Shadowfires

34 CONVERGENCE

After washing her face and doing what little she could with her lank and tangled hair, Rachael returned to the vicinity of the public telephones and sat on a red leatherette bench nearby, where she could see everyone who approached from the front of the hotel lobby and from the stairs that led out of the sunken casino. Most people remained down on the bright and noisy gaming level, but the lobby concourse was filled with a steady stream of passersby.

She studied all the men as surreptitiously as possible. She was not trying to spot Whitney Gavis, for she had no idea what he looked like. However, she was worried that someone might recognize her from photographs on television. She felt that enemies were everywhere, all around her, closing in — and while that might be paranoia, it might also be the truth.

If she had ever been wearier and more miserable, she could not remember the time. The few hours of sleep she'd had last night in Palm Springs had not prepared her for today's frantic activity. Her legs ached from all the running and climbing she had done; her arms felt stiff, leaden. A dull pain extended from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. Her eyes were bloodshot, grainy, and sore. Although she had stopped in Baker for a pack of diet sodas and had emptied all six cans during the drive to Vegas, her mouth was dry and sour.

“You look beat, kid,” Whitney Gavis said, stepping up to the bench on which she sat, startling her.

She'd seen him approaching from the front of the lobby, but she had turned her attention to other men, certain that he could not be Whitney Gavis. He was about five nine, an inch or two shorter than Benny, perhaps more solidly built than Benny, with heavier shoulders, a broader chest. He was wearing baggy white pants and a soft pastel-blue cotton-knit shirt, a modified Miami Vice look without the white jacket. However, the left side of his face was disfigured by a web of red and brown scars, as if he'd been deeply cut or burned — or both. His left ear was lumpy, gnarled. He walked with a stiff and awkward gait, laboriously swinging his left hip in a manner that indicated either that the leg was paralyzed or, more likely, that it was an artificial limb. His left arm had been amputated midway between the elbow and the wrist, and the stump poked out of the short sleeve of his shirt.

Laughing at her surprise, he said, “Evidently Benny didn't warn you: as knight-errant riding to the rescue, I leave something to be desired.”

Blinking up at him, she said, “No, no, I'm glad you're here, I'm glad to have a friend no matter… I mean, I didn't… I'm sure that you… Oh, hell, there's no reason to…” She started to get up, then realized he might be more comfortable sitting down, then realized that was a patronizing thought, and consequently found herself bobbing up and down in embarrassing indecision.

Laughing again, taking her by the arm with his one hand, Whitney said, “Relax, kid. I'm not offended. I've never known anyone who's less concerned about a person's appearance than Benny; he judges you by what you are and what you deliver, not by the way you look or by your physical limitations, so it's just exactly like him to forget to mention my… shall we say 'peculiarities'? I refuse to call them handicaps. Anyway, you've every reason to be disconcerted, kid.”

“I guess he didn't have time to mention it, even if he'd given it a thought,” she said, deciding to remain standing. “We parted in quite a hurry.”

She'd been startled because she had known that Benny and Whitney had been in Vietnam together, and on first seeing this man's grievous infirmities, she couldn't understand how he could have been a soldier. Then, of course, she realized he had been a whole man when he had gone to Southeast Asia and that he'd lost his arm and leg in that conflict.

“Ben's all right?” Whitney asked.

“I don't know.”

“Where is he?”

“Coming here to join me, I hope. But I don't know for sure.”

Suddenly she was stricken by the awful realization that it might just as easily have been her Benny who had returned from the war with his face scarred, one hand gone, one leg blown off, and that thought was devastating. Since Monday night, when Benny had taken the.357 Magnum away from Vince Baresco, Rachael had more or less unconsciously thought of him as endlessly resourceful, indomitable, and virtually invincible. She had been afraid for him at times, and since she had left him alone on the mountain above Lake Arrowhead, she had worried about him constantly. But deep down she had wanted to believe that he was too tough and quick to come to any harm. Now, seeing how Whitney Gavis had returned from the war, and knowing that Benny had served at Whitney's side, Rachael abruptly knew and felt — and finally believed — that Benny was a mortal man, as fragile as any other, tethered to life by a thread as pitifully thin as those by which everyone else was suspended above the void.

“Hey, are you all right?” Whitney asked.

“I… I'll be okay,” she said shakily. “I'm just exhausted… and worried.”

“I want to know everything — the real story, not the one on the news.”

“There's a lot to tell,” she said. “But not here.”

“No,” he said, looking around at the passersby, “not here.”

“Benny's going to meet me at the Golden Sand.”

“The motel? Yeah, sure, that's a good place to hole up, I guess. Not exactly first-class accommodations.”

“I'm in no position to be choosy.”

He'd entrusted his car to the valet, too, and he presented both his claim check and Rachael's when they left the hotel.

Beyond the enormous, high-ceilinged porte cochere, wind-harried rain slashed the night. The lightning had abated, but the downpour was not gray and dreary and lightless, at least not in the vicinity of the hotel. Millions of droplets reflected the amber and yellow lights that surrounded the entrance to the Grand, so it looked as if a storm of molten gold were plating the Strip in an armor fit for angels.

Whitney's car, a like-new white Karmann Ghia, was delivered first, but the black Mercedes rolled up behind it. Although she knew that she was calling attention to herself in front of the valets, Rachael insisted on looking carefully in the back seat and in the trunk before she would get behind the wheel and drive away. The plastic garbage bag containing the Wildcard file was where she had left it, though that was not what she was looking for. She was being ridiculous, and she knew it. Eric was dead — or reduced to a subhuman form, creeping around in the desert more than a hundred miles from here. There was no way he could have trailed her to the Grand, no way he could have gotten into the car during the short time it had been parked in the hotel's underground valet garage. Nevertheless, she looked warily in the trunk and was relieved when she found it empty.

She followed Whitney's Karmann Ghia onto Flamingo Boulevard, drove east to Paradise Boulevard, then turned south toward Tropicana and the shelter of the shuttered Golden Sand Inn.

Even at night and in the cloaking rain, Eric dared not drive along Las Vegas Boulevard South, that garish and baroque street that the locals called the Strip. The night was set ablaze by eight- and ten-story signs of blinking-pulsing-flashing incandescent bulbs, and by hundreds upon hundreds of miles of glowing neon tubes folded upon themselves as if they were the luminous intestines of transparent deep-water fish. The blur of water on the pickup's windows and the cowboy hat, its brim turned down, were not sufficient to disguise his nightmarish face from passing motorists. Therefore, he turned off the Strip well before he reached the hotels, on the first eastbound street he encountered, just past the back of McCarran International Airport. That street boasted no hotels, no carnivalesque banks of lights, and the traffic was sparse. By a circuitous route, he made his way to Tropicana Boulevard.

He had overheard Shadway telling Rachael about the Golden Sand Inn, and he had no difficulty finding it on a relatively undeveloped and somewhat dreary stretch of Tropicana. The single-story, U-shaped building embraced a swimming pool, with the open end exposed to the street. Sun-weathered wood trim in need of paint. Stained, cracked, pockmarked stucco. A tar-and-crushed-rock roof of the type common in the desert, bald and in need of rerocking. A few windows broken and boarded over. Landscaping overrun by weeds. Dead leaves and paper litter drifted against one wall. A large neon sign, broken and unlit, hung between twenty-foot-tall steel posts near the entrance drive, swinging slightly on its pivots as the wind wailed in from the west.

Nothing but empty scrubland lay for two hundred yards on either side of the Golden Sand Inn. Across the boulevard was a new housing development currently under construction: a score of homes in various stages of framing, skeletal shapes in the night and rain. But for the few cars passing on Tropicana, the motel was relatively isolated here on the southeastern edge of the city.

And judging by the total lack of lights, Rachael had not yet arrived. Where was she? He had driven very fast, but he did not believe he could have passed her on the highway.

As he thought about her, his heart began to pound. His vision acquired a crimson tint. The memory of blood made his saliva flow. That familiar cold rage spread out in icy crystals through his entire body, but he clenched his shark-fierce teeth and strove to remain at least functionally rational.

He parked the pickup on the graveled shoulder of the road more than a hundred yards past the Golden Sand, easing the front end into a shallow drainage ditch to give the impression that it had slid off the road and had been abandoned until morning. He switched off the headlights, then the engine. The pounding of the rain was louder now that the competing sound of the engine was gone. He waited until the eastbound and westbound lanes of the boulevard were deserted, then threw open the passenger-side door and got out into the storm.

He sloshed through the drainage ditch, which was full of racing brown water, and made his way across the barren stretch of desert toward the motel. He ran, for if a car came along Tropicana, he had nothing behind which to hide except a few tumbleweeds still rooted in the sandy soil and shaking in the wind.

Exposed to the elements, he again wanted to strip off his clothes and succumb to a deep-seated desire to run free through the wind and night, away from the lights of the city, into wild places. But the greater need for vengeance kept him clothed and focused on his objective.

The motel's small office occupied the northeast corner of the U-shaped structure. Through the big plate-glass windows, he could see only a portion of the unlighted room: the dim shapes of a sofa, one chair, an empty postcard rack, an end table and lamp, and the check-in desk. The manager's apartment, where Shadway had told Rachael to take shelter, was probably reached through the office. Eric tried the door, the knob disappearing in his huge leathery hand; it was locked, as he had expected.

Abruptly he saw a vague reflection of himself in the wet glass, a horned demonic visage bristling with teeth and twisted by strange bony excrescences. He looked quickly away, choking back the whimper that tried to escape him.

He moved into the courtyard, where doors to motel rooms lay on three sides. There were no lights, but he could see a surprising amount of detail, including the dark blue shade of paint on the doors. Whatever he was becoming, it was perhaps a creature with better night vision than a man possessed.

A battered aluminum awning overhung the cracked walkway that served all three wings, forming a shabby promenade. Rain drizzled from the awning, splashed onto the edge of the concrete walk, and puddled in a strip of grass that had been almost entirely choked out by weeds. His boots made thick squelching sounds as he walked through the weeds onto the concrete pool apron.

The swimming pool had been drained, but the storm was beginning to fill it again. Down at the deeper end of the sloped bottom, at least a foot of water had already collected. Beneath the water, an elusive — and perhaps illusory — shadowfire flickered crimson and silver, further distorted by the rippling of the fluid under which it burned.

Something about that shadowfire, more than any other before it, shot sparks of fear through him. Looking down into the black hole of the mostly empty pool, he was overcome by an instinctive urge to run, to put as much distance between himself and this place as possible.

He quickly turned away from the pool.

He stepped under the aluminum awning, where the tinny drumming of the rain made him feel claustrophobic, as if he were sealed inside a can. He went to room 15, near the center of the middle wing of the U, and tried the door. It was locked, too, but the lock looked old and flimsy. He stepped back and began kicking the door. By the third blow, he was so excited by the very act of destruction that he began to keen shrilly and uncontrollably. On the fourth kick, the lock snapped, and the door flew inward with a screech of tortured metal.

He went inside.

He remembered Shadway telling Rachael that electrical service had been maintained, but he did not switch on the lights. For one thing, he did not want to alert Rachael to his presence when, at last, she arrived. Besides, because of his drastically improved night vision, the dimensions of the lightless room and the contours of the furniture were revealed in sufficient detail to allow him to roam the chamber without falling over things.

Quietly he closed the door.

He moved to the window that looked out upon the courtyard, parted the musty, greasy drapes an inch or two, and peered into the lesser gloom of the blustery night. From here, he had a commanding view of the open end of the motel and of the door to the office.

When she came, he would see her.

Once she had settled in, he would go after her.

He shifted his weight impatiently from one foot to the other.

He made a thin, whispery, eager sound.

He longed for the blood.

Amos Zachariah Tate — the craggy-faced, squint-eyed trucker with the carefully tended handlebar mustache — looked as if he might be the reincarnation of an outlaw who had prowled these same solitary reaches of the Mojave in the days of the Old West, preying upon stagecoaches and pony-express riders. However, his manner was more that of an itinerant preacher from the same age: soft-spoken, most courteous, generous, yet hard-bitten, with firm convictions about the redemption of the soul that was possible through the love of Jesus.

He provided Ben not merely with a free ride to Las Vegas but with a wool blanket to ward off the chill that the truck's air conditioner threw upon his rain-sodden body, coffee from one of two large thermos bottles, a chewy granola bar, and spiritual advice. He was genuinely concerned about Ben's comfort and physical well-being, a natural-born Good Samaritan who was embarrassed by displays of gratitude and who was devoid of self-righteousness, which drained all of the potential offensiveness from his well-meant, low-key pitch for Jesus.

Besides, Amos believed Ben's lie about a desperately injured — perhaps dying — wife in the Sunrise Hospital in Vegas. Although Amos said he did not usually take the laws of the land lightly — even minor laws like speed limits — he made an exception in this case and pushed the big rig up to sixty-five and seventy miles an hour, which was as fast as he felt he dared go in this foul weather.

