Shadowfires (47 page)

At 4:10, she reached the roadside rest area that she had recalled when deciding not to stop in Barstow. She slowed, left the highway, and drove into a large empty parking lot. She stopped in front of a low concrete-block building that housed men’s and women’s rest rooms. To the right of the rest rooms, a piece of ground was shaded by sturdy metal latticework on four eight-foot metal poles, and under that sun-foiling shelter were three picnic tables. The scrub and bunchgrass were cleared away from the surrounding area, leaving clean bare sand, and blue garbage cans with hinged lids bore polite requests in white block letters—PLEASE DO NOT LITTER.

She got out of the Mercedes, taking only the keys and her purse, leaving the thirty-two and the boxes of ammunition hidden under the driver’s seat, where she had put them when she stopped for gas at the entrance to I-15. She closed the door, locked it more from habit than out of necessity.

For a moment she looked up at the sky, which was ninety percent concealed behind steel-gray clouds, as if it were girdling itself in armor. The day remained very hot, between ninety and one hundred degrees, although two hours ago, before the cloud cover settled in, the temperature had surely been ten or even twenty degrees higher.

Out on the interstate, two enormous eighteen-wheelers roared by, heading east, ripping apart the desert’s quiet fabric but laying down an even more seamless cloth of silence in their wake.

Walking to the door of the women’s rest room, she passed a sign that warned travelers to watch out for rattlesnakes. She supposed they liked to slither in from the desert and stretch full-length on the sunbaked concrete sidewalks.

The rest room was hot, ventilated only by jalousie windows set high in the walls, but at least it had been cleaned recently. The place smelled of pine-scented disinfectant. She also detected the limey odor of concrete that had cooked too long in the fierce desert sun.

 

Eric ascended slowly from an intense and vivid dream—or perhaps an unthinkably ancient racial memory—in which he was something other than a man. He was crawling inside a rough-walled burrow, not his own but that of some other creature, creeping downward, following a musky scent with the sure knowledge that succulent eggs of some kind could be found and devoured in the gloom below. A pair of glowing amber eyes in the inkiness was the first indication he had of resistance to his plans. A warm-blooded furry beast, well armed with teeth and claws, rushed at him to protect its subterranean nest, and he was suddenly engaged in a fierce battle that was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Cold, reptilian fury filled him, making him forget the hunger that had driven him in search of eggs. In the darkness, he and his adversary bit, tore, and lashed at each other. Eric hissed—the other squealed and spat—and he inflicted more ruinous wounds than he received, until the burrow filled with the exciting stink of blood and feces and urine . . .

Regaining human consciousness, Eric realized that the car was no longer moving. He had no idea how long it had been stopped—maybe only a minute or two, maybe hours. Struggling against the hypnotic pull of the dreamworld that he’d just left, wanting to retreat back into that thrillingly violent and reassuringly simple place of primal needs and pleasures, he bit down on his lower lip to clear his head and was startled—but, on consideration, not surprised—to find that his teeth seemed sharper than they had been previously. He listened for a moment, but he heard no voices or other noises outside. He wondered if they had gone all the way to Vegas and if the car was now parked in the motel garage where Shadway had told Rachael to put it.

The cold, inhuman rage that he had felt in his dream was in him still, although redirected now from an amber-eyed, burrow-dwelling little mammal to Rachael. His hatred of her was overwhelming, and his need to get his hands on her—tear out her throat, rip open her guts—was building toward a frenzy.

He fumbled in the pitch-black trunk for the screwdriver. Though there was no more light than before, he did not seem quite as blind as he had been. If he was not actually
seeing
the vague dimensions of his Stygian cell, then he was evidently apprehending them with some newfound sixth sense, for he possessed at least a threshold awareness of the position and features of each metal wall. He also perceived the screwdriver lying against the wall near his knees, and when he reached down to test the validity of that perception, he put his hand on the ribbed Lucite handle of the tool.

He popped the trunk lid.

Light speared in. For a moment his eyes stung, then adjusted.

