Upper West Side: West 81st.
[The cab driver pulls to a halt, brakes squealing on tarmac as the doodads hanging from the wing mirror dance crazily back and forth. His skin has gone the color of putty and it's a thunderstorm overhead, the sky breaking up briefly, livid-white touching the buildings and spreading and then gone in an instant. The groceries sit in brown paper bags, clustering her knees, her iPod churns away, Tosca mellow and rich as melted chocolate.
And then she sees why. Something. Some kind of hulkish mass that's not some woman taking her kids to school in a tank. CRACK of lightning and Pepper can see it's some kind of -- boat? The people in it, they don't look like people and the cab driver starts repeating his Hail Mary, sliding into Spanish, as something tall and sleek and impossibly alien is marching toward the car, taking two strides to cross a distance that would take ten for a man, and slamming down the nose of the car with both hands.
She screams. It's not efficient. It's not remotely helpful. The door handle slides past her fingers, sticky with cold sweat and the door unlatches - the cab driver, she can see, is doing the same, and she's clear, rolling denim knees onto the road as the car whisks past them both, launched like a child's toy thrown across the room.