Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  Outside a car pulled into the motel parking lot and stopped.

  Rachael glanced worriedly at the barricaded door.

  In the still desert air, a car door opened, closed.

  Ben sat up straighter in his chair, tense.

  Footsteps echoed softly through the empty night. They were heading away from Rachael’s and Ben’s room. In another part of the motel, the door to another room opened and closed.

  With visible relief Rachael let her shoulders sag. “Mice are natural-born cowards, of course. They never fight their enemies. They’re not equipped to. They survive by running, dodging, hiding. They don’t even fight among themselves for supremacy or territory. They’re meek, timid. But the mice who came back weren’t meek at all. They fought one another, and they attacked mice that had not been resurrected—and they even tried to nip at the researchers handling them, though a mouse has no hope of hurting a man and is ordinarily acutely aware of that. They flew into rages, clawing at the floors of their cages, pawing at the air as if fighting imaginary enemies, sometimes even clawing at themselves. Occasionally these fits lasted less than a minute, but more often went on until the mouse collapsed in exhaustion.”

  For a moment, neither spoke.

  The silence in the motel room was sepulchral, profound.

  At last Ben said, “In spite of this strangeness in the mice, Eric and his researchers must’ve been electrified. Dear God, they’d hoped to extend the life span—and instead they defeated death altogether! So they were eager to move on to development of similar methods of genetic alteration for human beings.”

  “Yes.”

  “In spite of the mice’s unexplained tendency to frenzies, rages, random violence.”

  “Yes.”

  “Figuring that problem might never arise in a human subject … or could be dealt with somewhere along the way.”

  “Yes.”

  Ben said, “So … slowly the work progressed, but too slowly for Eric. Youth-oriented, youth-obsessed, and inordinately afraid of dying, he decided not to wait for a safe and proven process.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what you meant in Eric’s office tonight, when you asked Baresco if he knew Eric had broken the cardinal rule. To a genetics researcher or other specialist in biological sciences, the cardinal rule would be—what?—that he should never experiment with human beings until all encountered problems and unanswered questions are dealt with at the test-animal level or below.”

  “Exactly,” she said. She had folded her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking, but her fingers kept picking at one another. “And Vincent didn’t know Eric had broken the cardinal rule. I knew, but it must’ve come as a nasty shock to them when they heard Eric’s body was missing. The moment they heard, they knew he’d done the craziest, most reckless, most unforgivable thing he possibly could’ve done.”

  “And now what?” Ben asked. “They want to help him?”

  “No. They want to kill him. Again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he won’t come back all the way, won’t ever be exactly like he was. This stuff wasn’t perfected yet.”

  “He’ll be like the lab animals?”

  “Probably. Strangely violent, dangerous.”

  Ben thought of the mindless destruction in the Villa Park house, the blood in the trunk of the car.

  Rachael said, “Remember—he was a ruthless man all his life and troubled by barely suppressed violent urges even before this. The mice started out meek, but Eric didn’t, so what might he be like now? Look what he did to Sarah Kiel.”

  Ben remembered not only the beaten girl but the wrecked kitchen in the Palm Springs house, the knives driven into the wall.

  “And if Eric murders someone in one of these rages,” Rachael said, “the police are more likely to learn he’s alive, and Wildcard will be blown wide open. So his partners want to kill him in some very final manner that’ll rule out another resurrection. I wouldn’t be surprised if they dismembered the corpse or burned it to ashes and then disposed of the remains in several locations.”

  Good God, Ben thought, is this reality or Chiller Theater?

  He said, “They want to kill you because you know about Wildcard?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the only reason they’d like to get their hands on me. They’ve got two others at least. For one thing, they probably think I know where Eric will go to ground.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I had some ideas. And Sarah Kiel gave me another one. But I don’t know for sure.”

  “You said there’s a third reason they’d want you?”

  She nodded. “I’m first in line to inherit Geneplan, and they don’t trust me to continue pumping enough money into Wildcard. By removing me, they stand a much better chance of retaining control of the corporation and of keeping Wildcard secret. If I could’ve gotten to Eric’s safe ahead of them and could’ve put my hands on his project diary, I would’ve had solid proof that Wildcard exists, and then they wouldn’t have dared touch me. Without proof, I’m vulnerable.”

  Ben rose and began to move restlessly around the room, thinking furiously.

  Somewhere in the night, not far beyond the motel walls, a cat cried either in anger or in passion. It went on a long time, rising and falling, an eerie ululation.

  Finally Ben said, “Rachael, why are you pursuing Eric? Why this desperate rush to reach him before the others? What’ll you do if you find him?”

  “Kill him,” she said without hesitation, and the bleakness in her green eyes was now complemented by a Rachael-like determination and iron resolve. “Kill him for good. Because if I don’t kill him, he’s going to hide out until he’s in better condition, until he’s a bit more in control of himself, and then he’s going to come kill me. He died furious with me, consumed by such hatred for me that he dashed blindly out into traffic, and I’m sure that same hatred was seething in him the moment awareness returned to him in the county morgue. In his clouded and twisted mind, I’m very likely his primary obsession, and I don’t think he’ll rest until I’m dead. Or until he’s dead, really dead this time.”

