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.
It.
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 side wise biological revolution — 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 he
ard 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.
She continued to edge backward.
It moved toward her with slow, easy steps.
“Raysheeeel…”
* * *
Convinced that a dying wife lay in an intensive-care ward waiting for her husband, Amos Tate wanted to drive Ben all the way to Sunrise Hospital, which would have taken him too far away from the Golden Sand Inn. Ben had to insist strenuously on being dropped at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana. And as there was no good reason to refuse Amos's generous offer, Ben was reduced to admitting that he had lied about the wife, though he offered no explanation. He flung off the blanket, threw open the cab door, jumped down to the street, and ran east on Tropicana, past the Tropicana Hotel, leaving the startled trucker staring after him in puzzlement.
The Golden Sand Inn was approximately a mile ahead, a distance he could ordinarily cover in six minutes or less. But in the heavy rain, he did not want to risk sprinting at top speed, for if he fell and broke an arm or leg, he would not be in any condition to help Rachael if, in fact, she needed help. (God, please, let her be warm and safe and sound and in need of no help at all!) He ran along the shoulder of the broad boulevard, the revolver digging into his flesh where it was tucked under his waistband. He splashed through puddles that filled every depression in the macadam. Only a few cars passed him; several of the drivers slowed to stare, but none offered him a lift. He did not bother trying to hitch a ride, for he sensed that he had no time to waste.
A mile was not a great distance, but tonight it seemed like a journey to the far end of the world.
* * *
Julio and Reese had been able to board the plane in Orange County with their service revolvers holstered under their coats because they had presented their police credentials to the attendant at the metal-detecting security gate. Now, having landed at McCarran International in Las Vegas, they used their ID again to obtain swift service from the clerk at the rental-car desk, an attractive brunette named Ruth. Instead of just handing them the keys and sending them out to the lot to locate their designated rental on their own, she telephoned a night-duty mechanic to pick it up and drive it around to the front entrance of the terminal.
Since they had not come dressed for rain, they stood inside the terminal at a set of glass doors until they saw the Dodge pull up at the curb, then went out into the storm. The mechanic, more suitably dressed for the foul weather in a vinyl raincoat with a vinyl hood, quickly checked their rental papers and turned the car over to them.
Although clouds had claimed the sky late in the day in Orange County, Reese had not realized things would be worse to the east and had not bargained for a landing in a rainstorm. Though their descent and touchdown had been as smooth as glass, he had gripped the arms of his seat so tightly that his hands were still slightly stiff and achy.
Safely on the ground, he should have been relieved, but he could not forget Teddy Bertlesman, the tall pink lady, and he could also not forget little Esther waiting at home for him. This morning, he'd had only his Esther to live for, just that one small blessing, which was not a sufficient abundance to tempt the cruelty of fate. But now there was also the glorious real-estate saleswoman, and Reese was acutely aware that when a man had more reason to live he was more likely to die.
Superstitious nonsense, perhaps.
But the rain, when he had expected a clear desert night, seemed like a bad omen, and he was uneasy.
As Julio drove away from the terminal, Reese wiped the rain off his face and said, “What about all those TV commercials for Vegas on the L.A. stations?”
“What about them?”
“Where's the sunshine? Where're all those girls in tiny little bikinis?”
“What do you care about girls in bikinis when you have a date with Teddy Bertlesman on Saturday?”
Don't talk about that, Reese thought superstitiously.
He said, “Hell, this doesn't look like Vegas. This looks more like Seattle.”
* * *
Rachael slammed the bedroom door and thumbed in the button to engage the flimsy lock. She ran to the only window, pulled open the rotting drapes, found it had jalousie panes, and realized that, because of those metal cross-ribs, there was no easy exit.
Looking around for something that could be used as a weapon, she saw only the bed, two nightstands, one lamp, and a chair.
She expected the door to crash inward, but it did not.
She heard nothing from the creature in the living room, and its silence, while welcome, was also unnerving. What was it up to?
