Shadowfires

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!”

They ran around the side of the office toward the garage at the back of the motel, where the gusting wind was repeatedly banging the open door against the wall.

36 THE MANY FORMS OF FIRE

Slumped against the retaining wall, facing out toward Tropicana, Whitney Gavis felt that the rain was washing him away. He was a man made of mud, and the rain was dissolving him. Moment by moment, he grew weaker, too weak to raise a hand to check the bleeding from his cheek and temple, too weak to shout at the dishearteningly few cars that whisked by on the wide boulevard. He was lying in a shadowed area, thirty feet back from the roadway, where their headlights did not sweep across him, and he supposed none of the drivers noticed him.

He had watched Ben empty the Combat Magnum into Leben's mutated hulk, and he had seen the mutant rise up again. As there was nothing he could do to help, he had concentrated upon pulling himself around the corner of the four-foot-high wall of the flower bed, intending to make himself more visible to those passing on the boulevard, hoping someone would spot him and stop. He even dared to hope for a passing patrol car and a couple of well-armed cops, but merely hoping for help was not going to be good enough.

Behind him, he had heard Ben fire two more shots, heard him and Rachael talking frantically, then running footsteps. He knew that Ben would never bug out on him, so he figured they'd thought of something else that might stop Leben. The problem was that, weak as he felt, he did not know if he was going to last long enough to find out what new strategy they had devised.

He saw another car coming west on Tropicana. He tried to call out but failed; he tried to raise one arm from his lap so he could wave to attract attention, but the arm seemed nailed to his thigh.

Then he noticed this car was moving far slower than previous traffic, and it was approaching half in its lane and half on the shoulder of the road. The closer it got, the slower it moved.

Medevac, he thought, and that thought spooked him a little because this wasn't Nam, for God's sake, this was Vegas, and they didn't have Medevac units in Vegas. Besides, this was a car, not a helicopter.

He shook his head to clear it, and when he looked again the car was closer.

They're going to pull right into the motel, Whit thought, and he would have been excited except he suddenly didn't have sufficient energy for excitement. And the already deep black night seemed to be getting blacker.

* * *

As soon as Ben and Rachael had entered the garage, they'd closed and locked the outer door. She did not have the keys with her, and there was no thumb latch on this side of the kitchen door, so they had to leave that one standing open and just hope that Leben came at them from the other direction.

“No door will keep it out, anyway,” Rachael said. “It'll get in if it knows we're here.”

Ben had recalled garden hoses among the heaps of junk that the former owners had left behind: “Existing supplies, tools, materials, and sundry useful items,” they had called the trash when trying to boost the sales price of the place. He found a pair of rusted hedge clippers, intending to use them to chop a length of hose that might work as a siphon, but then he saw a coil of narrow, flexible rubber tubing hanging from a hook on the wall, which was even more suitable.

He snatched the tubing off the hook and hastily stuffed one end into the Mercedes's fuel tank. He sucked on the other end and barely avoided getting a mouthful of gasoline.

Rachael had been busy searching through the junk for a container without a hole in the bottom. She slipped a galvanized bucket under the siphon only seconds before the gasoline began to flow.

“I never knew gas fumes could smell so sweet,” he said as he watched the golden fluid streaming into the bucket.

“Even this might not stop it,” she said worriedly.

“If we saturate it, the damage from fire will be much more extensive than—”

“You have matches?” Rachael interrupted.

He blinked. “No.”

“Me neither.”

“Damn.”

Looking around the cluttered garage, she said, “Would there be any here?”

Before he could answer, the knob on the side door of the garage rattled violently. Evidently the Leben-thing had seen them go around the motel or had followed their trail by scent — only God knew what its capabilities were, and in this case maybe even God was in the dark — and already it had arrived.

“The kitchen,” Ben said urgently. “They didn't bother taking anything or cleaning out the drawers. Maybe you'll find some matches there.”

Rachael ran to the end of the garage and disappeared into the apartment.

The beast threw itself against the outside door, which was not a hollow-core model like the one it had easily smashed through in the bedroom. This more solid barrier would not immediately collapse, but it shuddered and clattered in its loosely fitted jamb. The mutant hit it again, and the door gave out a dry-wood splintering sound but still held, and then it was hit a third time.

Half a minute, Ben thought, glancing back and forth from the door to the gasoline collecting in the bucket. Please, God, let it hold just half a minute more.

The beast hit the door again.

* * *

Whit Gavis didn't know who the two men were. They had stopped their car along the boulevard and had run to him. The big man was taking his pulse, and the smaller guy — he looked Mexican — was using one of those detachable glove-compartment flashlights to examine the lacerations in Whitney's face and temple. Their dark suits had quickly gotten darker as the rain soaked them.

They might have been some of the federal agents who were after Ben and Rachael, but at this point Whitney didn't care if they were lieutenants in the devil's own army, because surely no one could pose a greater danger than