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the highway. Furthermore, it was time to think about where to spend the night. She generally hid and slept at night, preferring to travel during the day when she had a better chance of seeing things before she stumbled into them. She should be looking for shelter instead of being given the runabout by a panicked dog.
    Twice she made moves as if to go around the dog, and twice the dog moved to block her, snarling a warning. As she stood in indecision, staring into the dimness of the woods and wondering whether or not the dog would really attack her if she tried to run past it, she began to hear something. There was a crashing coming from the woods up the hill, on her right. It was getting closer.
    She crouched in readiness. The crashing was coming on quickly now, the sound of a large animal running or stumbling through the brush. It was too late to move—she would not be out of sight before it was upon her. The dog’s growling grew in volume as it, taking its cue from her, also crouched, ready to meet what was coming.
    The noise grew and grew. Suddenly she saw a blurred shape come crashing out of the trees and begin to tumble down the hill right at her. In a moment, the shape resolved itself into a man, all windmilling arms and legs, alternately stumbling and rolling down the steep slope toward them. He had obviously been running for a long time, and was exhausted. His breathing was ragged and he sagged, almost falling as he got to the road.
    As soon as he hit the road the dog leapt forward, snarling and snapping, and the man took several frantic steps backward, landing on his rear at the bottom of the dirt slope.
    “Jeez, girl! Call… Call off your dog… Call off your dog!” His words came in short bursts between his labored breaths.
    She looked at the dog, deciding. Maybe the dog had the right idea.
    “Come on, man… Christ! Look…” She looked at him as he pleaded. The dog continued to snarl but was no longer advancing.
    “I’m a human! … Just me! … One man… no… threat.” With that he threw up his hands, and lay back, panting.
    “They’re behind me, man! They’re coming…”
    When the man lay back, the dog backed off a few steps as well, reverting to a lower growl. She looked up the slope.
    “They’re coming?”
    “Up in the woods, behind me, yeah.” The man’s breathing was coming under control but he still looked wiped out. “They been chasing me for like two days, man. I got nothing more in me. I can’t go no further. You gotta help me.”
    She frowned at him. “She does not help,” she began, but then she saw them.
    At first she thought it was the bushes moving, but when they got to the top of the slope, she could see them more clearly. Some kind of small animal, perhaps, and there were a lot of them. Already she could see at least twenty, and more were emerging all the time. They seemed somehow rounded, and her brain’s first guess was “armadillo” but she knew that wasn’t going to be right.
    One tipped over while traversing the slope and actually started rolling down the hill towards them. It picked up momentum, going faster and faster, until it hit the road, coming to a stop.
    Now she could see it looked much more like a crab than anything else. Like a crab, but definitely not an actual crab. The top was a rounded shell, almost the shape of a bowling ball, with a flat bottom. It had legs all the way around its circumference, and claws on all sides, too, all covered in a hard, dark brown shell. This one was cracked and damaged from its tumble down the hill, missing several legs and several claws. It could no longer walk, managing only a few vague skittering motions with its remaining legs.
    It looked like the legs and claws went all the way around the body, pretty much evenly spaced. She saw no sign of eyes or a mouth. She flipped it over with her toe, carefully touching only the side with no remaining claws. It was surprisingly heavy.
    When it rolled onto its back, she was