the claws snapped, and the cloth tore, and he fell away into the arroyo.
Rachael didn't wait long enough to watch him tumble two stories to the bottom of the gulch, but turned at once to the demanding task of heaving herself onto the narrow stone ledge from which she hung precariously. Pulsations of pain, throbbing in time with her wildly pounding heart, coursed through her arms from wrists to shoulders. Her straining muscles twitched and rebelled at her demands. Clenching her teeth, breathing through her nose so hard that she snorted like a horse, she struggled upward, digging at the wall beneath the ledge with her feet to provide what little thrust she could. By sheer perseverance and determination — spiced with a generous measure of motivating terror — she clambered onto the ledge at last.
Exhausted, suffering several pains, she nevertheless refused to pause. She dragged herself up the last eight feet of the arroyo wall, finding handholds in a few final outcroppings of rock and among the erosion-exposed roots of the mesquite bushes that grew at — the brink. Then she was at the edge, over the top, pushing through a break in the mesquite, and she rolled onto the surface of the desert.
Lightning stepped down the sky as if providing a staircase for some descending god, and all around Rachael the low desert scrub threw short-lived, giant shadows.
Thunder followed, hard and flat, and she felt it reverberate in the ground against her back.
She dragged herself back to the brink of the arroyo, praying that she would see the Eric-thing still at the bottom, motionless, dead a second time. Maybe he'd fallen on a rock. There
She peered over the edge.
He was more than halfway up the wall again.
Lightning flashed, illuminating his deformed face, silvering his inhuman eyes, plating an electric gleam to his too-sharp teeth.
Leaping up, Rachael started kicking at the loose earth along the brink and at the brush that grew there, knocking it down on top of him. He hung from the quartz-veined ledge, keeping his head under it for protection, so the sandy earth and brush cascaded harmlessly over him. She stopped kicking dirt, looked around for some stones, found a few about the size of eggs, and hurled them down at his hands. When the stones connected with his grotesque fingers, he let go of the ledge and moved entirely under it, clinging to the earth in the shadow of that stone shelf, where she could not hit him.
She could wait for him to reappear, then pelt him again. She could keep him pinned there for hours. But nothing would be gained. It would be a tense, wearying, futile enterprise; when she exhausted the supply of stones within her reach and had only dirt to throw, he would ascend with animal quickness, undeterred by that pathetic bombardment, and he would finish her.
A white-hot celestial cauldron tipped, spilling forth a third molten streak of lightning. It made contact with the earth much closer than the two before it, no more than a quarter of a mile away, accompanied by a simultaneous crash worthy of Armageddon, and with a crackle-sizzle that was the voice of Death speaking in the language of electricity.
Below, unfazed by the lightning, emboldened by the cessation of the attack Rachael had been waging, the Eric-thing put one monstrous hand over the edge of the ledge.
She kicked more dirt down on him, lots of it. He withdrew his hand, taking shelter again, but she continued to stomp away at the rotten brink of the embankment. Suddenly an enormous chunk collapsed directly under her feet, and she nearly fell into the arroyo. As the ground began to shift, she threw herself backward just in time to avoid catastrophe, and landed hard on her buttocks.
With so much dirt pouring down over him, he might hesitate longer before making another attempt to pull himself across the overhanging ledge. His caution might give her an extra couple of minutes' lead time. She got up and sprinted off into the forbidding desert.
The overused muscles in her legs were repeatedly stabbed and split by cleaver-sharp pains. Her right ankle remained tender, and her right calf burned where the claws had cut through her jeans.
Her mouth was drier than ever, and her throat was cracking. Her lungs felt seared by her deep shuddering gasps of hot desert air.
She didn't succumb to the agony, couldn't afford to succumb, just kept on running, not as fast as before but as fast as she could.
Ahead, the land became less flat than it had been, began to roll in a series of low hills and hollows. She ran up a hill and down, up another, on and on, trying to put concealing barriers between herself and Eric before he crawled out of the arroyo. Eventually, deciding to stay in one of the hollows, she turned in a direction that she thought was north; though her sense of direction might have become totally fouled up during the chase, she believed she had to go north first, then east, if she hoped to circle around to the Mercedes, which was now at least a mile away, probably much farther.
Lightning…
This time, an incredibly long-lived bolt glimmered between the thunderheads and the ground below for at least ten seconds, racing-jigging south to north, like a gigantic needle trying to sew the storm tight to the land forever.
That flash and the empyrean blast that followed were sufficient to bring the rain, at last. It fell hard, pasting Rachael's hair to her skull, stinging her face. It was cool, blessedly cool. She licked her chapped lips, grateful for the moisture.
Several times she looked back, dreading what she would see, but Eric was never there.
She had lost him. And even if she'd left footprints to mark her flight, the rain would swiftly erase them. In his alien incarnation, he might somehow be able to track her by scent, but the rain would provide cover in that regard as well, scrubbing her odor from the land and air. Even if his strange eyes provided better vision than the human eyes they had once been, he would not be able to see far in this heavy rain and gloom.
You've escaped, she told herself as she hurried north. You're going to be safe.
It was probably true.
But she didn't believe it.
By the time Ben Shadway drove just a few miles east of Barstow, the rain not only filled the world but became the world. Except for the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers, all sounds were those of water in motion, drowning out everything else: a ceaseless drumming on the roof of the Merkur, the snap-snap-snap of droplets hitting the windshield at high speed, the slosh and hiss of wet pavement under the tires. Beyond the comfortable — though abruptly humid — confines of the car, most of the light had bled out of the bruised and wounded storm-dark sky, and little remained to be seen other than the omnipresent rain falling in millions of slanting gray lines. Sometimes the wind caught sheets of water the same way it might catch sheer curtains at an open window, blowing them across the vast desert floor in graceful, undulant patterns, one filmy layer after another, gray on gray. When the lightning flashed — which it did with unnerving frequency — billions of drops turned bright silver, and for a second or two, it appeared as if snow were falling on the Mojave; at other times, the lightning-transformed rain seemed more like glittery, streaming tinsel.
The downpour grew worse until the windshield wipers could not keep the glass clear. Hunching over the steering wheel, Ben squinted into the storm-lashed day. The highway ahead was barely visible. He had switched on the headlights, which did not improve visibility. But the headlights of oncoming cars — though few — were refracted by the film of water on the windshield, stinging his eyes.
He slowed to forty, then thirty. Finally, because the nearest rest area was over twenty miles ahead, he drove onto the narrow shoulder of the highway, stopped, left the engine running, and switched on the Merkur's emergency blinkers. Since he had failed to reach Whitney Gavis, his concern for Rachael was greater than ever, and he was more acutely aware of his inadequacies by the minute, but it would be foolhardy to do anything other than wait for the blinding storm to subside. He would be of no help whatsoever to Rachael if he lost control of the car on the rain-greased pavement, slid into one of the big eighteen-wheelers that constituted most of the sparse traffic, and got himself killed.
After Ben had waited through ten minutes of the hardest rain he had ever seen, as he was beginning to wonder if it would ever let up, he saw that a sluice of fast-moving dirty water had overflowed the drainage channel beside the road. Because the highway was elevated a few feet above the surrounding land, the water could not flow