She ran to the closet, slid the door open, and looked inside. Nothing of use. Just a tier of empty shelves in one corner and then a rod and empty hangers. She could not fashion a weapon out of a few wire hangers.
The doorknob rattled.
“Raysheeeel,” the thing hissed tauntingly.
A fragment of Eric's consciousness evidently did remain within the mutant, for it was that Eric-part that wanted to make her sweat and wanted her to have plenty of time to contemplate what he was going to do to her.
She would die here, and it would be a slow and terrible death.
In frustration, she started to turn away from the empty clothes rod and hangers, but noticed a trap in the closet ceiling, an access to the attic.
The creature thumped a heavy hand against the door, then again and again. “Raysheeeel…”
She slipped inside the closet and tugged on the shelves to test their sturdiness. To her relief, they were built in, screwed to the wall studs, so she was able to climb them as if they were a ladder. She stood on the fourth tier, her head only a foot below the ceiling. Holding the adjacent rod with one hand, she reached out and up to one side with her free hand, beyond the shelves, and quietly pushed up the hinged trap.
“Raysheeeel, Raysheeeel,” it crooned, dragging its claws down the outside of the locked bedroom door, then throwing itself lightly — almost teasingly — against that barrier.
In the closet, Rachael climbed one more step, got a grip on two edges of the overhead opening, swung off the shelves, dangled for a moment with the rod against her breasts, then muscled herself up and into the attic. There was no flooring, just two-by-four beams sixteen inches apart, with sheathed pads of Fiberglas insulation laid between those supports. In the wan yellow light that rose through the open trap, she saw the attic ceiling was very low, providing only a four-foot-high space, with roofing nails poking through in a lot of places, and with larger exposed rafter nails lancing out here and there. To her surprise, the attic was not limited to the area over the office and the manager's apartment, but led off across the ceilings of all the rooms in that long wing.
Below, something crashed so hard that she felt the reverberation through the bedroom-ceiling beams on which she knelt. Another crash was accompanied by the dry splintering of wood and the hard sharp snap of breaking metal.
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She quickly closed the trap, plunging the attic into perfect darkness. She crawled as silently as possible along a parallel pair of two-by-fours, one hand and one knee on each of them, until she was about eight feet from the trap. There she stopped and waited in the high lightless chamber.
Anxiously she listened for movement in the room below. With the trap closed, she could not easily hear what was happening down there, for the heavy rain was hammering on the motel's roof only inches above her head.
She prayed that, in his degenerate state, with an IQ closer to that of an animal than a man, the Eric-thing would be unable to puzzle out her route of escape.
* * *
With only one arm and one leg, Whitney Gavis had first dragged himself toward the garage in dogged pursuit of the departing creature that had torn off his artificial leg. But by the time he reached the open door, he knew that he was fooling himself: with his handicaps, he could do nothing to help Rachael. Handicaps — that's what they were. Earlier, he had jokingly called his amputations “peculiarities” and had told Rachael that he refused to use the word “handicaps.” In the current situation, however, there was no room for self-delusion; the painful truth had to be faced. Handicaps. He was furious with himself for his limitations, furious with the long-ago war and the Vietcong and life in general, and for a moment he was almost overcome by tears.
But being angry did no good, and Whit Gavis did not waste time and energy on either fruitless activities or self-pity. “Put a lid on it, Whit,” he said aloud. He turned away from the garage and began to haul himself laboriously along the muddy ground toward the paved alley, intending to crawl all the way out to Tropicana and into the middle of that boulevard, where the sight of him would surely stop even the most unsympathetic motorist.
He had gone only six or eight yards when his face, which had been numbed by a blow from the beast's club-hard hand, suddenly began to burn and sting. He flopped on his back, face turned up into the cold rain, raised his good hand, and felt his disfigured cheek. He found deep lacerations cutting through the scar tissue that was part of his Vietnam legacy.
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