She came to the bottom of the stairwell and touched the handle of the big brown door that led to the garage. She didn’t go in because the sound was coming from there. But what in hell was going on, because it sounded like some kind of a drum corps. The drumming was infectious and intense but weird to be coming from down here. Also, it made her feel even more uneasy. She recognized that she was near panic. But she had to open that door. She had to get to her Vespa because she just plain wanted nothing more to do with this situation or with Frisco right now. It was a weird city, for sure, and she liked that, but this was just too weird.

She opened the door and was blasted by drumming so loud that it almost knocked her back into the stairwell.

The first thing she saw were kids, nice-looking kids, banging snare drums with hands that moved so fast you could hardly see them. Amazing hands. Some younger ones danced among the parked cars. As she headed past Zack’s Beemer, she noticed people were in it. Then she saw that a lot of the other cars had people in them, too, and they were jumping around and shaking them and squalling, as if they didn’t know why they couldn’t make them go. She decided to ignore this for now and call it in when she was back in cell-phone range. Because she could see that this was no high school band in here. Also, a smell was in here—strong—one that she knew from her childhood. When they were kids, her brother had gone reptile crazy and kept a bunch of exotic snakes, and his room had smelled of this same musty, stinkbuggy odor. The garage was full of children who smelled like snakes, and not only that, they were all watching her. They were soft-faced little things, sort of. The sort of part was their eyes, which followed her with a steadiness that was exactly like Tim’s snakes’ eyes.

“They look hungry,” she had said to Tim once, when looking at the snakes sliding and swaying in their terraria. “They’re snakes,” he’d replied. “Unless they’re asleep, they’re hungry.”

By the time she had got to the Vespa and was fumbling with the lock, the kids were dancing close to her.

“Hi there,” she said to the nearest one, a little boy wearing a T-shirt with a weird symbol on it that looked like the symbols on the thing overhead. But, hell, wait. The symbols weren’t weird. They were from Star Trek. It was Klingon! But what it might say was another question. She didn’t exactly read the stuff.