He was still kneeling on the wet ground, his broad humped back bowed to the driving rain. He appeared to have… changed. He did not look quite the same as when he had confronted her outside the public rest rooms. He was still monstrously deformed, though in a vaguely different way from before. A subtle difference but important… What was it, exactly? Peering out of the flute hole in the stone, wind whistling softly through the eight- or ten-inch-deep bore and blowing in her face, Rachael strained her eyes to get a better view of him. The rain and murky light hampered her, but she thought he seemed more apelike. Hulking, slump-shouldered, slightly longer in the arms. Perhaps he was also less reptilian than he had been, yet still with those grotesque, bony, long, and wickedly taloned hands.
Surely any change she perceived must be imaginary, for the very structure of his bones and flesh couldn't have altered noticeably in less than a quarter of an hour. Could it? Then again… why not? If his genetic integrity had collapsed thoroughly since he had beaten Sarah Kiel last night — when he'd still been human in appearance — if his face and body and limbs had been altered so drastically in the twelve hours between then and now, the pace of his metamorphosis was obviously so frantic that, indeed, a difference might be noticeable in just a quarter of an hour.
The realization was unnerving.
It was followed by a worse realization: Eric was holding a thick, writhing snake — one hand gripping it near the tail, the other hand behind its head — and he was eating it alive. Rachael saw the snake's jaws unhinged and gaping, fangs like twin slivers of ivory in the flickering storm light, as it struggled unsuccessfully to curl its head back and bite the hand of the man-thing that held it. Eric was tearing at the middle of the serpent with his inhumanly sharp teeth, ripping hunks of meat loose and chewing enthusiastically. Because his jaws were heavier and longer than the jaws of any man, their obscenely eager movement — the crushing and grinding of the snake — could be seen even at this distance.
Shocked and nauseated, Rachael wanted to turn away from the spy-hole in the rock. However, she did not vomit, and she did not turn away, because her nausea and disgust were outweighed by her bafflement and her need to understand Eric.
Considering how much he wanted to get his hands on her, why had he abandoned the chase? Had he forgotten her? Had the snake bitten him and had he, in his savage rage, traded bite for bite?
But he was not merely striking back at the snake: he was eating it, eagerly consuming one solid mouthful after another. Once, when Eric looked up at the fulminous heavens, Rachael saw his storm-lit countenance twisted in a frightening expression of inhuman ecstasy. He shuddered with apparent delight as he tore at the serpent. His hunger seemed as urgent and insatiable as it was unspeakable.
Rain slashed, wind moaned, thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and she felt as if she were peering through a chink in the walls of hell, watching a demon devour the souls of the damned. Her heart hammered hard enough to compete with the sound of the rain drumming on the ground. She knew she should run, but she was mesmerized by the pure evil of the sight framed in the flute hole.
She saw a second snake — then a third, fourth, fifth — oozing out of the rain-pooled ground around Eric's knees. He was kneeling at the entrance to a den of the deadly creatures, a nest that was apparently flooding with the runoff from the storm. The rattlers wriggled forth and, finding the man-thing in their midst, immediately struck at his thighs and arms, biting him repeatedly. Though Eric neither cried out nor flinched, Rachael was filled with relief, knowing that he would soon collapse from the effects of the venom.
He threw aside the half-eaten snake and seized another. With no diminishment of his perverse hunger, he sank his pointed, razored teeth into the snake's living flesh and tore loose one dripping gobbet after another. Maybe his altered metabolism was capable of dealing with the potent venom of the rattlers — either breaking it down into an array of harmless chemicals, or repairing tissues as rapidly as the venom damaged them.
Chain lightning flashed back and forth across the malevolent sky, and in that incandescent flare, Eric's long sharp teeth gleamed like shards of a broken mirror. His strangely shining eyes cast back a cold reflection of the celestial fire. His wet, tangled hair streamed with short-lived silvery brightness; the rain glistered like molten silver on his face; and all around him the earth sizzled as if the lightning-lined water was actually melted fat bubbling and crackling in a frying pan.