Huddled under the warm wool blanket, sipping coffee, chewing the sweet granola bar and thinking bitter thoughts of death and loss, Ben was grateful to Amos Tate, but he wished they could make even better speed. If love was the closest that human beings could hope to come to immortality — which was what he'd thought when in bed with Rachael — then he had been given a key to life everlasting when he had found her. Now, at the gates of that paradise, it seemed the key was being snatched out of his hand. When he considered the bleakness of life without her, he wanted to seize control of the truck from Amos, push the driver aside, get behind the wheel, and make the rig fly to Vegas.

But all he could do was pull the blanket a little tighter around himself and, with growing trepidation, watch the dark miles go by.

The manager's apartment at the Golden Sand Inn had been unused for a month or more, and it had a stale smell. Although the odor was not strong, Rachael repeatedly wrinkled her nose in distaste. There was a quality of putrescence in the smell which, over time, would probably leave her nauseated.

The living room was large, the bedroom small, the bathroom minuscule. The tiny kitchen was cramped and dreary but completely equipped. The walls did not look as if they had been painted in a decade. The carpets were threadbare, and the kitchen linoleum was cracked and discolored. The furniture was sagging and scarred and splitting at the seams, and the major kitchen appliances were dented and scraped and yellowing with age.

“Not a layout you're ever going to see in Architectural Digest,” Whitney Gavis said, bracing himself against the refrigerator with the stump of his left arm and reaching behind with his one good hand to insert the plug in the wall socket. The motor came on at once. “But the stuff works, pretty much, and it's unlikely anyone's going to look for you here.”

As they had gone through the apartment, turning on lights, she had begun to tell him the real story behind the warrants for her and Benny's arrest. Now they pulled up chairs at the Formica-topped kitchen table, which was filmed with gray dust and ringed with a score of cigarette scars, and she told him the rest of it as succinctly as she could.

Outside, the moaning wind seemed like a sentient beast, pressing its featureless face to the windows as if it wanted to hear the tale she told or as if it had something of its own to add to the story.

Standing at the window of room 15, waiting for Rachael to arrive, Eric had felt the changefire growing hotter within him. He began to pour sweat; it streamed off his brow and down his face, gushed from every pore as if trying to match the rate at which the rain ran off the awning of the promenade beyond the window. He felt as if he were standing in a furnace, and every breath he drew seared through his lungs. All around him now, in every corner, the room was filled with the phantom flames of shadowfires, at which he dared not look. His bones felt molten, and his flesh was so hot that he would not have been surprised to see real flames spurt from his fingertips.

“Melting…” he said in a voice deep and guttural and thoroughly inhuman. “… the… melting man.”

His face suddenly shifted. A terrible crunching-splintering noise filled his ears for a moment, issuing from within his skull, but it turned almost at once into a sickening, spluttering, oozing liquid sound. The process was accelerating insanely. Horrified, terrified — but also with a dark exhilaration and a wild demonic joy — he sensed his face changing shape. For a moment he was aware of a gnarled brow extending so far out over his eyes that it penetrated his peripheral vision, but then it was gone, subsiding, the new bone melting into his nose and mouth and jawline, pulling his nominally human countenance forward into a rudimentary, misshapen snout. His legs began to give way beneath him, so he turned reluctantly from the window, and with a crash he fell to his knees on the floor. Something snapped in his chest. To accommodate the snoutlike restructuring of his visage, his lips split farther back along his cheeks. He dragged himself onto the bed, rolled onto his back, giving himself entirely to the devastating yet not essentially unpleasant process of revolutionary change, and as from a great distance he heard himself making peculiar sounds: a doglike growl, a reptilian hiss, and the wordless but unmistakable exclamations of a man in the throes of sexual orgasm.

For a while, darkness claimed him.

When he came partially to his senses a few minutes later, he found that he had rolled off the bed and was lying beneath the window, where he had recently been keeping a watch for Rachael. Although the changefire had not grown cooler, although he still felt his tissues seeking new forms in every part of his body, he resolutely pushed aside the drapes and reached up toward the window. In the dim light, his hands looked enormous and chitinous, as if they belonged to a crab or lobster that had been gifted with fingers instead of pincers. He grabbed the sill and pulled himself off the floor, stood. He leaned against the glass, his breath coming in great hot gasps that steamed the pane.

Light shone in the windows of the motel office.

Rachael must have arrived.

Instantly he was seething with hatred. The motivating memory-smell of blood filled his nostrils.

But he also had an immense and strangely formed erection. He wanted to mount her, then kill her as he had taken and then slain the cowboy's woman. In his degenerate and mutant state, he was unsettled to discover that he was having trouble holding on to an understanding of her identity. Second by second he was ceasing to care who she was: the only thing that mattered now was that she was female — and prey-He turned away from the window and tried to reach the door, but his metamorphosing legs collapsed beneath him. Again, for a time, he squirmed and writhed upon the motel floor, the changefire hotter than ever within him.

His genes and chromosomes, once the undisputed regulators — the masters — of his very form and function, had become plastic themselves. They were no longer primarily re-creating previous stages in human evolution but were exploring utterly alien forms that had nothing to do with the physiological history of the human species. They were mutating either randomly or in response to inexplicable forces and patterns he could not perceive. And as they mutated, they directed his body to produce the mad flood of hormones and proteins with which his flesh was molded.

He was becoming something that had never before walked the earth and that had never been meant to walk it.

The Marine Corps twin-engine turboprop transport from Twentynine Palms landed in driving rain at McCarren International Airport in Las Vegas at 9:03 p.m. Tuesday. It was only ten minutes ahead of the estimated time of arrival for the scheduled airline flight from Orange County on which Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom were passengers.

Harold Ince, a DSA agent in the Nevada office, met Anson Sharp, Jerry Peake, and Nelson Gosser at the debarkation gate.

Gosser immediately headed for another gate, where the incoming flight from Orange County would unload. It would be his job to run a discreet tail on Verdad and Hagerstrom until they had left the terminal, whereupon they would become the responsibility of the surveillance team that would be waiting outside.

Ince said, “Mr. Sharp, sir, we're cutting it awful close.”

“Tell me something I don't know,” Sharp said, walking swiftly across the waiting area that served the gate, toward the long corridor that led to the front of the terminal.

Peake hurried after Sharp, and Ince — a much shorter man than Sharp — hustled to stay at his side. “Sir, the car's waiting for you out front, discreetly at the end of the taxi line, as you requested.”

“Good. But what if they don't take a cab?”

“One rental-car desk is still open. If they stop to make those arrangements, I'll warn you at once.”

“Good.”

They reached the moving walkway and stepped onto the rubber belt. No other flights had landed recently or were about to take off, so the corridor was deserted. On the speaker system that served the long hall, taped messages from Vegas showroom performers — Joan Rivers, Paul Anka, Rodney Dangerfield, Tom Dreesen, Bill Cosby, and others — offered lame jokes and, mostly, advice about safety on the pedway: Please use the moving handrail, stay to the right, allow other passengers to pass on the left, and be careful not to trip at the end of the moving belt.

Dissatisfied with the leisurely speed of the walkway, striding along between the moving handrails, Sharp glanced down and slightly back at Ince and said, “How's your relationship with the Las Vegas police?”

“They're cooperative, sir.”

“That's all?”

“Well, maybe better than that,” Ince said. “They're good guys. They have a hell of a job to do in this city, what with all the hoods and transients, and they handle it well. Got to give them credit. They're not soft, and because they know how hard it is to keep the peace, they have a lot of respect for cops of all kinds.”

“Like us?”

“Like us.”

“If there's shooting,” Sharp said, “and if someone reports it, and if the Vegas uniforms arrive before we've been able to mop up, can we count on them to conform their reports to our needs?”

Ince blinked in surprise. “Well, I… maybe.”

“I see,” Sharp said coldly. They reached the end of the moving walkway. As they strode into the main lobby of the terminal, he said, “Ince, in days to come, you better build a tighter relationship with the local agencies. Next time, I don't want to hear 'maybe.' ”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“You stay here, maybe over by the newsstand. Make yourself as inconspicuous as possible.”

“That's why I'm dressed this way,” Ince said. He was wearing a green polyester leisure suit and an orange Banlon shirt.

Leaving Ince behind, Sharp pushed through a glass door and went outside, where rain was blowing under the overhanging roof.

Jerry Peake caught up with him at last.

“How long do we have, Jerry?”

Glancing at his watch, Peake said, “They land in five minutes.”

The taxi line was short at this hour — only four cabs. Their car was parked at the curb marked arrivals — unloading only, about fifty feet behind the last taxi. It was one of the agency's standard crap-brown Fords that might as well have had unmarked law-enforcement sedan painted on the sides in foot-tall block letters. Fortunately, the rain would disguise the institutional nature of the car and would make it more difficult for Verdad and Hagerstrom to spot a tail.

Peake got behind the wheel, and Sharp sat in the passenger's seat, putting his attaché case on his lap. He said, “If they take a cab, get close enough to read its plates, then fall way back. Then if we lose it, we can get a quick fix on its destination from the taxi company.”

Peake nodded.

Their car was half sheltered by the overhang and half exposed to the storm. Rain hammered only on Sharp's side, and only his windows were blurred by the sheeting water.

He opened the attaché case and removed the two pistols whose registration numbers could be traced neither to him nor to the DSA. One of the silencers was fresh, the other too well used when they had pursued Shadway at Lake Arrowhead. He fitted the fresh one to a pistol, keeping that weapon for himself. He gave the other gun to Peake, who seemed to accept it with reluctance.

“Something wrong?” Sharp asked.

Peake said, “Well… sir… do you still want to kill Shadway?”

Sharp gave him a narrow look. “It isn't what I want, Jerry. Those are my orders: terminate him. Orders from authorities so high up the ladder that I sure as hell am not going to buck them.”

“But…”

“What is it?”

“If Verdad and Hagerstrom lead us to Shadway and Mrs. Leben, if they're right there, you can't terminate anyone in front of them. I mean, sir, those detectives won't keep their mouths shut. Not them.”

“I'm pretty sure I can make Verdad and Hagerstrom back off,” Sharp assured him. He pulled the clip out of the pistol to make sure it was fully loaded. “The bastards are supposed to stay out of this, and they know it. When I catch them red-handed in the middle of it, they're going to realize that their careers and pensions are in jeopardy. They'll back off. And when they're gone, we'll take out Shadway and the woman.”

“If they don't back off?”

“Then we take them out, too,” Sharp said. With the heel of his hand, he slammed the clip back into the pistol.

The refrigerator hummed noisily.

The damp air still smelled stale, with a hint of decay.

They hunched over the old kitchen table like two conspirators in one of those old war movies about the anti-Nazi underground in Europe. Rachael's thirty-two pistol lay on the cigarette-scarred Formica, within easy reach, though she did not really believe she would need it — at least not tonight.

Whitney Gavis had absorbed her story — in a condensed form — with remarkably little shock and without skepticism, which surprised her. He did not seem to be a gullible man. He would not believe just any crazy tale he was told. Yet he had believed her wild narrative. Maybe he trusted her implicitly because Benny loved her.

“Benny showed you pictures of me?” she had asked. And Whitney had said, “Yeah, kid, the last couple months, you're all he can talk about.” So she said, “Then he knew that what we had together was special, knew it before I did.” Whitney said, “No, he told me that you knew the relationship was special, too, but you were afraid to admit it just yet; he said you'd come around, and he was right.” She said, “If he showed you pictures of me, why didn't he show me pictures of you or at least talk about you, since you're his best friend?” And Whitney had said, “Benny and me are committed to each other, have been ever since Nam, as good as brothers, better than brothers, so we share everything. But until recently, you hadn't committed to him, kid, and until you did, he wasn't going to share everything with you. Don't hold that against him. It's Nam that made him that way.”

Vietnam was probably another reason that Whitney Gavis believed her incredible tale, even the part about being pursued by a mutant beast in the Mojave Desert. After a man had been through the madness of Vietnam, maybe nothing strained his credulity anymore.

Now Whitney said, “But you don't know for certain that those snakes killed him.”

“No,” Rachael admitted.

“If he came back from the dead after being hit by the truck, is it possible he could come back after dying of multiple snakebites?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“And if he doesn't stay dead, you can't be certain he'll just degenerate into something that'll remain out there on the desert, living pretty much an animal's existence.”

“No,” she said, “of course, I can't guarantee that, either.”

He frowned, and the scarred side of his otherwise handsome face puckered and creased as if it were paper.

