Shadowfires

landscape without form, inhabited by an unseen but fearful creature that stalked him through the shadows, where all was vast and cold and lonely. It was — and yet was not — the Green Hell where he had spent more than three years of his youth, a familiar yet unfamiliar place, the same as it had been, yet changed as landscapes can be only in dreams.

Shortly after dawn, he came awake with bird-thin cries, full of dread, shuddering, and Rachael was with him. She had moved from the other bed and had drawn him to her, comforting him. Her warm tender touch dispelled the cold and lonely dream. The rhythmic thumping of her heart seemed like the steady throbbing of a bright lighthouse beacon along a fogbound coast, each pulse a reassurance.

He believed she had intended to offer nothing more than the comfort that a good friend could provide, though perhaps unconsciously she brought the greater gift of love and sought it in return. In the half-awake state following sleep, when his vision seemed filtered by a semitransparent cloth, when an invisible thinness of warm silk seemed to interpose itself between his hands and everything he touched, and while sounds were still dream- muffled, his perceptions were not sharp enough to determine how and when her offered comfort became offered — and accepted — love. He only knew that it happened and that, when he drew her unclothed body to his, he felt a rightness that he had never felt before in his thirty-seven years.

He was at last within her, and she was filled with him. It was fresh and wondrous, yet they did not have to search for the rhythms and patterns that pleased them, because they knew what was perfect for them as lovers of a decade might know.

Although the softly rumbling air conditioner kept the room cool, Ben had an almost psychic awareness of desert heat pressing at the windows. The cool chamber was a bubble suspended outside the reality of the harsh land, just as their special moment of tender coupling was a bubble drifting outside the normal flow of seconds and minutes.

Only one opaque window of frosted glass — high in the kitchenette wall — was not covered with a drape, and upon it the rising sun built a slowly growing fire. Outside, palm fronds, fanning lazily in a breeze, filtered the beams of the sun; feathery tropical shadows and frost-pale light fell on their nude bodies, rippling as they moved.

Ben saw her face clearly even in that inconstant light. Her eyes were shut, mouth open. She drew deep breaths at first, then breathed more quickly. Every line of her face was exquisitely sensuous — but also infinitely precious. His perception of her preciousness mattered more to him than the shatteringly sensuous vision she presented, for it was an emotional rather than physical response, a result of their months together and of his great affection for her. Because she was so special to him, their coupling was not merely an act of sex but an immeasurably more gratifying act of love.

Sensing his examination, she opened her eyes and looked into his, and he was electrified by that new degree of contact.

The palm-patterned morning light grew rapidly brighter, changing hue as well, from frost-pale to lemon- yellow to gold. It imparted those colors to Rachael's face, slender throat, full breasts. As the richness of the light increased, so did the pace of their lovemaking, till both were gasping, till she cried out and cried out again, at which moment the breeze outside became a sudden energetic wind that whipped the palm fronds, casting abruptly frantic shadows through the milky window, upon the bed. At precisely the moment when the wind-sculpted shadows leaped and shuddered, Ben thrust deep and shuddered too, emptying copious measures of himself into Rachael, and just when the last rush of his seed had streamed from him, the spill of wind was also depleted, flowing away to other corners of the world.

In time he withdrew from her, and they lay on their sides, facing each other, heads close, their breath mingling. Still, neither spoke nor needed to, and gradually they drifted toward sleep again.

He had never before felt as fulfilled and contented as this. Even in the good days of his youth, before the Green Hell, before Vietnam, he had never felt half this fine.

She slept before Ben did, and for a long pleasant moment he watched as a bubble of saliva slowly formed between her parted lips, and popped. His eyes grew heavy, and the last thing he saw before he closed them was the vague — almost invisible — scar along her jawline, where she had been cut when Eric had thrown a glass at her.

Drifting down into a restful darkness, Ben almost felt sorry for Eric Leben, because the scientist had never realized love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only — and best — answer to death was loving. Loving.

16 IN THE ZOMBIE ZONE

For part of the night he lay fully clothed on the bed in the cabin above Lake Arrowhead, in a condition deeper than sleep, deeper than coma, his body temperature steadily declining, his heart beating only, twenty times a minute, blood barely circulating, drawing breath shallow-ly and only intermittently. Occasionally his respiration and heartbeat stopped entirely for periods as long as ten or fifteen minutes, during which the only life within him was at a cellular level, though even that was not life as much as stasis, a strange twilight existence that no other man on earth had ever known. During those periods of suspended animation, with cells only slowly renewing themselves and performing their functions at a greatly reduced pace, the body was gathering energy for the next period of wakefulness and accelerated healing.

He was healing, and at an astonishing rate. Hour by hour, almost visibly, his multitude of punctures and lacerations were scabbing over, closing up. Beneath the ugly bluish blackness of the bruises that he had suffered from the brutal impact with the garbage truck, there was already a visible yellow hue arising as the blood from crushed capillaries was leeched from the tissues. When he was awake, he could feel fragments of his broken skull pressing insistently into his brain, even though medical wisdom held that tissue of the brain was without nerve endings and therefore insensate; it was not a pain as much as a pressure, like a Novocaine-numbed tooth registering the grinding bit of a dentist's drill. And he could sense, without understanding how, that his genetically improved body was methodically dealing with that head injury as surely as it was closing up its other wounds. For a week he would need much rest, but during that time the periods of stasis would grow shorter, less frequent, less frightening. That was what he wanted to believe. In two or three weeks, his physical condition would be no worse than that of a man leaving the hospital after major surgery. In a month he might be fully recovered, although he'd always have a slight — or even pronounced — depression along the right side of his skull.

But mental recovery was not keeping pace with the rapid physical regeneration of tissues. Even when awake, heartbeat and respiration close to normal, he was seldom fully alert. And during those brief periods when he possessed approximately the same intellectual capacity he had known before his death, he was acutely and dismally aware that for the most part he was functioning in a robotic state, with frequent lapses into a confused and, at times, virtually animalistic condition.

He had strange thoughts.

Sometimes he believed himself to be a young man again, recently graduated from college, but sometimes he recognized that he was actually past forty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was, especially when he was out on the road, driving, with no familiar reference points to his own past life; overcome by confusion, feeling lost and sensing that he would forever be lost, he had to pull over to the edge of the highway until the panic passed. He knew that he had a great goal, an important mission, though he was never quite able to define his purpose or destination. Sometimes he thought he was dead and making his way through the levels of hell on a Dantean journey. Sometimes he thought he had killed people, although he could not remember who, and then he did briefly remember and shrank from the memory, not only shrank from it but convinced himself that it was not a memory at all but a fantasy, for of course he was incapable of cold- blooded murder. Of course. Yet at other times he thought about how exciting and satisfying it would be to kill someone, anyone, everyone, because in his heart he knew they were after him, all of them, out to get him, the rotten bastards, as they had always been out to get him, though they were even more determined now than ever. Sometimes he thought urgently, Remember the mice, the mice, the deranged mice bashing themselves