We started out with a bang, picking up with Arnold, laying in his bed, listening to the phantom ticking.  He finds a clockwork device in his showerhead, and then a series of other devices scattered all through his house, which he methodically gathers up and smashes to shit on his front walk with a hammer.  The last one is a larger thing up in his attic which spills out a tickertape-like paper reel with his every move neatly typed up and recorded.  While he's burning the reams of paper on his front walk, his neighbors by this time understandably somewhat pissed, he notices those damn kids again, skulking around the side of his house.  Hefting the hammer, he follows them out through the back alley, and finally manages a good look at one. 

The kid doesn't have a face. 

And down the alley a ways is what looks remarkably like an unmarked cop car, two inhabitants in the front seat both staring at him.  When he gets closer, that ticking sound starts up again.  The cops are ticking, and each has a little clockwork key sticking from the top of his head, ticking neatly around in circles.  They even have a clockwork radio on the dash, which is ... ticking.  Really, it's too much to bear.  Arnold puts his hammer through the face of the one who gets out to talk to him, and the other throws the car in reverse and tears away, radioing for help.  Before long, sirens start up in the distance.

Arnold flees the scene, heading for a local convenience store, pursued by the sound of sirens and also the phantom, faceless kids.  He steals a truck and manages to run one of the kids over, only to find that once dead, she looks very much like a normal kid, if a normal kid was struck by a vehicle and had her brains dashed out against a brick wall.  Arnold gets the truck moving again, knocking the bloodstained windsheild out, and loses his tail of oddly mismatched police cars, only to crash at the mouth of an alley.  He's thrown clear, and when he manages to get himself to his feet and focus in on his surroundings, he's not where he should be.  The street is nowhere in his neighborhood.  From the rooftops all around, he hears the sound of hundreds of doors slamming shut, as the sonorous tones of a clocktower tolls out the hour.  Thirteen o'clock.