Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  Exhausted, suffering several pains, she nevertheless refused to pause. She dragged herself up the last eight feet of the arroyo wall, finding handholds in a few final outcroppings of rock and among the erosion-exposed roots of the mesquite bushes that grew at the brink. Then she was at the edge, over the top, pushing through a break in the mesquite, and she rolled onto the surface of the desert.

  Lightning stepped down the sky as if providing a staircase for some descending god, and all around Rachael the low desert scrub threw short-lived, giant shadows.

  Thunder followed, hard and flat, and she felt it reverberate in the ground against her back.

  She dragged herself back to the brink of the arroyo, praying that she would see the Eric-thing still at the bottom, motionless, dead a second time. Maybe he’d fallen on a rock. There were a few rocks on the floor of the gulch. It was possible. Maybe he had landed on one of them and had snapped his spine.

  She peered over the edge.

  He was more than halfway up the wall again.

  Lightning flashed, illuminating his deformed face, silvering his inhuman eyes, plating an electric gleam to his too-sharp teeth.

  Leaping up, Rachael started kicking at the loose earth along the brink and at the brush that grew there, knocking it down on top of him. He hung from the quartz-veined ledge, keeping his head under it for protection, so the sandy earth and brush cascaded harmlessly over him. She stopped kicking dirt, looked around for some stones, found a few about the size of eggs, and hurled them down at his hands. When the stones connected with his grotesque fingers, he let go of the ledge and moved entirely under it, clinging to the earth in the shadow of that stone shelf, where she could not hit him.

  She could wait for him to reappear, then pelt him again. She could keep him pinned there for hours. But nothing would be gained. It would be a tense, wearying, futile enterprise; when she exhausted the supply of stones within her reach and had only dirt to throw, he would ascend with animal quickness, undeterred by that pathetic bombardment, and he would finish her.

  A white-hot celestial cauldron tipped, spilling forth a third molten streak of lightning. It made contact with the earth much closer than the two before it, no more than a quarter of a mile away, accompanied by a simultaneous crash worthy of Armageddon, and with a crackle-sizzle that was the voice of Death speaking in the language of electricity.

  Below, unfazed by the lightning, emboldened by the cessation of the attack Rachael had been waging, the Eric-thing put one monstrous hand over the edge of the ledge.

  She kicked more dirt down on him, lots of it. He withdrew his hand, taking shelter again, but she continued to stomp away at the rotten brink of the embankment. Suddenly an enormous chunk collapsed directly under her feet, and she nearly fell into the arroyo. As the ground began to shift, she threw herself backward just in time to avoid catastrophe, and landed hard on her buttocks.

  With so much dirt pouring down over him, he might hesitate longer before making another attempt to pull himself across the overhanging ledge. His caution might give her an extra couple of minutes’ lead time. She got up and sprinted off into the forbidding desert.

  The overused muscles in her legs were repeatedly stabbed and split by cleaver-sharp pains. Her right ankle remained tender, and her right calf burned where the claws had cut through her jeans.

  Her mouth was drier than ever, and her throat was cracking. Her lungs felt seared by her deep shuddering gasps of hot desert air.

  She didn’t succumb to the agony, couldn’t afford to succumb, just kept on running, not as fast as before but as fast as she could.

  Ahead, the land became less flat than it had been, began to roll in a series of low hills and hollows. She ran up a hill and down, up another, on and on, trying to put concealing barriers between herself and Eric before he crawled out of the arroyo. Eventually, deciding to stay in one of the hollows, she turned in a direction that she thought was north; though her sense of direction might have become totally fouled up during the chase, she believed she had to go north first, then east, if she hoped to circle around to the Mercedes, which was now at least a mile away, probably much farther.

  Lightning … lightning.

  This time, an incredibly long-lived bolt glimmered between the thunderheads and the ground below for at least ten seconds, racing-jigging south to north, like a gigantic needle trying to sew the storm tight to the land forever.

