NOS4A2(183)

The bike wobbled dangerously on the slippery rocks and lost speed, and suddenly the girl was on the bike. Her claws—they were, really, the claws of an old crone, with their long, ragged fingernails—grabbed Vic’s leg, and the girl hauled herself up onto the seat behind her.

Vic accelerated again, and the bike leaped forward, speeding up as it flung itself around the rotary.

The girl on the bike behind her was making noises, choked, snarling sounds, like a dog. One hand slipped around Vic’s waist, and Vic almost shouted at the cold of it, a cold so intense it burned.

The girl gripped a length of chain in the other hand, which she lifted and brought down on Vic’s left knee, as if she somehow knew exactly what would hurt most. A firecracker went off behind Vic’s kneecap, and she sobbed and shoved her elbow backward. The elbow struck the girl in her white face with its crackling enamel skin.

The girl cried out—a strangled, broken sound—and Vic glanced back and her heart gave a sick lurch in her chest and she promptly lost control of the Triumph.

The girl’s pretty little-girl face had deformed, lips stretching wide, becoming like the mouth of a flukeworm, a ragged pink hole encircled with teeth going all the way down her gullet. Her tongue was black, and her breath stank of old meat. She opened her mouth until it was wide enough for someone to put an arm down her throat, then clamped her teeth on Vic’s shoulder.

It was like being brushed by a chainsaw. The sleeve of Vic’s T-shirt and the skin beneath were torn into a bloody mess.

The bike went down on its right side, hit the ground in a spray of golden sparks, and slid screeching across the cobblestones. Vic did not know if she jumped or was thrown, only that she was already off the bike and tumbling, rolling across the bricks.

“SHE’S DOWN, SHE’S DOWN, CUT HER, KILL HER!”



the moon screamed, and the ground shook beneath her, as if a convoy of eighteen-wheelers were thundering past.

She was on her back, arms flung out, head on the stones. She stared at the silvered galleons of the clouds above her (move).

Vic tried to decide how badly she was hurt. She could not feel her left leg at all anymore (move).

Her right hip felt abraded and sore. She lifted her head slightly, and the world swooped around her with a nauseating suddenness (move move).

She blinked, and for an instant the sky was filled not with clouds but with static, a charged flurry of black and white particles (MOVE).

She sat up on her elbows and looked to her left. The Triumph had carried her halfway around the circle, to one of the roads branching off into the amusement park. She stared across the rotary and saw children—perhaps as many as fifty—streaming toward her through the dark in a silent run. Beyond them was the tree as tall as a ten-story building, and beyond that, somewhere, were the Wraith and Wayne.

The moon glared down at her from in the sky, its horrible, bloodshot eye bulging.

“SCISSORS-FOR-THE-DRIFTER! SCISSORS-FOR-THE-BITCH!”



bellowed the moon. But for an instant he flickered out of sight, like a TV caught between channels. The sky was a chaos of white noise. Vic could even hear it hissing.

MOVE, she thought, and then abruptly found herself on her feet, grabbing the motorcycle by the handlebars. She heaved her weight against it, crying out as a fresh jolt of withering pain passed through her left knee and her hip.

The little girl with the flukeworm mouth had been thrown into the door of a shop on the corner: Charlie’s Costume Carnival! It—she—sat against the door, shaking her head as if to clear it. Vic saw that the white plastic sack of ANFO had, somehow, wound up between the girl’s ankles.

ANFO, Vic thought—the word had achieved the quality of a mantra—and she leaned over and grabbed the backpack, still tangled on the rear peg. She slipped it loose, hung it on her shoulder, and put a leg over the bike.

The children running at her should’ve been screaming, or war-whooping, or something, but they came on in a silent rush, pouring out of the snowy central circle and spilling across the cobblestones. Vic jumped on the kickstart.

The Triumph coughed, did nothing.

She jumped again. One of the pipes, which was now broken loose and dangled over the cobblestones, puffed some watery exhaust, but the engine made only a tired, choked sound and died.

A rock hit the back of her head, and a black flash exploded behind her eyes. When her vision cleared, the sky was full of static again—for a moment—then blurred and re-formed as clouds and darkness. She hit the kickstarter.

She heard sprockets whirring, refusing to engage, going dead.

The first of the children reached her. He did not have a weapon of any kind—perhaps he was the one who had thrown the rock—but his jaw unhinged, opening into an obscene pink cavern filled with row upon row of teeth. He fastened his mouth on her bare leg. Fishhook teeth punctured meat, caught in muscle.

Vic shouted in pain and kicked out with her right foot, to shake the boy loose. Her heel struck the kickstarter, and the engine erupted into life. She grabbed the throttle, and the bike hurtled forward. The boy was yanked off his feet, flung to the stones, left behind.

She looked over her left shoulder as she raced down the side road toward the Sleighcoaster and the Reindeer-Go-Round.

Twenty, thirty, perhaps forty children sprinted down the road behind her, many of them barefoot, their heels whacking on the stones.

The child who had been tossed into the doors of Charlie’s Costume Carnival was sitting up now. She bent forward, reaching out for the white plastic sack of ANFO by her feet.