Tick Tock

to childhood memories of the bloody carnage that had followed the fall of Saigon in the weeks immediately before he and his family had escaped to sea. Having once lived through an apocalypse, he knew that it could happen again.
    Orange County had not been besieged by the rampaging mobs that had chased Tommy through his dreams, however, and even Los Angeles had soon returned to normal, although normal couldn't accurately be called civility in the City of Angels these days. He had never needed the pistol.
    Until this minute.
    Now he desperately needed the weapon not to hold at bay the expected band of looters, not even to defend his home from a single burglar, but to protect himself from a rag doll. Or from whatever was hidden within the rag doll.
    As he hurried out of the bedroom and into the second-floor hallway again, Tommy Phan wondered if he might be losing his mind.
    Then he wondered why he was wondering. Of course he was losing his mind. He was already past the edge of rationality, plunging off the cliff, on the bobsled of insanity and rocketing down a huge chute that would take him into the cold dark depths of total lunacy.
    Rag dolls couldn't become animate.
    Ten-inch-tall humanoid creatures with radiant green snake eyes didn't exist.
    A blood vessel had popped in his brain. Or maybe a cancerous tumour had grown to that critical stage at which it exerted disabling pressure on the brain cells around it. He was hallucinating. That was the only credible explanation.
    The door to his office was closed, as he had left it.
    The house was as silent as a monastery full of sleeping monks, without even the murmur of whispered prayers. No wind in the eaves. No tick of clock or creak of floorboards.
    Trembling, sweating, Tommy sidled along the carpeted hall, approaching the office door with extreme caution.
    The pistol shook in his hand. Fully loaded, it weighed only about two and three-quarter pounds, but under the circumstances it felt enormously heavy. It was a squeeze cocker, as safe as any double-action piece on the market, but he pointed the muzzle only at the ceiling and kept his finger lightly on the trigger. Chambered for a .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge, the gun could do serious damage.
    He reached the closed door, halted, and hesitated.
    The doll—or whatever was hiding in the doll—was far too small to reach the knob. Even if it could climb up to the knob, it would not have sufficient strength—or be able to apply enough leverage—to open the door. The thing was trapped in there.
    On the other hand, how could he be so confident that it wouldn't have the requisite strength or the leverage? This creature was an impossibility to begin with, something out of a science-fiction film, and logic applied to this situation no more than it applied in movies or in dreams.
    Tommy stared at the knob, half expecting to see it turn. The polished brass gleamed with a reflection of the hall light overhead. If he peered closely enough, he could discern a weirdly distorted reflection of his own sweat-damp face in the shiny metal: He looked scarier than the thing inside the rag doll.
    After a while he put one ear to the door. No sound came from the room beyond—at least none that he could hear over the runaway thudding of his heart.
    His legs felt rubbery, and the perceived weight of the Heckler & Koch—more important than its real weight—was now twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five, so heavy that his arm was beginning to ache with the burden of it.
    What was the creature doing in there? Was it still ripping out of the cotton fabric, like a waking mummy unwinding its burial wrappings?
    He tried again to assure himself that this whole incident was an hallucination brought on by a stroke.
    His mother had been right. The cheeseburgers, the French fries, the onion rings, the double-thick chocolate milkshakes—those were the culprits that had done him in. Although he was only thirty, his abused circulatory system had collapsed under the massive freight of cholesterol that he forced it to carry. When this terminal episode was finished and the pathologists performed an autopsy on him, they would discover that his arteries and veins were clogged with enough greasy fat to lubricate the wheels on all the trains in America. Standing over his coffin, his weeping but quietly smug mother would say, Tuong, I try tell you but you not listen, never listen. Too many cheeseburgers, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger, start seeing little snake-eyed