They were coming out and she had one thought now, which was to get the hell away from them as fast as humanly possible, because this was not a safe place to be, not at all. She did not want to go west on Geary, not directly under the thing, and she didn’t want to go anywhere near any blown manholes, because live things were down in there. What she wanted to do was to get home to her little apartment in Berkeley, where she still lived because she was going back next fall to get her MFA, just after she’d built up a little more money in the bank.

Going toward the Bay Bridge was going away from the machine anyway, so that was what she did.

Even over the buzzing of the scooter, she could hear drums and more drums rising throughout the city, all beating to the same rhythm. It was eerie, it was impossible, but then she saw a troop of the creatures coming down Geary near Jones, and they had their drums and they were wearing some kind of weird cloaks with wobbled up human faces on them. These looked like people’s skins, but that could not be. They were some kind of cloak.

A man painted red stood in the middle of the street, his arms windmilling. You could see his teeth. He had no lips. He was naked, his inner thighs running brown. Did he have any idea how disgusting he was?

She sped up.

Over the rumble of drums, over the sirens and the echoing shots, there came another sound, the angry scream of a military jet, and she saw it flying low, blue fire coming out of its exhausts. It headed straight for the gigantic thing in the sky, and she stood up on the racing scooter and threw her head back and shouted at the top of her voice, “U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force!”

The plane went into a tight turn and there was a high, screaming hiss and a bright white dot shot off it and into the machine. This was followed by a flash and a rumble that could have been the thunder at the end of the world, it was so loud.

When the smoke cleared, though, the machine was still there. Nothing had changed except that the missile had exploded inside its guts, to no apparent effect.

The purple light on the end of the down-pointing antenna was still just as bright. The machine had not moved an inch. But she did see that the black block lettering on its base was moving, the letters changing as she watched.

Now the jet, which had disappeared behind Nob Hill, came speeding back, the echoing blare of its engines awesome to hear, and this time it fired four missiles, which went speeding toward the target and all … sort of went into it.