by Dean Koontz
Behind her, the staccato plop-plop-plop of water dripping off the picnic-table cover sounded like scurrying rats. More water sheeted off the comfort-station roof, splashing on the sidewalk. All around, the falling rain slashed into the pools and puddles with a crackling-cellophane sound that seemed to grow louder by the second.
She took a step toward the car, another, halted again.
He might not be in the trunk but inside the car itself. He might have closed the trunk and slipped into the back seat or even into the front, where he could be lying now—silent, still, unseen—waiting for her to open the door. Waiting to sink his teeth into her the way he’d sunk them into the snakes …
Rain streamed off the roof of the Mercedes, rippled down the windows, blurring her view of the car’s shadowy interior.
Scared to approach the car but equally afraid of turning back, Rachael at last took another step forward.
Lightning flashed. Looming large and ominous in the stuttering light, the black Mercedes suddenly reminded her of a hearse.
Out on the highway, a large truck passed, engine roaring, big tires making a slushy sound on the wet pavement.
Rachael reached the Mercedes, jerked open the driver’s door, saw no one inside. She fumbled under the seat for the pistol. Found it. While she still had the courage to act, she went around to the back of the car, hesitated only a second, pushed on the latch button, and lifted the trunk lid, prepared to empty the clip of the thirty-two into the Eric-thing if it was crouching there.
The trunk was empty. The carpet was soaked, and a gray puddle of rain spread over the center of the compartment, so she figured it had remained open to the elements until an especially strong gust of wind had blown it shut.
She slammed the lid, used her keys to lock it, returned to the driver’s door, and got in behind the wheel. She put the pistol on the passenger’s seat, where she could grab it quickly.
The car started without hesitation. The windshield wipers flung the rain off the glass.
Outside, the desert beyond the concrete-block comfort station was rendered entirely in shades of slate: grays, blacks, browns, and rust. In that dreary sandscape, the only movement was the driving rain and the windblown tumbleweed.
Eric had not followed her.
Maybe the rattlesnakes had killed him, after all. Surely he could not have survived so many bites from so many snakes. Perhaps his genetically altered body, though capable of repairing massive tissue damage, was not able to counteract the toxic effects of such potent venom.
She drove out of the rest area, back onto the highway, heading east toward Las Vegas, grateful to be alive. The rain was falling too hard to permit safe travel above forty or fifty miles an hour, so she stayed in the extreme right lane, letting the more daring motorists pass her. Mile by mile she tried to convince herself that the worst was past—but she remained unconvinced.
Ben put the Merkur in gear and pulled onto the highway again.
The storm was moving rapidly eastward, toward Las Vegas. The rolling thunder was more distant than before, a deep rumble rather than a bone-jarring crash. The lightning, which had been striking perilously close on all sides, now flickered farther away, near the eastern horizon. Rain was still falling hard, but it no longer came down in blinding sheets, and driving was possible again.
The dashboard clock confirmed the time on Ben’s watch: 5:15. Yet the summer day was darker than it should have been at that hour. The storm-blackened sky had brought an early dusk, and ahead the somber land was fading steadily in the embrace of a false twilight.
At his current speed, he would not reach Las Vegas until about eight-thirty tonight, probably two or three hours after Rachael had gotten there. He would have to stop in Baker, the only outpost in this part of the Mojave, and try to reach Whitney Gavis again. But he had the feeling he was not going to get hold of Whit. A feeling that maybe his and Rachael’s luck had run out.
31
FEEDING FRENZY
Eric remembered the rattlesnakes only vaguely. Their fangs had left puncture wounds in his hands, arms, and thighs, but those small holes had already healed, and the rain had washed the bloodstains from his sodden clothes. His mutating flesh burned with that peculiar painless fire of ongoing change, which completely masked the lesser sting of venom. Sometimes his knees grew weak, or his stomach churned with nausea, or his vision blurred, or a spell of dizziness seized him, but those symptoms of poisoning grew less noticeable minute by minute. As he moved across the storm-darkened desert, images of the serpents rose in his memory—writhing forms curling like smoke around him, whispering in a language that he could almost understand—but he had difficulty believing that they had been real. A few times, he recalled biting, chewing, and swallowing mouthfuls of rattler meat, gripped by a feeding frenzy. A part of him responded to those bloody memories with excitement and satisfaction. But another part of him—the part that was still Eric Leben—was disgusted and repelled, and he repressed those grim recollections, aware that he would lose his already tenuous grip on sanity if he dwelt on them.
