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 chan
gefire 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 smelle
d 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.
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