At last, Rachael broke the mesmeric hold that the scene exerted, turned from the flute hole, and ran back the way she had come. She sought another hollow between other low hills, a different route that would lead her to the roadside comfort station and the Mercedes.
Leaving the hilly area and recrossing the sandy plains, she was frequently the tallest thing in sight, much taller than the desert scrub. Once more, she worried about being struck by lightning. In the eerie stroboscopic light, the bleak and barren land appeared to leap and fall and leap again, as if eons of geological activity were being compressed into a few frantic seconds.
She tried to enter an arroyo, where she might be safe from the lightning. But the deep gulch was two-thirds full of muddy, churning water. Flotillas of whirling tumble-weed boats and bobbing mesquite rafts were borne on the water's rolling back.
She was forced to find a route around the network of flooded arroyos. But in time she came to the rest area where she had first encountered Eric. Her purse was still where she had dropped it, and she picked it up. The Mercedes was also exactly where she'd left it.
A few steps from the car, she halted abruptly, for she saw that the trunk lid, previously open, was now closed. She had the dreadful feeling that Eric — or the thing that had once been Eric — had returned ahead of her, had climbed into the trunk again, and had pulled the lid shut behind him.
Shaking, indecisive, afraid, Rachael stood in the drenching rain, reluctant to go closer to the car. The parking lot, lacking adequate drainage, was being transformed into a shallow lake. She stood in water that came over the tops of her running shoes.
The thirty-two pistol was under the driver's seat. If she could reach it before Eric threw open the trunk lid and came out…
Behind her, the staccato plop-plop-plop of water dripping off the picnic-table cover sounded like scurrying rats. More water sheeted off the comfort-station roof, splashing on the sidewalk. All around, the falling rain slashed into the pools and puddles with a crackling-cellophane sound that seemed to grow louder by the second.
She took a step toward the car, another, halted again.
He might not be in the trunk but inside the car itself. He might have closed the trunk and slipped into the back seat or even into the front, where he could be lying now — silent, still, unseen — waiting for her to open the door. Waiting to sink his teeth into her the way he'd sunk them into the snakes…
Rain streamed off the roof of the Mercedes, rippled down the windows, blurring her view of the car's shadowy interior.
Scared to approach the car but equally afraid of turning back, Rachael at last took another step forward.
Lightning flashed. Looming large and ominous in the stuttering light, the black Mercedes suddenly reminded her of a hearse.
Out on the highway, a large truck passed, engine roaring, big tires making a slushy sound on the wet pavement.
Rachael reached the Mercedes, jerked open the driver's door, saw no one inside. She fumbled under the seat for the pistol. Found it. While she still had the courage to act, she went around to the back of the car, hesitated only a second, pushed on the latch button, and lifted the trunk lid, prepared to empty the clip of the thirty-two into the Eric-thing if it was crouching there.
The trunk was empty. The carpet was soaked, and a gray puddle of rain spread over the center of the compartment, so she figured it had remained open to the elements until an especially strong gust of wind had blown it shut.
She slammed the lid, used her keys to lock it, returned to the driver's door, and got in
behind the wheel. She put the pistol on the passenger's seat, where she could grab it quickly.
The car started without hesitation. The windshield wipers flung the rain off the glass.
Outside, the desert beyond the concrete-block comfort station was rendered entirely in shades of slate: grays, blacks, browns, and rust. In that dreary sandscape, the only movement was the driving rain and the windblown tumbleweed.
Eric had not followed her.
Maybe the rattlesnakes had killed him, after all. Surely he could not have survived so many bites from so many snakes. Perhaps his genetically altered body, though capable of repairing massive tissue damage, was not able to counteract the toxic effects of such potent venom.
She drove out of the rest area, back onto the highway, heading east toward Las Vegas, grateful to be alive. The rain was falling too hard to permit safe travel above forty or fifty miles an hour, so she stayed in the extreme right lane, letting the more daring motorists pass her. Mile by mile she tried to convince herself that the worst was past — but she remained unconvinced.
