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.
Buttons popped off his red plaid shirt. One of the shoulder seams split as his body swelled and bent into a grotesque new form.
“Rachael . . .”
During the past several hours, as his feet had grown larger and smaller and then larger again, his boots periodically pinched. Now they were painfully confining, crippling, and he could not bear them any longer. He literally tore them off, frenziedly ripped away the soles and heels, wrenched with his powerful hands until the sturdily stitched seams split, used his razored claws to puncture and shred the leather.
His unshod feet proved to have changed as completely as his hands had done. They were broader, flatter, with an exceptionally gnarled and bony bridge, the toes as long as fingers, terminating in claws as sharp as those on his hands.
“Rachael . . .”
Change
smashed
through him as if it were a bolt of lightning blasting through a tree, the current entering at the highest point of the highest limb and sizzling out through the hair-fine tips of the deepest roots.
He twitched and spasmed.
He drummed his heels against the floor.
Hot tears flooded from his eyes, and rivulets of thick saliva streamed from his mouth.
Sweating copiously, being burned alive by the changefire within him, he was nevertheless cold at the core. There was ice in both his heart and mind.
He squirmed into a corner and curled up, hugging himself. His breastbone cracked, shuddered, swelled larger, and sought a new shape. His spine creaked, and he felt it shifting within him to accommodate other alterations in his form.
Only seconds later, he skittered out of the corner in a crablike crawl. He stopped in the middle of the room and rose onto his knees. Gasping, moaning deep in his throat, he knelt for a moment with his head hung low, letting the dizziness flow out with his rancid sweat.
The changefire had finally cooled. For the moment, his form had stabilized.
He stood, swaying.
“Rachael . . .”
He opened his eyes and looked around the motel room, and he was not surprised to discover that his vision was nearly as good in the dark as it had ever been in full daylight. Furthermore, his field of vision had dramatically increased: when he looked straight ahead, objects on both his left and right sides were as clear and as sharply detailed as those things immediately in front of him.
He went to the door. Parts of his mutated body seemed ill formed and dysfunctional, forcing him to hitch along like some hard-shelled crustacean that had only recently developed the ability to stand upright like a man. Yet he was not crippled; he could move quickly and silently, and he had a sense of tremendous strength far greater than anything he had ever known before.
Making a soft hissing noise that was lost in the sounds of wind and drizzling rain, he opened the door and stepped into the night, which welcomed him.
35
SOMETHING THAT LOVES THE DARK
Whitney left the manager’s apartment at the Golden Sand Inn by way of the rear door of the kitchen. It opened into a dusty garage where, earlier, they had put the black Mercedes. Now the 560 SEL stood in small puddles of rainwater that had dripped from it. His own car was outside, in the serviceway behind the motel.
Turning to Rachael, who stood on the threshold between kitchen and garage, Whitney said, “You lock this door behind me and sit tight. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got to get the Wildcard file in order. That’ll keep me busy.”
He had no trouble understanding why Ben had fallen so hard for her. Even as disheveled as she was, pale with exhaustion and worry, Rachael was gorgeous. But her beauty was not her only attribute. She was caring, perceptive, smart, and tough—not a common mix of qualities.
“Ben will probably show up before I do,” he assured her.
She smiled thinly, grateful for his attempt to cheer her. She nodded, bit her lower lip, but could not speak because, obviously, she was still more than half convinced that she would never again see Ben alive.
Whitney motioned her back from the threshold and pulled the door shut between them. He waited until he heard her engage the dead-bolt lock. Then he crossed the grease- and oil-stained concrete floor, passing the front of the Mercedes, not bothering to put up the big rear door, but heading toward the side entrance.
The three-car garage, illuminated by a single bare bulb dangling on a cord from a crossbeam, was filthy and musty, a badly cluttered repository of old and poorly maintained maintenance equipment plus a lot of stuff that was just plain junk: rusting buckets; tattered brooms; ragged, motheaten mops; a broken outdoor vacuum cleaner; several motel-room chairs with broken legs or torn upholstery, which the previous owners had intended to repair and put back into service; scraps of lumber; coils of wire and coiled hoses; a bathroom sink; spare brass sprinkler heads spilling from an overturned cardboard box; one cotton gardening glove lying palm up like a severed hand; cans of paint and lacquer, their contents almost surely thickened and dried beyond usefulness. This trash was piled along the walls, scattered over portions of the floor, and stacked precariously in the loft.
Just as he unlocked the dead bolt on the side door of the garage, before he actually opened the door, Whitney heard a rattling in the garage behind him. The noise was short-lived; in fact, it stopped even as he turned to see what it was.
Frowning, he let his gaze travel over the piles of junk, the Mercedes, the gas furnace in the far corner, the sagging workbench, and the hot-water heater. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.
He listened.
The only sounds were the many voices of the wind in the eaves and the rain on the roof.
He turned away from the door, walked slowly to the car, circled it, but found nothing that could have caused the noise.
Maybe one of the piles of junk had shifted under its own weight—or had been disturbed by a rat. He would not be surprised to discover that the moldering old building was rat-infested, though he had not previously seen evidence of such an infestation. The trash was piled so haphazardly that he could not discern if it was all in the same position as it had been a moment ago.
He returned to the door again, took one last look around, then went out into the storm.
Even as the wind-harried rain slashed at him, he belatedly realized what he had heard in the garage: someone trying to pull open the big rear door from outside. But it was an electric door that could not be operated manually while in its automatic mode, and was therefore secure against prowlers. Whoever had tried it must have realized, at once, that he could not get in that way, which explained why the rattling had lasted only a moment.
Whitney limped warily toward the corner of the garage and the serviceway beyond it to see if anyone was still there. The rain was falling hard, making a crisp sound on the walk, a sloppier sound on the earth, spilling off the corner of the roof where the downspout was missing. All that wet noise effectively masked his own footsteps, as it would mask the activities of anyone behind the garage, and though he listened intently to the night, he did not at first hear anything unusual. He took six or eight steps, pausing twice to listen, before the patter and susurration of the rain was cut by a frightening noise.
Behind
him. It was partly a hiss like escaping steam, partly a thin catlike whine, partly a thick and menacing growl, and it put the hair up on the back of his neck.