He moved rapidly toward an unknown place, propelled by instinct. Mostly he ran fully erect, more or less like a man, but sometimes he loped and shambled, with his shoulders hunched forward and his body bent in an apelike posture. Occasionally he was overcome with the urge to drop forward on all fours and scuttle across the wet sand on his belly; however, that queer compulsion frightened him, and he successfully resisted it.
Shadowfires burned here and there upon the desert floor, but he was not drawn toward them as he had been before. They were not as mysterious and intriguing as they had been previously, for he now suspected that they were gateways to hell. Previously, when he had seen those phantom flames, he had also seen his long-dead uncle Barry, which probably meant that Uncle Barry had come out of the fire. Eric was sure that Barry Hampstead resided in hell, so he figured the doors were portals to damnation. When Eric had died in Santa Ana yesterday, he had become Satan’s property, doomed to spend eternity with Barry Hampstead, but at the penultimate moment he had thrown off the claims of the grave and had rescued his own soul from the pit. Now Satan was opening these doors around him, in hopes he would be impelled by curiosity to investigate one gate or another and, on stepping through, would deliver himself to the sulfurous cell reserved for him. His parents had warned him that he was in danger of going to hell, that his surrender to his uncle’s desires—and, later, the murder of his tormentor—had damned his soul. Now he knew they were right. Hell was close. He dared not look into its flames, where something beckoned and smiled.
He raced on through the desert scrub. The storm, like clashing armies, blasted the day with bright bursts and rolling cannonades.
His unknown destination proved to be the comfort station at the roadside rest area where he had first confronted Rachael. Activated by solenoids that had misinterpreted the storm as nightfall, banks of fluorescent lights had blinked on at the front of the structure and over the doors on each side. In the parking lot, a few mercury-vapor arc lamps cast a bluish light on the puddled pavement.
When he saw the squat concrete-block building in the rain-swept murk ahead, Eric’s muddy thoughts cleared, and suddenly he remembered everything Rachael had done to him. His encounter with the garbage truck on Main Street was her doing. And because the violent shock of death was what had triggered his malignant growth, he blamed his monstrous mutation on her as well. He’d almost gotten his hands on her, had almost torn her to pieces, but she’d slipped away from him when he’d been overcome by hunger, by a desperate need to provide fuel for his out-of-control metabolism. Now, thinking of her, he felt that cold reptilian rage well up in him again, and he loosed a thin bleat of fury that was lost in the noise of the storm.
Rounding the side of the building, he sensed someone near. A thrill coursed through him. He dropped to all fours and crouched against the block wall, in a pool of shadow just beyond the reach of the nearest fluorescent light.
He list
ened—head cocked, breath held. A jalousie window was open above his head, high in the men’s-room wall. Movement inside. A man coughed. Then Eric heard soft, sweet whistling: “All Alone in the Moonlight,” from the musical Cats. The scrape and click of footsteps on concrete. The door opened outward onto the walk, eight or ten feet from where Eric crouched, and a man appeared.
The guy was in his late twenties, solidly built, rugged-looking, wearing boots, jeans, cowboy shirt, and a tan Stetson. He stood for a moment beneath the sheltering overhang, looking out at the falling rain. Suddenly he became aware of Eric, turned, stopped whistling, and stared in disbelief and horror.
