Tick Tock

had probably broken more laws tonight than in his entire previous thirty years combined.
    The Bluewater's twin diesel engines chugged, coughed, and then turned over with a hard rumble of power. The foredeck vibrated under Tommy's shoes.
    He looked toward the top-deck helm again and saw, beside Del, Scootie's head, ears pricked. The Labrador was apparently standing with his forepaws on the instrument board, and Del was patting his big head as if to say, Good dog.
    For some reason he couldn't grasp, Tommy was reminded of the swarming birds. He flashed back, as well, to the courtyard of Del's house, when they had entered from the street with the Samaritan in pursuit of them, and the previously locked front door had seemed to be open before she could have reached it. Abruptly he felt poised on the brink of a satori again, but then the moment passed without bringing him enlightenment.
    This time, when he turned his attention to the docks, he saw the Samaritan-thing hurtling through the gate at the sea wall, no more than two hundred feet away, raincoat billowing like a cape behind it, no longer dazzled by birds, its eyes on the prize.
    “Go, go!” Tommy urged Del as the yacht began to ease backward out of its slip.
    The demon descended to the dock head and raced westward along the base of the sea wall, passing all of the boats that Del had rejected.
    Standing in the anchor well, Tommy held the Mossberg in both hands, hoping the creature would never get close enough to require the use of the shotgun.
    The yacht was halfway out of the slip and moving faster by the second.
    Tommy heard the thudding of his own heart, and then he heard an even louder pounding: the hollow booming of the demon's footfalls on the dock planks.
    The yacht was three-quarters of the way out of the slip, and waves of black water rolled in where it had been, slapping the dock.
    Skidding on the wet planks, the fat-man-that-wasn't-a-fat-man reached the head of the slip and sprinted onto the port-side finger, desperately trying to catch them before they reversed all the way into the channel.
    The beast was close enough for Tommy to see its radiant green eyes in the pale face of the Samaritan, as improbable and frightening in the countenance of the fat man as in that of the rag doll.
    The Bluewater reversed all the way out of the slip, churning hard through water now festooned with garlands of phosphorescent foam.
    The demon sprinted to the end of the port-side finger of the slip just as the yacht pulled away. It didn't stop, but leaped across the six-foot gap between the end of the dock and the boat, slammed into the pulpit only three feet in front of Tommy, and seized the railing with both hands.
    As the thing tried to pull itself over the railing and aboard, Tommy squeezed off a round from the shotgun, point-blank in its face, flinching at the roar and at the gout of flame that spurted from the muzzle of the Mossberg.
    In the pearlescent glow of the running lights, he saw the fat man's face vanish in the blast, and he gagged in revulsion at the grisly spectacle.
    But the Samaritan-thing didn't let go of the pulpit railing. It should have been torn loose by the powerful hit that it had taken, but the relentless beast still hung from the bow and continued trying to drag-heave-roll itself onto the foredeck.
    Out of the raw, oozing mass of torn flesh left by the shotgun blast, the fat man's glistening white face at once miraculously re-formed, utterly undamaged, and the green serpent eyes blinked open, radiant and fierce.
    The thick-lipped mouth yawned wide, gaping silently for a moment, and then the Samaritan-thing screamed at Tommy. The piercing voice was not remotely human, less like an animal sound than like an electronic shriek.
    Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breech, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.
    The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature's grip.
    Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger, pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.
    Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the