Hardly a minute after being told to lock their doors, they were being commanded to fling them open and join the hunt.

Because his weight was greater than the girl’s, even the thick runners of the ancient jasmine vine sagged and split under him. He clambered up through a noisy crackling of wood, torn green leaves, and sweet-smelling tiny white flowers cascading to the ground behind him. When he reached the top, he saw Amity in another backyard, this one greener and more recently mowed than the previous property, sans pool, but graced by a birdbath and an English garden in which flourished pink phlox and Firecandle and May Night and blue poppies.

A white-haired couple rushed at Amity, as though with concern for the child’s welfare, but instead grabbed her to prevent her from escaping.

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The man appeared to be in his seventies, but he wasn’t frail. He must have been a strapping specimen in his youth, footballer and gym rat. He remained formidable, like a monster pickup truck with a quarter million miles on it but still able to uproot an oak by means of a tow chain. With his wreath of snowy hair and cherry-red nose, even without a generous belly, he could have played Santa Claus, although at the moment he was a psycho Santa, eyes bulging and face wrenched and teeth bared as if to bite, perhaps a patriotic citizen or just a retiree worried that his pension would be taken away if he allowed these enemies of the state to escape. He grabbed Amity by one arm, and when she tried to pull away, he seized her throat with his other hand.

Leaping off the wall between properties, Jeffy shouted not at his daughter’s assailant, but at Amity, reminding her of how she had been taught to deal with the hordes of bogeymen, some real and some imagined, whose dark intentions were the stuff of a father’s worst nightmares. “Nutcracker!” he cried. “Nutcracker, nutcracker!”

Perhaps the girl needed no reminder, because even as Jeffy shouted, she drove one knee hard into her attacker’s crotch. When the old man convulsed and let go of her throat, she gave him the knee again, harder than the first time. In an instant, his flushed face turned as gray as the cardigan he wore. He bent over, cupping his broken stones, staggered sideways and then backward, as though practicing a dance step that he was too awkward to master, and sat on the yard with an expression that suggested he had for the first time in his life taken seriously the concept of a wrathful God.

The old woman’s cardigan was pink, complementing a pale-blue blouse and matching blue slacks with a pink belt, but in spite of that rather cheerful ensemble, her face was as severe as that of a witch who could call forth a squadron of flying monkeys. Her eyes burned with hatred. Maybe she was too arthritic to make use of the nutcracker defense effectively, but she had no need to resort to that because she had a garden spade with a three-foot handle. She swung it at Jeffy with the earnest desire to cut him with the edge of the shovel’s blade or concuss him with the flat of it, and then perhaps drive the point through his neck as he lay on his back on the grass.

At her age, such a ferocious assault should have been of brief duration, consisting of three or four lunges with the spade before her body reminded her of the decades of strain it had previously endured. However, she seemed indefatigable, slashing at Jeffy, forcing him to duck and backstep as the shovel carved the air—whoosh, whoosh—with all the seeming lethality of a broadsword. Out in the street, the mobile loudspeaker continued to call to arms all loyal citizens, while the harpy in pink and blue snarled invective in counterpoint to her industrious work with the spade—“You fucking traitor . . . shitface creep . . . puke-eating scum”—like a grandmother possessed by a demonic entity.

As grandpa lay on his side in the fetal position, whimpering and willing himself to be reborn, Amity snatched up a bucket in which a dozen freshly cut roses stood. She swung it at the woman, scattering the flowers and the few inches of water that sustained them.

The pail met the spade-wielder’s head with a sound like a cheap bell, staggering her but not rendering her unconscious. She dropped her weapon and weaved away toward the birdbath, where she leaned with both hands on the rim of that bowl, as if dizzy.

Amity grinned at her father, a rather wild-eyed manic grin, and he grinned at her as he snatched up the spade. He threw it over the wall, into the neighboring yard, where the kneecapped man was no doubt still lying at the bottom of the empty pool and wondering why he’d thought that it was a good idea to rush to the service of the nation.

A weird exhilaration overcame Jeffy, a motivating astonishment that he and Amity, having been cast into this maelstrom of mortal threats, were proving so quick and competent. Like characters in one of the fantasy novels they enjoyed. He was a guy who restored old radios and yearned to live in the past, a guy whose wife walked out on him, and Amity was but a slip of a girl, yet they were alive and free when by now they should have been captured and in chains. Their daring and spirit inspired him to believe they could handle this, split this dismal America, and flash across the multiverse to their own and better world.

The harpy turned from the birdbath and came at Amity as if she would claw the girl’s eyes out. Jeffy interceded, snared the woman by her cardigan, spun her around, and shoved her facedown into a bed of red and purple primulas. He’d never imagined that he could treat a woman so roughly, let alone one old enough to be a grandmother, but he’d also never imagined that he would encounter a homicidal, geriatric champion of a police state.

“You are the goat!” Amity declared.

For an instant, Jeffy indeed almost felt he was the greatest of all time, father and stalwart defender. Even though his fear did not in the least relent, his confidence swelled. Perhaps dangerously.

The barrier between this property and the next was not a wall like the one that he and Amity had scaled only a minute earlier, but instead a wrought-iron fence in front of which grew periwinkle and Cistus and golden candle and holly flame pea. Before they could even consider clambering over it, however, two policemen appeared in the neighboring yard. One of them had drawn his pistol.

On his hands and knees, the crotch-kicked man growled as he tried to get up, and his wife spat out primula petals.

A fence at the back of the property featured a gate to an alleyway where a black van now glided into view.

They couldn’t flee to the street in front of the residence, because that was where some vehicle with a loudspeaker continued to blare warnings about enemies of the state.

Men in black were getting out of the van in the alley, and the police in the next yard were rushing toward the wrought-iron fence, and a long soft peal of thunder rumbled through the lowering sky.

Jeffy grabbed Amity’s hand. They ran along the path through the English garden, across the patio with its white-painted wrought-iron chairs and hanging baskets of flower-laden fuchsia, to the back door of the house. They simply needed to get out of sight, find a haven that would provide fourteen seconds of privacy in which to switch on and use the key to everything.

They went inside. He slammed the door and twisted the thumb turn on the deadbolt to lock it.

“Where?” Amity asked breathlessly.

“Upstairs,” Jeffy said. “They don’t know we can just teleport out of here, or whatever it is the key does to us. They’ll search down here, which will give us all the time we need.”

“I hope there’s not a mean dog,” she worried as they crossed the kitchen toward a swinging door that no doubt led to the ground-floor hallway.

“There won’t be a mean dog,” Jeffy promised as he pushed open the door, and in fact there was no dog, though waiting for them was the meanest member of the family.

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