Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his, he said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him; I’ve handled worse than him, much worse—”

  “Don’t be so confident! That’s what’ll get you killed.”

  “I’m trained for war, well trained to take care of myself—”

  “Please!”

  “And I’ve kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can’t count on anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a nasty lesson about the modern world that I didn’t want to admit I’d learned, which is why I’ve spent so much time immersed in the past. But the very fact that I’ve kept in shape and kept practicing my fighting skills is proof of the lesson. Tip-top shape, Rachael. And I’m well armed.” He hushed her when she tried to object. “We have no choice, Rachael. That’s what it comes down to. No other choice. If we just kill him, blast the sucker with twenty or thirty rounds from the shotgun, kill him so bad he stays dead for good this time—then we have no proof of what he did to himself. We just have a corpse. Who could prove he’d been reanimated? It’d look as if we stole his body from the morgue, pumped it full of buckshot, and concocted this crazy story, maybe concocted it to cover the very crimes the government is accusing us of.”

  “Lab tests of his cell structure would prove something,” Rachael said. “Examination of his genetic material—”

  “That would take weeks. Before then, the government would’ve found a way to claim the body, eliminate us, and doctor the test results to show nothing out of the ordinary.”

  She started to speak, hesitated, and stopped because she was obviously beginning to realize that he was right. She looked more forlorn than any woman he had ever seen.

  He said, “Our only hope of getting the government off our backs is to get proof of Wildcard and break the story to the press. The only reason they want to kill us is to keep the secret, so when the secret is blown, we’ll be safe. Since we didn’t get the Wildcard file from Eric’s office safe, Eric himself is the only proof we have a chance of putting our hands on. And we need him alive. They need to see him breathing, functioning, in spite of his staved-in head. They need to see the change in him that you suspect there’ll be—the irrational rages, the sullen quality of the living dead.”

  She swallowed hard. She nodded. “All right. Okay. But I’m so scared.”

  “You can be strong; you have it in you.”

  “I know I do. I know. But …”

  He leaned forward and gave her a kiss.

  Her lips were icy.

  Eric groaned and opened his eyes.

  Evidently he had descended once more into a short period of suspended animation, a minor but deep coma, for he slowly regained consciousness on the floor of the living room, sprawled among at least a hundred sheets of typing paper. His splitting headache was gone, although a peculiar burning sensation extended from the top of his skull downward to his chin, all across his face, and in most of his muscles and joints as well, in shoulders and arms and legs. It was not an unpleasant burning, and not pleasant either, just a neutral sensation unlike anything he had felt before.

  I’m like a candy man, made of chocolate, sitting on a sun-washed table, melting, melting, but melting from the inside.

  For a while he just lay there, wondering where the weird thought had come from. He was disoriented, dizzy. His mind was a swamp in which unconnected thoughts burst like stinking bubbles on the watery surface. Gradually the water cleared a bit and the soupy mud of the swamp grew somewhat firmer.

  Pushing up to a sitting position, he looked at the papers strewn around him and could not remember what they were. He picked up a few and tried to read them. The blurry letters would not at first resolve into words; then the words would not form coherent sentences. When at last he could read a bit, he could understand only a fraction of what he read, but he could grasp enough to realize that this was the third paper copy of the Wildcard file.

  In addition to the project data stored in the Geneplan computers, there had been one hard-copy file in Riverside, one in his office safe at the headquarters in Newport Beach, and a third here. The cabin was his secret retreat, known only to him, and it had seemed prudent to keep a fully updated file in the hidden basement safe, as insurance against the day when Seitz and Knowls—the money men behind his work—tried to take the corporation away from him through clever financial maneuvering. That anticipated treachery was unlikely because they needed him, needed his genius, and would most likely still need him when Wildcard was perfected. But he was not a man who took chances. (Other than the one big chance, when he had injected himself with the devil’s brew that was turning his body into pliable clay.) He had not wanted to risk being booted out of Geneplan and finding himself cut off from data crucial to the production of the immortality serum.

