Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

“Then I’ll wait right here.”

  “You’ll be in the way here,” Werfell said. “You’ll wait in the visitors’ lounge, and we’ll call you when Miss Kiel is awake.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Peake insisted, scrunching his baby face into the sternest, toughest, most hard-boiled look he could manage.

  “The visitors’ lounge,” Werfell said ominously. “And if you do not proceed there immediately, I’ll have hospital security men escort you.”

  Peake hesitated, wishing to God he could be more aggressive. “All right, but you damn well better call me the minute she wakes up.”

  Furious, he turned from Werfell and stalked down the hall in search of the visitors’ lounge, too embarrassed to ask where it was. When he glanced back at Werfell, who was now in deep conversation with another physician, he realized the doctor was a dead ringer for Dashiell Hammett, the formidable Pinkerton detective and mystery novelist, which was why he had looked familiar to a dedicated reader like Peake. No wonder Werfell had such a tremendous air of authority. Dashiell Hammett, for God’s sake. Peake felt a little better about having deferred to him.

  They slept another two hours, woke within moments of each other, and made love again in the motel bed. For Rachael, it was even better this time than it had been before: slower, sweeter, with an even more graceful and fulfilling rhythm. She was sinewy, supple, taut, and she took enormous and intense pleasure in her superb physical condition, drew satisfaction from each flexing and gentle thrusting and soft lazy grinding of her body, not merely the usual pleasure of male and female organs mating, but the more subtle thrill of muscle and tendon and bone functioning with the perfect oiled smoothness that, like nothing else, made her feel young, healthy, alive.

  With her special gift for fully experiencing the moment, she let her hands roam over Benny’s body, marveling over his leanness, testing the rock-hard muscles of his shoulders and arms, kneading the bunched muscles of his back, glorying in the silken smoothness of his skin, the rocking motion of his hips against hers, pelvis to pelvis, the hot touch of his hands, the branding heat of his lips upon her cheeks, her mouth, her throat, her breasts.

  Until this interlude with Benny, Rachael had not made love in almost fifteen months. And never in her life had she made love like this: never this good, this tender or exciting, never this satisfying. She felt as if she had been half dead heretofore and this was the hour of her resurrection.

  Finally spent, they lay in each other’s arms for a while, silent, at peace, but the soft afterglow of lovemaking slowly gave way to a curious disquiet. At first she was not certain what disturbed her, but soon she recognized it as that rare and peculiar feeling that someone had just walked over her grave, an irrational but convincingly instinctive sensation that brought a vague chill to her bare flesh and a colder shiver to her spine.

  She looked at Benny’s gentle smile, studied every much-loved line of his face, stared into his eyes—and had the shocking, unshakable feeling that she was going to lose him.

  She tried to tell herself that her sudden apprehension was the understandable reaction of a thirty-year-old woman who, having made one bad marriage, had at last miraculously found the right man. Call it the I-don’t-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome. When life finally hands us a beautiful bouquet of flowers, we usually peer cautiously among the petals in expectation of a bee. Superstition—evinced especially in a distrust of good fortune—was perhaps the very core of human nature, and it was natural for her to fear losing him.

  That was what she tried to tell herself, but she knew her sudden terror was something more than superstition, something darker. The chill along her spine deepened until she felt as if each vertebra had been transformed into a lump of ice. The cool breath that had touched her skin now penetrated deeper, down toward her bones.

  She turned from him, swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, naked and shivering.

  Benny said, “Rachael?”

  “Let’s get moving,” she said anxiously, heading toward the bathroom through the golden light and palm shadows that came through the single, undraped window.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “We’re sitting ducks here. Or might be. We’ve got to keep moving. We’ve got to keep on the offensive. We’ve got to find him before he finds us—or before anyone else finds us.”

  Benny got out of bed, stepped between her and the bathroom door, put his hands on her shoulders. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But it will.”

  “Don’t tempt fate.”

  “We’re strong together,” he said. “Nothing’s stronger.”

