darkened window directly above the curly x in Roxy's 101 Varieties Pizza Parlor.
With deliberation he took aim and fired three times. The cry brought gooseflesh to his upper arms and across his shoulders. Not human, surely? More like the screech of a wounded animal.
Sweating and yet cold, Chase flattened himself against the wall and watched the half-track, now a good thirty yards away, turn off at an intersection and disappear from view. He moved off along the side street, staying close to the protective lee of the buildings in case sniping was a popular pastime in the district. Crossing the street at a brisk jog, he turned right into the one parallel with Collins Avenue, glancing into every doorway and shattered shopfront, shoulders hunched as if anticipating at any second a shot zinging out from the ruined buildings.
He didn't have fond memories of Miami from his previous visit and this trip had done nothing to modify his opinion.
Distantly the horn sounded and he ran gratefully toward it. His heart hammered in his chest and his rapid breathing fogged the faceplate. He wasn't in shape, Chase realized, even for someone in his mid-forties. But that strange guttural cry, he guessed, had done as much to make his heart race as the physical exertion. What the hell was it?
Nearing the corner he slowed to a walk and buckled the automatic into its holster. Glass crunched underfoot, making him stop dead in his tracks. There was a queer dragging sound and he spun on his heel, seeing a childhood terror made real, lurching toward him from a doorway with reaching arms and dead eyes staring straight ahead. The outer layer of flesh had peeled away, leaving a drab pasty white. There were eyes but no eyelids. There was a gash of a mouth and two raw holes in place of nostrils. The bone of the skull showed through the peeling strips of skin, and in his stricken terror, when the mind seizes on irrelevant details, Chase saw that the fingernails on the outstretched hands had fallen off leaving red tatters of flesh.
If this thing had once been human it was human no more.
Then the most remarkable thing about it struck him like a blow.
Chase's hand fumbled with the holster flap and gripped the butt of the automatic. He stepped backward as the nonhuman thing shambled toward him. A moment later Chase dropped through a trapdoor as his foot slid from beneath him and he hit the slimy pavement with a jarring thump that dug the air tank into the small of his back as if he'd been rabbit-punched.
Chase gasped with pain. Frantically he tried to squirm away as the nonhuman thing stooped over him, its face looming nearer like a rotting skull. The mouth opened. A few jagged pegs of black teeth remained in the red weeping gums. A string of brackish brown saliva leaked from its mouth and dribbled onto his faceplate.
The groping hands reached for him. Tugging desperately at the automatic, Chase at last got it free. But the nonhuman thing now had hold of his mask. One quick wrench and he was as good as dead: The toxic mix of gases would kill him even if oxygen starvation didn't.
In his panic Chase thought he was blacking out. The nonhuman thing's head had vanished. Huge dark spots obscured his vision. He couldn't see--just as he hadn't heard the explosion as Dan's shot smashed the thing between the eyes and scattered shards of bone and red-speckled brain matter ten yards across the street.
Cheryl helped Dan remove the headless body, but even without its weight Chase was unable to stand. They got him to his feet, one supporting each arm. His mouth was clamped shut. He gagged and vomit spurted from his nostrils.
'Hurry, for God's sake!' Cheryl started dragging him along the street. 'If he's sick inside the mask he'll suffocate!'
Chase was bent forward, gagging and choking, the mask filling up. Drowning in his own vomit, he was led blindly up the street.
A few miles north of Fort Pierce they encountered civilization again: the pitted and pockmarked two-lane blacktop that was all that remained of the Florida turnpike. Regular patrols by the National Guard made the road reasonably safe.
Above the old 55 mph speed limit signs a warning had been added in large red capitals: don't breathe the air!
Some people still lived this far south, surviving in isolated communities. Like bacteria and insects, it seemed, the human race could adapt to the most adverse and hostile conditions. Chilling to think, Chase brooded, that in time they might adapt to the point of actual mutation --was the creature with which he'd come face-to-face in Miami Beach the portent of things to come?
Ten years ago even the gloomiest of doom-laden prophecies hadn't prepared them for the catastrophic decline they were now experiencing. Maybe Bill Inchcape had known, based on DELFI's predictions, but if so he'd kept tight-lipped about it. There was a sick irony in the fact that Theo Detrick's prognosis had been vindicated by events and the man himself raised to the misty heights of prophet in the popular imagination.
Chase bore some of the responsibility for that. His book
The theme of
What the military sought to bring about, the factory furnace and the automobile had already accomplished.
The book polarized opinion in both the lay and scientific press. It was accused of being 'paranoid fantasy.' Other critics dismissed it as a piece of trashy sensationalism--panic-mongering at its worst to get onto the best- seller lists--and the author's bid to become the 'ecology guru' of the twenty-first century. Chase had expected this. He had been less prepared for the abuse and vilification heaped upon his head by many leading scientists who, in a positive fury (or envy?), leveled the charge that he was 'betraying' science.
All the fuss and controversy had the predictable effect of boosting sales and making Chase an internationally known figure. In the eighteen months after publication he was hardly off the television screen. He achieved the respect and notoriety, in pretty well equal measure, that many commentators could only compare to how Ralph Nader had been regarded thirty years before.
The success of the book and his subsequent fame served another useful purpose too--they saved his life.
He had returned from New York with the unshakable conviction that powerful vested interests were determined to silence him. Precisely who these interests were he could only guess at. But the man at JFK (who Chase had belatedly recognized as the same man who had threatened Cheryl in Geneva) was in the pay of a multinational or a government agency or a military group; it was immaterial which, to Chase at least, because the end result was clearly to shut him up at all costs. Dead journalists tell no tales.
For fourteen months Chase worked solidly on the book, living with Dan in a remote croft near the small town of Dornoch on the east coast of Scotland. There they settled down in the tiny two-room dwelling with its whitewashed walls and red corrugated iron roof, with not a neighbor in sight. No electricity, no phone, no TV. Oil lamps, a camping gas stove, and a log fire for when the bleak and bitterly cold northern winter closed in.
In the spring of 2000 he delivered the typescript, and seven months later it was published. Prior to its publication