He pushed the lid up.

He was surprised to see the desert.

He climbed out of the trunk.

 

Rachael washed her hands at the sink—there was hot water but no soap—and dried them in the blast of the hot-air blower that was provided in lieu of paper towels.

Outside, as the heavy door closed behind her, she saw that no rattlesnakes had taken up residence on the walkway. She went only three steps before she also saw that the trunk of the Mercedes was open wide.

She stopped, frowning. Even if the trunk had not been locked, the lid could not have slipped its catch spontaneously.

Suddenly she knew:
Eric
.

Even as his name flashed through her mind, he appeared at the corner of the building, fifteen feet away from her. He stopped and stared as if the sight of her riveted him as much as she was frozen by the sight of him.

It was Eric, yet it was not Eric.

She stared at him, horrified and disbelieving, not immediately able to comprehend his bizarre metamorphosis, yet sensing that the manipulation of his genetic structure had somehow resulted in these monstrous changes. His body appeared deformed; however, because of his clothing, it was hard to tell precisely what had happened to him. Something was different about his knee joints and his hips. And he was hunchbacked: his red plaid shirt was straining at the seams to contain the mound that had risen from shoulder to shoulder. His arms had grown two or three inches, which would have been obvious even if his knobby and strangely jointed wrists had not thrust out beyond his shirt cuffs. His hands looked fearfully powerful, deformed by human standards, yet with a suggestion of suppleness and dexterity; they were mottled yellow-brown-gray; the hugely knuckled and elongated fingers terminated in claws; in places, his skin seemed to have been supplanted by pebbly scales.

His strangely altered face was the worst thing about him. Every aspect of his once-handsome countenance was changed, yet just enough of his familiar features remained to leave him recognizable. Bones had re-formed, becoming broader and flatter in some places, narrower and more rounded in others, heavier over and under his now-sunken eyes and through his jawline, which was prognathous. A hideous serrated bony ridge had formed up the center of his lumpish brow and—diminishing—trailed across the top of his scalp.

“Rachael,” he said.

His voice was low, vibratory, and hoarse. She thought there was a mournful, even melancholy, note in it.

On his thickened forehead were twin conical protrusions that appeared to be half formed, although they seemed destined to be horns the size of Rachael’s thumb when they were finished growing. Horns would have made no sense at all to her if the patches of scaly flesh on his hands had not been matched by patches on his face and by wattles of dark leathery skin under his jaw and along his neck in the manner of certain reptiles; a few lizards had horns, and perhaps at some point in mankind’s distant beginnings, evolution had included an amphibian stage boasting such protuberances (though that seemed unlikely). Other elements of his tortured visage were human, while still others were apelike. She dimly began to perceive that tens of millions of years of genetic heritage had been unleashed within him, that every stage of evolution was fighting for control of him at the same time; long-abandoned forms—a multitude of possibilities—were struggling to reassert themselves as if his tissues were just so much putty.

“Rachael,” he repeated but still did not move. “I want . . . I want . . .” He could not seem to find the words to finish the thought, or perhaps he simply did not know what it was he wanted.

She could not move, either, partly because she was paralyzed by terror but partly because she desperately wanted to understand what had happened to him. If in fact he was being pulled in opposing directions by the many racial memories within his genes, if he was devolving toward a subhuman state while his modern form and intellect strove to retain dominance of its tissues, then it seemed every change in him should be functional, with a purpose obviously connected to one prehuman form or another. However, that did not appear to be the case. In his face, pulsing arteries and gnarled veins and bony excrescences and random concavities seemed to exist without reason, with no connection to any known creature on the evolutionary ladder. The same was true of the hump on his back. She suspected that, in addition to the reassertion of various forms from human biological heritage,
mutated
genes were causing purposeless changes in him or, perhaps, were pushing him toward some alien life-form utterly different from the human species.

“Rachael . . .”

His teeth were sharp.

“Rachael . . .”