  “Don’t,” she insisted, putting a hand to his lips to silence him. “Please. I … I couldn’t bear losing you.”

  “You won’t lose me,” he said.

  But when she looked at him, she had the terrible feeling that he was already lost, that death was very near to him, inevitable.

  The I-don’t-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome.

  Or maybe a genuine premonition.

  She had no way of knowing which it was.

  The search for Dr. Eric Leben was getting nowhere.

  The grim possibility of failure was, for Anson Sharp, like a great pressure pushing in on the walls of Geneplan’s underground labs in Riverside, compressing the windowless rooms, until he felt as if he were being slowly crushed. He could not abide failure; he was a winner, always a winner, superior to all other men, and that was the only way he cared to think of himself, the only way he could bear to think of himself, as the sole member of a superior species, for that image of himself justified anything he wished to do, anything at all, and he was a man who simply could not live with the moral and ethical limitations of ordinary men.

  Yet field agents were filing negative reports from every place that the walking dead man might have been expected to show up, and Sharp was getting angrier and more nervous by the hour. Perhaps their knowledge of Eric Leben was not quite as thorough as they thought. In anticipation of these events, perhaps the geneticist had prepared a place where he could go to ground, and had managed to keep it secret even from the DSA. If that were the case, the failure to apprehend Leben would be seen as Sharp’s personal failure, for he had identified himself too closely with the operation in expectation of taking full credit for its success.

  Then he got a break. Jerry Peake called to report that Sarah Kiel, Eric Leben’s underage mistress, had been located in a Palm Springs hospital. “But the damn medical staff,” Peake explained in his earnest but frustratingly wimpy manner, “isn’t cooperative.”

  Sometimes Anson Sharp wondered if the advantages of surrounding himself with weaker—and therefore unthreatening—young agents were outweighed by the disadvantage of their inefficiency. Certainly none of them would pose a danger to him once he had ascended to the director’s chair, but neither were they likely to do anything on their own hook that would reflect positively on him as their mentor.

  Sharp said, “I’ll be there before she shakes off the sedative.”

  The investigation at the Geneplan labs could proceed without him for a while. The researchers and technicians had arrived for the day and had been sent home with orders not to report back until notified. Defense Security Agency computer mavens were seeking the Wildcard files hidden in the Geneplan data banks, but their work was so highly specialized that Sharp could neither supervise nor understand it.

  He made a few telephone calls to several federal agencies in Washington, seeking—and obtaining—information about Desert General Hospital and Dr. Hans Werfell that might give him leverage with them, then boarded his waiting chopper and flew back across the desert to Palm Springs, pleased to be on the move again.

  Rachael and Benny taxied to the Palm Springs airport, rented a clean new Ford from Hertz, and drove back into town in time to be the first customers at a clothing store that opened at nine-thirty. She bought tan jeans, a pale yellow blouse, thick white tube socks, a
nd Adidas jogging shoes. Benny chose blue jeans, a white shirt, tube socks, and similar shoes, and they changed out of their badly rumpled clothes in the public rest rooms of a service station at the north end of Palm Canyon Drive. Unwilling to waste time stopping for breakfast, partly because they were afraid of being spotted, they grabbed Egg McMuffins and coffee at McDonald’s, and ate as they drove.

  Rachael had infected Benny with her premonition of oncoming death and her sudden—almost clairvoyant—sense that time was running out, which had first struck her at the motel, just after they had made love for the second time. Benny had attempted to reassure her, calm her, but instead he had grown more uneasy by the minute. They were like two animals independently and instinctively perceiving the advance of a terrible storm.

  Wishing they could have gone back for her red Mercedes, which would have made better time than the rental Ford, Rachael slumped in the passenger’s seat and nibbled at her take-out breakfast without enthusiasm, while Benny drove north on State Route 111, then west on Interstate 10. Although he squeezed as much speed out of the Ford as anyone could have, handling it with that startling combination of recklessness and ease that was so out of character for a real-estate salesman, they would not reach Eric’s cabin, above Lake Arrowhead, until almost one o’clock in the afternoon.

