Free Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) by Jonathan R. Stanley Page A

duck across the driver’s side seat and hit the accelerator with my hand.  The car bucks and leaps forward as the dweller lands on the vehicle’s shadow.  Without sitting up, I begin to steer the car away, using my supernatural awareness to navigate.  In a second, I get into position and sense that the creature is still following me.  I catch it in the rearview mirror, tumbling along in pursuit, using its limbs like tentacles to guide its sloppy summersaults.  It repeatedly rolls ass over head while its legs and arms flop on the road to direct its chase.  With every rotation, that big orange eye comes around and it re-adjusts its course.
    This piece of shit car is too slow and I have to swerve through a vacant pedestrian walkway to avoid an entanglement with the cyclops.  The monster keeps rolling towards me, eating up café furniture and cement posts as it goes.  There’s a father and teenage son up ahead - I can sense the bond between them.  Tension is being mended over a midnight stroll.  There’s no way for me to get back on the street without hitting one of them.
    “Fuck!” I lift the e-brake and cut the wheel right with all my frustration.  The car makes a sharp 90 and comes to a stop on the far side of a handicap ramp so the top is only inches above the landing and sheltered from the cyclops.   
    Seven-tenths of a seconds later, the dweller leaps into the air like a frog and comes down on me, blasting through the ramp and crushing the back end of the car. I am launched up from my seat hard enough to make a nice bust relief on the metal the roof.  Then the creature gets a good grip on the rear doors and hurls the car to the other side of the street.  I sweep through the corner window of a bank lobby in a shower of glass and the wailing of an alarm, rolling sideways once, spinning around and coming to rest upside down.  I bail out through the shattered windshield.
    Fucker drew blood . I duck into a side alley behind the cafés and drape kharma about my form to make myself harder to see.  Not fast enough apparently, as he’s tracked me this far and is heading down the filthy back street, plowing through dumpsters and piles of trash.  I look ahead to a fire escape and make the jump, catching the bottom rail with both hands and swinging up onto the second landing.  My feet barely hold my weight before the dweller smashes into the rusty scaffolding and I’m swept flat onto my head with a deep, metallic gong .
    Shaking it off, I get to the third floor ledge then scramble to the fifth and top story.  The dweller has regained his balance below and is halfway up the building, crushing the fire escape into tiny compartments as he goes.  I fence hop the ledge onto the rooftop and start running.  Without the momentum to clear the street in a single jump, I take the corner and balance my way along the edge like a gymnast on a beam.  As I make a smaller jump across an alleyway, the faintest of my senses catch Sabetha and Bullworth approaching the wreckage of the car at the bank.  Finally.
    I briefly consider outrunning the monster till Bullworth tracks me down, but I’m already dodging its flopping arms.  It’s on the rooftop behind me and gaining as I leap to a lower building top and slide on my hip down an inclined metal vent cover.  It lands close by, crashing through a brick chimney and pelting me with rubble.  The monster is within arm’s reach when I hear gun fire.  To my side is Bullworth, galloping down a parallel street with Sabetha on his back.  She’s firing a machinegun with one hand, the belt of ammunition dangling in the wind while she grips Bullworth’s fur with her other hand.  It was pure luck that she didn’t hit me with the spray, but the hailstorm of glowing bullets did manage to slow down my pursuer, or at least distract him.
    As I near the edge of the rooftop, I whistle to Sabetha, pointing in front of me and then opening my hands, anticipating a catch.  She reaches