Each time she started to look back, he squinted so she would not be able to pinpoint his position by spotting his radiant eyes. When she paused to listen, she could surely hear him coming, but her inability to get a visual fix had her obviously terrified.
The stink of her acute terror was as strong as her femaleness, though sour. The former scent sparked his blood lust as effectively as the latter incited his sexual desire. He longed to feel her blood spurting against his lips, to taste it on his tongue, to push his mouth within her slashed abdomen in search of the rich and satisfying flesh of her liver.
He was twenty feet behind her.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Ben helped Whit sit up against a four-foot-high retaining wall that enclosed a tangle of weeds where once had been a bed of flowers. Above them, the motel sign scraped and creaked in the wind.
“Don’t worry about me,” Whit said, pushing him away.
“Your face—”
“Help
her
. Help Rachael.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’ll live, I’ll live. But it’s after Rachael,” Whit said with that unnervingly familiar note of purest horror and desperation that Ben had not heard in anyone’s voice since Vietnam. “It left me, and it went after her.”
“It?”
“You have a gun? Good. A Magnum. Good.”
“It?” Ben repeated.
Abruptly the wind wailed louder, and the rain fell as if a dam had broken above them, and Whit raised his voice to be heard over the storm. “Leben. It’s Leben, but he’s changed. My God, he’s changed. Not really Leben anymore. Genetic chaos, she calls it. Retrograde evolution, devolution, she says. Massive mutations. Hurry, Ben! The manager’s apartment!”
Unable to understand what the hell Whit was talking about, but sensing that Rachael was in even graver danger than he had feared, Ben left his old friend propped against the retaining wall and ran toward the entrance to the motel office.
Blind, half deafened by the thunderous impact of the rain upon the roof, Rachael crawled through the mine-dark attic as fast as she dared. Though she was afraid that she was moving too slowly to escape the beast, she came to the end of the long chamber sooner than she’d expected, bumping up against the outer wall at the end of the motel’s first wing.
Crazily, she had given no thought to what she would do when she reached a dead end. Her mind had been focused so intently upon the need to stay beyond the reach of the Eric-thing that she had proceeded as if the attic would go on forever.
She let out a whimper of despair when she discovered that she was cornered. She shuffled to her right, hoping that the attic made a turn and continued over the middle wing of the U-shaped building. In fact, it must have done just that, but she encountered a concrete-block partition between the two wings, perhaps a fire wall. Searching frantically in the darkness, she could feel the cool, rough surface of the blocks and the lines of mortar, and she knew there would be no pass-through in such a barrier.
Behind her, the Eric-thing issued a wordless cry of triumph and obscene hunger that pierced the curtain of rain noise and seemed to originate only inches from her ear.
She gasped and snapped her head around, shocked by the nearness of the demonic voice. She’d thought she had a minute to scheme, half a minute at least. But for the first time since the beast had cast the attic into absolute darkness by closing the trap door, Rachael saw its murderous eyes. The radiant pale green orb was undergoing changes that would no doubt make it more like the orange serpent’s eye. She was so close that she could see the unspeakable hatred in that alien gaze. It . . .
it
was no more than six feet from her.
Its breath reeked.
She somehow knew that it could see her clearly.
And it was reaching for her in the darkness.
She sensed its grotesque hand straining toward her.
She pressed back against the concrete blocks.
Think,
think
.
Cornered, she could do nothing except embrace one of the very dangers that she had thus far been striving to avoid: Instead of clinging precariously to the beams, she threw herself to one side, into the insulated hollow between a pair of two-by-fours, and the old Sheetrock cracked and collapsed beneath her. She fell straight out of the attic, down through the ceiling of one of the motel rooms, praying that she would not land on the edge of a dresser or chair, would not break her back, praying that she would not become easy meat—
—and she dropped smack into the middle of a bed with broken springs and a mattress that had become a breeding ground for mold and fungus. Those cold and slimy growths burst beneath her, spewing spores, oozing sticky fluids, and exuding a noxious odor almost as bad as rotten eggs, though she breathed deeply of it without complaint because she was alive and unhurt.
