Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  A few months later, he applied to the Defense Security Agency for a position in its training program, and waited to see if his campaign to remake his reputation had succeeded. It had. He was accepted into the DSA after passing an FBI investigation of his past and character. Thereafter, with the dedication of a true powermonger and the cunning of a natural-born Machiavelli, he had begun a lightning-fast ascent through the DSA. It didn’t hurt that he was able to use that computer to improve his agency records by inserting forged commendations and exceptional service notations from senior officers after they were killed in the line of duty or died of natural causes and were unable to dispute those postdated tributes.

  Sharp had decided that he could be tripped up only by a handful of men who’d served with him in Vietnam and had participated in his court-martial. Therefore, after joining the DSA, he began keeping track of those who posed a threat. Three had been killed in Nam after Sharp was shipped home. Another died years later in Jimmy Carter’s ill-conceived attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages. Another died of natural causes. Another was shot in the head in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he’d opened an all-night convenience store after retiring from the Marines and where he’d had the misfortune to be clerking when a Benzedrine-crazed teenager tried to commit armed robbery. Three other men—each capable of revealing Sharp’s true past and destroying him—returned to Washington after the war and began careers in the State Department, FBI, and Justice Department. With great care—but without delay, lest they discover Sharp at the DSA—he planned the murder of all three and executed those plans without a hitch.

  Four others who knew the truth about him were still alive—including Shadway—but none of them was involved in government or seemed likely to discover him at the DSA. Of course, if he ascended to the director’s chair, his name would more often appear in the news, and enemies like Shadway might be more likely to hear of him and try to bring him down. He had known for some time that those four must die sooner or later. When Shadway had gotten mixed up in the Leben case, Sharp had seen it as yet one more gift of fate, additional proof that he, Sharp, was destined to rise as far as he wished to go.

  Given his own history, Sharp was not surprised to learn of Eric Leben’s self-experimentation. Others professed amazement or shock at Leben’s arrogance in attempting to break the laws of God and nature by cheating death. But long ago Sharp had learned that absolutes like Truth—or Right or Wrong or Justice or even Death—were no longer so absolute in this high-tech age. Sharp had remade his reputation by the manipulation of electrons, and Eric Leben had attempted to remake himself from a corpse into a living man by the manipulation of his own genes, and to Sharp it was all part of the same wondrous enchiridion to be found in the sorcerer’s bag of twentieth-century science.

  Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.

  Sleep eluded Jerry Peake for a while. He had not been to bed in twenty-four hours, had chased up and down mountains, had achieved two or three shattering insights, and had been exhausted when they got back to Palm Springs a short while ago, too exhausted to eat any of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that Nelson Gosser supplied. He was still exhausted, but he could not sleep.

  For one thing, Gosser had brought a message from Sharp to the effect that Peake was to catch two hours of shut-eye and be ready for action by seven-thirty this evening, which gave him half an hour to shower and dress after he woke. Two hours! He needed ten. It hardly seemed worth lying down if he had to get up again so soon.

  Besides, he was no nearer to finding a way out of the nasty moral dilemma that had plagued him all day: serve as an accomplice to murder at Sharp’s demand and thereby further his career at the cost of his soul; or pull a gun on Sharp if that became necessary, thus ruining his career but saving his soul. The latter course seemed an obvious choice, except that if he pulled a gun on Sharp he might be shot and killed. Sharp was cleverer and quicker than Peake, and Peake knew it. He had hoped that his failure to shoot at Shadway would have put him in such disfavor with the deputy director that he would be booted off the case, dropped with disgust, which would not have been good for his career but would sure have solved this dilemma. But Sharp’s talons were deep in Jerry Peake now, and Peake reluctantly acknowledged that there would be no easy way out.

  What most bothered him was the certainty that a smarter man than he would already have found a way to use this situation to his great advantage. Having never known his mother, having been unloved by his sullen widowed father, having been unpopular in school because he was shy and introverted, Jerry Peake had long dreamed of remaking himself from a loser into a winner, from a nobody into a legend, and now his chance had come to start the climb, but he did not know what to do with the opportunity.

