Franco’s tongue was exploring the window glass. Except that the tongue wasn’t a tongue at all.

The driver kicked open his door. Roger yelled, “No!” through the partition glass, but the driver was already outside. He fired the handgun from behind the door, shooting it with a flick of his wrist, as though throwing bullets from it. He fired again and again, the pair in front of the car doubling up, struck by small-caliber rounds, but not dropping.

The driver kicked off two more wild shots and one of them struck the man in the head. His scalp flew backward and he stumbled to the ground.

Then another grabbed the driver from behind. It was Hal Chatfield, Roger’s neighbor, his blue bathrobe hanging off his shoulders.

“No!” Roger shouted, but too late.

Hal spun the driver to the road. The thing came out of his mouth and pierced the driver’s neck. Roger watched the howling driver through his window.

Another one rose up into the headlights. No, not another one—the same man who had been shot in the head. His wound was leaking white, running down the side of his face. He used the car to hold himself up, but he was still coming.

Roger wanted to run, but he was trapped. To the right, past Franco the gardener, Roger saw a man in UPS brown shirt and shorts come out of the garage next door with the head of a shovel on his shoulder, like the baseball bat of an on-deck hitter.

The head-wound man pulled himself around the driver’s open door and climbed into the front seat. He looked through the plastic partition at Roger, the front-right lobe of his head raised like a forelock of flesh. White ooze glazed his cheek and jaw.

Roger turned just in time to see the UPS guy swing the shovel. It clanged off the rear window, leaving a long scrape in the reinforced glass, light from the streetlamps glinting in the spiderweb cracks.

Roger heard the scrape on the partition. The head-wound man’s tongue came out, and he was trying to slip it through the ashtray-style pay slot. The fleshy tip poked through, straining, almost sniffing at the air as it tried to get at Roger.

With a scream, Roger kicked at the slot in a frenzy, slamming it shut. The man in front let out an ungodly squeal, and the severed tip of his…whatever it was, fell directly into Roger’s lap. Roger swatted it away as, on the other side of the partition, the man spurted white all over, gone wild either in pain or in pure castration hysteria.

Whamm! Another swing of the shovel crashed against the back window behind Roger’s head, the antishatter glass cracking and bending but still refusing to break.

Pown-pown-pown. Footsteps leaving craters on the roof now.