Outside, the night was marked by ominous noises, though all were related to the storm: the fronds of a palm tree scraped against the roof; the motel sign, stirred by the wind, creaked on corroded hinges; a loose section of downspouting popped and rattled against its braces. Rachael listened for sounds that could not be explained by the wind and rain, heard none, but kept listening anyway.

Whitney said, “The really disturbing thing is that Eric must've overheard Benny telling you about this place.”

“Maybe,” Rachael said uneasily.

“Almost certainly, kid.”

“All right. But considering his appearance when I last saw him, he won't be able to just stand out along the road and hitch a ride. Besides, he seemed to be devolving mentally and emotionally, not just physically. I mean… Whitney, if you could've seen him with those snakes, you'd realize how unlikely it is that he'd have the mental capacity to find a path out of the desert and somehow get all the way here to Vegas.”

“Unlikely, but not impossible,” he said. “Nothing's impossible, kid. After I had my run-in with an antipersonnel mine in Nam, they told my family I couldn't possibly live. But I did. So they told me I couldn't possibly regain enough muscle control of my damaged face to speak without impairment. But I did. Hell, they had a whole list of things that were impossible — but none of them turned out to be. And I didn't have your husband's advantage — this genetic business.”

“If you can call it an advantage,” she said, remembering the hideous notched ridge of bone on Eric's forehead, the nascent horns, the inhuman eyes, the fierce hands…

“I should arrange other accommodations for you.”

“No,” she said quickly. “This is where Benny's expecting to find me. If I'm not here—”

“Don't sweat it, kid. He'll find you through me.”

“No. If he shows up, I want to be here.”

“But—”

“I want to be here,” she insisted sharply, determined not to be talked into another course of action. “As soon as he gets here, I want to… I have to… see him. I have to see him.”

Whitney Gavis studied her for a moment. He had a discomfitingly intense gaze. Finally he said, “God, you really love him, don't you?”

“Yes,” she said tremulously.

“I mean really love him.”

“Yes,” she repeated, trying to prevent her voice from cracking with emotion. “And I'm worried about him… so very worried.”

“He'll be all right. He's a survivor.”

“If anything happens to him—”

“Nothing will,” Whitney said. “But I guess there's not much danger in you staying here tonight, at least. Even if your husband… even if Eric gets to Vegas, it sounds as if he's going to have to stay out of sight and make a slow and careful journey of it. Probably won't arrive for a few days—”

“If ever.”

“—so we can wait until tomorrow to find another place for you. You can stay here and wait for Benny tonight. And he'll come. I know he will, Rachael.”

Tears shimmered in her eyes. Not trusting herself to speak, she merely nodded.

With the good grace not to remark upon her tears and the good sense not to try to comfort her, Whitney pushed himself up from the kitchen table and said, “Yes, well, all right, then! If you're going to spend even one night in this dump, we've got to make the place more comfortable. For one thing, although there may be towels and some sheets in the linen closet, they're probably dusty, mildewed or even crawling with disease. So what I'll do is, I'll go buy a set of sheets, towels… and how about some food?”

“I'm starved,” she said. “I only had an Egg McMuffin early this morning and a couple of candy bars later, but I've burned all that off half a dozen times over. I made a quick stop in Baker, but that was after my encounter with Eric, and I didn't have much appetite. Just picked up a six-pack of diet soda 'cause I was feeling so dehydrated.”

“I'll bring back some grub, too. You want to give me a dinner order, or do you trust me?”

She stood up and wearily pushed a pale and trembling hand through her hair. “I'll eat almost anything except turnips and squid.”

He smiled. “Lucky for you, this is Vegas. Any other town, the only store open at this hour would be the turnip and squid emporium. But hardly anything in Vegas ever closes. You want to come with me?”

“I shouldn't be showing my face.”

He nodded. “You're right. Well, I ought to be back in an hour. You be okay here?”

“Really,” she said, “I'm safer here than anywhere else I've been since yesterday morning.”

In the velvety blackness of room 15, Eric crawled aimlessly across the floor, first one way and then another, twitching, kicking spasmodically, hitching and shuddering and squirming like a broken-backed cockroach.

“Rachael…”

He heard himself speak that word and only that word, each time with a different intonation, as if it constituted his entire vocabulary. Although his voice was thick as mud, those two syllables were always clear. Sometimes he knew what the word meant, remembered who she was, but at other times it had no meaning for him. However, regardless of whether or not he knew what it meant, the name predictably engendered precisely the same response in him each time he spoke it: mindless, icy fury.

“Rachael…”

Caught helplessly in the tides of change, he groaned, hissed, gagged, whimpered, and sometimes he laughed softly in the back of his throat. He coughed and choked and gasped for breath. He lay on his back, shaking and bucking as the changes surged through him, clawing at the air with hands twice as large as his hands had been in his previous life.

Buttons popped off his red plaid shirt. One of the shoulder seams split as his body swelled and bent into a grotesque new form.

“Rachael…”

During the past several hours, as his feet had grown larger and smaller and then larger again, his boots periodically pinched. Now they were painfully confining, crippling, and he could not bear them any longer. He literally tore them off, frenziedly ripped away the soles and heels, wrenched with his powerful hands until the sturdily stitched seams split, used his razored claws to puncture and shred the leather.

His unshod feet proved to have changed as completely as his hands had done. They were broader, flatter, with an exceptionally gnarled and bony bridge, the toes as long as fingers, terminating in claws as sharp as those on his hands.

“Rachael…”

Change smashed through him as if it were a bolt of lightning blasting through a tree, the current entering at the highest point of the highest limb and sizzling out through the hair-fine tips of the deepest roots.

He twitched and spasmed.

He drummed his heels against the floor.

Hot tears flooded from his eyes, and rivulets of thick saliva streamed from his mouth.

Sweating copiously, being burned alive by the change-fire within him, he was nevertheless cold at the core. There was ice in both his heart and mind.

He squirmed into a corner and curled up, hugging himself. His breastbone cracked, shuddered, swelled larger, and sought a new shape. His spine creaked, and he felt it shifting within him to accommodate other alterations in his form.

Only seconds later, he skittered out of the corner in a crablike crawl. He stopped in the middle of the room and rose onto his knees. Gasping, moaning deep in his throat, he knelt for a moment with his head hung low, letting the dizziness flow out with his rancid sweat.

The changefire had finally cooled. For the moment, his form had stabilized.

He stood, swaying.

“Rachael…”

He opened his eyes and looked around the motel room, and he was not surprised to discover that his vision was nearly as good in the dark as it had ever been in full daylight. Furthermore, his field of vision had dramatically increased: when he looked straight ahead, objects on both his left and right sides were as clear and as sharply detailed as those things immediately in front of him.

He went to the door. Parts of his mutated body seemed ill formed and dysfunctional, forcing him to hitch along like some hard-shelled crustacean that had only recently developed the ability to stand upright like a man. Yet he was not crippled; he could move quickly and silently, and he had a sense of tremendous strength far greater than anything he had ever known before.

Making a soft hissing noise that was lost in the sounds of wind and drizzling rain, he opened the door and stepped into the night, which welcomed him.

35 SOMETHING THAT LOVES THE DARK

Whitney left the manager's apartment at the Golden Sand Inn by way of the rear door of the kitchen. It opened into a dusty garage where, earlier, they had put the black Mercedes. Now the 560 SEL stood in small puddles of rainwater that had dripped from it. His own car was outside, in the serviceway behind the motel.

Turning to Rachael, who stood on the threshold between kitchen and garage, Whitney said, “You lock this door behind me and sit tight. I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“Don't worry. I'll be fine,” she said. “I've got to get the Wildcard file in order. That'll keep me busy.”

He had no trouble understanding why Ben had fallen so hard for her. Even as disheveled as she was, pale with exhaustion and worry, Rachael was gorgeous. But her beauty was not her only attribute. She was caring, perceptive, smart, and tough — not a common mix of qualities.

“Ben will probably show up before I do,” he assured her.

She smiled thinly, grateful for his attempt to cheer her. She nodded, bit her lower lip, but could not speak because, obviously, she was still more than half convinced that she would never again see Ben alive.

Whitney motioned her back from the threshold and pulled the door shut between them. He waited until he heard her engage the dead-bolt lock. Then he crossed the grease- and oil-stained concrete floor, passing the front of the Mercedes, not bothering to put up the big rear door, but heading toward the side entrance.

The three-car garage, illuminated by a single bare bulb dangling on a cord from a crossbeam, was filthy and musty, a badly cluttered repository of old and poorly maintained maintenance equipment plus a lot of stuff that was just plain junk: rusting buckets; tattered brooms; ragged, motheaten mops; a broken outdoor vacuum cleaner; several motel-room chairs with broken legs or torn upholstery, which the previous owners had intended to repair and put back into service; scraps of lumber; coils of wire and coiled hoses; a bathroom sink; spare brass sprinkler heads spilling from an overturned cardboard box; one cotton gardening glove lying palm up like a severed hand; cans of paint and lacquer, their contents almost surely thickened and dried beyond usefulness. This trash was piled along the walls, scattered over portions of the floor, and stacked precariously in the loft.

Just as he unlocked the dead bolt on the side door of the garage, before he actually opened the door, Whitney heard a rattling in the garage behind him. The noise was short-lived; in fact, it stopped even as he turned to see what it was.

Frowning, he let his gaze travel over the piles of junk, the Mercedes, the gas furnace in the far corner, the sagging workbench, and the hot-water heater. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

He listened.

The only sounds were the many voices of the wind in the eaves and the rain on the roof.

He turned away from the door, walked slowly to the car, circled it, but found nothing that could have caused the noise.

Maybe one of the piles of junk had shifted under its own weight — or had been disturbed by a rat. He would not be surprised to discover that the moldering old building was rat-infested, though he had not previously seen evidence of such an infestation. The trash was piled so haphazardly that he could not discern if it was all in the same position as it had been a moment ago.

He returned to the door again, took one last look around, then went out into the storm.

Even as the wind-harried rain slashed at him, he belatedly realized what he had heard in the garage: someone trying to pull open the big rear door from outside. But it was an electric door that could not be operated manually while in its automatic mode, and was therefore secure against prowlers. Whoever had tried it must have realized, at once, that he could not get in that way, which explained why the rattling had lasted only a moment.

Whitney limped warily toward the corner of the garage and the serviceway beyond it to see if anyone was still there. The rain was falling hard, making a crisp sound on the walk, a sloppier sound on the earth, spilling off the corner of the roof where the downspout was missing. All that wet noise effectively masked his own footsteps, as it would mask the activities of anyone behind the garage, arid though he listened intently to the night, he did not at first hear anything unusual. He took six or eight steps, pausing twice to listen, before the patter and susurration of the rain was cut by a frightening noise. Behind him. It was partly a hiss like escaping steam, partly a thin catlike whine, partly a thick and menacing growl, and it put the hair up on the back of his neck.

He turned quickly, cried out, and stumbled backward when he saw the thing looming over him in the gloom. Incomprehensibly strange eyes looked down at him from a height of six and a half feet or more. They were bulging, mismatched eyes, each as large as an egg, one pale green and the other orange, iridescent like the eyes of some animals, one rather like the eye of a hyperthyroid cat, the other featuring a mean slit-shaped iris reminiscent of a serpent, both beveled and many-faceted, for God's sake, like the eyes of an insect.

For a moment Whit stood transfixed. Suddenly a powerful arm lashed out at him, backhanded him across the face, and knocked him down. He fell onto the concrete walk, hurting his tailbone, and rolled into mud and weeds.

The creature's arm—Leben's arm, Whit knew that it had to be Eric Leben transformed beyond understanding — had appeared not to be hinged like a human arm. It seemed to be segmented, equipped with three or four smaller, elbowlike joints that could lock in any combination and that gave it tremendous flexibility. Now, stunned by the vicious blow he had taken, half paralyzed by terror, looking up at the beast as it approached him, he saw that it was slump-shouldered and hunchbacked yet possessed a queer sort of grace, perhaps because its legs, mostly concealed by tattered jeans, were similar in design to the powerful, segmented arms.

Whit realized he was screaming. He had screamed—really screamed — only once before in his life, in Nam, when the antipersonnel mine had blown up beneath him, when he had Iain on the jungle floor and had seen the bottom half of his own leg lying five yards away, the bloody mangled toes poking through burnt and blasted boot leather. Now he screamed again and could not stop.

Over his own screams, he heard a shrill keening sound from his adversary, what might have been a cry of triumph.

Its head rolled and bobbled strangely, and for a moment Whit had a glimpse of terrible hooked teeth.

He tried to scoot backward across the sodden earth, propelling himself with his good right arm and the stump of the other, but he was unable to move fast. He did not have time to get his legs under him. He managed to retreat only a couple of yards before Leben reached him and bent down and grabbed him by the foot of his left leg, fortunately the artificial leg, and began to drag him toward the open door of the garage.

