Free Ticktock by Dean Koontz

rolled onto its back. Then it sat up and sighed. The sigh was one not of weariness but of pleasure, as though being shot point-blank in the chest had been an interesting and gratifying experience.
    Tommy pushed up onto his knees.
    Across the office, the minikin put its black-and-yellow-mottled hands on its scorched, smoking abdomen. No…it actually reached
into
its abdomen, digging with its claws, and wrenched something out of itself.
    Even from a distance of fifteen feet, Tommy was pretty sure that the lumpish object in the beast’s hands was the misshapen slug from the .40-caliber cartridge. The minikin tossed the chunk of lead aside.
    Shaky, weak-kneed, slightly nauseated, Tommy got to his feet.
    He felt his scalp, where the puncture wounds from the thing’s claws still stung. When he checked his fingertips, he saw only tiny dots of blood.
    He hadn’t been seriously hurt.
    Yet.
    His adversary rose to its feet as well.
    Although he was seven times taller than the minikin and perhaps thirty times its weight, Tommy was so terrified that he felt as though he might pee in his pants.
    Chip Nguyen, hard-boiled detective, would never lose control of himself in that fashion, humiliate himself to that extent, but Tommy Phan no longer gave a damn what Chip Nguyen would do. Chip Nguyen was an idiot, a whiskey-drinking fool who put too much faith in guns, martial arts, and tough talk. The most precisely executed and powerfully delivered tae kwan do kick wouldn’t stop a supernaturally animated devil doll that could take a .40-caliber round in its guts and keep on ticking.
    Now,
there
was an indisputable truth. Not the kind of truth you would hear on the evening news or read in the newspaper. Not a truth they taught in school or church. Not a truth that would be acclaimed by Carl Sagan or the scientific establishment. Truth nonetheless, from Tommy’s point of view, truth even if the only forum that might report it was a rag like the
National Enquirer
in a story about the ominous rise of demonic presences in our apocalyptic age and the inevitable forthcoming battle between Satan Incarnate and Saint Elvis on the eve of the new millennium.
    Pointing the P7 at the minikin, Tommy felt a mad laugh swelling in him, but he choked it down. He wasn’t insane. He had gotten past that fear. It was God Himself who must be mad—and the universe a lunatic asylum—if He made room in Creation for something like this predatory gremlin in a rag-doll disguise.
    If the minikin was a supernatural presence, as it seemed to be, resistance to it might be stupid and pointless, but Tommy couldn’t very well throw the gun aside, bare his throat, and wait for the killing bite. At least the round from the pistol had knocked the thing down and temporarily stunned it. He might not be able to kill it with the gun, but at least he could fend it off.
    Until he ran out of ammunition.
    He had fired three rounds. One when the thing dropped from the drapery rod onto his head. Two more when he was lying on the floor.
    Ten rounds remained in the thirteen-shot magazine. And in his bedroom closet was a box of ammunition, which would buy more time if he could get to it.
    The doll-thing cocked its rag-swaddled head and regarded him with a fierce green-eyed hunger. The strips of cotton hanging over its face looked like white dreadlocks.
    Thus far the gunfire had probably been pretty much masked by the peals of thunder. Eventually, however, the neighbors in this peaceful city of Irvine would realize that a battle was being waged next door, and they would call the cops.
    The doll-thing hissed at him.
    God in Heaven, what is this—Showdown at the Twilight Zone Corral?
    When the police arrived, he would have to tell them what was happening, even though he would sound like a poster boy for paranoid dementia. Then the minikin would either brazenly reveal itself, and the rest of the world would plummet into this nightmare along with Tommy—or