The gray-blue irises of his eyes were no longer perfectly round but were tending toward a vertical-oval shape like those in the eyes of serpents. Not all the way there, yet. Apparently still in the middle of metamorphosis. But no longer quite the eyes of a man.

“Rachael . . .”

His nose seemed to have collapsed part of the way into his face, and the nostrils were more exposed than before.

“Rachael . . . please . . . please . . .” He held one monstrous hand toward her in a pathetic gesture, and in his raspy voice was a note of misery and another of self-pity. But there was an even more obvious and more affecting note of love and longing that seemed to surprise him every bit as much as it surprised her. “Please . . . please . . . I want . . .”

“Eric,” she said, her own voice almost as strange as his, twisted by fear and weighted down with sadness. “What do you want?”

“I want . . . I . . . I want . . . not to be . . .”

“Yes?”

“ . . . afraid . . .”

She did not know what to say.

He took one step toward her.

She immediately backed up.

He took another step, and she saw that he was having a little trouble with his feet, as if they had changed within his boots and were no longer comfortable in that confinement.

Again she retreated to match his advance.

Squeezing the words out as if it were agony to form and expel them, he said, “I want . . . you . . .”

“Eric,” she said softly, pityingly.

“ . . . you . . . you . . .”

He took three quick, lurching steps; she scampered four backward.

In that voice fit for a man trapped in hell, he said, “Don’t . . . don’t reject me . . . don’t . . . Rachael, don’t . . .”

“Eric, I can’t help you.”

“Don’t reject me.”

“You’re beyond help, Eric.”

“Don’t reject me . . .
again
.”

She had no weapons, just her car keys in one hand and her purse in the other, and she cursed herself for leaving the pistol in the Mercedes. She backed farther away from him.

With a savage cry of rage that made Rachael go cold in the late-June heat, Eric came at her in a headlong rush.

She threw her purse at his head, turned, and sprinted into the desert behind the comfort station. The soft sand shifted under her feet, and a couple of times she almost twisted an ankle, almost fell, and the sparse scrub brush whipped at her legs and almost tripped her, but she did not fall, kept going, ran fast as the wind, tucked her head down, drew her elbows in to her sides, ran, ran for her life.

When confronting Rachael on the walk beside the rest rooms, Eric’s initial reaction had surprised him. Seeing her beautiful face, her titian hair, and her lovely body beside which he had once lain, Eric was unexpectedly overcome with remorse for the way he had treated her and was filled with an unbearable sense of loss. The primal fury that had been churning in him abruptly subsided, and more human emotions held sway, though tenuously. Tears stung his eyes. He found it difficult to speak, not only because changes within his throat made speech more difficult, but because he was choked up with regret and grief and a sudden crippling loneliness.

But she rejected him again, confirming the worst suspicions he had of her and jolting him out of his anguish and self-pity. Like a wave of dark water filled with churning ice, the cold rage of an ancient consciousness surged into him again. The desire to stroke her hair, to gently touch her smooth skin, to take her in his arms—that vanished instantly and was replaced by something stronger than desire, by a profound need to kill her. He wanted to gut her, bury his mouth in her still-warm flesh, and finally proclaim his triumph by urinating on her lifeless remains. He threw himself at her, still wanting her but for different purposes.

She ran, and he pursued.

Instinct, racial memory of countless other pursuits—memories not only in the recesses of his mind but flowing in his blood—gave him an advantage. He would bring her down. It was only a matter of time.

She was fast, this arrogant animal, but they were always fast when propelled by terror and the survival instinct, fast for a while but not forever. And in their fear, the hunted were never as cunning as the hunter. Experience assured him of that.

He wished that he had taken off the boots, for they restricted him now. But his own adrenaline level was so high that he had blocked out the pain in his cramped toes and twisted heels; temporarily the discomfort did not register.

The prey fled south, though nothing in that direction offered the smallest hope of sanctuary. Between them and the faraway mountains, the inhospitable land was home only to things that crawled and crept and slithered, things that bit and stung and sometimes ate their own young to stay alive.