wanted to hear the tale she told or as if it had something of its own to add to the story.
Standing at the window of room 15, waiting for Rachael to arrive, Eric had felt the changefire growing hotter within him. He began to pour sweat; it streamed off his brow and down his face, gushed from every pore as if trying to match the rate at which the rain ran off the awning of the promenade beyond the window. He felt as if he were standing in a furnace, and every breath he drew seared through his lungs. All around him now, in every corner, the room was filled with the phantom flames of shadowfires, at which he dared not look. His bones felt molten, and his flesh was so hot that he would not have been surprised to see real flames spurt from his fingertips.
“Melting…” he said in a voice deep and guttural and thoroughly inhuman. “… the… melting man.”
His face suddenly
For a while, darkness claimed him.
When he came partially to his senses a few minutes later, he found that he had rolled off the bed and was lying beneath the window, where he had recently been keeping a watch for Rachael. Although the changefire had not grown cooler, although he still felt his tissues seeking new forms in every part of his body, he resolutely pushed aside the drapes and reached up toward the window. In the dim light, his hands looked enormous and chitinous, as if they belonged to a crab or lobster that had been gifted with fingers instead of pincers. He grabbed the sill and pulled himself off the floor, stood. He leaned against the glass, his breath coming in great hot gasps that steamed the pane.
Light shone in the windows of the motel office.
Rachael must have arrived.
Instantly he was seething with hatred. The motivating memory-smell of blood filled his nostrils.
But he also had an immense and strangely formed erection. He wanted to mount her, then kill her as he had taken and then slain the cowboy's woman. In his degenerate and mutant state, he was unsettled to discover that he was having trouble holding on to an understanding of her identity. Second by second he was ceasing to care who she was: the only thing that mattered now was that she was female — and prey-He turned away from the window and tried to reach the door, but his metamorphosing legs collapsed beneath him. Again, for a time, he squirmed and writhed upon the motel floor, the changefire hotter than ever within him.
His genes and chromosomes, once the undisputed regulators — the masters — of his very form and function, had become plastic themselves. They were no longer primarily re-creating previous stages in human evolution but were exploring utterly alien forms that had nothing to do with the physiological history of the human species. They were mutating either randomly or in response to inexplicable forces and patterns he could not perceive. And as they mutated, they directed his body to produce the mad flood of hormones and proteins with which his flesh was molded.
He was becoming something that had never before walked the earth and that had never been meant to walk it.
The Marine Corps twin-engine turboprop transport from Twentynine Palms landed in driving rain at McCarren International Airport in Las Vegas at 9:03 p.m. Tuesday. It was only ten minutes ahead of the estimated time of arrival for the scheduled airline flight from Orange County on which Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom were passengers.
Harold Ince, a DSA agent in the Nevada office, met Anson Sharp, Jerry Peake, and Nelson Gosser at the debarkation gate.
Gosser immediately headed for another gate, where the incoming flight from Orange County would unload. It would be his job to run a discreet tail on Verdad and Hagerstrom until they had left the terminal, whereupon they would become the responsibility of the surveillance team that would be waiting outside.
Ince said, “Mr. Sharp, sir, we're cutting it awful close.”
“Tell me something I don't know,” Sharp said, walking swiftly across the waiting area that served the gate, toward the long corridor that led to the front of the terminal.
Peake hurried after Sharp, and Ince — a much shorter man than Sharp — hustled to stay at his side. “Sir, the car's waiting for you out front, discreetly at the end of the taxi line, as you requested.”
“Good. But what if they don't take a cab?”
“One rental-car desk is still open. If they stop to make those arrangements, I'll warn you at once.”
“Good.”
They reached the moving walkway and stepped onto the rubber belt. No other flights had landed recently or were about to take off, so the corridor was deserted. On the speaker system that served the long hall, taped messages from Vegas showroom performers — Joan Rivers, Paul Anka, Rodney Dangerfield, Tom Dreesen, Bill Cosby, and others — offered lame jokes and, mostly, advice about safety on the pedway: Please use the moving handrail, stay to the right, allow other passengers to pass on the left, and be careful not to trip at the end of the moving belt.
Dissatisfied with the leisurely speed of the walkway, striding along between the moving handrails, Sharp glanced down and slightly back at Ince and said, “How's your relationship with the Las Vegas police?”
“They're cooperative, sir.”
“That's all?”
“Well, maybe better than that,” Ince said. “They're good guys. They have a hell of a job to do in this city, what with all the hoods and transients, and they handle it well. Got to give them credit. They're not soft, and because they know how hard it is to keep the peace, they have a lot of respect for cops of all kinds.”
“Like us?”
“Like us.”
“If there's shooting,” Sharp said, “and if someone reports it, and if the Vegas uniforms arrive before we've been able to mop up, can we count on them to conform their reports to our needs?”
Ince blinked in surprise. “Well, I… maybe.”
“I see,” Sharp said coldly. They reached the end of the moving walkway. As they strode into the main lobby of the terminal, he said, “Ince, in days to come, you better build a tighter relationship with the local agencies. Next time, I don't want to hear 'maybe.' ”
“Yes, sir. But—”
“You stay here, maybe over by the newsstand. Make yourself as inconspicuous as possible.”
“That's why I'm dressed this way,” Ince said. He was wearing a green polyester leisure suit and an orange Banlon shirt.
Leaving Ince behind, Sharp pushed through a glass door and went outside, where rain was blowing under the overhanging roof.
Jerry Peake caught up with him at last.
“How long do we have, Jerry?”
Glancing at his watch, Peake said, “They land in five minutes.”
The taxi line was short at this hour — only four cabs. Their car was parked at the curb marked arrivals — unloading only, about fifty feet behind the last taxi. It was one of the agency's standard crap-brown Fords that might as well have had unmarked law-enforcement sedan painted on the sides in foot-tall block letters. Fortunately, the rain would disguise the institutional nature of the car and would make it more difficult for Verdad and Hagerstrom to spot a tail.