  Evidently, after stumbling out of the bathroom, he had gone down to the basement, had opened the safe, and had brought the file up here for perusal. What had he been seeking? An explanation for what was happening to him? A way to undo the changes that had occurred—that were still occurring—in him?

  That was pointless. These monstrous developments had been unanticipated. Nothing in the file would refer to the possibility of runaway growth or point the way to salvation. He must have been seized by delirium, for only in such a state would he have bothered to pursue a magic cure in this pile of Xeroxes.

  He knelt in the scattered papers for a minute or two, preoccupied by the strange though painless burning sensation that filled his body, trying to understand its source and meaning. In some places—along his spine, across the top of his head, at the base of his throat, in his testicles—the heat was accompanied by an eerie tingle. He almost felt as if a billion fire ants had made their home within him and were moving by the millions through his veins and arteries and through a maze of tunnels they had burrowed in his flesh and bone.

  Finally he got to his feet, and a fierce anger rose in him for no specific reason, and with no particular target. He kicked out furiously, stirring up a briefly airborne, noisy cloud of papers.

  A frightening rage seethed under the surface of the mindswamp, and he was just perceptive enough to realize that it was in some way quite different from the previous rages to which he had succumbed. This one was … even more primal, less focused, less of a human rage, more like the irrationally churning fury of an animal. He felt as if some deeply buried racial memory were asserting itself, something crawling up out of the genetic pit, up from ten million years ago, up from the faraway time when men were only apes, or from a time even farther removed than that, from an unthinkably ancient age when men were as yet only amphibian creatures crawling painfully onto a volcanic shore and breathing air for the first time. It was a cold rage instead of hot like the ones before it, as cold as the heart of the Arctic, a billion years of coldness … reptilian. Yes, that was the feel of it, an icy reptilian rage, and when he began to grasp its nature, he recoiled from further consideration of it and desperately hoped that he would be able to keep it under control.

  The mirror.

  He was certain that changes had taken place in him while he had been unconscious on the living-room floor, and he knew he should go into the bathroom and look at himself in the mirror. But suddenly he was shaken anew by fear of what he was becoming, and he could not find the courage to take even one step in that direction.

  Instead, he decided to employ the Braille approach by which he had previously discovered the first alterations in his face. Feeling the differences before seeing them would prepare him somewhat for the shock of his appearance. Hesitantly he raised his hands to explore his face but did not get that far because he saw that his hands were changing, and he was arrested by the sight of them.

  They were not radically different hands from what they had been, but they were unquestionably not his hands anymore, not the hands he had used all his life. The fingers were longer and thinner, perhaps a
whole inch longer, with fleshier pads at the tips. The nails were different, too: thicker, harder, yellowish, more pointed than ordinary fingernails. They were nascent claws, damned if they weren’t, and if the metamorphosis continued, they would probably develop into even more pointed, hooked, and razor-sharp talons. His knuckles were changing, too—larger, bonier, almost like arthritic knuckles.

  He expected to find his hands stiff and less usable than they had been, but to his surprise the altered knuckles worked easily, fluidly, and proved superior to the knuckles out of which they had grown. He worked his hands experimentally and discovered that he was incredibly dexterous; his elongated fingers possessed a new suppleness and startling flexibility.

  And he sensed that the changes were continuing unchecked, though not fast enough for him to actually see the bones growing and the flesh remaking itself. But by tomorrow his hands would surely be far more radically changed than they were now.

  This was electrifyingly different from the apparent random, tumorlike excrescences of bone and tissue that had formed across his forehead. These hands were not just the result of an excess of growth hormones and proteins. This growth had purpose, direction. In fact, he suddenly noticed that on both hands, between thumb and forefinger, below the first knuckle of each digit, translucent webs had begun to fill in the empty space.

