by Dean Koontz
Standing at the window of room 15, waiting for Rachael to arrive, Eric had felt the changefire growing hotter within him. He began to pour sweat; it streamed off his brow and down his face, gushed from every pore as if trying to match the rate at which the rain ran off the awning of the promenade beyond the window. He felt as if he were standing in a furnace, and every breath he drew seared through his lungs. All around him now, in every corner, the room was filled with the phantom flames of shadowfires, at which he dared not look. His bones felt molten, and his flesh was so hot that he would not have been surprised to see real flames spurt from his fingertips.
“Melting …” he said in a voice deep and guttural and thoroughly inhuman. “ … the … melting man.”
His face suddenly shifted. A terrible crunching-splintering noise filled his ears for a moment, issuing from within his skull, but it turned almost at once into a sickening, spluttering, oozing liquid sound. The process was accelerating insanely. Horrified, terrified—but also with a dark exhilaration and a wild demonic joy—he sensed his face changing shape. For a moment he was aware of a gnarled brow extending so far out over his eyes that it penetrated his peripheral vision, but then it was gone, subsiding, the new bone melting into his nose and mouth and jawline, pulling his nominally human countenance forward into a rudimentary, misshapen snout. His legs began to give way beneath him, so he turned reluctantly from the window, and with a crash he fell to his knees on the floor. Something snapped in his chest. To accommodate the snoutlike restructuring of his visage, his lips split farther back along his cheeks. He dragged himself onto the bed, rolled onto his back, giving himself entirely to the devastating yet not essentially unpleasant process of revolutionary change, and as from a great distance he heard himself making peculiar sounds: a doglike growl, a reptilian hiss, and the wordless but unmistakable exclamations of a man in the throes of sexual orgasm.
For a while, darkness claimed him.
When he came partially to his senses a few minutes later, he found that he had rolled off the bed and was lying beneath the window, where he had recently been keeping a watch for Rachael. Although the changefire had not grown cooler, although he still felt his tissues seeking new forms in every part of his body, he resolutely pushed aside the drapes and reached up toward the window. In the dim light, his hands looked enormous and chitinous, as if they belonged to a crab or lobster that had been gifted with fingers instead of pincers. He grabbed the sill and pulled himself off the floor, stood. He leaned against the glass, his breath coming in great hot gasps that steamed the pane.
Light shone in the windows of the motel office.
Rachael must have arrived.
Instantly he was seething with hatred. The motivating memory-smell of blood filled his nostrils.
But he also had an immense and strangely formed erection. He wanted to mount her, then kill her as he had taken and then slain the cowboy’s woman. In his degenerate and mutant state, he was unsettled to discover that he was having trouble holding on to an understanding of her identity. Second by second he was ceasing to care who she was: the only thing that mattered now was that she was female—and prey.
He turned away from the window and tried to reach the door, but his metamorphosing legs collapsed beneath him. Again, for a time, he squirmed and writhed upon the motel floor, the changefire hotter than ever within him.
His genes and chromosomes, once the undisputed regulators—the masters—of his very form and function, had become plastic themselves. They were no longer primarily re-creating previous stages in human evolution but were exploring utterly alien forms that had nothing to do with the physiological history of the human species. They were mutating either randomly or in response to inexplicable forces and patterns he could not perceive. And as they mutated, they directed his body to produce the mad flood of hormones and proteins with which his flesh was molded.
He was becoming something that had never before walked the earth and that had never been meant to walk it.
The Marine Corps twin-engine turboprop transport from Twentynine Palms landed in driving rain at Mc-Carren International Airport in Las Vegas at 9:03 P.M. Tuesday. It was only ten minutes ahead of the estimated time of arrival for the scheduled airline flight from Orange County on which Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom were passengers.
Harold Ince, a DSA agent in the Nevada office, met Anson Sharp, Jerry Peake, and Nelson Gosser at the debarkation gate.