  That flash and the empyrean blast that followed were sufficient to bring the rain, at last. It fell hard, pasting Rachael’s hair to her skull, stinging her face. It was cool, blessedly cool. She licked her chapped lips, grateful for the moisture.

  Several times she looked back, dreading what she would see, but Eric was never there.

  She had lost him. And even if she’d left footprints to mark her flight, the rain would swiftly erase them. In his alien incarnation, he might somehow be able to track her by scent, but the rain would provide cover in that regard as well, scrubbing her odor from the land and air. Even if his strange eyes provided better vision than the human eyes they had once been, he would not be able to see far in this heavy rain and gloom.

  You’ve escaped, she told herself as she hurried north. You’re going to be safe.

  It was probably true.

  But she didn’t believe it.

  By the time Ben Shadway drove just a few miles east of Barstow, the rain not only filled the world but became the world. Except for the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers, all sounds were those of water in motion, drowning out everything else: a ceaseless drumming on the roof of the Merkur, the snap-snap-snap of droplets hitting the windshield at high speed, the slosh and hiss of wet pavement under the tires. Beyond the comfortable—though abruptly humid—confines of the car, most of the light had bled out of the bruised and wounded storm-dark sky, and little remained to be seen other than the omnipresent rain falling in millions of slanting gray lines. Sometimes the wind caught sheets of water the same way it might catch sheer curtains at an open window, blowing them across the vast desert floor in graceful, undulant patterns, one filmy layer after another, gray on gray. When the lightning flashed—which it did with unnerving frequency—billions of drops turned bright silver, and for a second or two, it appeared as if snow were falling on the Mojave; at other times, the lightning-transformed rain seemed more like glittery, streaming tinsel.

  The downpour grew worse until the windshield wipers could not keep the glass clear. Hunching over the steering wheel, Ben squinted into the storm-lashed day. The highway ahead was barely visible. He had switched on the headlights, which did not improve visibility. But the headlights of oncoming cars—though few—were refracted by the film of water on the windshield, stinging his eyes.

  He slowed to forty, then thirty. Finally, because the nearest rest area was over twenty miles ahead, he drove onto the narrow shoulder of the highway, stopped, left the engine running, and switched on the Merkur’s emergency blinkers. Since he had failed to reach Whitney Gavis, his concern for Rachael was greater than ever, and he was more acutely aware of his inadequacies by the minute, but it would be foolhardy to do anything other than wait for the blinding storm to subside. He would be of no help whatsoever to Rachael if he lost control of the car on the rain-greased pavement, slid into one of the big eighteen-wheelers that constituted most of the sparse traffic, and got himself killed.

  After Ben had waited through ten minutes of the hardest rain he had ever seen, as he was beginning to wonder if it would ever let up, he saw that a sluice of fast-moving dirty water had overflowed the drainage channel beside the road. Because the highway was elevated a few feet above the surrounding land, the water could not flow onto the pavement, but it did spill into the desert beyond. As he looked out the side window of the Merkur, he saw a sinuous dark form gliding smoothly across the surface of the racing yellow-brown torrent, then another similar form, then a third and a fourth. For a moment he stared uncomprehendingly before he realized they were rattlesnakes driven o
ut of the ground when their dens flooded. There must have been several nests of rattlers in the immediate area, for in moments two score of them appeared. They made their way across the steadily widening spate to higher and drier ground, where they came together, coiling among one another—weaving, tangling, knotting their long bodies—forming a writhing and fluxuous mass, as if they were not individual creatures but parts of one entity that had become detached in the deluge and was now struggling to re-form itself.

  Lightning flashed.

  The squirming rattlers, like the mane of an otherwise buried Medusa, appeared to churn with greater fury as the stroboscopic storm light revealed them in stuttering flashes.

  The sight sent a chill to the very marrow of Ben’s bones. He looked away from the serpents and stared straight ahead through the rain-washed windshield. Minute by minute, his optimism was fading; his despair was growing; his fear for Rachael had attained such depth and intensity that it began to shake him, physically shake him, and he sat shivering in the stolen car, in the blinding rain, upon the somber storm-hammered desert.

