Shadowfires

tension that suddenly gripped her and caused her to sit up straighter.

“Kill me? No, no, Benny. The U.S. government just executing civilians as if this were some banana republic? No, surely not.”

“Not necessarily the whole government, Rachael. The House, Senate, president, and cabinet secretaries haven't held meetings to discuss the obstacle you pose, haven't conspired by the hundreds to terminate you. But someone in the Pentagon or the DS A or the CIA has determined that you're standing in the way of the national interest, that you pose a threat to the welfare of millions of citizens. When they weigh the welfare of millions against one or two little murders, the choice is clear to them, as it always is to collectivist thinkers. One or two little murders — tens of thousands of murders — are always justifiable when the welfare of the masses is at stake. At least, that's how they see it, even if they do pretend to believe in the sanctity of the individual. So they can order one or two little murders and even feel righteous about it.”

“Dear God,” she said with feeling. “What have I dragged you into, Benny?”

“You didn't drag me into anything,” he said. “I forced my way in. You couldn't keep me out of it. And I've no regrets.”

She seemed unable to speak.

Ahead, on the left, a branch road led down to the lake. A sign announced: lake approach — boat launching facilities.

Ben turned off the state route and followed the narrower gravel road down through a crowd of immense trees. In a quarter of a mile, he drove out of the trees, into a sixty-foot-wide, three-hundred-foot-long open area by the shore. Sequins of sunlight decorated the lake in some places, and serpentine streams of sunlight wriggled across the shifting surface in other places, and here and there brilliant shafts bounced off the waves and dazzled the eye.

More than a dozen cars, pickups, and campers were parked at the far end of the clearing, several with empty boat trailers behind them. A big recreational pickup — black with red and gray stripes, bedecked with gobs of sun- heated chrome — was backed up near the water's edge, and three men were launching a twenty-four-foot twin- engine Water King from their trailer. Several people were eating lunch at picnic tables near the shore, and an Irish setter was sniffing under a table in search of scraps, and two young boys were tossing a football back and forth, and eight or ten fishermen were tending their poles along the bank.

They all looked as if they were enjoying themselves. If any of them realized the world beyond this pleasant haven was turning dark and going mad, he was keeping it to himself.

Benny drove to the parking area but tucked the Ford in by the edge of the forest, as far from the other vehicles as he could get. He switched off the engine and rolled down his window. He put his seat back as far as it would go in order to give himself room to work, took the shotgun box on his lap, opened it, withdrew the gun, and threw the empty box into the back seat.

“Keep a watch out,” he told Rachael. “You see anybody coming, let me know. I'll get out and meet him. Don't want anybody to see the shotgun and be spooked. It's sure as hell not hunting season.”

“Benny, what're we going to do?”

“Just what we planned to do,” he said, using one of the car keys to slit the shrink-wrapped plastic in which the shotgun was encased. “Follow the directions Sarah Kiel gave you, find Eric's cabin, and see if he's there.”

“But the warrants for our arrest… people wanting to kill us… doesn't that change everything?”

“Not much.” He discarded the shredded plastic and looked the gun over. It came fully assembled, a nice piece of work, and it felt good and reliable in his hands. “Originally we wanted to get to Eric and finish him before he healed entirely and came looking to finish you. Now maybe what we'll have to do is capture him instead of kill him—”

“Take him alive?” Rachael said, alarmed by that suggestion.

“Well, he's not exactly alive, is he? But I think we're going to have to take him in whatever condition he's in, tie him up, drive him someplace like… well, someplace like the offices of the Los Angeles Times. Then we can hold a real shocker of a press conference.”

“Oh, Benny, no, no, we can't.” She shook her head adamantly. “That's crazy. He's going to be violent, extremely violent. I told you about the mice. You saw the blood in the trunk of the car, for God's sake. The destruction everywhere he's been, the knives in the wall of the Palm Springs house, the beating he gave Sarah. We can't risk getting close to him. He won't respect the gun, if that's what you're thinking. He won't have any fear of it at all. You get close enough to try to capture him, and he'll take your head off in spite of the gun. He might even have a gun of his own. No, no, if we see him, we've got to finish him right away, shoot him without any hesitation, shoot him again and again, do so much damage to him that he won't be able to come back again.”

A panicky note had entered her voice, and she had spoken faster and faster as she strove to convince Ben. Her skin was powder-white, and her lips had acquired a bluish tint. She was shivering.

Even considering their precarious situation and the admittedly hideous nature of their quarry, her fear seemed too great to Ben, and he wondered how much her reaction to Eric's resurrection was heightened by the ultrareligious childhood that had formed her. Without fully understanding her own feelings, perhaps she was afraid of Eric not merely because she knew his potential for violence, and not merely because he was a walking dead man, but because he had dared to seize the power of God by defeating death and thereby had become not simply a zombie but some hellborn creature returned from the realm of the damned.

Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his, he said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him; I've handled worse than him, much worse—”

“Don't be so confident! That's what'll get you killed.”

“I'm trained for war, well trained to take care of myself—”

“Please!”

“And I've kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can't count on anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a nasty lesson about the modern world that I didn't want to admit I'd learned, which is why I've spent so much time immersed in the past. But the very fact that I've kept in shape and kept practicing my fighting skills is proof of the lesson. Tip-top shape, Rachael. And I'm well armed.” He hushed her when she tried to object. “We have no choice, Rachael. That's what it comes down to. No other choice. If we just kill him, blast the sucker with twenty or thirty rounds from the shotgun, kill him so bad he stays dead for good this time — then we have no proof of what he did to himself. We just have a corpse. Who could prove he'd been reanimated? It'd look as if we stole his body from the morgue, pumped it full of buckshot, and concocted this crazy story, maybe concocted it to cover the very crimes the government is accusing us of.”

“Lab tests of his cell structure would prove something,” Rachael said. “Examination of his genetic material —”

“That would take weeks. Before then, the government would've found a way to claim the body, eliminate us, and doctor the test results to show nothing out of the ordinary.”

She started to speak, hesitated, and stopped because she was obviously beginning to realize that he was right. She looked more forlorn than any woman he had ever seen.

He said, “Our only hope of getting the government off our backs is to get proof of Wildcard and break the story to the press. The only reason they want to kill us is to keep the secret, so when the secret is blown, we'll be safe. Since we didn't get the Wildcard file from Eric's office safe, Eric himself is the only proof we have a chance of putting our hands on. And we need him alive. They need to see him breathing, functioning, in spite of his staved-in head. They need to see the change in him that you suspect there'll be — the irrational rages, the sullen quality of the living dead.”

She swallowed hard. She nodded. “All right. Okay. But I'm so scared.”

“You can be strong; you have it in you.”

“I know I do. I know. But…”

He leaned forward and gave her a kiss.

Her lips were icy.

* * *

Eric groaned and opened his eyes.

Evidently he had descended once more into a short period of suspended animation, a minor but deep coma,