Even in the night shadows and rain, Whit could see enough of the man-thing's hand to know that it was as thoroughly inhuman as the rest of the beast. And huge. And powerful.

Frantically Whit Gavis kicked out with his good foot, putting all the force he had into the blow, and connected solidly with Leben's leg. The man-thing shrieked, though apparently not in pain as much as in anger. In response, it wrenched his artificial leg so hard that the securing straps tore loose of their buckles. With a brief agony that robbed Whit of breath, the prosthetic limb came loose, leaving him at an even greater disadvantage.

In the cramped kitchen of the motel manager's apartment, Rachael had just opened the plastic garbage bag and had removed one handful of rumpled, soiled Xeroxes from the disorganized Wildcard file when she heard the first scream. She knew immediately that it was Whitney, and she also knew instinctively that there could be only one cause of it: Eric.

She threw the papers aside and plucked the thirty-two pistol off the table. She went to the rear door, hesitated, then unlocked it.

Stepping into the dank garage, she paused again, for there was movement on all sides of her. A strong draft swept in through the open side door from the raging night beyond, swinging the single dirty light bulb on its cord. The motion of the light made shadows leap up and fall back and leap up again in every corner. She looked around warily at the stacks of eerily illuminated trash and old furniture, all of which seemed alive amidst the animated shadows.

Whitney's screaming was coming from outside, so she figured that Eric was out there, too, rather than in the garage. She abandoned caution and hurried past the black Mercedes, stepping over a couple of paint cans and around a pile of coiled garden hoses.

A piercing, blood-freezing shriek cut through Whitney's screams, and Rachael knew without doubt that it was Eric, for that shrill cry was similar to the one he'd made while pursuing her across the desert earlier in the day. But it was more fierce and furious than she remembered, more powerful, and even less human and more alien than it had been before. Hearing that monstrous voice, she almost turned and ran. Almost. But, after all, she was not capable of abandoning Whitney Gavis.

She plunged through the open door, into the night and tempest, the pistol held out in front of her. The Eric-thing was only a few yards away, its back to her. She cried out in shock because she saw that it was holding Whitney's leg, which it seemed to have torn from him.

An instant later, she realized that it was the artificial leg, but by then she had drawn the beast's attention. It threw the fake limb aside and turned toward her, its impossible eyes gleaming.

Its appearance was so numbingly horrific that 'she, unlike Whitney, was unable to scream; she tried, but her voice failed her. The darkness and rain mercifully concealed many details of the mutant form, but she had an impression of a massive and misshapen head, jaws that resembled a cross between those of a wolf and a crocodile, and an abundance of deadly teeth. Shirtless and shoeless, clad only in jeans, it was a few inches taller than Eric had been, and its spine curved up into hunched and deformed shoulders. There was an immense expanse of breastbone that looked as if it might be covered with horns or spines of some sort, and with rounded knobby excrescences. Long and strangely jointed arms hung almost to its knees. The hands were surely just like the hands of demons who, in the fiery depths of hell, cracked open human souls and ate the meat of them.

“Rachael… Rachael… come for you… Rachael,” the Eric-thing said in a vile and whispery voice, slowly forming each word with care, as if the knowledge and use of language were nearly forgotten. The creature's throat and mouth and tongue and lips were no longer designed for the production of human speech; the formation of each syllable obviously required tremendous effort and perhaps some pain. “Come… for… you…”

It took a step toward her, its arms swinging against its sides with a scraping, clicking, chitinous sound.

It.

She could no longer think of him as Eric, as her husband. Now, he was just a thing, an abomination, that by its very existence made a mockery of everything else in God's creation.

She fired point-blank at its chest.

It did not even flinch at the impact of the slug. It emitted a high-pitched squeal that seemed more an expression of eagerness than pain, and it took another step.

She fired again, then a third time, and a fourth.

The multiple impacts of the slugs made the beast stagger slightly to one side, but it did not go down.

“Rachael… Rachael…”

Whitney shouted, “Shoot it, kill it!”

The pistol's clip held ten rounds. She squeezed off the last six as fast as she could, certain that she hit the thing every time in the gut and chest and even in the face.

It finally roared in pain and collapsed onto its knees, then toppled facedown in the mud.

“Thank God,” she said shakily, “thank God,” and she was suddenly so weak that she had to lean against the outside wall of the garage.

The Eric-thing retched, gagged, twitched, and pushed up onto hands and knees.

“No,” she said disbelievingly.

It raised its grisly head and stared fiercely at her with cold, mismatched lantern eyes. Slowly lids slid down over the eyes, then slowly up, and when revealed again, those radiant ovals seemed brighter than before.

Even if its altered genetic structure provided for incredibly rapid healing and for resurrection after death, surely it could not recover this fast. If it could repair and reanimate itself in seconds after succumbing to ten bullet wounds, it was not just a quick healer, and not just potentially immortal, but virtually invincible.

“Die, damn you,” she said.

It shuddered and spat something into the mud, then lurched up from the ground, all the way to its feet.

“Run!” Whitney shouted. “For Christ's sake, Rachael, run!”

She had no hope of saving Whitney. There was no point in staying to be killed with him.

“Rachael,” the creature said, and in its gravelly mucus-thick voice were anger and hunger and hatred and dark need.

No more bullets in the gun. There were boxes of ammunition in the Mercedes, but she could never reach them in time to reload. She dropped the pistol.

“Run!” Whit Gavis shouted again.

Heart hammering, Rachael sprinted back into the garage, leaping over the paint cans and garden hoses. A twinge of pain shot through the ankle she had twisted earlier in the day, and the claw punctures in her thigh began to burn as if they were fresh wounds.

The demon shrieked behind her.

As she went, Rachael toppled a set of freestanding metal shelves laden with tools and boxes of nails, hoping to delay the thing if it pursued her immediately instead of finishing Whitney Gavis first. The shelves went over with a resounding crash, and by the time she reached the open kitchen door, she heard the beast clambering through the debris. It had, indeed, left Whitney alive, for it was in a frenzy to put its hands upon her.

She bounded across the threshold, slammed the kitchen door, but before she could engage the dead-bolt latch, the door was thrown open with tremendous force. She was propelled across the kitchen, nearly fell, somehow stayed on her feet, but struck her hip against the edge of a counter and slammed backward into the refrigerator hard enough to send a brief though intense current of pain from the small of her back to the base of her neck.

It came in from the garage. In the kitchen light, it appeared immense and was more hideous than she had wanted to believe.

For a moment, it stood just inside the door, glaring across the small dusty kitchen. It lifted its head and expanded its chest as if giving her an opportunity to admire it. Its flesh was mottled brown-gray-green-black, with lighter patches that almost resembled human skin, though it was mostly pebbled like elephant hide and scaly in some places. The head was pear-shaped, set at a slant on the thick muscular neck, with the round end at the top and the slimmer end at the bottom of the face. The entire narrow part of the “pear” was composed of a snoutlike protrusion and jaws. When it opened its enormous mouth to hiss, the pointed teeth within were sharklike in their sharpness and profusion. The darting tongue was dark and quick and utterly inhuman. Its entire face was lumpy; in addition to a pair of hornlike knobs on its forehead, there were odd convexities and concavities that seemed to have no biological purpose, plus tumorous knots of bone or other tissue. On its brow and radiating downward from its eyes, throbbing arteries and swollen veins shone just beneath the skin.

In the Mojave, earlier in the day, she had thought that Eric was undergoing retrograde evolution, that his genetically altered body was becoming a sort of patchwork of ancient racial forms. But this thing owed nothing to human physiological history. This was the nightmare product of genetic chaos, a creature that went neither backward nor forward along the chain of human evolution. It was embarked upon a side wise biological revolution — and had severed most if not all links with the human seed from which it sprang. Some of Eric's consciousness evidently still existed within the dreadful hulk, although Rachael suspected only the faintest trace of his personality and intellect remained and that soon even this spark of Eric would be extinguished forever.

“See… me…” it said, reinforcing her feeling that it was preening before her.

She edged away from the refrigerator, toward the open door between the kitchen and the living room.

It raised one murderous hand, palm out, as if to tell her she must stop retreating. The segmented arm appeared capable of bending backward or forward at four places, and each of those bizarre joints was protected by hard brown-black plates of tissue that seemed similar in substance to a beetle's carapace. The long, claw-tipped fingers were frightening, but something worse lay in the center of its palm: a round, sucker-shaped orifice as large as a half-dollar. As she stared in horror at this Dantean apparition, the orifice in its palm opened and closed slowly, opened and closed like a raw wound, opened and closed. The function of the mouth-in-hand was in part mysterious and in part too dreadfully clear; as she stared, it grew red and moist with an obscene hunger.

Panicked, she made a break for the nearby doorway and heard the beast's feet clicking like cloven hooves on the linoleum as it rushed after her. Five or six steps into the living room, heading toward the door that opened into the motel office, with eight or ten steps to go, she saw the beast looming at her right side.

It moved so fast!

Screaming, she threw herself to the floor and rolled to escape its grasp. She collided with an armchair, shot to her feet, and put the chair between her and the enemy.

When she changed directions, the creature had not immediately followed. It was standing in the center of the room, watching her, apparently aware that it had cut her off from her only route of escape and that it could take time to relish her terror before it closed in for the kill.

She began to back toward the bedroom.

It said, “Raysheeeel, Raysheeeel,” no longer capable of speaking her name clearly.

The tumorous lumps across the beast's forehead rippled and reformed. Right before her eyes, one of its small horns melted away entirely as another minor wave of change passed through the creature, and a new vein traced a path across its face much like a slow-moving fissure forming in the earth.

She continued to edge backward.

It moved toward her with slow, easy steps.

“Raysheeeel…”

Convinced that a dying wife lay in an intensive-care ward waiting for her husband, Amos Tate wanted to drive Ben all the way to Sunrise Hospital, which would have taken him too far away from the Golden Sand Inn. Ben had to insist strenuously on being dropped at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana. And as there was no good reason to refuse Amos's generous offer, Ben was reduced to admitting that he had lied about the wife, though he offered no explanation. He flung off the blanket, threw open the cab door, jumped down to the street, and ran east on Tropicana, past the Tropicana Hotel, leaving the startled trucker staring after him in puzzlement.

The Golden Sand Inn was approximately a mile ahead, a distance he could ordinarily cover in six minutes or less. But in the heavy rain, he did not want to risk sprinting at top speed, for if he fell and broke an arm or leg, he would not be in any condition to help Rachael if, in fact, she needed help. (God, please, let her be warm and safe and sound and in need of no help at all!) He ran along the shoulder of the broad boulevard, the revolver digging into his flesh where it was tucked under his waistband. He splashed through puddles that filled every depression in the macadam. Only a few cars passed him; several of the drivers slowed to stare, but none offered him a lift. He did not bother trying to hitch a ride, for he sensed that he had no time to waste.

A mile was not a great distance, but tonight it seemed like a journey to the far end of the world.

Julio and Reese had been able to board the plane in Orange County with their service revolvers holstered under their coats because they had presented their police credentials to the attendant at the metal-detecting security gate. Now, having landed at McCarran International in Las Vegas, they used their ID again to obtain swift service from the clerk at the rental-car desk, an attractive brunette named Ruth. Instead of just handing them the keys and sending them out to the lot to locate their designated rental on their own, she telephoned a night-duty mechanic to pick it up and drive it around to the front entrance of the terminal.

Since they had not come dressed for rain, they stood inside the terminal at a set of glass doors until they saw the Dodge pull up at the curb, then went out into the storm. The mechanic, more suitably dressed for the foul weather in a vinyl raincoat with a vinyl hood, quickly checked their rental papers and turned the car over to them.

Although clouds had claimed the sky late in the day in Orange County, Reese had not realized things would be worse to the east and had not bargained for a landing in a rainstorm. Though their descent and touchdown had been as smooth as glass, he had gripped the arms of his seat so tightly that his hands were still slightly stiff and achy.

Safely on the ground, he should have been relieved, but he could not forget Teddy Bertlesman, the tall pink lady, and he could also not forget little Esther waiting at home for him. This morning, he'd had only his Esther to live for, just that one small blessing, which was not a sufficient abundance to tempt the cruelty of fate. But now there was also the glorious real-estate saleswoman, and Reese was acutely aware that when a man had more reason to live he was more likely to die.

Superstitious nonsense, perhaps.

But the rain, when he had expected a clear desert night, seemed like a bad omen, and he was uneasy.

As Julio drove away from the terminal, Reese wiped the rain off his face and said, “What about all those TV commercials for Vegas on the L.A. stations?”

“What about them?”

“Where's the sunshine? Where're all those girls in tiny little bikinis?”

“What do you care about girls in bikinis when you have a date with Teddy Bertlesman on Saturday?”

