Thousands of people must be up there, and what was happening to them was the most terrifying thing that Kelly had ever known. It seemed almost like a sort of theatrical event, not anything real, yet the scale of it was so unimaginably huge that it was completely beyond comprehension. But it looked as if the entire city—everything that was even slightly loose—had been ripped from the grasp of gravity, and her own stomach quailed as her scooter kept threatening to join them, and she rode with her head down over the handlebars, heedless of direction, safety, anything, just trying with all her soul to get away from here.

The drums hummed and roared, mixing with the single, vast scream that the city had become, and the booms of the great machine overhead, thundering as it drove its quarry through the sky.

The creatures—aliens, she supposed—were as pale as dolls, their faces gleaming in the sun, their bodies strong and young, their children darting among them full of happy excitement. They wore ordinary clothes but in strange ways, as if they had not yet understood how to put on a shirt frontward. They looked like some kind of drunk Halloween party coming down the streets.

Chairs and stoves and TVs and books were now gushing out of the windows of houses and apartments and offices along with the occupants, adding to the dark, towering cloud of living people and possessions until it blotted the sun and shattered the last clouds of morning, and the machine directing it all disappeared somewhere above it.

She twisted the throttle and the Vespa leaped ahead, and she shot the length of the Embarcadero. As she passed the Aquatic Park, the noise from above increased thunderously. Horns started honking, people screaming and praying, adding to the panic of the dogs and the shrieks of the crazed horde of gulls that was following the living cloud.

The drumming stopped. The howls stopped. With a noise unlike any she had ever heard before, a resonant, howling shriek, the mass of people and their possessions dropped two hundred feet into the water. Geysers erupted as cars and trucks and buses hit and around them the furniture, the mailboxes, the flailing human forms and the struggling animals. The waters splashed white and frothed and the gulls swooped, their wings gleaming in the lovely sun.

Shapes were around her again, creatures running as nobody could ever possibly run, gaining even as she wound the Vespa up as far as she dared. They breathed against her, clutching and growling.

Only by turning the bike practically into a bullet did she outrun them.

They were a quarter of a mile back now, so she put the Vespa into gear and went up Bay Street this time, heading for Marina, then the Presidio and the Golden Gate into Marin. But would Marin be safe? Why would it be? Or any other place?