Kenway was entranced by the action taking place on the screen. “What in the balls is even going on right now,” he said, leaning over the Macbook, eyes fixed on the video. “Is he—is that guy growling like a house cat?”
“Her familiars,” Heather told him, not looking up from her salad.
In the video, she juked left, running underneath the lemon tree and around the side of Chandler’s track house, between the board fence and the clapboard wall. The pounding of sneakered feet made it clear that the familiars were chasing her. The fence ended near the back corner and Heather jumped the sidewalk, almost losing her footing, sprinting across the street. She opened the driver door of the CONLIN PLUMBING van and threw herself inside, wriggling into the seat.
Through the window she could see half the neighborhood pouring out of the gap behind the fence like hornets from a nest, and just as terrifying.
When she went to shut the door, she slammed it on the meaty arm of a fat man in an old Bulls jersey, the collar frayed around his hoary neck.
“Mrrrr!” he growled. His eyes were green screwheads.
Her keys were already in the ignition. She twisted it until she thought she would snap it off in the steering column. The van chugged a few times and turned over mightily, GRRRRUH!
Crazed, yowling people clustered around the van and started hammering the panels with their fists, clawing at the windows and prying at the hood. Jersey Man’s arm flapped into the cab with her, fighting her hands, and he found her throat with the fork of his palm, pressing it against her windpipe.
Her neck was pinned against the headrest. She couldn’t breathe.
Thrusting her foot into the floorboard, she found the accelerator and put all her weight on it. The engine snarled, vibrating the van, revving hard, so hard that for a second she thought it would come apart, but nothing else happened.
“Fffffk,” she choked out, fumbling for the gearshift.
The passenger window imploded in a tumble of glass and someone reached in at her.
Heather put the van in Drive and stood on the gas again. This time the machine leapt forward, catching hard and plowing low as if she was up to the headlights in water. The engine coughed once, twice, the drive-train rumbled, and then the crowd fell away and she was barreling down the street.
Bodies fell in the headlights and the van clambered over them, bonk-badunk-clank-bang.
She twisted the steering wheel this way and that, trying to shake off the two men halfway inside the cab with her, but only the one hanging out the window fell. The van hauled back and forth, teetering with the gravity of a Spanish galleon on the sea.
“Rrrrrowww!” complained Jersey Man, his fingers still clamping Heather’s neck to the seat. She could feel her heartbeat in her face.
“Here, kitty-kitty.” She jerked the wheel to the left and sideswiped a telephone pole.
The wooden trunk slammed into the man’s shoulder and knocked him off, his fingernails biting into the skin under her ear. Her tires barked and wailed as Heather fought to keep the van under control. The telephone pole scraped down the side of the vehicle, beating on the hollow panels with a noise like thunder.
She glanced at the side mirror. Two dozen men and women were running helter-skelter down the street behind her, looking for all the world like a midnight marathon.
She did not stop. She did not slow down. She drove on.
The video ended and became a grid of links to related videos by other uploaders. Kenway clicked the link at the bottom that took him back to the main MalusDomestica page and then clicked through to the list of Heather’s video thumbnails.
There were at least two hundred videos.
Heather stole Kenway’s beer and washed down the last bite of salad with it, giving him an expectant eye over the bottle.