Shadowfires

what? — that he should never experiment with human beings until all encountered problems and unanswered questions are dealt with at the test-animal level or below.”

“Exactly,” she said. She had folded her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking, but her fingers kept picking at one another. “And Vincent didn't know Eric had broken the cardinal rule, I knew, but it must've come as a nasty shock to them when they heard Eric's body was missing. The moment they heard, they knew he'd done the craziest, most reckless, most unforgivable thing he possibly could've done.”

“And now what?” Ben asked. “They want to help him?”

“No. They want to kill him. Again.”

“Why?”

“Because he won't come back all the way, won't ever be exactly like he was. This stuff wasn't perfected yet.”

“He'll be like the lab animals?”

“Probably. Strangely violent, dangerous.”

Ben thought of the mindless destruction in the Villa Park house, the blood in the trunk of the car.

Rachael said, “Remember — he was a ruthless man all his life and troubled by barely suppressed violent urges even before this. The mice started out meek, but Eric didn't, so what might he be like now? Look what he did to Sarah Kiel.”

Ben remembered not only the beaten girl but the wrecked kitchen in the Palm Springs house, the knives driven into the wall.

“And if Eric murders someone in one of these rages,” Rachael said, “the police are more likely to learn he's alive, and Wildcard will be blown wide open. So his partners want to kill him in some very final manner that'll rule out another resurrection. I wouldn't be surprised if they dismembered the corpse or burned it to ashes and then disposed of the remains in several locations.”

Good God, Ben thought, is this reality or Chiller Theater?

He said, “They want to kill you because you know about Wildcard?”

“Yes, but that's not the only reason they'd like to get their hands on me. They've got two others at least. For one thing, they probably think I know where Eric will go to ground.”

“But you don't?”

“I had some ideas. And Sarah Kiel gave me another one. But I don't know for sure.”

“You said there's a third reason they'd want you?”

She nodded. “I'm first in line to inherit Geneplan, and they don't trust me to continue pumping enough money into Wildcard. By removing me, they stand a much better chance of retaining control of the corporation and of keeping Wildcard secret. If I could've gotten to Eric's safe ahead of them and could've put my hands on his project diary, I would've had solid proof that Wildcard exists, and then they wouldn't have dared touch me. Without proof, I'm vulnerable.”

Ben rose and began to move restlessly around the room, thinking furiously.

Somewhere in the night, not far beyond the motel walls, a cat cried either in anger or in passion. It went on a long time, rising and falling, an eerie ululation.

Finally Ben said, “Rachael, why are you pursuing Eric? Why this desperate rush to reach him before the others? What'll you do if you find him?”

“Kill him,” she said without hesitation, and the bleakness in her green eyes was now complemented by a Rachael-like determination and iron resolve. “Kill him for good. Because if I don't kill him, he's going to hide out until he's in better condition, until he's a bit more in control of himself, and then he's going to come kill me. He died furious with me, consumed by such hatred for me that he dashed blindly out into traffic, and I'm sure that same hatred was seething in him the moment awareness returned to him in the county morgue. In his clouded and twisted mind, I'm very likely his primary obsession, and I don't think he'll rest until I'm dead. Or until he's dead, really dead this time.”

He knew she was right. He was deeply afraid for her.

His preference for the past was as strong in him now as it had ever been, and he longed for simpler times. How mad had the modern world become? Criminals owned the city streets at night. The whole planet could be utterly destroyed in an hour with the pressing of a few buttons. And now… now dead men could be reanimated. Ben wished for a time machine that could carry him back to a better age: say the early 1920s, when a sense of wonder was still alive and when faith in the human potential was unsullied and unsurpassed.

Yet… he remembered the joy that had surged in him when Rachael had first said that death had been beaten, before she had explained that those who came back from beyond were frighteningly changed. He had been thrilled. Hardly the response of a genuine stick-in-the-mud reactionary. He might peer back at the past and long for it with full-blown sentimentalism, but in his heart he was, like others of his age, undeniably attracted to science and its potential for creating a brighter future. Maybe he was not such a misfit in the modern world as he liked to pretend. Maybe this experience was teaching him something about himself that he would have preferred not to learn.

He said, “Could you really pull the trigger on Eric?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not sure you could. I suspect you'd freeze up when you were really confronted with the moral implications of murder.”

“This wouldn't be murder. He's no longer a human being. He's already dead. The living dead. The walking dead. He's not a man anymore. He's different. Changed. Just as those mice were changed. He's only a thing now, not a man, a dangerous thing, and I wouldn't have any qualms about blowing his head off. If the authorities ever found out, I don't think they'd even try to prosecute me. And I see no moral questions that would put me on trial in my own mind.”

“You've obviously thought hard about this,” he said. “But why not hide out, keep a low profile, let Eric's partners find him and kill him for you?”

She shook her head. “I can't bet everything on their success. They might fail. They might not get to him before he finds me. This is my life we're talking about, and by God I'm not trusting in anyone but me to protect it.”

“And me,” he said.

“And you, yes. And you, Benny.”

He came to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, beside her. “So we're chasing a dead man.”

“Yes.”

“But we've got to get some rest now.”

“I'm beat,” she agreed.

“Then where will we go tomorrow?”

“Sarah told me about a cabin Eric has in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. It sounded secluded. Just what he needs now, for the next few days, while the initial healing's going on.”

Ben sighed. “Yeah, I think we might find him in a place like that.”

“You don't have to come with me.”

“I will.”

“But you don't have to.”

“I know. But I will.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Though she was weary, sweaty, and rumpled, with lank hair and bloodshot eyes, she was beautiful.

He had never felt closer to her. Facing death together always forged a special bond between people, drew them even closer regardless of how very close they might have been before. He knew, for he had been to war in the Green Hell.

Tenderly she said, “Let's get some rest, Benny.”

“Right,” he said.

But before he could lie down and turn off the lights, he had to break out the magazine of the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum that he had taken off Vincent Baresco several hours ago and count the remaining cartridges. Three. Half the magazine's load had been expended in Eric's office, when Baresco had fired wildly in the