Oh, hell, Peake thought miserably.
* * *
Lieutenant Verdad stood on one side of Benny, hastily reloading his revolver.
Rachael stood on the other side, sheltering the box of wooden matches from the relentless rain. She had withdrawn one match and had been holding it and the box in her cupped hands, silently cursing the wind and water that would try to extinguish the flame the moment it was struck.
From the front of the motel courtyard, backlit by the amber light spilling through the office windows, the Eric-thing approached in that frighteningly swift, darkly graceful stride that seemed entirely at odds with its size and with its cumbersome, gnarled appearance. It emitted a shrill, ululant cry as it raced toward them. Clearly, it had no fear.
Rachael was afraid that its reckless advance was justified, that the fire would do it no more damage than the bullets.
It was already halfway along the forty-foot length of the pool. When it reached the end, it would only have to turn the corner and come another fifteen feet before it would be upon them.
The lieutenant had not finished reloading his revolver, but he snapped the cylinder into place anyway, apparently deciding that he didn't have time to slip the last two cartridges into their chambers.
The beast reached the corner of the pool.
Benny gripped the bucket of gasoline with both hands, one on the rim and the other on the bottom. He swung it back at his side, brought it forward, and threw the contents all over the face and chest of the mutant as it leaped across the last fifteen feet of concrete decking.
* * *
At a run, Peake followed Sharp past the motel office and into the courtyard just in time to see Shadway throw a bucket full of something into the face of—
Of what? Christ, what was that thing?
Sharp, too, halted in amazement.
The creature screamed in fury and staggered back from Shadway. It wiped at its monstrous face — Peake saw eyes that glowed orange like a pair of hot coals — and pawed at its chest, trying to remove whatever Shadway had thrown on it.
“Leben,” Sharp said. “Holy shit, it must be Leben.”
Jerry Peake understood at once, even though he didn't want to understand, did not want to know, for this was a secret that it would be dangerous to know, dangerous not only to his physical well-being but to his sanity.
* * *
The gasoline seemed to have choked and temporarily blinded it, but Rachael knew that it would recover from this assault as quickly as it had recovered from being shot. So, as Benny dropped the empty bucket and stepped out of the way, she struck the match and only then realized she should have had a torch, something she could have set aflame and then thrown at the creature. Now she had no choice but to step in close with the short-stemmed match.
The Eric-thing had stopped shrieking and, temporarily overcome by the gasoline fumes, was hunched over, wheezing noisily, gasping for air.
She took only three steps toward it before the wind or the rain — or both — extinguished the match.
Making a strange terrified mewling that she could not control, she slid open the box, took out another match, and struck it. This time she had not even taken one step before the flame went out.
The demonic mutant seemed to be breathing easier, and it began to straighten up, raising its monstrous head again.
The rain, Rachael thought desperately, the rain is washing the gasoline off its body.
As she shakily withdrew a third match, Benny said, “Here,” and he turned the empty bucket upright on the concrete at her feet.
She understood. She rasped the third match against the striking pad on the side of the box, couldn't get it to light.
The creature drew in a deep breath at last, another. Recovering, it shrieked at them.
She scraped the match against the box again and let out a cry of relief when the flame spurted up. The instant the match was lit, she dropped it straight into the bucket, and the residue of gasoline burst into flames.
Lieutenant Verdad, who had been waiting to do his part, stepped in fast and kicked the bucket at the Eric-thing.
The flaming pail struck one of the beast's jean-clad thighs, where some of the gasoline had landed when Benny had thrown it. The fire leaped out of the bucket onto the jeans and raced up over the creature's spiny chest, swiftly enveloped the misshapen head.
The fire did not stop it.