  He tossed. He turned.

  He planned and schemed and plotted against Sharp and for his own success, but his plans and schemes and plots repeatedly fell apart under the weight of their own poor conception and naïveté. He wanted so badly to be George Smiley or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, but what he felt like was Sylvester the Cat witlessly plotting to capture and eat the infinitely clever Tweetie Bird.

  His sleep was filled with nightmares of falling off ladders and off roofs and out of trees while pursuing a macabre canary that had Anson Sharp’s face.

  Ben had wasted time ditching the stolen Chevette at Silverwood Lake and finding another car to steal. It would be suicidal to keep the Chevette when Sharp had both its description and license number. He finally located a new black Merkur parked at the head of a long footpath that led down to the lake, out of sight of its fisherman owner. The doors were locked, but the windows were open a crack for ventilation. He had found a wire coat hanger in the trunk of the Chevette—along with an incredible collection of other junk—and he had brought it along for just this sort of emergency. He’d used it to reach through the open top of the window and pop the door latch, then had hot-wired the Merkur and headed for Interstate 15.

  He did not reach Barstow until four forty-five. He had already arrived at the unnerving conclusion that he would never be able to catch up to Rachael on the road. Because of Sharp, he had lost too much time. When the lowering sky released a few fat drops of rain, he realized that a storm would slow the Merkur down even more than the reliably maneuverable Mercedes, widening the gap between him and Rachael. So he swung off the lightly trafficked interstate, into the heart of Barstow, and used a telephone booth at a Union 76 station to call Whitney Gavis in Las Vegas.

  He would tell Whitney about Eric Leben hiding in the trunk of Rachael’s car. With any luck at all, Rachael would not stop on the road, would not give Eric an easy opportunity to go after her, so the dead man would wait in his hidey-hole until they were all the way into Vegas. There, forewarned, Whit Gavis could fire about six rounds of heavy buckshot into the trunk as Eric opened it from the inside, and Rachael, never having realized she was in danger, would be safe.

  Everything was going to be all right.

  Whit would take care of everything.

  Ben finished tapping in the number, using his AT&T card for the call, and in a moment Whit’s phone began to ring a hundred and sixty miles away.

  The storm was still having trouble breaking. Only a few big drops of rain spattered against the glass walls of the booth.

  The phone rang, rang.

  The previously milky clouds had curdled into immense gray-black thunderheads, which in turn had formed still-darker, knotted, more malignant masses that were moving at great speed toward the southeast.

  The phone rang again and again and again.

  Be there, damn it, Ben thought.

  But Whit was not there, and wishing him home would not make it true. On the twentieth ring, Ben hung up.

  For a moment he stood in the telephone booth, despairing, not sure what to do.

  Once, he’d been a man of action, with never
a doubt in a crisis. But in reaction to various unsettling discoveries about the world he lived in, he had tried to remake himself into a different man—student of the past, train fancier. He had failed in that remake, a failure that recent events had made eminently clear: He could not just stop being the man he had once been. He accepted that now. And he had thought that he had lost none of his edge. But he realized that all those years of pretending to be someone else had dulled him. His failure to look in the Mercedes’s trunk before sending Rachael away, his current despair, his confusion, his sudden lack of direction were all proof that too much pretending had its deadly effect.

  Lightning sizzled across the swollen black heavens, but even that scalpel of light did not split open the belly of the storm.

  He decided there was nothing to be done but hit the road, head for Vegas, hope for the best, though hope seemed futile now. He could stop in Baker, sixty miles ahead, and try Whit’s number again.

  Maybe his luck would change.

  It had to change.

  He opened the door of the booth and ran to the stolen Merkur.

  Again, lightning blasted the charred sky.

  A cannonade of thunder volleyed back and forth between the sky and the waiting earth.