As the other turned toward him, Eric moved so fast he seemed to be a leaping reflection of the lightning that flashed along the eastern horizon. Tall and well-muscled, the cowboy would have been a dangerous adversary in a fight with an ordinary man, but Eric Leben was no longer an ordinary man—or even quite a man at all. And the cowboy’s shock at his attacker’s appearance was a grave disadvantage, for it paralyzed him. Eric slammed into his prey and drove all five talons of his right hand into the man’s belly, very deep. At the same time, seizing his prey’s throat with his other hand, he destroyed the windpipe, ripping out the voice box and vocal cords, ensuring instant silence. Blood spurted from severed carotid arteries. Death glazed the cowboy’s eyes even before Eric tore open his belly. Steaming guts cascaded onto rain-wet concrete, and the dead man collapsed into his own hot entrails.
Feeling wild and free and powerful, Eric settled down atop the warm corpse. Strangely, killing no longer repulsed or frightened him. He was becoming a primal beast who took a savage delight in slaughter. However, even the part of him that remained civilized—the Eric Leben part—was undeniably exhilarated by the violence, as well as by the enormous power and catlike quickness of his mutant body. He knew he should have been shocked, nauseated, but he was not. All his life, he had needed to dominate others, to crush his adversaries, and now the need found expression in its purest form: cruel, merciless, violent murder.
He was also, for the first time, able to remember clearly the murder of the two young women whose car he had stolen in Santa Ana on Monday evening. He felt no burdensome responsibility for their deaths, no rush of guilt, only a sweet dark satisfaction and a fierce sort of glee. Indeed, the memory of their spilled blood, the memory of the naked woman whom he had nailed to the wall, only contributed to his exhilaration over the murder of the cowboy, and his heart pounded out a rhythm of icy joy.
Then, for a while, lowering himself onto the corpse by the men’s-room door, he lost all conscious awareness of himself as a creature of intellect, as a creature with a past and a future. He descended into a dreamy state where the only sensations were the smell and taste of blood. The drumming and gurgling of rain continued to reach him, too, but it seemed now that it was an internal rather than external noise, perhaps the sound of change surging through his arteries, veins, bones, and tissues.
He was jolted out of his trance by a scream. He looked up from the ruined throat of his prey, where he’d buried his muzzle. A woman was standing at the corner of the building, wide-eyed, one arm held defensively across her breasts. Judging by her boots, jeans, and cowboy shirt, she was with the man whom Eric had just killed.
Eric realized that he had been feeding on his prey, and he was neither startled nor appalled by that realization. A lion would not be surprised or dismayed by its own savagery. His racing metabolism generated hunger unlike any he had ever known, and he needed rich nutrients to allay those pangs. In the meat of his prey, he found the food he required, just as the lion found what it needed in the flesh of the gazelle.
The woman tried to scream again but could not make a sound.
Eric rose from the corpse. He licked his blood-slicked lips.
The woman ran into the wind-driven rain. Her Stetson flew off, and her yellow hair streamed behind her, the only brightness in the storm-blackened day.
Eric pursued her. He found indescribable pleasure in the feel of his feet pounding on the hard concrete, then on waterlogged sand. He splashed across the flooded macadam parking lot, gaining on her by the second.
She was heading toward a dull red pickup truck. She glanced back and saw him drawing nearer. She must have realized that she would not reach the pickup in time to start it and drive away, so she turned toward the interstate, evidently hoping to get help from the driver of one of the infrequently passing cars or trucks.
The chase was short. He dragged her down before she had reached the end of the parking lot. They rolled through dirty ankle-deep water. She flailed at him, tried to claw him. He sank his razored talons into her arms, nailing them to her sides, and she let out a terrible cry of pain. Thrashing furiously, they rolled one last time, and then he had her pinned down in the storm runoff, which was chilly in spite of the warm air around them.
For a moment he was surprised to find his blood subsiding, replaced by carnal hunger as he looked down upon the helpless woman. But he merely surrendered to that need as he had surrendered to the urgent need for blood. Beneath him, sensing his intent, the woman tried desperately to throw him off. Her screams of pain gave way to shrill cries of pure terror. Ripping his talons loose of her arm, he shredded her blouse and put his dark, gnarled, inhuman hand upon her bare breasts.
