Shadowfires

* * *

The search for Dr. Eric Leben was getting nowhere.

The grim possibility of failure was, for Anson Sharp, like a great pressure pushing in on the walls of Geneplan's underground labs in Riverside, compressing the window-less rooms, until he felt as if he were being slowly crushed. He could not abide failure; he was a winner, always a winner, superior to all other men, and that was the only way he cared to think of himself, the only way he could bear to think of himself, as the sole member of a superior species, for that image of himself justified anything he wished to do, anything at all, and he was a man who simply could not live with the moral and ethical limitations of ordinary men.

Yet field agents were filing negative reports from every place that the walking dead man might have been expected to show up, and Sharp was getting angrier and more nervous by the hour. Perhaps their knowledge of Eric Leben was not quite as thorough as they thought. In anticipation of these events, perhaps the geneticist had prepared a place where he could go to ground, and had managed to keep it secret even from the DSA. If that were the case, the failure to apprehend Leben would be seen as Sharp's personal failure, for he had identified himself too closely with the operation in expectation of taking full credit for its success.

Then he got a break. Jerry Peake called to report that Sarah Kiel, Eric Leben's underage mistress, had been located in a Palm Springs hospital. “But the damn medical staff,” Peake explained in his earnest but frustratingly wimpy manner, “isn't cooperative.”

Sometimes Anson Sharp wondered if the advantages of surrounding himself with weaker — and therefore unthreatening — young agents were outweighed by the disadvantage of their inefficiency. Certainly none of them would pose a danger to him once he had ascended to the director's chair, but neither were they likely to do anything on their own hook that would reflect positively on him as their mentor.

Sharp said, “I'll be there before she shakes off the sedative.”

The investigation at the Geneplan labs could proceed without him for a while. The researchers and technicians had arrived for the day and had been sent home with orders not to report back until notified. Defense Security Agency computer mavens were seeking the Wildcard files hidden in the Geneplan data banks, but their work was so highly specialized that Sharp could neither supervise nor understand it.

He made a few telephone calls to several federal agencies in Washington, seeking — and obtaining — information about Desert General Hospital and Dr. Hans Werfell that might give him leverage with them, then boarded his waiting chopper and flew back across the desert to Palm Springs, pleased to be on the move again.

* * *

Rachael and Benny taxied to the Palm Springs airport, rented a clean new Ford from Hertz, and drove back into town in time to be the first customers at a clothing store that opened at nine-thirty. She bought tan jeans, a pale yellow blouse, thick white tube socks, and Adidas jogging shoes. Benny chose blue jeans, a white shirt, tube socks, and similar shoes, and they changed out of their badly rumpled clothes in the public rest rooms of a service station at the north end of Palm Canyon Drive. Unwilling to waste time stopping for breakfast, partly because they were afraid of being spotted, they grabbed Egg McMuffins and coffee at McDonald's, and ate as they drove.

Rachael had infected Benny with her premonition of oncoming death and her sudden — almost clairvoyant — sense that time was running out, which had first struck her at the motel, just after they had made love for the second time. Benny had attempted to reassure her, calm her, but instead he had grown more uneasy by the minute. They were like two animals independently and instinctively perceiving the advance of a terrible storm.

Wishing they could have gone back for her red Mercedes, which would have made better time than the rental Ford, Rachael slumped in the passenger's seat and nibbled at her take-out breakfast without enthusiasm, while Benny drove north on State Route 111, then west on Interstate 10. Although he squeezed as much speed out of the Ford as anyone could have, handling it with that startling combination of recklessness and ease that was so out of character for a real-estate salesman, they would not reach Eric's cabin, above Lake Arrowhead, until almost one o'clock in the afternoon.

She hoped to God that would be soon enough.

And she tried not to think about what Eric might be like when — and if — they found him.

18 ZOMBIE BLUES

The dark rage passed, and Eric Leben regained his senses — such as they were — in the debris-strewn bedroom of the cabin, where he had smashed nearly everything he could get his hands on. A hard, sharp pain pounded through his head, and a duller pain throbbed in all of his muscles. His joints felt swollen and stiff. His eyes were grainy, watery, hot. His teeth ached, and his mouth tasted of ashes.

Following each fit of mindless fury, Eric found himself, as now, in a gray mood, in a gray world, where colors were washed out, where sounds were muted, where the edges of objects were fuzzy, and where every light, regardless of the strength of its source, was murky and too thin to sufficiently illuminate anything. It was as if the fury had drained him, and as if he had been forced to power down until he could replenish his reserves of energy. He moved sluggishly, somewhat clumsily, and he had difficulty thinking clearly.

When he had finished healing, the periods of coma and the gray spells would surely cease. However, that knowledge did not lift his spirits, for his muddy thought processes made it difficult for him to think ahead to a better future. His condition was eerie, unpleasant, even frightening; he felt that he was not in control of his destiny and that, in fact, he was trapped within his own body, chained to this now-imperfect, half-dead flesh.

He staggered into the bathroom, slowly showered, brushed his teeth. He kept a complete wardrobe at the cabin, just as he did at the house in Palm Springs, so he would never need to pack a suitcase when visiting either place, and now he changed into khaki pants, a red plaid shirt, wool socks, and a pair of woodsman's boots. In his strange gray haze, that morning routine required more time than it should have: He had trouble adjusting the shower controls to get the right temperature; he kept dropping the toothbrush into the sink; he cursed his stiff fingers as they fumbled with the buttons on his shirt; when he tried to roll up his long sleeves, the material resisted him as if it possessed a will of its own; and he succeeded in lacing the boots only with monumental effort.

Eric was further distracted by the shadowfires.

Several times, at the periphery of his vision, ordinary shadows burst into flames. Just short-circuiting electrical impulses in his badly damaged — but healing — brain. Illusions born in sputtering cerebral synapses between neurons. Nothing more. However, when he turned to look directly at the fires, they never faded or winked out as mere mirages might have done, but grew even brighter.

Although they produced no smoke or heat, consumed no fuel, and had no real substance, he stared at those nonexistent flames with greater fear each time they appeared, partly because within them — or perhaps beyond them — he saw something mysterious, frightening; darkly shrouded and monstrous figures that beckoned through the leaping brightness. Although he knew the phantoms were only figments of his overwrought imagination, although he had no idea what they might represent to him or why he should be afraid of them, he was afraid. And at times, mesmerized by shadowfires, he heard himself whimpering as if he were a terrorized child.

Food. Although his genetically altered body was capable of miraculous regeneration and rapid recuperation, it still required proper nutrition — vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins — the building blocks with which to repair its damaged tissues. And for the first time since arising in the morgue, he was hungry.

He shuffled unsteadily into the kitchen, shambled to the big refrigerator.

He thought he saw something crawling out of the slots in a wall plug just at the edge of vision. Something long, thin. Insectile. Menacing. But he knew it was not real. He had seen things like it before. It was another symptom of his brain damage. He just had to ignore it, not let it frighten him, even though he heard its chitinous feet tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Tap-tap-tapping. He refused to look. Go away. He held on to the refrigerator. Tapping. He gritted his teeth. Go away. The sound faded. When he looked toward the wall plug, there was no strange insect, nothing out of the ordinary.

But now his uncle Barry, long dead, was sitting at the kitchen table, grinning at him. As a child, he had