Screaming in pain, a pillar of flame, the thing nevertheless came forward faster than Rachael would have believed possible. In the red-orange light of the leaping fire, she saw its outreaching hands, saw what appeared to be mouths in the palms, and then it had its hands on her. Hell could be no worse than having those hands on her; she almost died right there from the horror of it. The thing seized her by one arm and by the neck, and she felt those orifices within its hands eating into her flesh, and she felt the fire reaching out for her, and she saw the spikes on the mutant's huge chest where she could be so quickly and easily impaled — a multitude of possible deaths — and now it lifted her, and she knew she was certainly dead, finished, but Verdad appeared and opened fire with his revolver, squeezing off two shots that hit the Eric-thing in the head, but even before he could pull off a third shot, Benny came in at a flying leap, in some crazy karate movement, airborne, driving both feet into the monster's shoulder, and Rachael felt it let go of her with one hand, so she wrenched and kicked at its flaming chest, and suddenly she was free, the creature was toppling into the shallow end of the empty swimming pool, she fell to the concrete decking, free, free — except that her shoes were on fire.
* * *
Ben delivered the kick and threw himself to the left, hit the decking, rolled, and came immediately onto his feet in time to see the creature falling into the shallow end of the empty pool. He also saw that Rachael's shoes were afire from gasoline, and he dove for her, threw himself upon her, and smothered the flames.
For a moment, she clung fiercely to him, and he held her tightly with an equal need of reassurance. He had never before felt anything half as good as her heart's frantic pounding, which was conveyed through her breast to his.
“Are you all right?”
“Good enough,” she said shakily.
He hugged her again, then gave her a quick examination. There was a bleeding circlet on her arm and another on her neck, where the mouths in the mutant's hands had attached themselves to her, but neither wound looked serious.
In the pool, the creature was screaming in a way it had not screamed before, and Ben was sure that these must be its death cries — although he would not have taken any bets on it.
Together, with his arm around her waist and her arm encircling him, they went to the edge of the pool, where Lieutenant Verdad was already standing.
Burning as if it were made of the purest candle tallow, the beast staggered down the sloping floor of the pool, perhaps trying to reach the collected rainwater at the deep end. But the falling rain did nothing to quench the flames, and Ben suspected that the puddle below would be equally ineffective. The fire was inexplicably intense, as if the gasoline were not the only fuel, as if something in the mutant's body chemistry were also feeding the flames. At the halfway point, the creature collapsed onto its knees, clawing at the air and then at the wet concrete before it. It continued to the bottom, crawling, then slithering along on its belly, finally dragging itself laboriously toward hoped-for salvation.
* * *
The shadowfire burned within the water, down under the cooling surface, and he was drawn toward it, not merely to extinguish the flames that were consuming his body but to snuff out the changefire within him, too. The unbearable pain of immolation had jolted what remained of his human consciousness, had bestirred him from the trancelike state into which he had retreated when the savage alien part of him had gained dominance. For a moment he knew who he was, what he had become, and what was happening to him. But he also knew that the knowledge was tenuous, that awareness would fade, that th
e small remaining portion of his intellect and personality would eventually be completely destroyed in the process of growth and change, and that the only hope for him was death.
Death.
He had striven hard to avoid death, had taken insane risks to save, himself from the grave, but now he welcomed Charon.
Eaten alive by fire, he dragged himself down, down toward the shadowfire beneath the water, the strange fire burning on a far shore.
He stopped screaming. He had traveled beyond pain and terror, into a great lonely calm.
He knew that the flaming gasoline would not kill him, not that alone. The changefire within him was worse than the external fire. The changefire was blazing very brightly now, burning in every cell, raging, and he was overwhelmed by a painful hunger a thousand times more demanding and excruciating than any he had known before. He was desperate for fuel, for carbohydrates and proteins and vitamins and minerals with which to support his uncontrolled metabolism. But because he was in no condition to stalk and kill and feed, he could not provide his system with the fuel it needed. Therefore, his body started to cannibalize itself; the changefire did not subside but began to burn up some of his tissues in order to obtain the enormous amounts of energy required to transform those tissues that it did not consume as fuel. Second by second, his body weight rapidly declined, not because the gasoline was feeding on it but because he was feeding on himself, devouring himself from within. He felt his head changing shape, felt his arms shrinking and a second pair of arms extruding from his lower rib cage. Each change consumed more of him, yet the fires of mutation did not subside.