Her screams faded. She stared up at him emptily—voiceless, shaking, paralyzed by dread.
A moment later, having torn open her pants, he eagerly withdrew his manhood from his own jeans. Even in his frenzy to couple with her, he realized that the erect organ in his hand was not human; it was large, strange, hideous. When the woman’s gaze fell upon that monstrous staff, she began to weep and whimper. She must have thought that the gates of hell had opened and that demons had come forth. Her horror and abject fear further inflamed his lust.
The storm, which had been subsiding, grew worse for a while, as if in malevolent accompaniment to the brutal act that he was about to perpetrate.
He mounted her.
The rain beat upon them.
The water sloshed around them.
A few minutes later, he killed her.
Lightning blazed, and as its reflection played across the flooded parking lot, the woman’s spreading blood looked like opalescent films of oil on the water.
After he had killed her, he fed.
When he was satiated, his primal urges grew less demanding, and the part of him that possessed an intellect gained dominance over the savage beast. Slowly he became aware of the danger of being seen. There was little traffic on the interstate, but if one of the passing cars or trucks pulled into the rest area, he would be spotted. He hurriedly dragged the dead woman across the macadam, around the side of the comfort station, and into the mesquite behind the building. He disposed of the dead man there as well.
He found the keys in the ignition of the pickup. The engine turned over on the second try.
He had taken the cowboy’s hat. Now he jammed it on his head, pulling the brim down, hoping it would disguise the strangeness of his face. The pickup’s fuel gauge indicated a full tank, so he would not need to stop between here and Vegas. But if a passing motorist glanced over and saw his face … He must remain alert, drive well, attract no notice—always resisting the retrograde evolution that steadily pulled him into the mindless perspective of the beast. He had to remember to avert his grotesque face from the vehicles he passed and from those that passed him. If he took those precautions, then the hat—in conjunction with the early dusk brought by the storm—might provide sufficient cover.
He looked into the rearview mirror and saw a pair of unmatched eyes. One was a luminous pale green with a vertical slit-shaped orange iris that gleamed like a hot coal. The other was larger, dark, and … multifaceted.
That jarred him as nothing had for a while, and he looked quickly away from the mirror. Multifaceted? That was far too alien to bear consideration. Nothing like that had featured in any stage of human evolution, not even in ancient
eras when the first gasping amphibians had crawled out of the sea onto the shore. Here was proof that he was not merely devolving, that his body was not merely struggling to express all the potential in the genetic heritage of humankind; here was proof that his genetic structure had run amok and that it was conveying him toward a form and consciousness that had nothing to do with the human race. He was becoming something else, something beyond reptile or ape or Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man or modern European man, something so strange that he did not have the courage or the curiosity to confront it.
Henceforth, when he glanced in the mirror, he would be certain that it provided a view only of the roadway behind and revealed no slightest aspect of his own altered countenance.
He switched on the headlights and drove away from the rest area onto the highway.
The steering wheel felt odd in his malformed, monstrous hands. Driving, which should have been as familiar to him as walking, seemed like a singularly exotic act—and difficult, too, almost beyond his capabilities. He clutched the wheel and concentrated on the rainy highway ahead.
The whispering tires and metronomic thump of the windshield wipers seemed to pull him on through the storm and the gathering darkness, toward a special destiny. Once, when his full intellect returned to him for a brief moment, he thought of William Butler Yeats and remembered a fitting scrap of the great man’s poetry:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
32
FLAMINGO PINK
Tuesday afternoon, after their meeting with Dr. Easton Solberg at UCI, Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom, still on sick leave, had driven to Tustin, where the main offices of Shadway Realty were located in a suite on the ground floor of a three-story Spanish-style building with a blue tile roof. Julio had spotted the stakeout car on the first pass. It was an unmarked muck-green Ford, sitting at the curb half a block from Shadway Realty, where the occupants had a good view of those offices and of the driveway that serviced the parking lot alongside the building. Two men in blue suits were in the Ford: One was reading a newspaper and the other was keeping watch.