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
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 change-fire 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