  Reptilian. Like the cold rage that he knew would (if he let it) erupt in a frenzy of destruction. Reptilian.

  He lowered his hands, afraid to look at them anymore.

  He no longer had the courage to explore the contours of his face, not even by touch. The mere prospect of looking into a mirror filled him with dread.

  His heart was hammering, and with each thunderous beat, it seemed to pound spikes of fear and loneliness into him.

  For a moment he was utterly lost, confused, direction-less. He turned left, then right, took a step in one direction, then in another, the Wildcard papers crunching like dead leaves under his feet. Not sure what to do or where to go, he stopped and stood with shoulders slumped, head hung low under a weight of despair—

  —until suddenly the weird burning in his flesh and the eerie tingle along his spine were supplemented with a new sensation: hunger. His stomach growled, and his knees grew weak, and he started to shake with hunger. He began to work his mouth and to swallow continuously, involuntarily, hard swallows that almost hurt, as if his body were demanding to be fed. He headed toward the kitchen, his shakes getting worse with every step, his knees growing weaker. The sweat of need poured from him in streams, in rivers. A hunger unlike anything he had ever known before. Rabid hunger. Painful. Tearing at him. His vision clouded, and his thoughts funneled down toward one subject: food. The macabre changes taking place in him would require a great deal more fuel than usual, energy for tearing down old tissues, building blocks with which to construct new tissues—yes, of course—his metabolism was running wild, like a great furnace out of control, a raging fire, it had broken down and assimilated the Farmer John sausage-and-biscuit sandwiches that he had eaten earlier, and it needed more, much more, so by the time he opened the cupboard doors and began pulling cans of soup and stew from the shelves, he was wheezing and gasping, muttering wordlessly, grunting like a savage or a wild beast, sickened and repelled by his loss of control but too hungry to worry about it, frightened but hungry, despairing but so hungry, hungry, hungry …

  Following the directions Sarah Kiel had given Rachael, Ben turned off the state route onto a narrow, poorly maintained macadam lane that climbed a steep slope. The lane led deeper into the forest, where the deciduous trees gave way entirely to evergreens, many of which were ancient and huge. They drove half a mile, passing widely separated driveways that served houses and summer cottages. A couple of structures were fully visible, though most could barely be seen between the trees or were entirely hidden by foliage and forest shadows.

  The farther they went, the less the sun intruded upon the forest floor, and Rachael’s mood darkened at the same rate as the landscape. She held the thirty-two pistol in her lap and peered anxiously ahead.

  The pavement ended, but the road continued with a gravel surface for more than another quarter of a mile. They passed just two more driveways, plus two Dodge Chargers and a small motor home parked in a lay-by near one driveway, before coming to a closed gate. Made of steel pipe, painted sky blue, and padlocked, the gate was unattached to any fence and served only to limit vehicular access to the road beyond, which further declined in quality from gravel to dirt.

  Wired securely to the center of the barrier, a black-and-red sign warned:

  NO TRESPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY

  “Just like Sarah told you,” Ben said.

  Beyond the gate lay Eric Leben’s property, his secret retreat. The cabin was not visible, for it was another quarter of a mile up the mountainside, entirely screened by trees from this angle.

  “It’s still not too late to turn back,” Rachael said.

  “Yes, it is,” Ben said.

  She bit her lip and nodded grimly. She carefully switched off the double safeties on her pistol.

  Eric used the electric opener to take the lid off a large can of Progresso minestrone, realized he needed a pot in which to heat it, but was shaking too badly to wait any longer, so he just drank the cold soup out of the can, threw the can aside, wiping absentmindedly at the broth that dripped off his chin. He kept no fresh food in the cabin, only a few frozen things, mostly canned goods, so he opened a family-size Dinty Moore beef stew, and he ate that cold, too, all of it, so fast he kept choking on it.