  The cloudburst erased whatever trail Rachael might have left, which was good, but the storm had drawbacks, too. Though the downpour had reduced the temperature only a few degrees, leaving the day still very warm, and although she was not even slightly chilled, she was nevertheless soaked to the skin. Worse, the drenching rain fell in cataracts which, combined with the midday gloom that the gray-black clouds had imposed upon the land, made it difficult to maintain a good sense of direction; even when she risked ascending from one of the hollows onto a hill, to get a fix on her position, the poor visibility left her less than certain that she was heading back toward the rest area and the Mercedes. Worse still, the lightning shattered through the malignant bellies of the thunderheads and crashed to the ground with such frequency that she figured it was only a matter of time until she was struck by one of those bolts and reduced to a charred and smoking corpse.

  But worst of all, the loud and unrelenting noise of the rain—the hissing, chuckling, sizzling, crackling, gurgling, dripping, burbling, and hollow steady drumming—blotted out any warning sounds that the Eric-thing might have made in pursuit of her, so she was in greater danger of being set upon by surprise. She repeatedly looked behind her and glanced worriedly at the tops of the gentle slopes on both sides of the shallow little hollow through which she hurried. She slowed every time she approached a turn in the course of the hollow, fearing that he would be just around the bend, would loom out of the rain, strange eyes radiant in the gloom, and would seize her in his hideous hands.

  When, without warning, she encountered him at last, he did not see her. She turned one of those bends that she found so frightening, and Eric was only twenty or thirty feet away, on his knees in the middle of the hollow, preoccupied with some task that Rachael could not at first understand. A wind-carved, flute-holed rock formation projected out from the slope in a wedge-shaped wing, and Rachael quickly took cover behind it before he saw her. She almost turned at once to creep back the way she had come, but his peculiar posture and attitude had intrigued her. Suddenly it seemed important to know what he was doing because, by secretly observing him, she might learn something that would guarantee her escape or even something that would give her an advantage over him in a confrontation at some later time. She eased along the rock formation, peering into several convexities and flute holes, until she found a wind-sculpted bore about three inches in diameter, through which she could see Eric.

  He was still kneeling on the wet ground, his broad humped back bowed to the driving rain. He appeared to have … changed. He did not look quite the same as when he had confronted her outside the public rest rooms. He was still monstrously deformed, though in a vaguely different way from before. A subtle difference but important … What was it, exactly? Peering out of the flute hole in the stone, wind whistling softly through the eight- or ten-inch-deep bore and blowing in her face, Rachael strained her eyes to get a better view of him. The rain and murky light hampered her, but she thought he seemed more apelike. Hulking, slump-shouldered, slightly longer in the arms. Perhaps he was also less reptilian than he had been, yet still with those grotesque, bony, long, and wickedly taloned hands.

  Surely any change she perceived must be imaginary, for the very structure of his bones and flesh couldn’t have altered noticeably in less than a quarter of an hour. Could it? Then again … why not? If his genetic integrity had collapsed thoroughly since he had beaten Sarah Kiel last night—when he’d still been human in appearance—if his face and body and limbs had been altered so drastically in the twelve hours between then and now, the pace of his metamorphosis was obviously so frantic that, indeed, a difference might be noticeable in just a quarter of an hour.

  The realization was unnerving.

  It was followed by a worse realization: Eric was holding a thick, writhing snake—one hand gripping it near the tail, the other hand behind its head—and he was eating it alive. Rachael saw the snake’s jaws unhinged and gaping, fangs like twin slivers of ivory in the flickering storm light, as it struggled unsuccessfully to curl its head back and bite the hand of the man-thing that held it. Eric was tearing at the middle of the serpent with his inhumanly sharp teeth, ripping hunks of meat loose and chewing enthusiastically. Because his jaws were heavier and longer than the jaws of any man, their obscenely eager movement—the crushing and grinding of the snake—could be seen even at this distance.

