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.
* * *
Having run only a few hundred yards, Rachael was already gasping for breath. Her legs felt leaden.
She was not out of shape; it was just that the desert heat was so fierce it virtually had substance, and running through it seemed almost as bad as trying to run through water. For the most part, the heat did not come down from above, because all but a sliver or two of sky was clouded over. Instead, the heat came up, rising from the scorching sand that had been baking in the now-hidden sun, storing that terrific heat since dawn, until the clouds had arrived within the last hour or so. The day was still warm, ninety degrees, but the air rising off the sand must have been well over a hundred. She felt as if she were running across a furnace grate.
She glanced back.
Eric was about twenty yards behind her.
She looked straight ahead and pushed harder, really pumping her legs, putting everything she had into it, crashing through that wall of heat, only to find endless other walls beyond it, sucking in hot air until her mouth went dry and her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and her throat began to crack and her lungs began to burn. A natural hedge line of stunted mesquite lay ahead, extending twenty or thirty yards to the left, an equal distance to the right. She didn't want to detour around it, because she was afraid she'd lose ground to Eric. The mesquite was only knee high, and as far as she could see it was neither too solid nor too deep, so she plunged through the hedge, whereupon it proved to be deeper than it looked, fifteen or twenty feet across, and also somewhat more tightly grown than it appeared. The spiky, oily plant poked at her legs and snagged her jeans and delayed her with such tenacity that it seemed to be sentient and in league with Eric. Her racing heart began to pound harder, too hard, slamming against her breastbone. Then she was through the hedge, with hundreds of bits of mesquite bark and leaves stuck on her jeans and socks. She increased her pace again, gushing sweat, blinking salty streams of the same effluvient from her eyes before it could blur her vision too much, tasting it at the corners of her mouth. If she kept pouring at this rate, she'd dehydrate dangerously. Already she saw whirls of color at the periphery of her vision, felt a flutter of nausea in her stomach, and sensed incipient dizziness that might abruptly overwhelm her. But she kept pumping her legs, streaking across the barren land, because there was absolutely nothing else she could do.
She glanced back again.
Eric was closer. Only fifteen yards now.
At great cost, Rachael reached into herself and found a little more strength, a little more energy, an additional measure of stamina.
The ground, no longer treacherously soft, hardened into a wide flat sheet of exposed rock. The rock had been abraded by centuries of blowing sand that had carved hundreds of fine, elaborate whorls in its surface — the fingerprints of the wind. It provided good traction, and she picked up speed again. Soon, however, her reserves would be used up, and dehydration would set in — though she dared not think about that. Positive thinking was the key, so she thought positively for fifty more strides, confident of widening the gap between them.
The third time she glanced back, she loosed an involuntary cry of despair.
Eric was closer. Ten yards.
That was when she tripped and fell.
The rock ended, and sand replaced it. Because she had not been looking down and had not seen that the ground was going to change, she twisted her left ankle. She tried to stay up, tried to keep going, but the twist had destroyed her rhythm. The same ankle twisted again the very next time she put that foot down. She shouted—"No!" — and pitched to the left, rolled across a few weeds, stones, and clumps of crisp bunchgrass.
She wound up at the brink of a big arroyo — a naturally carved water channel through the desert, which was a roaring river during a flash flood but dry most of the time, dry now — about fifty feet across, thirty deep, with walls that sloped but only slightly. Even as she stopped rolling at the arroyo, she took in the situation, saw what she must do, did it: She threw herself over the brink, rolling again, down the steep wall this time, desperately hoping to avoid sharp rocks and rattlesnakes.
It was a bruising descent, and she hit bottom with enough force to knock half the wind out of her. Nevertheless, she scrambled to her feet, looked up, and saw Eric — or the thing that Eric had become — staring down at her from the top of the arroyo wall. He was just thirty or thirty-five feet above her, but thirty vertical feet seemed like more distance than thirty horizontally measured feet; it was as if she were standing in a city street, with him peering down from the roof of a three-story building. Her boldness and his hesitation had gained her some time. If he had rolled down right behind her, he very likely would have caught her by now.
She had won a brief reprieve, and she had to make the best of it. Turning right, she ran along the flat bed of the arroyo, favoring her twisted ankle. She did not know where the arroyo would lead her. But she stayed on the move and kept her eyes open for something that she could easily turn to her advantage, something that would save her, something…
Something.
Anything.
What she needed was a miracle.
She expected Eric to plunge down the wall of the gulch when she began to run, but he did not. Instead, he stayed up there at the edge of the channel, running alongside the brink, looking down at her, matching her progress step for step.
She supposed he was looking for an advantage of his own.
29
REMADE MEN
With the help of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, which provided a patrol car and a deputy to drive it, Sharp and Peake were back in Palm Springs by four-thirty Tuesday afternoon. They took two rooms in a motel along Palm Canyon Drive.
Sharp called Nelson Gosser, the agent who had been left on duty at Eric Leben's Palm Springs house. Gosser bought bathrobes for Peake and Sharp, took their clothes to a one-hour laundry and dry cleaner, and brought them two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken with coleslaw, fries, and biscuits.
While Sharp and Peake had been at Lake Arrowhead, Rachael Leben's red Mercedes 560 SL had been found, with one flat tire, behind an empty house a few blocks west of Palm Canyon Drive. Also, the blue Ford that Shadway had been driving in Arrowhead was traced to an airport rental agency. Of course, neither car offered any hope of a lead.
Sharp called the airport and spoke with the pilot of the Bell JetRanger. Repairs on the chopper were nearly completed. It would be fully fueled and at the deputy director's disposal within an hour.
Avoi
ding the french fries because he believed that eating them was begging for heart disease, ignoring the coleslaw because it had turned sour last April, he peeled the crisp and greasy breading off the fried chicken and ate just the meat, no fatty skin, while he made a number of other calls to subordinates at the Geneplan labs in Riverside and at several places in Orange County. More than sixty agents were on the case. He could not speak to all of them, but by contacting six, he got a detailed picture of where the various aspects of the investigation were going.
Where they were going was nowhere.
Lots of questions, no answers. Where was Eric Leben? Where was Ben Shadway? Why hadn't Rachael Leben been with Shadway at the cabin above Lake Arrowhead? Where had she gone? Where was she now? Was there any danger of Shadway and Mrs. Leben putting their hands on the kind of proof that could blow Wildcard wide open?
Considering all of those urgent unanswered questions and the humiliating failure of the expedition to Arrowhead, most other men would have had little appetite, but with gusto Anson Sharp worked through the last of the chicken and biscuits. And considering that he had put his entire future at risk by virtually subordinating the agency's goals in this case to his own personal vendetta against Ben Shadway, it seemed unlikely that he would be able to lie down and enjoy the deep and untroubled sleep of an innocent child. But as he turned back the covers on the queen-sized motel bed, he had no fear of insomnia. He was always able to sleep the moment he rested his head on the pillow, regardless of the circumstances.
He was, after all, a man whose only passion was himself, whose only commitment was to himself, whose only interests lay in those things which impinged directly upon him. Therefore, taking care of himself — eating well, sleeping, staying fit, and maintaining a good appearance — was of paramount importance. Besides, truly believing himself to be superior to other men and favored by fate, he could not be devastated by any setback, for he was certain that bad luck and disappointment were transitory conditions, insignificant anomalies in his otherwise smooth and ever-ascending path to greatness and acclaim.
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