Shadowfires (60 page)

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 lain 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.

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 sidewise biological
re
volution—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.