To Sam, the sprint to the car took on a feeling that was new to him—and not entirely bad. All at once the world had a clarity that was almost indescribable. A world made of simple and absolute things: the open car door, its inside handle, the little silvery lock button up near the window. Those things were all that mattered on Earth in the next five seconds. There was an exact way he needed to interact with them. A sequence of moves, each one simple and precise—he played it out in his head. He would get it right or else he would be killed, right here on this stranger’s lawn in this miserable, fake town.

The woman screamed her chimp scream again. Sam found it had almost no effect on him, this time. He cared about nothing but the geometry quiz coming toward him at sprint speed. Three seconds away. Two. One—

He threw himself across the last three feet of space, pulling his legs up, dropping his head low, twisting in the air, passing through the low-slung shape of the Escort’s open door. He grabbed hold of its inner handle as he went by, using his body’s momentum to haul the thing shut. It slammed home with a deeply satisfying thud, and in the same fraction of a second Sam brought his fist down on the door lock. He pivoted in the seat and leaned fast and hit the passenger door’s lock an instant later, and before he’d straightened upright again behind the wheel, both the man and woman collided with the driver’s side door. The impact was hard enough to jostle the vehicle.

A second later they were both pounding on the window with their fists, and on the metal roof above it. The tempered glass warped and flexed under each blow, but held—for now.

Sam could already feel the weird, hyper-focused frame of mind leaving him. In its wake was a fear he hoped he could at least keep a grip on.

He looked at the car’s controls and tried to see how to put it in reverse. He had never driven anything before, but he didn’t need to do much driving right now, either—he just had to get away.

The Escort was an automatic: there was no gear shifter with a knob on top, just a big selector stick jutting up from the center console below the dash. The selector had a lit-up band of letters running alongside it: P, R, N, D and L. Sam knew what all of those stood for. Right now there was a bright orange indicator line beside the P, because the car was in park.

The man’s fist came down on the upper corner of the windshield, cracking it in a big spiderweb pattern. Sam could see the glass bowing inward where it had been hit—it stayed intact, but maybe not by much.