Don't talk about that, Reese thought superstitiously.

He said, “Hell, this doesn't look like Vegas. This looks more like Seattle.”

Rachael slammed the bedroom door and thumbed in the button to engage the flimsy lock. She ran to the only window, pulled open the rotting drapes, found it had jalousie panes, and realized that, because of those metal cross-ribs, there was no easy exit.

Looking around for something that could be used as a weapon, she saw only the bed, two nightstands, one lamp, and a chair.

She expected the door to crash inward, but it did not.

She heard nothing from the creature in the living room, and its silence, while welcome, was also unnerving. What was it up to?

She ran to the closet, slid the door open, and looked inside. Nothing of use. Just a tier of empty shelves in one corner and then a rod and empty hangers. She could not fashion a weapon out of a few wire hangers.

The doorknob rattled.

“Raysheeeel,” the thing hissed tauntingly.

A fragment of Eric's consciousness evidently did remain within the mutant, for it was that Eric-part that wanted to make her sweat and wanted her to have plenty of time to contemplate what he was going to do to her.

She would die here, and it would be a slow and terrible death.

In frustration, she started to turn away from the empty clothes rod and hangers, but noticed a trap in the closet ceiling, an access to the attic.

The creature thumped a heavy hand against the door, then again and again. “Raysheeeel…”

She slipped inside the closet and tugged on the shelves to test their sturdiness. To her relief, they were built in, screwed to the wall studs, so she was able to climb them as if they were a ladder. She stood on the fourth tier, her head only a foot below the ceiling. Holding the adjacent rod with one hand, she reached out and up to one side with her free hand, beyond the shelves, and quietly pushed up the hinged trap.

“Raysheeeel, Raysheeeel,” it crooned, dragging its claws down the outside of the locked bedroom door, then throwing itself lightly — almost teasingly — against that barrier.

In the closet, Rachael climbed one more step, got a grip on two edges of the overhead opening, swung off the shelves, dangled for a moment with the rod against her breasts, then muscled herself up and into the attic. There was no flooring, just two-by-four beams sixteen inches apart, with sheathed pads of Fiberglas insulation laid between those supports. In the wan yellow light that rose through the open trap, she saw the attic ceiling was very low, providing only a four-foot-high space, with roofing nails poking through in a lot of places, and with larger exposed rafter nails lancing out here and there. To her surprise, the attic was not limited to the area over the office and the manager's apartment, but led off across the ceilings of all the rooms in that long wing.

Below, something crashed so hard that she felt the reverberation through the bedroom-ceiling beams on which she knelt. Another crash was accompanied by the dry splintering of wood and the hard sharp snap of breaking metal.

She quickly closed the trap, plunging the attic into perfect darkness. She crawled as silently as possible along a parallel pair of two-by-fours, one hand and one knee on each of them, until she was about eight feet from the trap. There she stopped and waited in the high lightless chamber.

Anxiously she listened for movement in the room below. With the trap closed, she could not easily hear what was happening down there, for the heavy rain was hammering on the motel's roof only inches above her head.

She prayed that, in his degenerate state, with an IQ closer to that of an animal than a man, the Eric-thing would be unable to puzzle out her route of escape.

With only one arm and one leg, Whitney Gavis had first dragged himself toward the garage in dogged pursuit of the departing creature that had torn off his artificial leg. But by the time he reached the open door, he knew that he was fooling himself: with his handicaps, he could do nothing to help Rachael. Handicaps — that's what they were. Earlier, he had jokingly called his amputations “peculiarities” and had told Rachael that he refused to use the word “handicaps.” In the current situation, however, there was no room for self-delusion; the painful truth had to be faced. Handicaps. He was furious with himself for his limitations, furious with the long-ago war and the Vietcong and life in general, and for a moment he was almost overcome by tears.

But being angry did no good, and Whit Gavis did not waste time and energy on either fruitless activities or self-pity. “Put a lid on it, Whit,” he said aloud. He turned away from the garage and began to haul himself laboriously along the muddy ground toward the paved alley, intending to crawl all the way out to Tropicana and into the middle of that boulevard, where the sight of him would surely stop even the most unsympathetic motorist.

He had gone only six or eight yards when his face, which had been numbed by a blow from the beast's club-hard hand, suddenly began to burn and sting. He flopped on his back, face turned up into the cold rain, raised his good hand, and felt his disfigured cheek. He found deep lacerations cutting through the scar tissue that was part of his Vietnam legacy.

He was sure that Leben had not clawed him, that the blow that knocked him down was delivered with the back of the immense, bony hand. But he was undeniably cut in four or five places, and he was bleeding freely, especially from one laceration that extended up into his left temple. Did that damn fugitive from a Halloween party have spurs on its knuckles or something? His probing fingers set off little detonations of pain in his face, and he immediately dropped his hand.

Rolling onto his belly again, he continued dragging himself toward the street.

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “That side of your face is never going to win you any beauty contests, anyway.”

He refused to think about the thick, swift stream of blood that he had felt flowing down from his temple.

Crouching in the lightless attic, Rachael began to believe that she had fooled the Eric-thing. Its degeneration was apparently mental as well as physical, just as she had suspected, and it did not possess sufficient intellectual capacity to figure out what had happened to her. Her heart continued to pound wildly, and she was still shaking, but she dared to hope.

Then the plyboard trapdoor in the closet ceiling swung upward, and light from below speared into the attic. The mutant's hideous hands reached through the opening. Then its head came into view, and it pulled itself into the upper chamber, turning its mad eyes upon her as it came.

She scuttled across the attic as fast as she dared go. She was acutely aware of the nails lancing down just inches above her head. She also knew that she must not put her weight down on the insulated hollows between the two-by-fours because there was no flooring; if she misstepped, shifting her weight off the beams for even a second, she would crash through the Sheetrock that formed the ceilings of the rooms below, tumbling into one of those chambers. Even if she did not tear loose electrical wires and fixtures in the fall — and thus escaped electrocution — she might break a leg or even snap her spine when she hit the floor below. Then she would be able only to lie immobile while the beast descended and took its sweet time with her.

She went about thirty feet, with at least another hundred and fifty feet of the motel attic ahead of her, before she glanced back. The thing had clambered all the way through the trap and was staring after her.

“Rayeeshuuuul,” it said, the quality of its speech declining by the minute.

It slammed the trapdoor shut, plunging them into total darkness, where it had all the advantages.

Ben's soggy Adidas running shoes were so thoroughly saturated that they began to slip on his feet. He felt the mild irritation of an incipient blister on his left heel.

When at last he came within sight of the Golden Sand Inn, where lights shone in the office windows, he slowed down long enough to shove one hand under his rain-soaked shirt and pull the Combat Magnum out of the waistband at the hollow of his back.

He wished he had the Remington shotgun that he had left behind in the disabled Merkur.

As he reached the motel's entrance drive, he saw a man crawling away from the place, toward Tropicana. An instant later he realized it was Whit Gavis without the artificial leg and, apparently, injured.

He had become something that loved the dark. He did not know what he was, did not clearly remember what — or who — he had once been, did not know where he was ultimately bound or for what purpose he existed, but he knew that his rightful place was now in darkness, where he not only thrived but ruled.

Ahead, the prey made her way cautiously through the blackness, effectively blinded and moving too slowly to stay out of his reach much longer. Unlike her, he was not hampered by the lack of light. He could see her clearly, and he could see most details of the place through which they crept.

He was, however, slightly confused as to his whereabouts. He knew that he had climbed up into this long tunnel, and from the smell of it he also knew its walls were made of wood, yet he felt as if he should be deep under the earth. The place was similar to moist dark burrows which he vaguely remembered from another age and which he found appealing for reasons he did not entirely comprehend.

Around him, shadowfires sprang to life, flourished for a moment, then faded away. He knew that he had once been afraid of them, but he could not recall the reason for his fear. Now the phantom flames seemed of no consequence to him, harmless as long as he ignored them.

The prey's female scent was pungent, and it inflamed him. Lust made him reckless, and he had to struggle against the urge to rush forward and throw himself upon her. He sensed that the footing here was perilous, yet caution had far less appeal than the prospect of sexual release.

Somehow he knew that it was dangerous to stray off the beams and into the hollow spaces, though he did not know why. Keeping to those safe tracks was easier for him than for the prey, because in spite of his size he was more agile than she. Besides, he could see where he was going, and she could not.

Each time she started to look back, he squinted so she would not be able to pinpoint his position by spotting his radiant eyes. When she paused to listen, she could surely hear him coming, but her inability to get a visual fix had her obviously terrified.

The stink of her acute terror was as strong as her femaleness, though sour. The former scent sparked his blood lust as effectively as the latter incited his sexual desire. He longed to feel her blood spurting against his lips, to taste it on his tongue, to push his mouth within her slashed abdomen in search of the rich and satisfying flesh of her liver.

He was twenty feet behind her.

Fifteen.

Ten.

Ben helped Whit sit up against a four-foot-high retaining wall that enclosed a tangle of weeds where once had been a bed of flowers. Above them, the motel sign scraped and creaked in the wind.

“Don't worry about me,” Whit said, pushing him away.

“Your face—”

“Help her. Help Rachael.”

“You're bleeding.”

“I'll live, I'll live. But it's after Rachael,” Whit said with that unnervingly familiar note of purest horror and desperation that Ben had not heard in anyone's voice since Vietnam. “It left me, and it went after her.”

“It?”

“You have a gun? Good. A Magnum. Good.”

“It?” Ben repeated.

Abruptly the wind wailed louder, and the rain fell as if a dam had broken above them, and Whit raised his voice to be heard over the storm. “Leben. It's Leben, but he's changed. My God, he's changed. Not really Leben anymore. Genetic chaos, she calls it. Retrograde evolution, devolution, she says. Massive mutations. Hurry, Ben! The manager's apartment!”

Unable to understand what the hell Whit was talking about, but sensing that Rachael was in even graver danger than he had feared, Ben left his old friend propped against the retaining wall and ran toward the entrance to the motel office.

Blind, half deafened by the thunderous impact of the rain upon the roof, Rachael crawled through the mine-dark attic as fast as she dared. Though she was afraid that she was moving too slowly to escape the beast, she came to the end of the long chamber sooner than she'd expected, bumping up against the outer wall at the end of the motel's first wing.

Crazily, she had given no thought to what she would do when she reached a dead end. Her mind had been focused so intently upon the need to stay beyond the reach of the Eric-thing that she had proceeded as if the attic would go on forever.

She let out a whimper of despair when she discovered that she was cornered. She shuffled to her right, hoping that the attic made a turn and continued over the middle wing of the U-shaped building. In fact, it must have done just that, but she encountered a concrete-block partition between the two wings, perhaps a fire wall. Searching frantically in the darkness, she could feel the cool, rough surface of the blocks and the lines of mortar, and she knew there would be no pass-through in such a barrier.

Behind her, the Eric-thing issued a wordless cry of triumph and obscene hunger that pierced the curtain of rain noise and seemed to originate only inches from her ear.

She gasped and snapped her head around, shocked by the nearness of the demonic voice. She'd thought she had a minute to scheme, half a minute at least. But for the first time since the beast had cast the attic into absolute darkness by closing the trap door, Rachael saw its murderous eyes. The radiant pale green orb was undergoing changes that would no doubt make it more like the orange serpent's eye. She was so close that she could see the unspeakable hatred in that alien gaze. It… it was no more than six feet from her.

Its breath reeked.

She somehow knew that it could see her clearly.

And it was reaching for her in the darkness.

She sensed its grotesque hand straining toward her.

She pressed back against the concrete blocks.

Think, think.

Cornered, she could do nothing except embrace one of the very dangers that she had thus far been striving to avoid: Instead of clinging precariously to the beams, she threw herself to one side, into the insulated hollow between a pair of two-by-fours, and the old Sheetrock cracked and collapsed beneath her. She fell straight out of the attic, down through the ceiling of one of the motel rooms, praying that she would not land on the edge of a dresser or chair, would not break her back, praying that she would not become easy meat—

— and she dropped smack into the middle of a bed with broken springs and a mattress that had become a breeding ground for mold and fungus. Those cold and slimy growths burst beneath her, spewing spores, oozing sticky fluids, and exuding a noxious odor almost as bad as rotten eggs, though she breathed deeply of it without complaint because she was alive and unhurt.

Above, the Eric-thing started down through the ceiling in a less radical fashion than she had chosen, clinging to the ceiling beams and kicking out more Sheetrock to make a wider passageway for itself.

She rolled off the bed and stumbled across the dark motel room in search of the door.

In the manager's apartment, Ben found the shattered bedroom door, but the bedroom itself was deserted, as were the living room and the kitchen. He looked in the garage as well, but neither Rachael nor Eric was there. Finding nothing was better than finding a lot of blood or her battered corpse, though not much better.