At last he could not pull himself any closer to the shadowfire that burned beneath the water. He stopped and lay still, choking and twitching.
But to his surprise, he saw the shadowfire rise out of the water ahead. It moved toward him until it encircled him, until his world was all aflame, inside and out.
In his dying agony, Eric finally understood that the mysterious shadowfires had been neither gateways to hell nor merely meaningless illusions generated by misfiring synapses in the brain. They were illusions, yes. Or, more accurately, they were hallucinations cast off by his subconscious, meant to warn him of the terrible destiny toward which he had been plunging ever since he had arisen from that slab in the morgue. His damaged brain had functioned too poorly for him to grasp the logical progression of his fate, at least on a conscious level. But his subconscious mind had known the truth and had tried to provide clues by creating the phantom shadowfires: fire (his subconscious had been telling him), fire is your destiny, the insatiable inner fire of a superheated metabolism, and sooner or later it is going to burn you up alive.
His neck dwindled until his head sat almost directly upon his shoulders.
He felt his spine lengthening into a tail.
His eyes sank back under a suddenly more massive brow.
He sensed that he had more than two legs.
Then he sensed nothing at all as the changefire swept through him, consuming the last fuel it could find. He descended into the many kinds of fire.
* * *
Before Ben's eyes, in only a minute or less, the creature burned — the flames leaped high into the air, seethed, roared—until there was nothing left of the corpse but a small bubbling pool of sludge, a few little flickering flames down there in the darkness that reclaimed the empty swimming pool. Uncomprehending, Ben stood in silence, unable to speak. Lieutenant Verdad and Rachael seemed equally amazed, for they did not break the silence, either.
It was broken, at last, by Anson Sharp. He was coming slowly around the edge of the pool. He had a gun, and he looked as if he would use it. “What the hell happened to him? What the hell?”
Startled, not having seen the DSA agents until now, Ben stared at his old enemy and said, “Same thing that's going to happen to you, Sharp. He did to himself what you'll do to yourself sooner or later, though in a different way.”
“What're you talking about?” Sharp demanded.
Holding Rachael and trying to ease his body between her and Sharp, Ben said, “He didn't like the world the way he found it, so he set out to make it conform to his own twisted expectations. But instead of making a paradise for himself, he made a living hell. It's what you'll make for yourself, given time.”
“Shit,” Anson Sharp said, “you've gone off the deep end, Shadway. Way off the deep end.” To Verdad, he said, “Lieutenant, please put down your revolver.”
Verdad said, “What? What're you talking about? I—”
Sharp shot Verdad, and the detective was flung off the concrete into the mud by the impact of the bullet.
* * *
Jerry Peake — a devoted reader of mysteries, given to dreams of legendary achievement — had a habit of thinking in melodramatic terms. Watching Eric Leben's monstrously mutated body burning away to nothing in the empty swimming pool, he was shocked, horrified, and frightened; but he was also thinking at an unusually furious pace for him. First, he made a mental list of the similarities between Eric Leben and Anson Sharp: They loved power, thrived on it; they were cold-blooded and capable of anything; they had a perverse taste for young girls… Then Jerry listened to what Ben Shadway said about how a man could make his own hell on earth, and he thought about that, too. Then he looked down at the smoldering remnants of the mutant Leben, and it seemed to him that he was at a crossroads between his own earthly paradise and hell: He could cooperate with Sharp, let murder be done, and live with the guilt forever, damned in this life as well as in the next; or he could resist Sharp, retain his integrity and self-respect, and feel good about himself no matter what happened to his career in the DSA. The choice was his. Which did he want to be — the thing down there in the pool or a man?