Above, the Eric-thing started down through the ceiling in a less radical fashion than she had chosen, clinging to the ceiling beams and kicking out more Sheetrock to make a wider passageway for itself.
She rolled off the bed and stumbled across the dark motel room in search of the door.
In the manager’s apartment, Ben found the shattered bedroom door, but the bedroom itself was deserted, as were the living room and the kitchen. He looked in the garage as well, but neither Rachael nor Eric was there. Finding nothing was better than finding a lot of blood or her battered corpse, though not
much
better.
With Whitney’s urgent warnings still echoing in his mind, Ben quickly retraced his path through the apartment to the motel office and out into the courtyard. From the corner of his eye, he saw movement down at the end of the first wing.
Rachael. Even in the gloom, there was no mistaking her.
She came out of one of the motel rooms, moving fast, and with immense relief Ben called her name. She looked up, then ran toward him along the awning-covered promenade. At first he thought her attitude was one of ordinary excitement or perhaps joy at the sight of him, but almost at once he realized she was propelled by terror.
“Benny, run!” she shouted as she approached. “Run, for God’s sake, run!”
Of course, he would not run because he could not abandon Whit out there against the wall of the weed-choked flower bed, and he could not carry Whit and run at the same time, so he stood his ground. However, when he saw the thing that came out of that motel room behind her, he
wanted
to run, no doubt of that; all courage fled him in an instant, even though the darkness allowed him to see only a fraction of the nightmare that pursued her.
Genetic chaos, Whit had said. Devolution. Moments ago, those words had meant little or nothing to Ben. Now, on his first glimpse of the thing that Eric Leben had become, he understood as much as he needed to understand for the moment. Leben was both Dr. Frankenstein and the Frankenstein monster, both the experimenter and the unlucky subject of the experiment, a genius and a damned soul.
Rachael reached Ben, grabbed him by the arm, and said, “Come on, come on, hurry.”
“I can’t leave Whit,” he said. “Stand back. Let me get a clear shot at it.”
“No! That’s no good, no good. Jesus, I shot it ten times, and it got right up again.”
“This is a hell of a lot more powerful weapon than yours,” he insisted.
The hideous Grendelesque figure raced toward them—virtually galloped in long graceful strides—along the canopied promenade, not in the awkward shamble that Ben had expected when first catching sight of it, but with startling and dismaying speed. Even in the weak gray light, parts of its body appeared to glisten like polished obsidian armor, not unlike the shells of certain insects, while in other places there was the scintillant silvery sheen of scales.
Ben barely had time to spread his legs in a shooter’s stance, raise the Combat Magnum in both hands, and squeeze off a shot. The revolver roared, and fire flashed from its muzzle.
Fifteen feet away, the creature was jolted by the impact of the slug, stumbled, but did not go down. Hell, it didn’t even stop; it came forward with less speed but still too fast.
He squeezed off a second shot, a third.
The beast screamed—a sound like nothing Ben had ever heard, and like nothing he wanted to hear again—and was at last halted. It fell against one of the steel poles that held up the aluminum awning and clung to that support.
Ben fired again, hitting it in the throat this time.
The impact of the .357 Magnum blew it away from the awning post and sent it staggering backward.
The fifth shot knocked it down at last, although only to its knees. It put one shovel-size hand to the front of its throat, and its other arm bent in an impossible fashion until it had put its other hand against the back of its neck.
“Again, again!” Rachael urged.
He pumped the sixth and final shot into the kneeling creature, and it pitched backward on the concrete, flopped onto its side, lay silent, motionless.
The Combat Magnum had a roar only slightly less impressive than a cannon’s. In the comparative stillness that followed the dwindling echo of the last gunshot, the drumming rain sounded hardly louder than a whisper.
“Do you have more bullets?” Rachael demanded, still in a state of acute terror.