  He knew she was right. He was deeply afraid for her.

  His preference for the past was as strong in him now as it had ever been, and he longed for simpler times. How mad had the modern world become? Criminals owned the city streets at night. The whole planet could be utterly destroyed in an hour with the pressing of a few buttons. And now … now dead men could be reanimated. Ben wished for a time machine that could carry him back to a better age: say the early 1920s, when a sense of wonder was still alive and when faith in the human potential was unsullied and unsurpassed.

  Yet … he remembered the joy that had surged in him when Rachael had first said that death had been beaten, before she had explained that those who came back from beyond were frighteningly changed. He had been thrilled. Hardly the response of a genuine stick-in-the-mud reactionary. He might peer back at the past and long for it with full-blown sentimentalism, but in his heart he was, like others of his age, undeniably attracted to science and its potential for creating a brighter future. Maybe he was not such a misfit in the modern world as he liked to pretend. Maybe this experience was teaching him something about himself that he would have preferred not to learn.

  He said, “Could you really pull the trigger on Eric?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure you could. I suspect you’d freeze up when you were really confronted with the moral implications of murder.”

  “This wouldn’t be murder. He’s no longer a human being. He’s already dead. The living dead. The walking dead. He’s not a man anymore. He’s different. Changed. Just as those mice were changed. He’s only a thing now, not a man, a dangerous thing, and I wouldn’t have any qualms about blowing his head off. If the authorities ever found out, I don’t think they’d even try to prosecute me. And I see no moral questions that would put me on trial in my own mind.”

  “You’ve
obviously thought hard about this,” he said. “But why not hide out, keep a low profile, let Eric’s partners find him and kill him for you?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t bet everything on their success. They might fail. They might not get to him before he finds me. This is my life we’re talking about, and by God I’m not trusting in anyone but me to protect it.”

  “And me,” he said.

  “And you, yes. And you, Benny.”

  He came to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, beside her. “So we’re chasing a dead man.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we’ve got to get some rest now.”

  “I’m beat,” she agreed.

  “Then where will we go tomorrow?”

  “Sarah told me about a cabin Eric has in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. It sounded secluded. Just what he needs now, for the next few days, while the initial healing’s going on.”

  Ben sighed. “Yeah, I think we might find him in a place like that.”

  “You don’t have to come with me.”

  “I will.”

  “But you don’t have to.”

  “I know. But I will.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  Though she was weary, sweaty, and rumpled, with lank hair and bloodshot eyes, she was beautiful.

  He had never felt closer to her. Facing death together always forged a special bond between people, drew them even closer regardless of how very close they might have been before. He knew, for he had been to war in the Green Hell.

  Tenderly she said, “Let’s get some rest, Benny.”

  “Right,” he said.

  But before he could lie down and turn off the lights, he had to break out the magazine of the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum that he had taken off Vincent Baresco several hours ago and count the remaining cartridges. Three. Half the magazine’s load had been expended in Eric’s office, when Baresco had fired wildly in the darkness as Ben attacked him. Three left. Not much. Not nearly enough to make Ben feel secure, even though Rachael had her own thirty-two pistol. How many bullets were required to stop a walking dead man? Ben put the Combat Magnum on the nightstand, where he could reach out and lay his hand on it in an instant if he needed it during what remained of the night.

  In the morning, he would buy a box of ammunition. Two boxes.

  14

  LIKE A NIGHT BIRD

  Leaving two men behind at Rachael Leben’s house in Placentia—where the crucified corpse of Rebecca Klienstad had finally been taken down from the bedroom wall—and leaving other men at the Leben house in Villa Park and still others at the Geneplan offices, Anson Sharp of the Defense Security Agency choppered through the desert darkness with two more agents, flying low and fast, to Eric Leben’s stylish yet squalid love nest in Palm Springs. The pilot put the helicopter down in a bank parking lot less than a block off Palm Canyon Drive, where a nondescript government car was waiting. The chuffling rotors of the aircraft sliced up the hot dry desert air and flung slabs of it at Sharp’s back as he dashed to the sedan.

  Five minutes later, they arrived at the house where Dr. Leben had kept his string of teenage girls. Sharp wasn’t surprised to find the front door ajar. He rang the bell repeatedly, but no one answered. Drawing his service revolver, a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, he led the way inside, in search of Sarah Kiel who, according to the most recent report on Leben, was the current piece of fluff in residence.

  The Defense Security Agency knew about Leben’s lechery because it knew everything about people engaged in top-secret contract work with the Pentagon. That was something civilians like Leben just could never seem to understand: Once they accepted the Pentagon’s money and undertook highly sensitive research work, they had absolutely no privacy. Sharp knew all about Leben’s fascination with modern art, modern design, and modern architecture. He knew about Eric Leben’s marital problems in detail. He knew what foods Leben preferred, what music he liked, what brand of underwear he wore; so of course he also knew every little thing about the teenage girls because the potential for blackmail that they presented was related to national security.