* * *
Ben put the Merkur in gear and pulled onto the highway again.
The storm was moving rapidly eastward, toward Las Vegas. The rolling thunder was more distant than before, a deep rumble rather than a bone-jarring crash. The lightning, which had been striking perilously close on all sides, now flickered farther away, near the eastern horizon. Rain was still falling hard, but it no longer came down in blinding sheets, and driving was possible again.
The dashboard clock confirmed the time on Ben's watch: 5:15. Yet the summer day was darker than it should have been at that hour. The storm-blackened sky had brought an early dusk, and ahead the somber land was fading steadily in the embrace of a false twilight.
At his current speed, he would not reach Las Vegas until about eight-thirty tonight, probably two or three hours after Rachael had gotten there. He would have to stop in Baker, the only outpost in this part of the Mojave, and try to reach Whitney Gavis again. But he had the feeling he was not going to get hold of Whit. A feeling that maybe his and Rachael's luck had run out.
31
FEEDING FRENZY
Eric remembered the rattlesnakes only vaguely. Their fangs had left puncture wounds in his hands, arms, and thighs, but those small holes had already healed, and the rain had washed the bloodstains from his sodden clothes. His mutating flesh burned with that peculiar painless fire of ongoing change, which completely masked the lesser sting of venom. Sometimes his knees grew weak, or his stomach churned with nausea, or his vision blurred, or a spell of dizziness seized him, but those symptoms of poisoning grew less noticeable minute by minute. As he moved across the storm-darkened desert, images of the serpents rose in his memory — writhing forms curling like smoke around him, whispering in a language that he could almost understand — but he had difficulty believing that they had been real. A few times, he recalled biting, chewing, and swallowing mouthfuls of rattler meat, gripped by a feeding frenzy. A part of him responded to those bloody memories with excitement and satisfaction. But another part of him — the part that was still Eric Leben — was disgusted and repelled, and he repressed those grim recollections, aware that he would lose his already tenuous grip on sanity if he dwelt on them.
He moved rapidly toward an unknown place, propelled by instinct. Mostly he ran fully erect, more or less like a man, but sometimes he loped and shambled, with his shoulders hunched forward and his body bent in an apelike posture. Occasionally he was overcome with the urge to drop forward on all fours and scuttle across the wet sand on his belly; however, that queer compulsion frightened him, and he successfully resisted it.
Shadowfires burned here and there upon the desert floor, but he was not drawn toward them as he had been before. They were not as mysterious and intriguing as they had been previously, for he now suspected that they were gateways to hell. Previously, when he had seen those phantom flames, he had also seen his long-dead uncle Barry, which probably meant that Uncle Barry had come out of the fire. Eric was sure that Barry Hampstead resided in hell, so he figured the doors were portals to damnation. When Eric had died in Santa Ana yesterday, he had become Satan's property, doomed to spend eternity with Barry Hampstead, but at the penultimate moment he had thrown off the claims of the grave and had rescued his own soul from the pit. Now Satan was opening these doors around him, in hopes he would be impelled by curiosity to investigate one gate or another and, on stepping through, would deliver himself to the sulfurous cell reserved for him. His parents had warned him that he was in danger of going to hell, that his surrender to his uncle's desires — and, later, the murder of his tormentor — had damned his soul. Now he knew they were right. Hell was close. He dared not look into its flames, where something beckoned and smiled.
He raced on through the desert scrub. The storm, like clashing armies, blasted the day with bright bursts and rolling cannonades.
His unknown destination proved to be the comfort station at the roadside rest area where he had first confronted Rachael. Activated by solenoids that had misinterpreted the storm as nightfall, banks of fluorescent lights had blinked on at the front of the structure and over the doors on each side. In the parking lot, a few mercury-vapor arc lamps cast a bluish light on the puddled pavement.