Sharp ordered Lieutenant Verdad to put down the gun, and Verdad began to question the order, and Sharp shot him, just shot him, with no argument or hesitation.
So Jerry Peake drew his own gun and shot Sharp. The slug hit the deputy director in the shoulder.
Sharp seemed to have sensed the impending betrayal, because he had started to turn toward Jerry even as Jerry shot him. He squeezed off a round of his own, and Jerry took the bullet in the leg, though he fired simultaneously. As he fell, he had the enormous pleasure of seeing Anson Sharp's head explode.
* * *
Rachael stripped the jacket and shirt off Lieutenant Verdad and examined the bullet wound in his shoulder.
“I'll live,” he said. “It hurts like the devil, but I'll live.”
In the distance, the mournful sound of sirens arose, drawing rapidly nearer.
“That'll be Reese's doing,” Verdad said. “As soon as he got Gavis to the hospital, he'll have called the locals.”
“There really isn't too much bleeding,” she said, relieved to be able to confirm his own assessment of his condition.
“I told you,” Verdad said. “Heck, I can't die. I intend to stay around long enough to see my partner marry the pink lady.” He laughed at her puzzlement and said, “Don't worry, Mrs. Leben. I'm not out of my head.”
* * *
Peake was flat on his back on the concrete decking, his head raised somewhat on the hard pillow of the pool coping.
With a wide strip of his own torn shirt, Ben had fashioned a tourniquet for Peake's leg. The only thing he could find to twist it with was the barrel of Anson Sharp's discarded, silencer-equipped pistol, which was perfect for the job.
“I don't think you really need a tourniquet,” he told Peake as the sirens drew steadily nearer, gradually overwhelming the patter of the rain, “but better safe than sorry. There's a lot of blood, but I didn't see any spurting, no torn artery. Must hurt like the devil, though.”
“Funny,” Peake said, “but it doesn't hurt much at all.”
“Shock,” Ben said worriedly.
“No,” Peake said, shaking his head. “No, I don't think I'm going into shock. I've got none of the symptoms — and I know them. You know what I think maybe it is?”
>
“What?”
“What I just did — shooting my own boss when he went bad — is going to make me a legend in the agency. Damned if it isn't. I didn't see it that way until he was dead. So, anyway, maybe a legend just doesn't feel pain as much as other people do.” He grinned at Ben.
Ben returned a frown for the grin. “Relax. Just try to relax—”
Jerry Peake laughed. “I'm not delirious, Mr. Shadway. Really, I'm not. Don't you see? Not only am I a legend, but I can still laugh at myself! Which means that maybe I really do have what it takes. I mean, see, maybe I can make a big reputation for myself and not let it go to my head. Isn't that a nice thing to learn about yourself?”
“It's a nice thing,” Ben agreed.
The night was filled with screaming sirens, then the bark of brakes, and then the sirens died as running footsteps sounded on the motel driveway.
* * *
Soon there would be questions — thousands of them — from police officers in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Lake Arrowhead, Santa Ana, Placentia, and other places.
Following that ordeal, the media would have questions of their own. ("How do you feel, Mrs. Leben? Please? How do you feel about your husband's murderous spree, about nearly dying at his hands, how do you feel?") They would be even more persistent than the police — and far less courteous.
But now, as Jerry Peake and Julio Verdad were loaded into the paramedics' van and as the uniformed Las Vegas officers kept a watch on Sharp's corpse to make certain no one touched it before the police coroner arrived, Rachael and Ben had a moment together, just the two of them. Detective Hagerstrom had reported that Whitney Gavis had made it to the hospital in time and was going to pull through, and now he was getting into the emergency van with Julio Verdad. They were blessedly alone. They stood under the promenade awning, holding each other, neither of them speaking at first. Then they seemed to realize simultaneously that they would not be alone together again for long, frustrating hours, and they both tried to speak at once.
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