Tick Tock

sentry duty, ready to warn them if the demon approached in either its Samaritan guise or any other.
    The Balboa Fun Zone, arguably the heart of the peninsula's important tourist business, extended for a few blocks along Edgewater Avenue, a pedestrian mall that did not admit vehicular traffic west of Main Street. Numerous gift shops, Pizza Pete's, ice-cream stands, restaurants, Balboa Saloon, arcades offering video games and pinball and skee-ball, boat-rental operations, bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, the carousel on which Tommy and Del sat, Lazer Tag, docks for various companies offering guided-tour cruises, and other diversions lined Edgewater, with views of the dazzling harbour and its islands to be glimpsed between the attractions on the north side.
    In spring, summer, and autumn—or on any warm day in the winter—tourists and sun lovers strolled this promenade, taking a break from the Pacific surf and from the beaches on the opposite side of the narrow peninsula. Newlyweds, elderly couples, spectacular-looking young women in bikinis, lean and tanned young men in shorts, and children walked-skated-rollerbladed among veterans in wheelchairs and babies in strollers, enjoying the glitter of sunlight on water, eating ice cream cones, roasted corn from Kountry Corn, popsicles, cookies. Laughter and happy chatter mingled with the music from the carousel, the putter of boat engines, and the ceaseless ring-beep-pong-bop from the game arcades.
    At two-thirty, on this stormy November morning, the Fun Zone was deserted. The only sounds were those made by the rain as it drummed hollowly on the carousel roof, pinged off the brass poles on the outer circle of horses, snapped against festoons of limp vinyl pennants, and drizzled through the fronds of the queen palms along the harbour side of the promenade. This was a lonely music, the forlorn and tuneless anthem of desolation.
    The shops and other attractions were shuttered and dark but for an occasional security lantern. On summer evenings, when augmented by the neon and the sparkling Tivoli lights of the arcades and rides, the old bronze lampposts with frosted-glass globes—some round, most in the form of urns with finials—provided an appealing and romantic glow; then everything glimmered, including the great mirror that was the harbour, and the world was scintillant, effervescent. But now the lamplight was strangely bleak, cold, too feeble to prevent the crushing weight of the November night from pressing low over the Fun Zone.
    Extracting a shotgun shell from a pocket in her ski jacket, Del spoke in a murmur that would not carry beyond the carousel: “Here. You only fired one round, I think.”
    “Yeah,” Tommy said, matching her soft tone.
    “Keep it fully loaded.”
    “Those poor damn guys,” he lamented as he slid the shell into the magazine tube on the Mossberg. “What horrible deaths.”
    “It's not your fault,” she said.
    “They wouldn't have been there, the thing wouldn't have been there, if I hadn't been there.”
    “It's upsetting,” she agreed. “But you were only trying to stay alive, running for your life, and they stepped in.”
    “Still.”
    “Obviously, they were marked for an unnatural extraction.”
    “Extraction?”
    “From this world. If the thing in the fat man hadn't gotten them, then they would have been taken in some other unusual way. Like spontaneous combustion. Or an encounter with a lycanthrope.”
    “Lycanthrope? Werewolf?” He wasn't able to deal with her weirdness just now, so he changed the subject. “Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that? Your mother again?”
    “Daddy. He taught Mom and me, wanted us to be prepared for anything. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns. I can handle an Uzi as if I was born with it, and—”
    “Uzi?”
    “Yeah. And when it comes to—”
    “Submachine guns?”
    “—when it comes to knife throwing—”
    “Knife throwing?” Tommy said, and realized that he had raised his voice.
    “—I'm good enough to put together a stage act and make a living with it in Vegas or even the circus, if I ever had to,” Del continued in a murmur as she unzipped another pocket and took from it a handful of cartridges for the Desert Eagle. “Unfortunately, I'm not half as good at fencing as I'd like to be, though I'll admit to being first-rate with a crossbow.”
    “He died when you were ten,” Tommy said. “So he taught you all this when you were just a little kid?”
    “Yeah. We'd go out in the desert near Vegas and blow the crap out of empty