  She hoped to God that would be soon enough.

  And she tried not to think about what Eric might be like when—and if—they found him.

  18

  ZOMBIE BLUES

  The dark rage passed, and Eric Leben regained his senses—such as they were—in the debris-strewn bedroom of the cabin, where he had smashed nearly everything he could get his hands on. A hard, sharp pain pounded through his head, and a duller pain throbbed in all of his muscles. His joints felt swollen and stiff. His eyes were grainy, watery, hot. His teeth ached, and his mouth tasted of ashes.

  Following each fit of mindless fury, Eric found himself, as now, in a gray mood, in a gray world, where colors were washed out, where sounds were muted, where the edges of objects were fuzzy, and where every light, regardless of the strength of its source, was murky and too thin to sufficiently illuminate anything. It was as if the fury had drained him, and as if he had been forced to power down until he could replenish his reserves of energy. He moved sluggishly, somewhat clumsily, and he had difficulty thinking clearly.

  When he had finished healing, the periods of coma and the gray spells would surely cease. However, that knowledge did not lift his spirits, for his muddy thought processes made it difficult for him to think ahead to a better future. His condition was eerie, unpleasant, even frightening; he felt that he was not in control of his destiny and that, in fact, he was trapped within his own body, chained to this now-imperfect, half-dead flesh.

  He staggered into the bathroom, slowly showered, brushed his teeth. He kept a complete wardrobe at the cabin, just as he did at the house in Palm Springs, so he would never need to pack a suitcase when visiting either place, and now he changed into khaki pants, a red plaid shirt, wool socks, and a pair of woodsman’s boots. In his strange gray haze, that morning routine required more time than it should have: He had trouble adjusting the shower controls to get the right temperature; he kept dropping the toothbrush into the sink; he cursed his stiff fingers as they fumbled with the buttons on his shirt; when he tried to roll up his long sleeves, the material resisted him as if it possessed a will of its own; and he succeeded in lacing the boots only with monumental effort.

  Eric was further distracted by the shadowfires.

  Several times, at the periphery of his vision, ordinary shadows burst into flames. Just short-circuiting electrical impulses in his badly damaged—but healing—brain. Illusions born in sputtering cerebral synapses between neurons. Nothing more. However, when he turned to look directly at the fires, they never faded or winked out as mere mirages might have done, but grew even brighter.

  Although they produced no smoke or heat, consumed no fuel, and had no real substance, he stared at those nonexistent flames with greater fear each time they appeared, partly because within them—or perhaps beyond them—he saw something mysterious, frightening; darkly shrouded and monstrous figures that beckoned through the leaping brightness. Although he knew the phantoms were only figments of his overwrought imagination, although he had no idea what they might represent to him or why he should be afraid of them, he was afraid. And at times, mesmerized by shadowfires, he heard himself whimpering as if he were a terrorized child.

  Food. Although his genetically altered body was capable of miraculous regeneration and rapid recuperation, it still required proper nutrition—vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins—the building blocks with which to repair its damaged tissues. And for the first time since arising in the morgue, he was hungry.

  He shuffled unsteadily into the kitchen, shambled to the big refrigerator.

  He thought he saw something crawling out of the slots in a wall plug just at the edge of vision. Something long, thin. Insectile. Menacing. But he knew it was not real. He had seen things like it before. It was another symptom of his brain damage. He just had to ignore it, not let it frighten him, even though he heard its chitinous feet tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Tap-tap-tapping. He refused to look. Go away. He held on to the refrigerator. Tapping. He gritted his teeth. Go away. The sound faded. When he looked toward the wall plug, there was no strange insect, nothing out of the ordinary.