With Whitney's urgent warnings still echoing in his mind, Ben quickly retraced his path through the apartment to the motel office and out into the courtyard. From the corner of his eye, he saw movement down at the end of the first wing.

Rachael. Even in the gloom, there was no mistaking her.

She came out of one of the motel rooms, moving fast, and with immense relief Ben called her name. She looked up, then ran toward him along the awning-covered promenade. At first he thought her attitude was one of ordinary excitement or perhaps joy at the sight of him, but almost at once he realized she was propelled by terror.

“Benny, run!” she shouted as she approached. “Run, for God's sake, run!”

Of course, he would not run because he could not abandon Whit out there against the wall of the weed-choked flower bed, and he could not carry Whit and run at the same time, so he stood his ground. However, when he saw the thing that came out of that motel room behind her, he wanted to run, no doubt of that; all courage fled him in an instant, even though the darkness allowed him to see only a fraction of the nightmare that pursued her.

Genetic chaos, Whit had said. Devolution. Moments ago, those words had meant little or nothing to Ben. Now, on his first glimpse of the thing that Eric Leben had become, he understood as much as he needed to understand for the moment. Leben was both Dr. Frankenstein and the Frankenstein monster, both the experimenter and the unlucky subject of the experiment, a genius and a damned soul.

Rachael reached Ben, grabbed him by the arm, and said, “Come on, come on, hurry.”

“I can't leave Whit,” he said. “Stand back. Let me get a clear shot at it.”

“No! That's no good, no good. Jesus, I shot it ten times, and it got right up again.”

“This is a hell of a lot more powerful weapon than yours,” he insisted.

The hideous Grendelesque figure raced toward them — virtually galloped in long graceful strides — along the canopied promenade, not in the awkward shamble that Ben had expected when first catching sight of it, but with startling and dismaying speed. Even in the weak gray light, parts of its body appeared to glisten like polished obsidian armor, not unlike the shells of certain insects, while in other places there was the scintillant silvery sheen of scales.

Ben barely had time to spread his legs in a shooter's stance, raise the Combat Magnum in both hands, and squeeze off a shot. The revolver roared, and fire flashed from its muzzle.

Fifteen feet away, the creature was jolted by the impact of the slug, stumbled, but did not go down. Hell, it didn't even stop; it came forward with less speed but still too fast.

He squeezed off a second shot, a third.

The beast screamed — a sound like nothing Ben had ever heard, and like nothing he wanted to hear again — and was at last halted. It fell against one of the steel poles that held up the aluminum awning and clung to that support.

Ben fired again, hitting it in the throat this time.

The impact of the.357 Magnum blew it away from the awning post and sent it staggering backward.

The fifth shot knocked it down at last, although only to its knees. It put one shovel-size hand to the front of its throat, and its other arm bent in an impossible fashion until it had put its other hand against the back of its neck.

“Again, again!” Rachael urged.

He pumped the sixth and final shot into the kneeling creature, and it pitched backward on the concrete, flopped onto its side, lay silent, motionless.

The Combat Magnum had a roar only slightly less impressive than a cannon's. In the comparative stillness that followed the dwindling echo of the last gunshot, the drumming rain sounded hardly louder than a whisper.

“Do you have more bullets?” Rachael demanded, still in a state of acute terror.

“It's all right,” Ben said shakily. “It's dead, it's dead.”

“If you have more cartridges, load them!” she shouted.

He was not shocked by her tone or by the panic in her voice, but he was shocked when he realized that she was not really hysterical — scared, yes, damn scared, but not out of control. She knew what she was talking about; she was terrified but not irrational, and she believed he would need to reload quickly.

This morning — an eternity ago — on the way to Eric's cabin above Lake Arrowhead, Ben had stuffed some extra rounds into his pockets along with a few spare shells for the shotgun. He had discarded the shotgun ammo when he had left the 12-gauge in the Merkur along I-15. Now, checking his pockets, he turned up only two revolver cartridges where he had expected to find half a dozen, and he figured that the others had spilled out with the shotgun shells when he had discarded those.

But it was all right, everything was okay, nothing to fear: the creature on the promenade had not moved and was not going to move.

“Hurry,” Rachael urged.

His hands were shaking. He broke out the revolver's cylinder and slipped one cartridge into a chamber.

“Benny” she said warningly.

He looked up and saw the beast moving. It had gotten its huge hands under itself and was trying to push up from the concrete.

“Holy shit,” he said. He fumbled the second round into the gun, snapped the cylinder back into place.

Incredibly, the beast had already risen to its knees and reached out to another awning post.

Ben aimed carefully, squeezed the trigger. The Combat Magnum boomed again.

The thing was jolted as the slug tore into it, but it held fast to the post, emitting an ungodly screech. It turned luminous eyes on Ben, and in them he thought he saw a challenge and an indestructible hatred.

Ben's hands were shaking so bad that he was afraid he was going to miss with the next — and last — shot. He had not been this rattled since his first combat mission in Nam.

It clawed for handholds on the post and heaved onto its feet.

His confidence shattered, but unwilling to admit that a weapon as devastatingly powerful as the.357 Magnum was inadequate, Ben fired the final round.

Again the beast went down, but this time it was not still for even a few seconds. It writhed and squealed and kicked in agony, the carapace-hard portions of its body scraping and clicking against the concrete.

Ben would have liked to believe that it was in its death throes, but by now he knew no ordinary gun would cut it down; an Uzi rigged for fully automatic fire, perhaps, or a fully automatic AK-91 assault rifle, or the equivalent, but not an ordinary gun.

Rachael pulled at him, wanting him to run before the beast got onto its feet again, but there was still the problem of Whit Gavis. Ben could save himself and Rachael by running, but in order to save Whit, he had to stay and fight and go on fighting until either he or the mutant Leben was dead.

Perhaps because he felt as if he were in the midst of a war again, he thought of Vietnam and of the particularly cruel weapon that had been such a special and infamous part of that brutal conflict: napalm. Napalm was jellied gasoline, and for the most part it killed whatever it touched, eating through flesh all the way to the bone, scoring the bone all the way to the marrow. In Nam, the stuff had been dreaded because, once unleashed, it brought inescapable death. Given enough time, he possessed the knowledge to manufacture a serviceable homemade version of napalm; he did not have the time, of course, although he realized that he could put his hands on gasoline in its mundane liquid form. Though the jellied brand was preferable, the ordinary stuff was effective in its own right.

As the mutant stopped screeching and writhing, as it began to struggle onto its knees once more, Ben grabbed Rachael by the shoulder and said, “The Mercedes — where is it?”

“The garage.”

He glanced toward the street and saw that Whit had presciently dragged himself around the corner of the retaining wall, where he was hidden from the motel. The wisdom of Nam: Help your buddies as much as possible, then cover your own ass as soon as you can. Initiates of that war never forgot the lessons it taught them. As long as Leben believed that Ben and Rachael were on the motel property, he was not likely to go out toward Tropicana and accidentally find the helpless man hiding against the wall. For a few more minutes, anyway, Whit was fairly safe where he was.

Casting aside the useless revolver, Ben grabbed Rachael's hand and said, “Come on!”

They ran around the side of the office toward the garage at the back of the motel, where the gusting wind was repeatedly banging the open door against the wall.

36 THE MANY FORMS OF FIRE

Slumped against the retaining wall, facing out toward Tropicana, Whitney Gavis felt that the rain was washing him away. He was a man made of mud, and the rain was dissolving him. Moment by moment, he grew weaker, too weak to raise a hand to check the bleeding from his cheek and temple, too weak to shout at the dishearteningly few cars that whisked by on the wide boulevard. He was lying in a shadowed area, thirty feet back from the roadway, where their headlights did not sweep across him, and he supposed none of the drivers noticed him.

He had watched Ben empty the Combat Magnum into Leben's mutated hulk, and he had seen the mutant rise up again. As there was nothing he could do to help, he had concentrated upon pulling himself around the corner of the four-foot-high wall of the flower bed, intending to make himself more visible to those passing on the boulevard, hoping someone would spot him and stop. He even dared to hope for a passing patrol car and a couple of well-armed cops, but merely hoping for help was not going to be good enough.

Behind him, he had heard Ben fire two more shots, heard him and Rachael talking frantically, then running footsteps. He knew that Ben would never bug out on him, so he figured they'd thought of something else that might stop Leben. The problem was that, weak as he felt, he did not know if he was going to last long enough to find out what new strategy they had devised.

He saw another car coming west on Tropicana. He tried to call out but failed; he tried to raise one arm from his lap so he could wave to attract attention, but the arm seemed nailed to his thigh.

Then he noticed this car was moving far slower than previous traffic, and it was approaching half in its lane and half on the shoulder of the road. The closer it got, the slower it moved.

Medevac, he thought, and that thought spooked him a little because this wasn't Nam, for God's sake, this was Vegas, and they didn't have Medevac units in Vegas. Besides, this was a car, not a helicopter.

He shook his head to clear it, and when he looked again the car was closer.

They're going to pull right into the motel, Whit thought, and he would have been excited except he suddenly didn't have sufficient energy for excitement. And the already deep black night seemed to be getting blacker.

As soon as Ben and Rachael had entered the garage, they'd closed and locked the outer door. She did not have the keys with her, and there was no thumb latch on this side of the kitchen door, so they had to leave that one standing open and just hope that Leben came at them from the other direction.

“No door will keep it out, anyway,” Rachael said. “It'll get in if it knows we're here.”

Ben had recalled garden hoses among the heaps of junk that the former owners had left behind: “Existing supplies, tools, materials, and sundry useful items,” they had called the trash when trying to boost the sales price of the place. He found a pair of rusted hedge clippers, intending to use them to chop a length of hose that might work as a siphon, but then he saw a coil of narrow, flexible rubber tubing hanging from a hook on the wall, which was even more suitable.

He snatched the tubing off the hook and hastily stuffed one end into the Mercedes's fuel tank. He sucked on the other end and barely avoided getting a mouthful of gasoline.

Rachael had been busy searching through the junk for a container without a hole in the bottom. She slipped a galvanized bucket under the siphon only seconds before the gasoline began to flow.

“I never knew gas fumes could smell so sweet,” he said as he watched the golden fluid streaming into the bucket.

“Even this might not stop it,” she said worriedly.

“If we saturate it, the damage from fire will be much more extensive than—”

“You have matches?” Rachael interrupted.

He blinked. “No.”

“Me neither.”

“Damn.”

Looking around the cluttered garage, she said, “Would there be any here?”

Before he could answer, the knob on the side door of the garage rattled violently. Evidently the Leben-thing had seen them go around the motel or had followed their trail by scent — only God knew what its capabilities were, and in this case maybe even God was in the dark — and already it had arrived.

“The kitchen,” Ben said urgently. “They didn't bother taking anything or cleaning out the drawers. Maybe you'll find some matches there.”

Rachael ran to the end of the garage and disappeared into the apartment.

The beast threw itself against the outside door, which was not a hollow-core model like the one it had easily smashed through in the bedroom. This more solid barrier would not immediately collapse, but it shuddered and clattered in its loosely fitted jamb. The mutant hit it again, and the door gave out a dry-wood splintering sound but still held, and then it was hit a third time.

Half a minute, Ben thought, glancing back and forth from the door to the gasoline collecting in the bucket. Please, God, let it hold just half a minute more.

The beast hit the door again.

Whit Gavis didn't know who the two men were. They had stopped their car along the boulevard and had run to him. The big man was taking his pulse, and the smaller guy — he looked Mexican — was using one of those detachable glove-compartment flashlights to examine the lacerations in Whitney's face and temple. Their dark suits had quickly gotten darker as the rain soaked them.

They might have been some of the federal agents who were after Ben and Rachael, but at this point Whitney didn't care if they were lieutenants in the devil's own army, because surely no one could pose a greater danger than the deadly creature that was stalking the motel grounds. Against that enemy, all men ought to be united in a common cause. Even federal agents, even DSA men, would be welcome allies in this battle. They would have to give up the idea of keeping the Wildcard Project a secret; they would see that there was no way this particular line of life-extension research could be safely carried on; and they would stop trying to silence Ben and Rachael, would help stop the thing that Leben had become, yes, that was certainly what they would do, so Whitney told them what was happening, urged them to help Ben and Rachael, alerted them to the nature of the danger that they faced…

“What's he saying?” the big one asked.

“I can't make it out exactly,” the small, well-dressed, Mexican-looking man said. He had stopped examining the cuts and had fished Whitney's wallet out of his trousers.

The big man carefully felt Whitney's left leg. “This isn't a recent injury. He lost the leg a long time ago. The same time he lost the arm, I guess.”

Whitney realized that his voice was no louder than a whisper and that it was mostly drowned out by the patter, splash, and gurgle of the rain. He tried again.