Gosser immediately headed for another gate, where the incoming flight from Orange County would unload. It would be his job to run a discreet tail on Verdad and Hagerstrom until they had left the terminal, whereupon they would become the responsibility of the surveillance team that would be waiting outside.
Ince said, “Mr. Sharp, sir, we’re cutting it awful close.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Sharp said, walking swiftly across the waiting area that served the gate, toward the long corridor that led to the front of the terminal.
Peake hurried after Sharp, and Ince—a much shorter man than Sharp—hustled to stay at his side. “Sir, the car’s waiting for you out front, discreetly at the end of the taxi line, as you requested.”
“Good. But what if they don’t take a cab?”
“One rental-car desk is still open. If they stop to make those arrangements, I’ll warn you at once.”
“Good.”
They reached the moving walkway and stepped onto the rubber belt. No other flights had landed recently or were about to take off, so the corridor was deserted. On the speaker system that served the long hall, taped messages from Vegas showroom performers—Joan Rivers, Paul Anka, Rodney Dangerfield, Tom Dreesen, Bill Cosby, and others—offered lame jokes and, mostly, advice about safety on the pedway: Please use the moving handrail, stay to the right, allow other passengers to pass on the left, and be careful not to trip at the end of the moving belt.
Dissatisfied with the leisurely speed of the walkway, striding along between the moving handrails, Sharp glanced down and slightly back at Ince and said, “How’s your relationship with the Las Vegas police?”
“They’re cooperative, sir.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, maybe better than that,” Ince said. “They’re good guys. They have a hell of a job to do in this city, what with all the hoods and transients, and they handle it well. Got to give them credit. They’re not soft, and because they know how hard it is to keep the peace, they have a lot of respect for cops of all kinds.”
“Like us?”
“Like us.”
“If there’s shooting,” Sharp said, “and if someone reports it, and if the Vegas uniforms arrive before we’ve been able to mop up, can we count on them to conform their reports to our needs?”
Ince blinked in surprise. “Well, I … maybe.”
“I see,” Sharp said coldly. They reached the end of the moving walkway. As they strode into the main lobby of the terminal, he said, “Ince, in days to come, you better build a tighter relationship with the local agencies. Next time, I don’t want to hear ‘maybe.’ ”
“Yes, sir. But—”
“You stay here, maybe over by the newsstand. Make yourself as inconspicuous as possible.”
“That’s why I’m dressed this way,” Ince said. He was wearing a green polyester leisure suit and an orange Banlon shirt.
Leaving Ince behind, Sharp pushed through a glass door and went outside, where rain was blowing under the overhanging roof.
Jerry Peake caught up with him at last.
“How long do we have, Jerry?”
Glancing at his watch, Peake said, “They land in five minutes.”
The taxi line was short at this hour—only four cabs. Their car was parked at the curb marked ARRIVALS—UNLOADING ONLY, about fifty feet behind the last taxi. It was one of the agency’s standard crap-brown Fords that might as well have had UNMARKED LAW-ENFORCEMENT SEDAN painted on the sides in foot-tall block letters. Fortunately, the rain would disguise the instit
utional nature of the car and would make it more difficult for Verdad and Hagerstrom to spot a tail.
Peake got behind the wheel, and Sharp sat in the passenger’s seat, putting his attaché case on his lap. He said, “If they take a cab, get close enough to read its plates, then fall way back. Then if we lose it, we can get a quick fix on its destination from the taxi company.”
Peake nodded.
Their car was half sheltered by the overhang and half exposed to the storm. Rain hammered only on Sharp’s side, and only his windows were blurred by the sheeting water.
He opened the attaché case and removed the two pistols whose registration numbers could be traced neither to him nor to the DSA. One of the silencers was fresh, the other too well used when they had pursued Shadway at Lake Arrowhead. He fitted the fresh one to a pistol, keeping that weapon for himself. He gave the other gun to Peake, who seemed to accept it with reluctance.
“Something wrong?” Sharp asked.
Peake said, “Well … sir … do you still want to kill Shadway?”