  But now his uncle Barry, long dead, was sitting at the kitchen table, grinning at him. As a child, he had frequently been left with Uncle Barry Hampstead, who had abused him, and he had been too afraid to tell anyone. Hampstead had threatened to hurt him, to cut off his penis, if he told anyone, and those threats had been so vivid and hideous that Eric had not doubted them for a minute. Now Uncle Barry sat at the table, one hand in his lap, grinning, and said, “Come here, little sweetheart; let’s have some fun,” and Eric could hear the voice as clearly as he’d heard it thirty-five years ago, though he knew that neither the man nor the voice was real, and he was as terrified of Barry Hampstead as he had been long ago, though he knew he was now far beyond his hated uncle’s reach.

  He closed his eyes and willed the illusion to go away. He must have stood there, shaking, for a minute or more, not wanting to open his eyes until he was certain the apparition would be gone. But then he began to think that Barry was there and was slipping closer to him while his eyes were closed and was going to grab him by the privates any second now, grab him and squeeze—

  His eyes snapped open.

  The phantom Barry Hampstead was gone.

  Breathing easier, Eric got a package of Farmer John sausage-and-biscuit sandwiches from the freezer compartment and heated them on a tray in the oven, concentrating intently on the task to avoid burning himself. Fumblingly, patiently, he brewed a pot of Maxwell House. Sitting at the table, shoulders hunched, head held low, he washed the food down with cup after cup of the hot black coffee.

  He had an insatiable appetite for a while, and the very act of eating made him feel more truly alive than anything he’d done since he’d been reborn. Biting, chewing, tasting, swallowing—by those simple actions, he was brought further back among the living than at any point since he’d stepped in the way of the garbage truck on Main Street. For a while, his spirits began to rise.

  Then he slowly became aware that the taste of the sausage was neither as strong nor as pleasing as when he had been fully alive and able to appreciate it; and though he put his nose close to the hot, greasy meat and drew deep breaths, he was unable to smell its spicy aroma. He stared at his cool, ash-gray, clammy hands, which held the biscuit-wrapped sausage, and the wad of steaming pork looked more alive than his own flesh.

  Suddenly the situation seemed uproariously funny to Eric: a dead man sitting at breakfast, chomping stolidly on Farmer John sausages, pouring hot Maxwell House down his cold gullet, desperately pretending to be one of the living, as if death could be reversed by pretense, as if life could be r
egained merely by the performance of enough mundane activities—showering, brushing his teeth, eating, drinking, crapping—and by the consumption of enough homely products. He must be alive, because they wouldn’t have Farmer John sausages and Maxwell House in either heaven or hell. Would they? He must be alive, because he had used his Mr. Coffee machine and his General Electric oven, and over in the corner his Westinghouse refrigerator was humming softly, and although those manufacturers’ wares were widely distributed, surely none of them would be found on the far shores of the river Styx, so he must be alive.

  Black humor certainly, very black indeed, but he laughed out loud, laughed and laughed—until he heard his laughter. It sounded hard, coarse, cold, not really laughter but a poor imitation, rough and harsh, as if he were choking, or as if he had swallowed stones that now rattled and clattered against one another in his throat. Dismayed by the sound, he shuddered and began to weep. He dropped the sausage-stuffed biscuit, swept the food and dishes to the floor, and collapsed forward, folding his arms upon the table and resting his head in his arms. Great gasping sobs of grief escaped him, and for a while he was immersed in a deep pool of self-pity.

  The mice, the mice, remember the mice bashing against the walls of their cages …

  He still did not know the meaning of that thought, could not recall any mice, though he felt that he was closer to understanding than ever before. A memory of mice, white mice, hovered tantalizingly just beyond his grasp.

  His gray mood darkened.

  His dulled senses grew even duller.

  After a while, he realized he was sinking into another coma, one of those periods of suspended animation during which his heart slowed dramatically and his respiration fell to a fraction of the normal rate, giving his body an opportunity to continue with repairs and accumulate new reserves of energy. He slipped from his chair to the kitchen floor and curled fetally beside the refrigerator.