  When Sharp stepped into the kitchen and saw the destruction, especially the knives driven into the wall, he figured he would not find Sarah Kiel alive. She would be nailed up in another room, or maybe bolted to the ceiling, or maybe hacked to pieces and hung on wire to form a bloody mobile, maybe even worse. You couldn’t guess what might happen next in this case. Anything could happen.

  Weird.

  Gosser and Peake, the two young agents with Sharp, were startled and made uneasy by the mess in the kitchen and by the psychopathic frenzy it implied. Their security clearance and need to know were as high as Sharp’s, so they were aware that they were hunting for a walking dead man. They knew Eric Leben had risen from a morgue slab and escaped in stolen hospital whites, and they knew a half-alive and deranged Eric Leben had killed the Hernandez and Klienstad women to obtain their car, so Gosser and Peake held their service revolvers as tightly and cautiously as Sharp held his.

  Of course, the DSA was fully aware of the nature of the work Geneplan was doing for the government: biological warfare research, the creation of deadly man-made viruses. But the agency also knew the details of other projects under way within the company, including the Wildcard Project, although Leben and his associates had labored under the delusion that the secret of Wildcard was theirs alone. They were unaware of the federal agents and stoolies among them. And they did not realize how quickly government computers had ascertained their intentions merely by surveying the research they farmed out to other companies and extrapolating the purpose of it all.

  These civilian types just could not understand that when you bargained with Uncle Sam and eagerly took his money, you couldn’t sell only a small piece of your soul. You had to sell it all.

  Anson Sharp usually enjoyed bringing that bit of nasty news to people like Eric Leben. They thought they were such big fish, but they forgot that even big fish are eaten by bigger fish, and there was no bigger fish in the sea than the whale called Washington. Sharp loved to watch that realization sink in. He relished seeing the self-important hotshots break into a sweat and quiver. They usually tried to bribe him or reason with him, and sometimes they begged, but of course he could not let them off the hook. Even if he could have let them off, he would not have done it, because he liked nothing more than seeing them squirm before him.

  Dr. Eric Leben and his six cronies had been permitted to proceed unhampered with their revolutionary research into longevity. But if they had solved all the problems and achieved a useful breakthrough, the government would have moved in on them and would have absorbed the project by one means or another, through the swift declaration of a national defense emergency.

  Now Eric Leben had screwed up everything. He administered the faulty treatment to himself and then accidentally put it to the test by walking in front of a damn garbage truck. No one could have anticipated such a turn of events because the guy had seemed too smart to risk his own genetic integrity.

  Looking at the broken china and the trampled food that littered the floor, Gosser wrinkled his choirboy face and said, “The guy’s a real berserker.”

  “Looks like the work of an animal,” Peake said, frowning.

  Sharp led them out of the kitchen, through the rest of the house, finally to the master bedroom and bath, where more destruction had been wrought and where there was also some blood, including a bloody palmprint on the wall. It was probably Leben’s print: proof that the dead man, in some strange fashion, lived.

  No cadaver could be found in the house, neither Sarah Kiel’s nor anybody else’s, and Sharp was disappointed. The nude and crucified woman in Placentia had been unexpected and kinky, a welcome change from the corpses he usually saw. Victims of guns, knives, plastique, and the garroting wire were old news to Sharp; he had seen them in such plenitude over the years that he no longer got a kick out of them. But he had sure gotten a kick out of t
hat bimbo nailed to the wall, and he was curious to see what Leben’s deranged and rotting mind might come up with next.

  Sharp checked the hidden safe in the floor of the bedroom closet and found that it had been emptied.

  Leaving Gosser behind to house-sit in case Leben returned, Sharp took Peake along on a search of the garage, expecting to find Sarah Kiel’s body, which they did not. Then he sent Peake into the backyard with a flashlight to examine the lawn and flower beds for signs of a freshly dug grave, though it seemed unlikely that Leben, in his current condition, would have the desire or the foresight to bury his victims and cover his tracks.

  “If you don’t find anything,” Sharp told Peake, “then start checking the hospitals. In spite of the blood, maybe the Kiel girl wasn’t killed. Maybe she managed to run away from him and get medical attention.”

  “If I find her at some hospital?”

  “I’ll need to know at once,” Sharp said, for he would have to prevent Sarah Kiel from talking about Eric Leben’s return. He would try to use reason, intimidation, and outright threats to ensure her silence. If that didn’t work, she would be quietly removed.

  Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway also had to be found soon and silenced.

  As Peake set out on his assigned tasks—and while Gosser waited alertly inside the house—Sharp climbed into the unmarked sedan at the curb and had the driver return him to the bank parking lot off Palm Canyon Drive, where the helicopter was still waiting for him.

  Airborne again, heading for the Geneplan labs in Riverside, Anson Sharp stared out at the night landscape as it rushed past below the chopper, his eyes narrowed as if he were a night bird seeking prey.

  15

  LOVING

  Ben’s dreams were dark and full of thunder, blasted by strange lightning that illuminated nothing in a landscape without form, inhabited by an unseen but fearful creature that stalked him through the shadows, where all was vast and cold and lonely. It was—and yet was not—the Green Hell where he had spent more than three years of his youth, a familiar yet unfamiliar place, the same as it had been, yet changed as landscapes can be only in dreams.