  Shocked and nauseated, Rachael wanted to turn away from the spy-hole in the rock. However, she did not vomit, and she did not turn away, because her nausea and disgust were outweighed by her bafflement and her need to understand Eric.

  Considering how much he wanted to get his hands on her, why had he abandoned the chase? Had he forgotten her? Had the snake bitten him and had he, in his savage rage, traded bite for bite?

  But he was not merely striking back at the snake: he was eating it, eagerly consuming one solid mouthful after another. Once, when Eric looked up at the fulminous heavens, Rachael saw his storm-lit countenance twisted in a frightening expression of inhuman ecstasy. He shuddered with apparent delight as he tore at the serpent. His hunger seemed as urgent and insatiable as it was unspeakable.

  Rain slashed, wind moaned, thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and she felt as if she were peering through a chink in the walls of hell, watching a demon devour the souls of the damned. Her heart hammered hard enough to compete with the sound of the rain drumming on the ground. She knew she should run, but she was mesmerized by the pure evil of the sight framed in the flute hole.

  She saw a second snake—then a third, fourth, fifth—oozing out of the rain-pooled ground around Eric’s knees. He was kneeling at the entrance to a den of the deadly creatures, a nest that was apparently flooding with the runoff from the storm. The rattlers wriggled forth and, finding the man-thing in their midst, immediately struck at his thighs and arms, biting him repeatedly. Though Eric neither cried out nor flinched, Rachael was filled with relief, knowing that he would soon collapse from the effects of the venom.

  He threw aside the half-eaten snake and seized another. With no diminishment of his perverse hunger, he sank his pointed, razored teeth into the snake’s living flesh and tore loose one dripping gobbet after another. Maybe his altered metabolism was capable of dealing with the potent venom of the rattlers—either breaking it down into an array of harmless chemicals, or repairing tissues as rapidly as the venom damaged them.

  Chain lightning flashed back and forth across the malevolent sky, and in that incandescent flare, Eric’s long sharp teeth gleamed like shards of a broken mirror. His strangely shining eyes cast back a cold reflection of the celestial fire. His wet, tangled hair streamed with short-lived silvery brightness; the rain glistered like molten silver on his face; and all around him the earth sizzled as if the lightning-lined water was actually melted fat bubbling and crackling in a frying pan.

  At last, Rachael broke the mesmeric hold that the scene exe
rted, turned from the flute hole, and ran back the way she had come. She sought another hollow between other low hills, a different route that would lead her to the roadside comfort station and the Mercedes.

  Leaving the hilly area and recrossing the sandy plains, she was frequently the tallest thing in sight, much taller than the desert scrub. Once more, she worried about being struck by lightning. In the eerie stroboscopic light, the bleak and barren land appeared to leap and fall and leap again, as if eons of geological activity were being compressed into a few frantic seconds.

  She tried to enter an arroyo, where she might be safe from the lightning. But the deep gulch was two-thirds full of muddy, churning water. Flotillas of whirling tumbleweed boats and bobbing mesquite rafts were borne on the water’s rolling back.

  She was forced to find a route around the network of flooded arroyos. But in time she came to the rest area where she had first encountered Eric. Her purse was still where she had dropped it, and she picked it up. The Mercedes was also exactly where she’d left it.

  A few steps from the car, she halted abruptly, for she saw that the trunk lid, previously open, was now closed. She had the dreadful feeling that Eric—or the thing that had once been Eric—had returned ahead of her, had climbed into the trunk again, and had pulled the lid shut behind him.

  Shaking, indecisive, afraid, Rachael stood in the drenching rain, reluctant to go closer to the car. The parking lot, lacking adequate drainage, was being transformed into a shallow lake. She stood in water that came over the tops of her running shoes.

  The thirty-two pistol was under the driver’s seat. If she could reach it before Eric threw open the trunk lid and came out …