Sammy grabbed at Connie’s jacket sleeve. “Listen to me, woman, you listen to me!”
Connie jerked loose of him, cocked her fist.
“No!” Harry said.
Connie barely checked herself, almost threw the punch.
Sammy was spraying spittle as he ranted: “—it gave me thirty-six hours to live, the ratman, but now it must be twenty-four or less, not sure—”
Harry tried to hold Connie back with one hand as she reached for Sammy again, while simultaneously pushing Sammy away with the other hand. Then the dog jumped up on him. Grinning, panting, its tail wagging. Harry twisted away, shook his leg, and the dog dropped back onto the sidewalk on all fours.
Sammy was babbling frantically, now clutching with both hands at Harry’s sleeve and tugging for attention, as if he didn’t have it already: “—his eyes like snake eyes, green and terrible, terrible, and he says I got thirty-six hours to live, ticktock, ticktock—”
Fear and amazement quivered through Harry when he heard that word, and the breeze off the ocean seemed suddenly colder than it had been.
Startled, Connie stopped trying to get at Sammy. “Wait a minute, what’d you say?”
“Aliens! Aliens!” Sammy shouted angrily. “You’re not listening to me, damn it.”
“Not the aliens part,” Connie said. The dog jumped on her. Patting its head and pushing it away, she said, “Harry, did he say what I think he said?”
“I’m a citizen, too,” Sammy shrieked. His need to give testimony had escalated into a frenzied determination. “I got a right to be listened to sometimes.”
“Ticktock,” Harry said.
“That’s right,” Sammy confirmed. He was pulling on Harry’s sleeve almost hard enough to tear it off. ” ‘Ticktock, ticktock, time is running out, you’ll be dead by dawn tomorrow, Sammy.’ And then he just dissolves into a pack of rats, right before my eyes.”
Or a whirlwind of trash, Harry thought, or a pillar of fire.
“All right, wait, let’s talk,” Connie said. “Calm down, Sammy, and let’s discuss this. I’m sorry for what I said, I really am. Just get calm.”
Sammy must have thought she was insincere and merely trying to humor him into letting his guard down, because he didn’t respond to the new respect and consideration she accorded him. He stamped his feet in frustration. His clothes flapped on his bony body, and he looked like a scarecrow shaken by a Halloween wind. “Aliens, you stupid woman, aliens, aliens, aliens!”
Glancing at The Green House, Harry saw that half a dozen people were at the barroom windows now, peering out at them.
He realized what a singular spectacle they were, all three of them bedraggled, tugging and pulling at each other, shouting about aliens. He was probably in the last hours of his life, pursued by something paranormal and incredibly vicious, and his desperate fight for survival had been transformed, at least for a moment, into a piece of slapstick street theater.
Welcome to the ‘90s. America on the brink of the millennium. Jesus.
Muffled music filtered to the street: the four-man combo was playing some West Coast swing now, “Kansas City,” but with weird riffs.
The host in the Armani suit was one of those at the bar windows. He was probably silently berating himself for being fooled by what he now surely believed were phony badges, and would go any second to call the real police.
A passing car slowed down, driver and passenger gawking.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid woman!” Sammy shouted at Connie.
The dog took hold of the right leg of Harry’s trousers, nearly jerked him off his feet. He staggered, kept his balance, and managed to pull free of Sammy, though not the dog. It squirmed backward, striving with canine tenacity to drag Harry along with it. Harry resisted, then almost lost his balance again when the mutt abruptly let go of him.
Connie was still trying to soothe Sammy, and the bum was still telling her that she was stupid, but at least neither was trying to hit the other.
The dog ran south along the sidewalk for a few steps, skidded to a halt in the downfall of light from a streetlamp, looked back, and barked at them. The breeze ruffled its fur, fluffed its tail. It dashed a little farther south, halted in shadows this time, and barked again.
Seeing that Harry was distracted by the dog, Sammy became even more outraged at his inability to get serious consideration. His voice became mocking, sarcastic: “Oh, sure, that’s it, pay more attention to a damn dog than to me! What am I, anyway, just some piece of street garbage, less than a dog, no reason to listen to trash like me. Go on, Timmy, go on, see what Lassie wants, maybe Dad’s trapped under an overturned tractor down on the fucking south forty!”
Harry couldn’t help laughing. He would never have expected a remark like that out of someone like Sammy, and he wondered who the man had been before he’d wound up as he was now.
The dog squealed plaintively, cutting Harry’s laugh short. Tucking its bushy tail between its legs, pricking up its ears, raising its head quizzically, it turned in a circle and sniffed at the night air.
“Something’s wrong,” Connie said, worriedly looking around at the street.
Harry felt it, too. A change in the air. An odd pressure. Something. Cop instinct. Cop and dog instinct.
The mutt caught a scent that made it yelp in fear. It spun around on the sidewalk, biting at the air, then rushed back toward Harry. For an instant he thought it was going to barrel into him and knock him on his ass, but then it angled toward the front of The Green House, plunged into a planting bed full of shrubbery, and lay flat on its belly, hiding among azaleas, only its eyes and snout visible.
Taking his cue from the dog, Sammy turned and sprinted toward the nearby alleyway.
Connie said, “Hey, no, wait,” and started after him.
“Connie,” Harry said warningly, not sure what he was warning her about, but sensing that it was not a good idea for them to separate just then.
She turned to him. “What?”
Beyond her, Sammy disappeared around the corner.
That was when everything stopped.
Growling uphill in the southbound lane of the coast highway, a tow truck, evidently on the way to help a stranded motorist, halted on the proverbial dime but without a squeal of brakes. Its laboring engine fell silent from one second to the next, without a lingering chug, cough, or sputter, though its headlights still shone.
Simultaneously a Volvo about a hundred feet behind the truck also stopped and fell mute.
In the same instant, the breeze died. It didn’t wane gradually or sputter out, but ceased as quickly as if a cosmic fan had been switched off. Thousands upon thousands of leaves stopped rustling as one.
Precisely in time with the silencing of traffic and vegetation, the music from the bar cut off mid-note.
Harry almost felt he had gone stone deaf. He’d never known a silence as profound in a controlled interior environment, let alone outdoors where the life of a town and the myriad background noises of the natural world produced a ceaseless atonal symphony even in the comparative stillness between midnight and dawn. He could not hear himself breathe, then realized that his own contribution to the preternatural hush was voluntary; he was simply so stunned by the change in the world that he was holding his breath.
In addition to sound, motion had been stolen from the night. The tow truck and Volvo were not the only things that had come to a complete standstill. The curbside trees and the shrubbery along the front of The Green House seemed to have been flash-frozen. The leaves had not merely stopped rustling, but had entirely ceased moving; they could not have been more still if sculpted from stone. Overhanging the windows of The Green House, the scalloped valances on the canvas awnings had been fluttering in the breeze, but they had gone rigid in mid-flutter; now they were as stiff as if formed from sheet metal. Across the street, the blinking arrow on a neon sign had frozen in the ON position.