“Now!” I hissed. “Now, Tub!”

I crabbed leftward, rolled through the sunlight, and then was under the idling car. Tub followed, panting. Wind blew the car’s exhaust our way and we coughed and fanned it aside. There: the buses were a short sprint away if we could just get a little closer. The car above us honked and we both jumped and banged our heads on the front axle. We heard the gear shift into drive position.

We scrunched up against each other, almost hugging, and let the car pull away. As soon as we cleared the back license plate, we scrambled out of the way of an oncoming convertible, tripped across a speed bump, and went somersaulting into the next row, right between two parked cars. Steve must have glimpsed part of our blundering because the basketball picked up its pace, that awful sound like a fist into flesh.

I scuttled beneath the car to the right, Tub to the left. My fingers locked into the slots of a manhole cover. The buses were close. We could make it. I located Steve’s sneakers. He was just far enough for me to dare to get Tub’s attention and gesture for us to break for it. But Tub was looking at me in terror.

I’m stuck, he mouthed. I’m stuck!

The car above me sunk as somebody got inside of it. My body went numb and I forgot how to breathe. The car started; in seconds, it would pull away and reveal my location. The ball blasted against pavement and I saw both it and Steve’s shoes moving toward our location in effortless harmony. He was five feet away, four, three, two. I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep myself from squeaking.

Metal scraped across cement, and I felt the manhole cover bounce beneath my elbow. I looked at it, expecting nothing more than vibration brought on by the car’s thrumming engine. But the cover was ajar and fed into the blackness of a sewer. I blinked for a moment, confused.

And then a massive, gnarled paw reached out from the depths.

I would have screamed had my terror not been so absolute. The paw was the size of my torso, the gray skin of the palm divided into leathery segments by the scars of untold battles. The fur that covered the back of the paw was black but hardened with the brown of congealed sewage. The hand oscillated like a radar until it faced me and then pounced, wrist and finger bones crackling. I contracted into a ball, and the paw scraped across the ground. Jagged yellow claws the size of my forearm pulverized the parking lot concrete as easily as if it were Ms. Pinkton’s chalk.

Far away, I heard the first bus pull away from the curb, followed by the rest.

I tried to squirm away from the manhole but was caught up by the back axle. The paw extended on an arm that just kept going, the muscles getting thicker, white scars crisscrossing the fur in gruesome glyphs. I looked to Tub for help, but he had his fists tight against his eyes, and I dimly realized that the basketball was right between our cars, beating out its patient, psychotic rhythm. I had bigger problems: the giant paw crawled at me like a spider. I curled between the rear wheels.