  The air stank of ozone.

  He got in the car, slammed the door, started the engine, and the storm finally broke, throwing a million tons of water down upon the desert in a sudden deluge.

  30

  RATTLESNAKES

  Rachael had been following the bottom of the wide arroyo for what seemed miles but was probably only a few hundred yards. The illusion of greater distance resulted partly from the hot pain in her twisted ankle, which was subsiding but only slowly.

  She felt trapped in a maze through which she might forever search futilely for a nonexistent exit. Narrower arroyos branched off the primary channel, all on the right-hand side. She considered pursuing another gulch, but each intersected the main run at an angle, so she couldn’t see how far they extended. She was afraid of deviating into one, only to encounter a dead end within a short distance.

  To her left, three stories above, Eric hurried along the brink of the arroyo, following her limping progress as if he were the mutant master of the maze in a Dungeons and Dragons game. If and when he started down the arroyo wall, she would have to turn and immediately climb the opposite wall, for she now knew she could not hold her own in a chase. Her only chance of survival was to get above him and find some rocks to hurl down on him as he ascended in her wake. She hoped he would not come after her for a few more minutes, because she needed time for the pain in her ankle to subside further before testing it in a climb.

  Distant thunder sounded from Barstow in the west: one long peal, another, then a third that was louder than the first two. The sky over this part of the desert was gray and soot-black, as if heaven had caught fire, burned, and was now composed only of ashes and cold black coals. The burnt-out sky had settled lower as well, until it almost seemed to be a lid that was going to come down all the way and clamp tightly over the top of the arroyo. A warm wind whistled mournfully and moaned up there on the surface of the Mojave, and some gusts found their way down into the channel, flinging bits of sand in Rachael’s face. The storm already under way in the west had not reached here yet, but it would arrive soon; a pre-storm scent was heavy in the air, and the atmosphere had the electrically charged feeling that preceded a hard rain.

  She rounded a bend and was startled by a pile of dry tumbleweeds that had rolled into the gulch from the desert above. Stirred by a downdraft, they moved rapidly toward her with a scratchy sound, almost a hiss, as if they were living creatures. She tried to sidestep those bristly brown balls, stumbled, and fell full-length into the powdery silt that covered the floor of the channel. Falling, she feared for the ankle she had already hurt, but fortunately she did not twist it again.

  Even as she fell, she heard more noise behind her. She thought for a moment that the sound was made by the tumbleweeds still rubbing against one another in their packlike progress along the arroyo, but a harder clatter alerted her to the true source of the noise. When she looked back and up, she saw that Eric had started down the wall of the gulch. He’d been waiting for her to fall or to encounter an obstacle; now that she was down, he was swiftly taking advantage of her bad luck. He had descended a third of the incline and was still on his feet, for the slope was not quite as steep here as it had been where Rachael had rolled over the edge. As he came, he dislodged a minor avalanche of dirt and stones, but the wall of the arroyo did not give way entirely. In a minute he would reach the bottom and then, in ten steps, would be on top of her.

  Rachael pushed up from the ground, ran toward the other wall of the gulch, intending to climb it, but realized she had dropped her car keys. She might never find her way back to the car; in fact, she’d probably either be brought down by Eric or get lost in the wasteland, but if by some miracle she did reach the Mercedes, she had to have the keys.

  Eric was almost halfway down the slope, descending through dust that rose from the slide he had started.

  Frantically looking for the keys, she returned to the place where she’d fallen, and at first she couldn’t see them. Then she glimpsed the shiny notched edges poking out of the powdery brown silt, almost entirely buried. Evidently she’d fallen atop the keys, pressing them into the soft soil. She snatched them up.

  Eric was more than halfway to the arroyo floor.

  He was making a strange sound: a thin, shrill cry—half stage whisper, half shriek.

  Thunder pounded the sky, somewhat closer now.