  He chewed the beef with something akin to manic glee, taking a strangely intense pleasure from the tearing and rending of the meat between his teeth. It was a pleasure unlike any he had experienced before—primal, savage—and it both delighted and frightened him.

  Although the stew was fully cooked, requiring only reheating, and although it was laden with spices and preservatives, Eric could smell the traces of blood remaining in the beef. Though the blood content was minuscule and thoroughly cooked, Eric perceived it not merely as a vague scent but as a strong, nearly overpowering odor, a thrilling and thoroughly delicious organic incense, which caused him to shudder with excitement. He breathed deeply and was dizzied by the blood fragrance, and on his tongue it was ambrosian.

  When he finished the cold beef stew, which took only a couple of minutes, he opened a can of chili and ate that even more quickly, then another can of soup, chicken noodle this time, and finally he began to take the sharp edge off his hunger. He unscrewed the lid from a jar of peanut butter, scooped some out with his fingers, and ate it. He did not like it as well as he liked the meat, but he knew it was good for him, rich in the nutrients that his racing metabolism required. He consumed more, cleaned out most of the jar, then threw it aside and stood for a moment, gasping for breath, exhausted from eating.

  The queer, painless fire continued to burn in him, but the hunger had substantially abated.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his uncle Barry Hampstead sitting in a chair at the small kitchen table, grinning at him. This time, instead of ignoring the phantom, Eric turned toward it, took a couple of steps closer, and said, “What do you want here, you son of a bitch?” His voice was gravelly, not at all like it had once been. “What’re you grinning at, you goddamn pervert? You get the hell out of here.”

  Uncle Barry actually began to fade away, although that was not surprising: He was only an illusion born of degenerated brain cells.

  Unreal flames, feeding on shadows, danced in the darkness beyond the cellar door, which Eric had evidently left open when he had come back upstairs with the Wildcard file. He watched the shadowfires. As before, he felt some mystery beckoning, and he was afraid. However, emboldened by his success in chasing away Barry Hampstead’s shade, he started toward the flickering red and silver flames, figuring either to dispel them or to see, at last, what lay within them.

  Then he remembered the armchair in the living room, the
window, the lookout he had been keeping. He had been distracted from that important task by a chain of events: the unusually brutal headache, the changes he had felt in his face, the macabre reflection in the mirror, the Wildcard file, his sudden crippling hunger, Uncle Barry’s apparition, and now the false fires beyond the cellar door. He could not concentrate on one thing for any length of time, and he cried out in frustration at this latest evidence of mental dysfunction.

  He moved back across the kitchen, kicking aside an empty Dinty Moore beef stew can and a couple of soup cans, heading for the living room and his abandoned guardpost.

  Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee … The one-note songs of the cicadas, monotonous to the human ear but most likely rich in meaning to other insects, echoed shrilly yet hollowly through the high forest.

  Standing beside the rental car, keeping a wary eye on the woods around them, Ben distributed four extra shotgun shells and eight extra rounds for the Combat Magnum in the pockets of his jeans.

  Rachael emptied out her purse and filled it with three boxes of ammunition, one for each of their guns. That was surely an excessive supply—but Ben did not suggest that she take any less.

  He carried the shotgun under one arm. Given the slightest provocation, he could swing it up and fire in a fraction of a second.

  Rachael carried the thirty-two pistol and the Combat Magnum, one in each hand. She wanted Ben to carry both the Remington and the .357, but he could not handle both efficiently, and he preferred the shotgun.

  They moved off into the brush just far enough to slip around the padlocked gate, returning to the dirt track on the other side.

  Ahead, the road rose under a canopy of pine limbs, flanked by rock-lined drainage ditches bristling with dead dry weeds that had sprung up during the rainy season and withered during the arid spring and summer. About two hundred yards above them, the lane took a sharp turn to the right and disappeared. According to Sarah Kiel, the lane ran straight and true beyond the bend, directly to the cabin, which was approximately another two hundred yards from that point.