“I think he's delirious,” the big man said.

I'm not delirious, damn it, just weak, Whitney tried to say. But no words came from him at all this time, which scared him.

“It's Gavis,” the smaller man said, studying the driver's license in Whitney's wallet. “Shadway's friend. The man Teddy Bertlesman told us about.”

“He's in a bad way, Julio.”

“You've got to take him in the car and get him to a hospital.”

“Me?” the bigger man said. “What about you?”

“I'll be all right here.”

“You can't go in alone,” the big man said, his face carved by lines of worry and bejeweled with rain.

“Reese, there's not going to be trouble here,” the smaller man said. “It's only Shadway and Mrs. Leben. They're no danger to me.”

“Bullshit,” the bigger man said. “Julio, there's someone else. Neither Shadway nor Mrs. Leben did this to Gavis.”

“Leben!” Whitney managed to expel the name loud enough for it to carry above the sound of the rain.

The two men looked at him, puzzled.

“Leben,” he managed again.

“Eric Leben?” Julio asked.

“Yes,” Whitney breathed. “Genetic… chaos… chaos, mutation… guns… guns…”

“What about guns?” the bigger man — Reese — asked.

“… won't… stop… him,” Whitney finished, exhausted.

“Get him into the car, Reese,” Julio said. “If he isn't in a hospital in ten or fifteen minutes, he's not going to make it.”

“What's he mean that guns won't stop Leben?” Reese asked.

“He's delirious,” Julio said. “Now move!”

Frowning, Reese scooped Whitney up as easily as a father might lift a small child.

The one named Julio hurried ahead, splashing through puddles of dirty water, and opened the back door of their car.

Reese maneuvered Whitney gently onto the seat, then turned to Julio. “I don't like this.”

“Just go,” Julio said.

“I swore I'd never cut and run on you, that I'd always be there when you needed me, any way you needed me, no matter what.”

“Right now,” Julio said sharply, “I need you to take this man to a hospital.” He slammed the rear door.

A moment later, Reese opened the front door and got in behind the wheel. To Julio, he said, “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

Lying on the rear seat, Whitney said, “Chaos… chaos… chaos… chaos.” He was trying to say a lot of other things, convey a more specific warning, but only that one word would come out.

Then the car began to move.

Peake had pulled to the side of Tropicana Boulevard and had switched off the headlights when Hagerstrom and Verdad had coasted to a stop along the shoulder about a quarter of a mile ahead.

Leaning forward, squinting through the smeary windshield past the monotonously thumping wipers, Sharp twice rubbed a stubborn patch of condensation from the glass and at last said, “Looks like… they've found someone lying in front of that place. What is that place?”

“Seems like it's out of business, a deserted motel,” Peake said. “Can't quite read that old sign from here. Golden… something.”

“What're they doing here?” Sharp wondered.

What am I doing here? Peake wondered silently.

“Could this be where Shadway and the Leben bitch are hiding out?” Sharp wondered.

Dear God, I hope not, Peake thought. I hope we never find them. I hope they're on a beach in Tahiti.

“Whoever those bastards have found,” Sharp said, “they're putting him in their car.”

Peake had given up all hope of becoming a legend. He had also given up all hope of becoming one of Anson Sharp's favorite agents. All he wanted was to get through this night alive, to prevent whatever killing he could, and to avoid humiliating himself.

At the side of the garage, the battered door cracked again, from top to bottom this time, and the jamb splintered, too, and one hinge tore loose, and the lock finally exploded, and everything crashed inward, and there was Leben, the beast, coming through like something that had broken out of a bad dream into the real world.

Ben grabbed the bucket — which was more than half full — and headed toward the kitchen door, trying to move fast without spilling any of the precious gasoline.

The creature saw him and let loose a shriek of such intense hatred and rage that the sound seemed to penetrate deep into Ben's bones and vibrate there. It kicked aside an outdoor vacuum cleaner and clambered over the piles of trash — including a fallen set of metal shelves — with arachnoid grace, as if it were an immense spider.

Entering the kitchen, Ben heard the thing close behind him. He dared not look back.

Half the cupboard doors and drawers were open, and just as Ben entered, Rachael pulled out another drawer. She cried—"There!" — and snatched up a box of matches.

“Run!” Ben said. “Outside!”

They absolutely had to put more distance between themselves and the beast, gain time and room to pull the trick they had in mind.

He followed her out of the kitchen into the living room, and some of the gasoline slopped over the edge of the pail, spattering the carpet and his shoes.

Behind them, the mutant crashed through the kitchen, slamming shut cupboard doors, heaving aside the small kitchen table and chairs even though that furniture wasn't in its way, snarling and shrieking, apparently in the grip of a destructive frenzy.

Ben felt as if he were moving in slow motion, fighting his way through air as thick as syrup. The living room seemed as long as a football field. Then, finally nearing the end of the room, he was suddenly afraid that the door to the motel office was going to be locked, that they were going to be halted here, with no time or room to set fire to the beast, at least not without serious risk of immolating themselves in the process. Then Rachael threw open the door, and Ben almost shouted with relief. They rushed into the motel office, through the swinging gate in one end of the check-in counter, across the small public area, through the outer glass door, into the night beneath the breezeway — and nearly collided with Detective Verdad, whom they had last seen on Monday evening, at the morgue in Santa Ana.

“What in the name of God?” Verdad said as the beast shrieked in the motel office behind them.

Ben saw that the rain-soaked policeman had a revolver in his hand. He said, “Back off and shoot it when it comes through the door. You can't kill it, but maybe you can slow it down.”

It wanted the female prey, it wanted blood, it was full of a cold rage, it was burning with hot desire, and it would not be stopped, not by guns or doors, not by anything, not until it had taken the female, buried its aching member inside her, not until it had killed both of them and fed upon them, it wanted to chew out their soft sweet eyes, bury its muzzle in their torn and spurting throats, it wanted to feed on the bloody pulsing muscle of their hearts, wanted to burrow through their eviscerated corpses in search of their rich livers and kidneys, it felt that overwhelming hunger beginning to grow within it again, the changefire within it needed more fuel, a mild hunger now but soon to get worse, like before, an all-consuming hunger that could not be denied, it needed meat, and it pushed through the glass door, out into the night wind and blowing rain, and there was another male, a smaller one, and fire flashed from something in the smaller male's hand, and a brief sharp pain stung its chest, and fire flashed again, and another pain, so it roared a furious challenge at its pathetic assailant—

Just this morning, when he had been at the library doing research related to the unofficial investigation he intended to conduct with Reese, Julio had read several magazine and journal articles Eric Leben had written about genetic engineering and about the prospects for the success of life extension by means of genetic manipulation. Later, he had spoken with Dr. Easton Solberg at UCI, had done a lot of thinking since then, and had just heard Whitney Gavis's disjointed ramblings about genetic chaos and mutation. He was not a stupid man, so when he saw the nightmare creature that followed Shadway and Mrs. Leben out of the motel office, he quickly determined that something had gone terribly wrong with Eric Leben's experiment and that this monstrosity was, in fact, the scientist himself.

As Julio unhesitatingly opened fire on the creature, Mrs. Leben and Shadway — who, judging from the smell of it, was carrying a bucket full of gasoline — hurried from beneath the cover of the breezeway into the rainy courtyard. The first two rounds did not faze the mutant, though it stopped for a moment as if baffled by Julio's sudden and unexpected appearance. To his astonishment, he saw that he might not be able to bring it down with the revolver.

It lurched forward, hissing, and swung one multiple-jointed arm at him as if to knock his head off his shoulders.

Julio barely ducked under the blow, felt the arm brush through his hair, and fired up into the beast's chest, which bristled with spines and strangely shaped lumps of tissue. If it embraced him, he would be impaled upon those breast spikes, and that realization brought his finger to bear upon the trigger again and again.

Those three shots finally drove the thing backward until it collided with the wall by the office door, where it stood for a moment, clawing at the air.

Julio fired the sixth and final round in the revolver, hitting his target again, but still it remained standing — hurt and maybe even dazed, but standing. He always carried a few extra cartridges in his jacket pocket, even though he had never before needed spare rounds in all his years of police work, and now he fumbled for them.

The creature shoved away from the motel wall, apparently having already recuperated from the six rounds it had just taken. It cut loose a cry so savage and furious that Julio turned away from it at once and ran into the courtyard, where Shadway and Mrs. Leben were standing at the far end of the swimming pool.

Peake had hoped that Sharp would send him off after Hagerstrom and the unknown man that the cop had loaded into the back seat of the rental car. Then, if shooting took place at the abandoned motel, it would be entirely Sharp's responsibility.

But Sharp said, “Let Hagerstrom go. Looks to me like he's taking that guy to a doctor. Anyway, Verdad is the real brains of the team. If Verdad's staying here, then this is where the action is; this is where we'll find Shadway and the woman.”

When Lieutenant Verdad headed back along the motel driveway toward the lighted office, Sharp told Peake to pull down there and park in front of the place. By the time they stopped again on the shoulder of the boulevard in front of the dilapidated sign — golden sand inn — they heard the first gunshots.

Oh, hell, Peake thought miserably.

Lieutenant Verdad stood on one side of Benny, hastily reloading his revolver.

Rachael stood on the other side, sheltering the box of wooden matches from the relentless rain. She had withdrawn one match and had been holding it and the box in her cupped hands, silently cursing the wind and water that would try to extinguish the flame the moment it was struck.

From the front of the motel courtyard, backlit by the amber light spilling through the office windows, the Eric-thing approached in that frighteningly swift, darkly graceful stride that seemed entirely at odds with its size and with its cumbersome, gnarled appearance. It emitted a shrill, ululant cry as it raced toward them. Clearly, it had no fear.

Rachael was afraid that its reckless advance was justified, that the fire would do it no more damage than the bullets.

It was already halfway along the forty-foot length of the pool. When it reached the end, it would only have to turn the corner and come another fifteen feet before it would be upon them.

The lieutenant had not finished reloading his revolver, but he snapped the cylinder into place anyway, apparently deciding that he didn't have time to slip the last two cartridges into their chambers.

The beast reached the corner of the pool.

Benny gripped the bucket of gasoline with both hands, one on the rim and the other on the bottom. He swung it back at his side, brought it forward, and threw the contents all over the face and chest of the mutant as it leaped across the last fifteen feet of concrete decking.

At a run, Peake followed Sharp past the motel office and into the courtyard just in time to see Shadway throw a bucket full of something into the face of—

Of what? Christ, what was that thing?

Sharp, too, halted in amazement.

The creature screamed in fury and staggered back from Shadway. It wiped at its monstrous face — Peake saw eyes that glowed orange like a pair of hot coals — and pawed at its chest, trying to remove whatever Shadway had thrown on it.

“Leben,” Sharp said. “Holy shit, it must be Leben.”

Jerry Peake understood at once, even though he didn't want to understand, did not want to know, for this was a secret that it would be dangerous to know, dangerous not only to his physical well-being but to his sanity.

The gasoline seemed to have choked and temporarily blinded it, but Rachael knew that it would recover from this assault as quickly as it had recovered from being shot. So, as Benny dropped the empty bucket and stepped out of the way, she struck the match and only then realized she should have had a torch, something she could have set aflame and then thrown at the creature. Now she had no choice but to step in close with the short-stemmed match.

The Eric-thing had stopped shrieking and, temporarily overcome by the gasoline fumes, was hunched over, wheezing noisily, gasping for air.

She took only three steps toward it before the wind or the rain — or both — extinguished the match.

Making a strange terrified mewling that she could not control, she slid open the box, took out another match, and struck it. This time she had not even taken one step before the flame went out.

The demonic mutant seemed to be breathing easier, and it began to straighten up, raising its monstrous head again.

The rain, Rachael thought desperately, the rain is washing the gasoline off its body.

As she shakily withdrew a third match, Benny said, “Here,” and he turned the empty bucket upright on the concrete at her feet.

She understood. She rasped the third match against the striking pad on the side of the box, couldn't get it to light.

The creature drew in a deep breath at last, another. Recovering, it shrieked at them.

She scraped the match against the box again and let out a cry of relief when the flame spurted up. The instant the match was lit, she dropped it straight into the bucket, and the residue of gasoline burst into flames.

Lieutenant Verdad, who had been waiting to do his part, stepped in fast and kicked the bucket at the Eric-thing.

The flaming pail struck one of the beast's jean-clad thighs, where some of the gasoline had landed when Benny had thrown it. The fire leaped out of the bucket onto the jeans and raced up over the creature's spiny chest, swiftly enveloped the misshapen head.

The fire did not stop it.