  Still pouring sweat, gasping for breath, her mouth seared by the hot air, her lungs aching, she ran to the far wall again, shoving the car keys into a pocket of her jeans. This embankment had the same degree of slope as the one Eric was descending, but Rachael discovered that ascending on her feet was not as easy as coming down that way; the angle worked against her as much as it would have worked for her if she’d been going the other direction. After three or four yards, she had to drop forward against the bank, desperately using hands and knees and feet to hold on and thrust herself steadily up the incline.

  Eric’s eerie whisper-shriek rose behind her, closer.

  She dared not look back.

  Fifteen feet farther to the top.

  Her progress was maddeningly hampered every foot of the way by the softness of the earth face she was climbing. In spots, it tended to crumble under her as she tried to find or make handholds and footholds. She required all the tenacity of a spider to retain what ground she gained, and she was terrified of suddenly slipping back all the way to the bottom.

  The top of the arroyo was less than twelve feet away, so she must be about two stories above the floor of it.

  “Rachael,” the Eric-thing said behind her in a raspy voice like a rat-tail file drawn across her spine.

  Don’t look down, don’t, don’t, for God’s sake, don’t …

  Vertical erosion channels cut the wall from top to bottom, some only a few inches wide and a few inches deep, others a foot wide and two feet deep. She had to stay away from those; for, where they scored the slope too close to one another, the earth was especially rotten and most prone to collapse under her.

  Fortunately, in some places there were bands of striated stone—pink, gray, brown, with veins of what appeared to be white quartz. These were the outer edges of rock strata that the eroding arroyo had only recently begun to uncover, and they provided firmer footholds.

  “Rachael …”

  She grabbed a foot-deep rock ledge that thrust out of the soft earth above her, intending to pull and kick her way onto it, hoping that it would not break off, but before she could test it, something grabbed at the heel of her right shoe. She couldn’t help it: she had to look down this time, and there he was, dear God, the Eric-thing, on the arroyo wall beneath her, holding himself in place with one hand, reaching up with the other, trying to get a grip on her shoe, coming up only an in
ch short of his goal.

  With dismaying agility, more like an animal than a human being, he flung himself upward. His hands and knees and feet refastened to the earthen wall with frightening ease. He reached eagerly for her again. He was now close enough to clutch at her calf instead of at the bottom of her shoe.

  But she was not exactly moving like a sloth. She was damn fast, too, responding even as he moved toward her. Reflexes goosed by a flood of adrenaline, she let go of the wall with her knees and feet, holding on only to the rock ledge an arm’s length above her head, dangling, recklessly letting the untested stone support her entire weight. As he reached for her, she pulled her legs up, then kicked down with both feet, putting all the power of her thighs into it, striking his grasping hand, smashing his long bony, mutant fingers.

  He loosed an inhuman wail.

  She kicked again.

  Instead of slipping back down the wall, as Rachael had hoped he would, Eric held on to it, surged upward another foot, shrieking in triumph, and took a swipe at her.

  At the same moment she kicked out again, smashing one foot into his arm, stomping the other squarely into his face.

  She heard her jeans tear, then felt a flash of pain and knew that he had hooked claws through the denim even as her kick had landed.

  He bellowed in pain, finally lost his hold on the wall, and hung for an instant by the claws in her jeans. Then the claws snapped, and the cloth tore, and he fell away into the arroyo.

  Rachael didn’t wait long enough to watch him tumble two stories to the bottom of the gulch, but turned at once to the demanding task of heaving herself onto the narrow stone ledge from which she hung precariously. Pulsations of pain, throbbing in time with her wildly pounding heart, coursed through her arms from wrists to shoulders. Her straining muscles twitched and rebelled at her demands. Clenching her teeth, breathing through her nose so hard that she snorted like a horse, she struggled upward, digging at the wall beneath the ledge with her feet to provide what little thrust she could. By sheer perseverance and determination—spiced with a generous measure of motivating terror—she clambered onto the ledge at last.