“Just trust me, I saw the whole situation in-”

The click of a doorknob is one of those sounds you come to recognize unmistakably, and when I heard it behind me I instantly realized why Marena hadn’t been shouting at me and in fact had been speaking almost softly, and that she must have said something that had activated her earring phone and-oh, right, in fact I knew what it was, it was when she’d used the words call all, that rang all the phones in the house-and “Hey, what’s going on?” Tony Sic’s voice said.

I snuck a peek over my left shoulder. He was in the doorway, about eight feet away. “Hi, Tony, nothing,” I started to say, but before I got to the — thing part Grgur had loomed in behind him. I may have said at some point that he looked like Leonid Brezhnev’s uglier brother, but now he looked like Leonid Brezhnev himself after going through the same gamma-ray-o-genic mutation that turned Ben Grimm into the Thing. He was in his goon outfit with the collar tips spreading over the lapels of the ill-fitting gray one-button sport coat. He was big. He edged Tony aside. There was an impression of motion on my right side and a shot of pain up my right thigh, and as I folded I realized that her foot had switchbladed into my knee-it was one of those low kicks Ana Vergara’d taught her-and I thought I was going to have to operate from the floor for a little while, but I surprised myself by getting my hands on the edge of the desk and holding myself up with I guess my arm strengthened by the epinephrine that sprays into your bloodstream so unbelievably fast when your amphibian brain decides there’s a threat out there. As Marena came toward me I picked up a big old LCD monitor off the desk with my right hand and tossed it at her. She tried to bat it away but hurt her hand, I think, since she grunted, and as it fell, trailing cables, the edge hit her knee and her second kick stopped almost before it started. Run, I thought. Holy shit holy shite shat shot run run run run. My hand was on the handle of the French door and I yanked it up. It was one of those locks that open when you open it, if you know what I mean, and I slid out into the dark courtyard. Grgur was right there but I took the time to push the door shut behind me, since I figured it would buy me a good two seconds, and I turned and dashed out, with my stocking feet ouching on this sort of upscale little shiny black rocks. Bright light flashed on all over, like movie lights. I’m on camera, I thought. Oh, well.

“Jed’s gone psycho,” Marena’s voice yelled behind me, and in the middle of the word gone, it switched from a normal yell to an iron scrawk blasting out of every speaker of every phone on the system, of which there were probably at least ten in the house and four outside. There was a slight lag between them that made the roar seem to be echoing off the walls of a vast crazy-angled canyon.

“GRAB HIM RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!!!”

I veered right. There was a sort of trapezoidal archway between the yard and the driveway, and beyond it there was an orange sliver of my car, and seeing the car must have made me reflexively thumb the key-card because there was the delicious bwheep of the door opening itself. The speakers started up. “Ride the snake,” Jim Morrison moaned, like he was breathing on my neck. Marena’s voice was louder, though, even through the layers of car: “NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW…”

“… NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW…”

Grgur’s heavy feet scrunched on the gravel behind me and then thwapped on concrete, which means he was under the arch. I’m doomed, I thought, he’s only like five steps back, I’ll never get the door open fast enough, but there was a sort of a scrunch-and-thwack behind me and a growl, “Sranje!” which I guessed was a cuss word in Urethrafuckistani, and I got the car door open the rest of the way and slid in and pulled the door closed. Reflexively, I touched LOCK ALL on the key card and the teeth inside the door snapped shut. I hit START and then snuck a look out at Grgur. He was just getting on his feet. What I guess happened-and it took me a few seconds to figure it out-was that since Marena’s replica house was one of many expressions of the twentieth-century Prometheus’ fascination with four-fifths scale, and what with the Lloyd Wright ceilings being low to begin with, and since the Grg was at least six foot six, the bastard must have scraped his head running through the archway. Good. The mighty V12 fired up on the second rev. Hah Whoa.

The supposedly ballistic driver’s window had cracked from side to side. The sound was soft, meaning, I guess, that Grgur had come upon me and smacked it with his elbow. I peeled out backward past him, steering through the mirror, which was something I used to practice. I shifted, swerved around Marena’s Cherokee, Ashley 3 ’s little purple carlet, and another two SUVs that were in the big circle. For a second I thought Grgur was going to climb up on my back bumper and try to hang on to the car while I drove, but I guess he was too trained for that sort of doomed effort because instead my last glimpse of him was as he opened the door of Marena’s Cherokee. I shifted into first and floored it. Whoa. Too much power. Almost did a Tiger Woods. The big baby banked through the two gravelly S-curves, giving me that sickening feeling like I was in a canoe getting sucked into rapids. If that bastard thinks he’s chasing me in that soccermommobile he’s less of a pro than I thought, I thought. Although, of course, I might hit an obstacle or wipe out or whatever. Gate was still open. Thank Satan. As I passed the little booth I saw the guard inside was on his phone, probably talking with Marena. Too late, dork. I got through the residential streets in thirty seconds, running the stop signs, and in forty seconds I was on the access road to Route 400. Things were slowing down and getting clearer the way they do when the adrenaline really floods in. On the other hand, one’s movements get jerky and stiff and you have to watch out for objects and things and stuff because you might bump Jim cut off and the car’s phone rang. “Answer,” I said. The line opened up. “Hi,” I went on. “Sorry about all that.”

“Jed,” Marena’s voice said. “If we don’t catch you, please reconsider. Don’t kill my kid. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please…” There was something that might have been either a sniffle or static and I wondered whether she was crying. I wished I could tell her what was what, that my motivation was utterly simple, that I’d simply seen something so horrible, or rather I’d worked out a truth that was so horrible, that I don’t think even the greatest writer who ever lived could convey it, although maybe H. P. Lovecraft, with the whole thing about the Other Gods gnawing at the crust of the universe, would come closest, except even that seems almost hopeful compared to the bleakness I’d seen when-but this wasn’t the right time for that discussion, even if Marena would have listened. I got on the ramp-and I know this is a bad time to brag, but I really took the speed bumps like Adrian Fernandez-and onto the Teflon-smooth highway, north toward the orange glow of burning houses in Orlando proper.

“Do you like Max?” Marena’s voice went.

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you love Max?”

“This-I, listen, this train of conversation is, I’m not…”

“You do, I know you love Max, so why do you, why, why, why, why…”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said. For some reason, at that moment I realized I’d left the nudibranch book behind. Damn it, I thought, my resolve was getting nicked up. Marena and Max and whoever were, like, real people, people with families, people who cared about each other, and I was just a fake person nobody including myself cared about, just one of those nowhere man losers who manage to take a few other people down with them, or in my case everybody. Damn, I needed to think about things. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, maybe Marena’s tone shifted down. “I knew that samlet shit would eat out your brain,” she said.