Screaming in pain, a pillar of flame, the thing nevertheless came forward faster than Rachael would have believed possible. In the red-orange light of the leaping fire, she saw its outreaching hands, saw what appeared to be mouths in the palms, and then it had its hands on her. Hell could be no worse than having those hands on her; she almost died right there from the horror of it. The thing seized her by one arm and by the neck, and she felt those orifices within its hands eating into her flesh, and she felt the fire reaching out for her, and she saw the spikes on the mutant's huge chest where she could be so quickly and easily impaled — a multitude of possible deaths — and now it lifted her, and she knew she was certainly dead, finished, but Verdad appeared and opened fire with his revolver, squeezing off two shots that hit the Eric-thing in the head, but even before he could pull off a third shot, Benny came in at a flying leap, in some crazy karate movement, airborne, driving both feet into the monster's shoulder, and Rachael felt it let go of her with one hand, so she wrenched and kicked at its flaming chest, and suddenly she was free, the creature was toppling into the shallow end of the empty swimming pool, she fell to the concrete decking, free, free — except that her shoes were on fire.

Ben delivered the kick and threw himself to the left, hit the decking, rolled, and came immediately onto his feet in time to see the creature falling into the shallow end of the empty pool. He also saw that Rachael's shoes were afire from gasoline, and he dove for her, threw himself upon her, and smothered the flames.

For a moment, she clung fiercely to him, and he held her tightly with an equal need of reassurance. He had never before felt anything half as good as her heart's frantic pounding, which was conveyed through her breast to his.

“Are you all right?”

“Good enough,” she said shakily.

He hugged her again, then gave her a quick examination. There was a bleeding circlet on her arm and another on her neck, where the mouths in the mutant's hands had attached themselves to her, but neither wound looked serious.

In the pool, the creature was screaming in a way it had not screamed before, and Ben was sure that these must be its death cries — although he would not have taken any bets on it.

Together, with his arm around her waist and her arm encircling him, they went to the edge of the pool, where Lieutenant Verdad was already standing.

Burning as if it were made of the purest candle tallow, the beast staggered down the sloping floor of the pool, perhaps trying to reach the collected rainwater at the deep end. But the falling rain did nothing to quench the flames, and Ben suspected that the puddle below would be equally ineffective. The fire was inexplicably intense, as if the gasoline were not the only fuel, as if something in the mutant's body chemistry were also feeding the flames. At the halfway point, the creature collapsed onto its knees, clawing at the air and then at the wet concrete before it. It continued to the bottom, crawling, then slithering along on its belly, finally dragging itself laboriously toward hoped-for salvation.

The shadowfire burned within the water, down under the cooling surface, and he was drawn toward it, not merely to extinguish the flames that were consuming his body but to snuff out the changefire within him, too. The unbearable pain of immolation had jolted what remained of his human consciousness, had bestirred him from the trancelike state into which he had retreated when the savage alien part of him had gained dominance. For a moment he knew who he was, what he had become, and what was happening to him. But he also knew that the knowledge was tenuous, that awareness would fade, that the small remaining portion of his intellect and personality would eventually be completely destroyed in the process of growth and change, and that the only hope for him was death.

Death.

He had striven hard to avoid death, had taken insane risks to save, himself from the grave, but now he welcomed Charon.

Eaten alive by fire, he dragged himself down, down toward the shadowfire beneath the water, the strange fire burning on a far shore.

He stopped screaming. He had traveled beyond pain and terror, into a great lonely calm.

He knew that the flaming gasoline would not kill him, not that alone. The changefire within him was worse than the external fire. The changefire was blazing very brightly now, burning in every cell, raging, and he was overwhelmed by a painful hunger a thousand times more demanding and excruciating than any he had known before. He was desperate for fuel, for carbohydrates and proteins and vitamins and minerals with which to support his uncontrolled metabolism. But because he was in no condition to stalk and kill and feed, he could not provide his system with the fuel it needed. Therefore, his body started to cannibalize itself; the changefire did not subside but began to burn up some of his tissues in order to obtain the enormous amounts of energy required to transform those tissues that it did not consume as fuel. Second by second, his body weight rapidly declined, not because the gasoline was feeding on it but because he was feeding on himself, devouring himself from within. He felt his head changing shape, felt his arms shrinking and a second pair of arms extruding from his lower rib cage. Each change consumed more of him, yet the fires of mutation did not subside.

At last he could not pull himself any closer to the shadowfire that burned beneath the water. He stopped and lay still, choking and twitching.

But to his surprise, he saw the shadowfire rise out of the water ahead. It moved toward him until it encircled him, until his world was all aflame, inside and out.

In his dying agony, Eric finally understood that the mysterious shadowfires had been neither gateways to hell nor merely meaningless illusions generated by misfiring synapses in the brain. They were illusions, yes. Or, more accurately, they were hallucinations cast off by his subconscious, meant to warn him of the terrible destiny toward which he had been plunging ever since he had arisen from that slab in the morgue. His damaged brain had functioned too poorly for him to grasp the logical progression of his fate, at least on a conscious level. But his subconscious mind had known the truth and had tried to provide clues by creating the phantom shadowfires: fire (his subconscious had been telling him), fire is your destiny, the insatiable inner fire of a superheated metabolism, and sooner or later it is going to burn you up alive.

His neck dwindled until his head sat almost directly upon his shoulders.

He felt his spine lengthening into a tail.

His eyes sank back under a suddenly more massive brow.

He sensed that he had more than two legs.

Then he sensed nothing at all as the changefire swept through him, consuming the last fuel it could find. He descended into the many kinds of fire.

Before Ben's eyes, in only a minute or less, the creature burned — the flames leaped high into the air, seethed, roared—until there was nothing left of the corpse but a small bubbling pool of sludge, a few little flickering flames down there in the darkness that reclaimed the empty swimming pool. Uncomprehending, Ben stood in silence, unable to speak. Lieutenant Verdad and Rachael seemed equally amazed, for they did not break the silence, either.

It was broken, at last, by Anson Sharp. He was coming slowly around the edge of the pool. He had a gun, and he looked as if he would use it. “What the hell happened to him? What the hell?”

Startled, not having seen the DSA agents until now, Ben stared at his old enemy and said, “Same thing that's going to happen to you, Sharp. He did to himself what you'll do to yourself sooner or later, though in a different way.”

“What're you talking about?” Sharp demanded.

Holding Rachael and trying to ease his body between her and Sharp, Ben said, “He didn't like the world the way he found it, so he set out to make it conform to his own twisted expectations. But instead of making a paradise for himself, he made a living hell. It's what you'll make for yourself, given time.”

“Shit,” Anson Sharp said, “you've gone off the deep end, Shadway. Way off the deep end.” To Verdad, he said, “Lieutenant, please put down your revolver.”

Verdad said, “What? What're you talking about? I—”

Sharp shot Verdad, and the detective was flung off the concrete into the mud by the impact of the bullet.

Jerry Peake — a devoted reader of mysteries, given to dreams of legendary achievement — had a habit of thinking in melodramatic terms. Watching Eric Leben's monstrously mutated body burning away to nothing in the empty swimming pool, he was shocked, horrified, and frightened; but he was also thinking at an unusually furious pace for him. First, he made a mental list of the similarities between Eric Leben and Anson Sharp: They loved power, thrived on it; they were cold-blooded and capable of anything; they had a perverse taste for young girls… Then Jerry listened to what Ben Shadway said about how a man could make his own hell on earth, and he thought about that, too. Then he looked down at the smoldering remnants of the mutant Leben, and it seemed to him that he was at a crossroads between his own earthly paradise and hell: He could cooperate with Sharp, let murder be done, and live with the guilt forever, damned in this life as well as in the next; or he could resist Sharp, retain his integrity and self-respect, and feel good about himself no matter what happened to his career in the DSA. The choice was his. Which did he want to be — the thing down there in the pool or a man?

Sharp ordered Lieutenant Verdad to put down the gun, and Verdad began to question the order, and Sharp shot him, just shot him, with no argument or hesitation.

So Jerry Peake drew his own gun and shot Sharp. The slug hit the deputy director in the shoulder.

Sharp seemed to have sensed the impending betrayal, because he had started to turn toward Jerry even as Jerry shot him. He squeezed off a round of his own, and Jerry took the bullet in the leg, though he fired simultaneously. As he fell, he had the enormous pleasure of seeing Anson Sharp's head explode.

Rachael stripped the jacket and shirt off Lieutenant Verdad and examined the bullet wound in his shoulder.

“I'll live,” he said. “It hurts like the devil, but I'll live.”

In the distance, the mournful sound of sirens arose, drawing rapidly nearer.

“That'll be Reese's doing,” Verdad said. “As soon as he got Gavis to the hospital, he'll have called the locals.”

“There really isn't too much bleeding,” she said, relieved to be able to confirm his own assessment of his condition.

“I told you,” Verdad said. “Heck, I can't die. I intend to stay around long enough to see my partner marry the pink lady.” He laughed at her puzzlement and said, “Don't worry, Mrs. Leben. I'm not out of my head.”

Peake was flat on his back on the concrete decking, his head raised somewhat on the hard pillow of the pool coping.

With a wide strip of his own torn shirt, Ben had fashioned a tourniquet for Peake's leg. The only thing he could find to twist it with was the barrel of Anson Sharp's discarded, silencer-equipped pistol, which was perfect for the job.

“I don't think you really need a tourniquet,” he told Peake as the sirens drew steadily nearer, gradually overwhelming the patter of the rain, “but better safe than sorry. There's a lot of blood, but I didn't see any spurting, no torn artery. Must hurt like the devil, though.”

“Funny,” Peake said, “but it doesn't hurt much at all.”

“Shock,” Ben said worriedly.

“No,” Peake said, shaking his head. “No, I don't think I'm going into shock. I've got none of the symptoms — and I know them. You know what I think maybe it is?”

“What?”

“What I just did — shooting my own boss when he went bad — is going to make me a legend in the agency. Damned if it isn't. I didn't see it that way until he was dead. So, anyway, maybe a legend just doesn't feel pain as much as other people do.” He grinned at Ben.

Ben returned a frown for the grin. “Relax. Just try to relax—”

Jerry Peake laughed. “I'm not delirious, Mr. Shadway. Really, I'm not. Don't you see? Not only am I a legend, but I can still laugh at myself! Which means that maybe I really do have what it takes. I mean, see, maybe I can make a big reputation for myself and not let it go to my head. Isn't that a nice thing to learn about yourself?”

“It's a nice thing,” Ben agreed.

The night was filled with screaming sirens, then the bark of brakes, and then the sirens died as running footsteps sounded on the motel driveway.

Soon there would be questions — thousands of them — from police officers in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Lake Arrowhead, Santa Ana, Placentia, and other places.

Following that ordeal, the media would have questions of their own. ("How do you feel, Mrs. Leben? Please? How do you feel about your husband's murderous spree, about nearly dying at his hands, how do you feel?") They would be even more persistent than the police — and far less courteous.

But now, as Jerry Peake and Julio Verdad were loaded into the paramedics' van and as the uniformed Las Vegas officers kept a watch on Sharp's corpse to make certain no one touched it before the police coroner arrived, Rachael and Ben had a moment together, just the two of them. Detective Hagerstrom had reported that Whitney Gavis had made it to the hospital in time and was going to pull through, and now he was getting into the emergency van with Julio Verdad. They were blessedly alone. They stood under the promenade awning, holding each other, neither of them speaking at first. Then they seemed to realize simultaneously that they would not be alone together again for long, frustrating hours, and they both tried to speak at once.

“You first,” he said, holding her almost at arm's length, looking into her eyes.

“No, you. What were you going to say?”

“I was wondering…”

“What?”

“… if you remembered.”

“Ah,” she said because she knew instinctively what he meant.

“When we stopped along the road to Palm Springs,” he said.

“I remember,” she said.

“I proposed.”

“Yes.”

“Marriage.”

“Yes.”

“I've never done that before.”

“I'm glad.”

“It wasn't very romantic, was it?”

“You did just fine,” she said. “Is the offer still open?”

“Yes. Is it still appealing?”

“Immensely appealing,” she said.

He pulled her close again.

She put her arms around him, and she felt protected, yet suddenly a shiver passed through her.

“It's all right,” he said. “It's over.”

“Yeah, it's over,” she said, putting her head against his chest. “We'll go back to Orange County, where it's always summer, and we'll get married, and I'll start collecting trains with you. I think I could get into trains, you know? We'll listen to old swing music, and we'll watch old movies on the VCR, and together we'll make a better world for ourselves, won't we?”

“We'll make a better world,” he agreed softly. “But not that way. Not by hiding from the world as it really is. Together, we don't need to hide. Together, we've got the power, don't you think?”

“I don't think,” she said. “I know.”

The rain had tailed off to a light drizzle. The storm was moving eastward, and the mad voice of the wind was stilled for now.