He opened the cargo door and selected a cooler full of bottled water and a box of canned goods—the kind of thing you could eat without cooking if you had to—and that, plus a few stacks of flatbread, was all he could carry. Enough for now. Or he could get in the car and drive it closer to the room: but that would block the route around the courtyard and maybe attract unwanted attention…

"Turk!" Lise yelled from the doorway. He looked back at her. The door was wide open and she was leaning forward, her hair framing her face. She pointed with obvious urgency: "Turk! In the street—"

He saw it at once.

It didn't look threatening. Whatever it was. In fact it looked like nothing more than a scrap of loose paper or sheet plastic caught in a gust of wind, fluttering at head level above the dust-duned highway by the diner. It flapped, but you couldn't really say it was flying, not in the purposeful way a bird flies.

But it wasn't a sheet of paper; it was something stranger than that. It was colored glassy blue at the center, red at its four extremities. And although it was clumsy in the air, it appeared to move by design, slip-sliding up the center of the road.

Then it seemed to hesitate, its four wing-tips pumping simultaneously to loft it a few feet higher. The next time it moved, it moved in a new direction.

It moved toward Turk.

"Get the fuck back here!" Lise was screaming.

They said these things weren't dangerous. Turk hoped that was true. He dropped everything but the carton of canned goods and began to run. About halfway to the door he glanced back over his shoulder.

The flapping thing was right behind him, a yard to his right—way too close. He dropped the last carton and broke into a full-out sprint.

The thing was bigger than it had looked from a distance. And louder: it sounded like a bedsheet on a laundry line in a windstorm. He didn't know whether it could hurt him but it was clearly interested in him.

He ran, and because the ash here was six inches deep, in places deeper, it was like running on a sandy beach. Or in a nightmare.

Lise threw the door wide open.

Soon Turk could see the flapping thing in his peripheral vision, beating the air like a piston. All it had to do was veer right and it would be on him. But it kept its steady if erratic course, paralleling him, almost as if it was racing him. Racing him—

To the open door.

He slowed down. The flapper rattled past him.

"Turk!"