Sharp gave him a narrow look. “It isn’t what I want, Jerry. Those are my orders: terminate him. Orders from authorities so high up the ladder that I sure as hell am not going to buck them.”
“But …”
“What is it?”
“If Verdad and Hagerstrom lead us to Shadway and Mrs. Leben, if they’re right there, you can’t terminate anyone in front of them. I mean, sir, those detectives won’t keep their mouths shut. Not them.”
“I’m pretty sure I can make Verdad and Hagerstrom back off,” Sharp assured him. He pulled the clip out of the pistol to make sure it was fully loaded. “The bastards are supposed to stay out of this, and they know it. When I catch them red-handed in the middle of it, they’re going to realize that their careers and pensions are in jeopardy. They’ll back off. And when they’re gone, we’ll take out Shadway and the woman.”
“If they don’t back off?”
“Then we take them out, too,” Sharp said. With the heel of his hand, he slammed the clip back into the pistol.
The refrigerator hummed noisily.
The damp air still smelled stale, with a hint of decay.
They hunched over the old kitchen table like two conspirators in one of those old war movies about the anti-Nazi underground in Europe. Rachael’s thirty-two pistol lay on the cigarette-scarred Formica, within easy reach, though she did not really believe she would need it—at least not tonight.
Whitney Gavis had absorbed her story—in a condensed form—with remarkably little shock and without skepticism, which surprised her. He did not seem to be a gullible man. He would not believe just any crazy tale he was told. Yet he had believed her wild narrative. Maybe he trusted her implicitly because Benny loved her.
“Benny showed you pictures of me?” she had asked. And Whitney had said, “Yeah, kid, the last couple months, you’re all he can talk about.” So she said, “Then he knew that what we had together was special, knew it before I did.” Whitney said, “No, he told me that you knew the relationship was special, too, but you were afraid to admit it just yet; he said you’d come around, and he was right.” She said, “If he showed you pictures of me, why didn’t he show me pictures of you or at least talk about you, since you’re his best friend?” And Whitney had said, “Benny and me are committed to each other, have been ever since Nam, as good as brothers, better than brothers, so we share everything. But until recently, you hadn’t committed to him, kid, and until you did, he wasn’t going to share everything with you. Don’t hold that against him. It’s Nam that made him that way.”
Vietnam was probably another reason that Whitney Gavis believed her incredible tale, even the part about being pursued by a mutant beast in the Mojave Desert. After a man had been through the madness of Vietnam, maybe nothing strained his credulity anymore.
Now Whitney said, “But you don’t know for certain that those snakes killed him.”
“No,” Rachael admitted.
“If he came back from the dead after being hit by the truck, is it possible he could come back after dying of multiple snakebites?”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“And if he doesn’t stay dead, you can’t be certain he’ll just degenerate into something that’ll remain out there on the desert, living pretty much an animal’s existence.”
“No,” she said, “of course, I can’t guarantee that, either.”
He frowned, and the scarred side of his otherwise handsome face puckered and creased as if it were paper.
Outside, the night was marked by ominous noises, though all were related to the storm: the fronds of a palm tree scraped against the roof; the motel sign, stirred by the wind, creaked on corroded hinges; a loose section of downspouting popped and rattled against its braces. Rachael listened for sounds that could not be explained by the wind and rain, heard none, but kept listening anyway.
Whitney said, “The really disturbing thing is that Eric must’ve overheard Benny telling you about this place.”
“Maybe,” Rachael said uneasily.
“Almost certainly, kid.”
“All right. But considering his appearance when I last saw him, he won’t be able to just stand out along the road and hitch a ride. Besides, he seemed to be devolving mentally and emotionally, not just physically. I mean … Whitney, if you could’ve seen him with those snakes, you’d realize how unlikely it is that he’d have the mental capacity to find a path out of the desert and somehow get all the way here to Vegas.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible,” he said. “Nothing’s impossible, kid. After I had my run-in with an antipersonnel mine in Nam, they told my family I couldn’t possibly live. But I did. So they told me I couldn’t possibly regain enough muscle control of my damaged face to speak without impairment. But I did. Hell, they had a whole list of things that were impossible—but none of them turned out to be. And I didn’t have your husband’s advantage—this genetic business.”
