the bag, sucking down my second double liter, I realized who the ratman has to be, I mean what he has to be— one of the aliens!”
“Aliens,” Connie said disgustedly. “Aliens, always aliens with you dim bulbs. Get out of here, you greasy hairball, or I swear to God I’m gonna—”
“No, no, listen. We’ve always known they’re coming, haven’t we? Always known, and now they’re here, and they’ve come to me first, and if I don’t warn the world, then everyone’s going to die.”
As he took hold of Sammy’s arm and tried to maneuver him out of their way, Harry was almost as leery of Connie as he was of the bum. If Sammy was an overwound clockwork mechanism ready to explode, then Connie was a nuclear plant heading for a meltdown. She was frustrated that the vagrant was delaying them from getting to Nancy Quan, the police artist, acutely aware that dawn was rushing toward them from the East. Harry was frustrated, too, but with him, unlike with Connie, there was no danger that he might knee Sammy in the crotch and pitch him through one of the nearby restaurant windows.
“—don’t want to be responsible for aliens killing the whole world, I’ve already got too much on my conscience, too much, can’t stand the idea of being responsible, I’ve let so many people down already—”
If Connie thumped the guy, they would never get to Nancy Quan or have a chance to locate Ticktock. They would be tied up here for an hour or longer, arranging for Sammy’s arrest, trying not to choke to death on his body odor, and struggling to deny police brutality (a few bar patrons were watching them, faces to the glass). Too many precious minutes would be lost.