When he saw the squat concrete-block building in the rain-swept murk ahead, Eric's muddy thoughts cleared, and suddenly he remembered everything Rachael had done to him. His encounter with the garbage truck on Main Street was her doing. And because the violent shock of death was what had triggered his malignant growth, he blamed his monstrous mutation on her as well. He'd almost gotten his hands on her, had almost torn her to pieces, but she'd slipped away from him when he'd been overcome by hunger, by a desperate need to provide fuel for his out-of-control metabolism. Now, thinking of her, he felt that cold reptilian rage well up in him again, and he loosed a thin bleat of fury that was lost in the noise of the storm.
Rounding the side of the building, he sensed someone near. A thrill coursed through him. He dropped to all fours and crouched against the block wall, in a pool of shadow just beyond the reach of the nearest fluorescent light.
He listened — head cocked, breath held. A jalousie window was open above his head, high in the men's-room wall. Movement inside. A man coughed. Then Eric heard soft, sweet whistling: “All Alone in the Moonlight,” from the musical Cats. The scrape and click of footsteps on concrete. The door opened outward onto the walk, eight or ten feet from where Eric crouched, and a man appeared.
The guy was in his late twenties, solidly built, rugged-looking, wearing boots, jeans, cowboy shirt, and a tan Stetson. He stood for a moment beneath the sheltering overhang, looking out at the falling rain. Suddenly he became aware of Eric, turned, stopped whistling, and stared in disbelief and horror.
As the other turned toward him, Eric moved so fast he seemed to be a leaping reflection of the lightning that flashed along the eastern horizon. Tall and well-muscled, the cowboy would have been a dangerous adversary in a fight with an ordinary man, but Eric Leben was no longer an ordinary man — or even quite a man at all. And the cowboy's shock at his attacker's appearance was a grave disadvantage, for it paralyzed him. Eric slammed into his prey and drove all five talons of his right hand into the man's belly, very deep. At the same time, seizing his prey's throat with his other hand, he destroyed the windpipe, ripping out the voice box and vocal cords, ensuring instant silence. Blood spurted from severed carotid arteries. Death glazed the cowboy's eyes even before Eric tore open his belly. Steaming guts cascaded onto rain-wet concrete, and the dead man collapsed into his own hot entrails.
Feeling wild and free and powerful, Eric settled down atop the warm corpse. Strangely, killing no longer repulsed or frightened him. He was becoming a primal beast who took a savage delight in slaughter. However, even the part of him that remained civilized — the Eric Leben part — was undeniably exhilarated by the violence, as well as by the enormous power and catlike
quickness of his mutant body. He knew he should have been shocked, nauseated, but he was not. All his life, he had needed to dominate others, to crush his adversaries, and now the need found expression in its purest form: cruel, merciless, violent murder.
He was also, for the first time, able to remember clearly the murder of the two young women whose car he had stolen in Santa Ana on Monday evening. He felt no burdensome responsibility for their deaths, no rush of guilt, only a sweet dark satisfaction and a fierce sort of glee. Indeed, the memory of their spilled blood, the memory of the naked woman whom he had nailed to the wall, only contributed to his exhilaration over the murder of the cowboy, and his heart pounded out a rhythm of icy joy.
Then, for a while, lowering himself onto the corpse by the men's-room door, he lost all conscious awareness of himself as a creature of intellect, as a creature with a past and a future. He descended into a dreamy state where the only sensations were the smell and taste of blood. The drumming and gurgling of rain continued to reach him, too, but it seemed now that it was an internal rather than external noise, perhaps the sound of change surging through his arteries, veins, bones, and tissues.
He was jolted out of his trance by a scream. He looked up from the ruined throat of his prey, where he'd buried his muzzle. A woman was standing at the corner of the building, wide-eyed, one arm held defensively across her breasts. Judging by her boots, jeans, and cowboy shirt, she was with the man whom Eric had just killed.
Eric realized that he had been feeding on his prey, and he was neither startled nor appalled by that realization. A lion would not be surprised or dismayed by its own savagery. His racing metabolism generated hunger unlike any he had ever known, and he needed rich nutrients to allay those pangs. In the meat of his prey, he found the food he required, just as the lion found what it needed in the flesh of the gazelle.
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