“If you can call it an advantage,” she said, remembering the hideous notched ridge of bone on Eric’s forehead, the nascent horns, the inhuman eyes, the fierce hands …
“I should arrange other accommodations for you.”
“No,” she said quickly. “This is where Benny’s expecting to find me. If I’m not here—”
“Don’t sweat it, kid. He’ll find you through me.”
“No. If he shows up, I want to be here.”
“But—”
“I want to be here,” she insisted sharply, determined not to be talked into another course of action. “As soon as he gets here, I want to … I have to … see him. I have to see him.”
Whitney Gavis studied her for a moment. He had a discomfitingly intense gaze. Finally he said, “God, you really love him, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said tremulously.
“I mean really love him.”
“Yes,” she repeated, trying to prevent her voice from cracking with emotion. “And I’m worried about him … so very worried.”
“He’ll be all right. He’s a survivor.”
“If anything happens to him—”
“Nothing will,” Whitney said. “But I guess there’s not much danger in you staying here tonight, at least. Even if your husband … even if Eric gets to Vegas, it sounds as if he’s going to have to stay out of sight and make a slow and careful journey of it. Probably won’t arrive for a few days—”
“If ever.”
“—so we can wait until tomorrow to find another place for you. You can stay here and wait for Benny tonight. And he’ll come. I know he will, Rachael.”
Tears shimmered in her eyes. Not trusting herself to speak, she merely nodded.
With the good grace not to remark upon her tears and the good sense not to try to comfort her, Whitney pushed himself up from the kitchen table and said, “Yes, well, all right, then! If you’re going to spend even one night in this dump, we’ve got to make the place more comfortable. For one thing, although there may
be towels and some sheets in the linen closet, they’re probably dusty, mildewed or even crawling with disease. So what I’ll do is, I’ll go buy a set of sheets, towels … and how about some food?”
“I’m starved,” she said. “I only had an Egg McMuffin early this morning and a couple of candy bars later, but I’ve burned all that off half a dozen times over. I made a quick stop in Baker, but that was after my encounter with Eric, and I didn’t have much appetite. Just picked up a six-pack of diet soda ’cause I was feeling so dehydrated.”
“I’ll bring back some grub, too. You want to give me a dinner order, or do you trust me?”
She stood up and wearily pushed a pale and trembling hand through her hair. “I’ll eat almost anything except turnips and squid.”
He smiled. “Lucky for you, this is Vegas. Any other town, the only store open at this hour would be the turnip and squid emporium. But hardly anything in Vegas ever closes. You want to come with me?”
“I shouldn’t be showing my face.”
He nodded. “You’re right. Well, I ought to be back in an hour. You be okay here?”
“Really,” she said, “I’m safer here than anywhere else I’ve been since yesterday morning.”
In the velvety blackness of room 15, Eric crawled aimlessly across the floor, first one way and then another, twitching, kicking spasmodically, hitching and shuddering and squirming like a broken-backed cockroach.
“Rachael …”
He heard himself speak that word and only that word, each time with a different intonation, as if it constituted his entire vocabulary. Although his voice was thick as mud, those two syllables were always clear. Sometimes he knew what the word meant, remembered who she was, but at other times it had no meaning for him. However, regardless of whether or not he knew what it meant, the name predictably engendered precisely the same response in him each time he spoke it: mindless, icy fury.
“Rachael …”
Caught helplessly in the tides of change, he groaned, hissed, gagged, whimpered, and sometimes he laughed softly in the back of his throat. He coughed and choked and gasped for breath. He lay on his back, shaking and bucking as the changes surged through him, clawing at the air with hands twice as large as his hands had been in his previous life.