24
When she realized she heard nothing following them, Violet stopped running.
“Hey,” she shouted to Donovan. “I think it went somewhere else.”
“Huh?” He stopped too and looked back at her. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” She gently massaged her right breast with a wince. She had a feeling her whole tit was gonna be one big bruise tomorrow. At least her arm was feeling mostly normal again. Still a little tingly, but even that was clearing up. “Sure I’m sure. It must have gone after the others.”
No sooner had she said this than they heard the clatter of hooves in the direction they had just come from. The sound was worryingly crisp and clear, as if there were no intervening objects between its source and their ears. They shone their flashlights down the aisle.
At first they saw nothing but darkness. Then there was a yellow-green glimmer at the farthest edge of the light. The glimmer grew larger and brighter and resolved itself into two round eyes with small black pupils at their centers.
“Fuck!” said Violet. She turned to run, but Donovan stood in her path, still gawping at the approaching leucrota.
“Move your ass!” she screamed, giving him a hard shove.
They resumed their mad dash toward the north end of the warehouse. As she ran, Violet reached out and swept the red plastic bins and their contents off the shelves and onto the floor behind her, hoping the jumbled debris would delay or even injure their grinning pursuer. Joy buzzers, jumping beans, fake ice-cubes with fake flies in them, battery-operated severed hands with fingers that wiggled when you pressed a button, fright wigs, X-Ray specs, wind-up teeth that started chattering the instant they hit the floor. The falling tricks and gags made a deafening racket as they fell. And then they made a more alarming racket several seconds later as the leucrota’s hooves tramped them all to shards and dust.
“Shoulda brought guns!” Violet’s voice cried out no more than fifty feet behind Violet.
“Stop ripping off my voice, you stupid fucking mutt!” Violet shouted.
They crossed one of the wide aisles, then plunged into the stacks on the opposite side. Here the shelves in each unit were fewer and spaced farther apart and bore larger items sans bins: ventriloquist’s dolls, gray plastic tombstones with “RIP” on them, fake fire hydrants, life-sized cardboard figures of celebrities, garden gnomes with their pants around their ankles and big smiles on their ruddy, bearded faces as they flashed you the big white moon. Violet continued strewing this crap into the aisle behind her, and the leucrota’s hooves continued pulverizing it like sledgehammers. The leucrota wasn’t slowing down one bit, though it wasn’t gaining on them either, which was good enough for now.
The end of the aisle appeared. Fifteen feet beyond it was the north wall of the building, against which stood stacks of wooden pallets.
When Donovan reached the end of the aisle he started to turn left. In the process, one of the pockets of his billowing trench coat snagged a large, angular screw-head on the corner of the shelving unit. The pocket tore free almost instantly, its stitches splitting down one side with a low, thick ripping sound, but the brief, hard tug was enough to throw him off-balance and send him crashing to the floor. He tumbled across the concrete, his torn coat flapping and twisting, his pockets’ manifold contents spilling out and tumbling in a crazy cloud along with him. His flashlight slipped from his grasp, caromed off the floor, and went out. Somewhere amid the tumble, his right knee struck the concrete hard enough to make him scream. He finally came to a stop on his back, staring up into the darkness. The world seemed to tilt and swoop as if he were still tumbling. His knee throbbed with pain.
A flashlight beam cleaved the darkness above him, then swooped down and settled on him. Donovan held up one arm to shield his eyes from the glare. Violet’s footsteps pounded toward him.
“What happened?” she cried. “What—”
With her flashlight fixed on Donovan instead of on the ground in front of her, Violet failed to notice the debris that had spilled from his pockets and was now strewn everywhere. She stepped right onto the tin of Altoids, which skidded under her weight with a shrill metallic screech, and her sprint turned into a slapstick headlong stumble, her legs flying every which way, her arms pinwheeling for balance. Before she could find that balance, she tripped over Donovan, her right foot clocking his injured knee. Donovan yelped in pain again, while Violet sailed over him, nearly horizontal.
She crashed down on the other side, her head hitting the floor with a sound like a pair of coconuts being knocked together, then tumbled away, limp. Her flashlight fell from her hand and rolled in a broad semicircle, coming to rest pointed right at Donovan and the clutter around him.
“Violet!” he called, sitting up. She didn’t answer. In the dim, indirect glow of the flashlight, her body was a still, gray shape.
In a deafening clatter of hooves, the leucrota shot out of the aisle. It halted barely ten feet from Donovan and stared at him and Violet, its bony smile a broad, pale crescent.
“Look at the nice doggie,” it said in the same sludgy, resonant voice it had used earlier.
Then it sprang.