“It’s all right,” Ben said shakily. “It’s dead, it’s dead.”
“If you have more cartridges,
load them!
” she shouted.
He was not shocked by her tone or by the panic in her voice, but he
was
shocked when he realized that she was not really hysterical—scared, yes, damn scared, but not out of control. She knew what she was talking about; she was terrified but not irrational, and she believed he would need to reload quickly.
This morning—an eternity ago—on the way to Eric’s cabin above Lake Arrowhead, Ben had stuffed some extra rounds into his pockets along with a few spare shells for the shotgun. He had discarded the shotgun ammo when he had left the 12-gauge in the Merkur along I-15. Now, checking his pockets, he turned up only two revolver cartridges where he had expected to find half a dozen, and he figured that the others had spilled out with the shotgun shells when he had discarded those.
But it was all right, everything was okay, nothing to fear: the creature on the promenade had not moved and was not going to move.
“Hurry,” Rachael urged.
His hands were shaking. He broke out the revolver’s cylinder and slipped one cartridge into a chamber.
“
Benny
,” she said warningly.
He looked up and saw the beast moving. It had gotten its huge hands under itself and was trying to push up from the concrete.
“Holy shit,” he said. He fumbled the second round into the gun, snapped the cylinder back into place.
Incredibly, the beast had already risen to its knees and reached out to another awning post.
Ben aimed carefully, squeezed the trigger. The Combat Magnum boomed again.
The thing was jolted as the slug tore into it, but it held fast to the post, emitting an ungodly screech. It turned luminous eyes on Ben, and in them he thought he saw a challenge and an indestructible hatred.
Ben’s hands were shaking so bad that he was afraid he was going to miss with the next—and last—shot. He had not been this rattled since his first combat mission in Nam.
It clawed for handholds on the post and heaved onto its feet.
His confidence shattered, but unwilling to admit that a weapon as devastatingly powerful as the .357 Magnum was inadequate, Ben fired the final round.
Again the beast went down, but this time it was not still for even a few seconds. It writhed and squealed and kicked in agony, the carapace-hard portions of its body scraping and clicking against the concrete.
Ben would have liked to believe that it was in its death throes, but by now he knew no ordinary gun would cut it down; an Uzi rigged for fully automatic fire, perhaps, or a fully automatic AK-91 assault rifle, or the equivalent, but not an ordinary gun.
Rachael pulled at him, wanting him to run before the beast got onto its feet again, but there was still the problem of Whit Gavis. Ben could save himself and Rachael by running, but in order to save Whit, he had to stay and fight and go on fighting until either he or the mutant Leben was dead.
Perhaps because he felt as if he were in the midst of a war again, he thought of Vietnam and of the particularly cruel weapon that had been such a special and infamous part of that brutal conflict: napalm. Napalm was jellied gasoline, and for the most part it killed whatever it touched, eating through flesh all the way to the bone, scoring the bone all the way to the marrow. In Nam, the stuff had been dreaded because, once unleashed, it brought inescapable death. Given enough time, he possessed the knowledge to manufacture a serviceable homemade version of napalm; he did
not
have the time, of course, although he realized that he could put his hands on gasoline in its mundane liquid form. Though the jellied brand was preferable, the ordinary stuff was effective in its own right.
As the mutant stopped screeching and writhing, as it began to struggle onto its knees once more, Ben grabbed Rachael by the shoulder and said, “The Mercedes—where is it?”
“The garage.”
He glanced toward the street and saw that Whit had presciently dragged himself around the corner of the retaining wall, where he was hidden from the motel. The wisdom of Nam: Help your buddies as much as possible, then cover your own ass as soon as you can. Initiates of that war never forgot the lessons it taught them. As long as Leben believed that Ben and Rachael were on the motel property, he was not likely to go out toward Tropicana and accidentally find the helpless man hiding against the wall. For a few more minutes, anyway, Whit was fairly safe where he was.
Casting aside the useless revolver, Ben grabbed Rachael’s hand and said, “Come on!”