penetrated her as completely as a sharp knife slicing through soft
butter She got up and went into the bathroom, guided only by the thin
moon glow that filtered through the sheers over the window. In the bath
room she did not turn on the light. After she peed, she washed her
hands and stood for a while just looking at her dim, amorphous
reflection in the silvery-black mirror. She washed her hands. She got
a drink of cold water She realized that she was delaying her return to
the bedroom because she was afraid she would be drawn to the window
again.
This is ridiculous, she told herself What’s gotten into you?
She reentered the bedroom and found herself approaching the window
instead of the bed. She parted the sheers.
He was not out there.
Holly felt as much disappointment as relief As she stared into the
night-swaddled reaches of Council Crest Park, an extended chill quivered
through her again, and she realized that only half of it was generated
by nameless fear. A strange excitement coursed through her, as well, a
first ant anticipation of. . .
Of what?
She didn’t know.
Jim Ironheart’s effect on her was profound and lingering. She had not
experienced anything like it. Although she struggled to understand what
she was feeling, enlightenment eluded her. Mere sexual attraction was
the explanation. She was long past puberty, and neither the tidal pull
hormones nor the girlish desire for romance could affect her like this
At last she returned to bed. She was certain that she would lie awake
for the rest of the night, but to her surprise she soon drifted off
again. As she tumbled on the wire of consciousness, she heard herself
mumble, “those” then fell into the yawning void.
In his own bed in Laguna Niguel, Jim woke just before dawn. His heart
was pounding. Though the room was cool, he was bathed in sweat.
He’d ‘been having one of his frequent nightmares, but all he could
recall of it was that something relentless, powerful, and vicious had
been pursuing him. His sense of onrushing death was so powerful that he
had to turn on the lights to be certain that something inhuman and
murderous was not actually in the room with him. He was alone.
“But not for long,” he said aloud.
He wondered what he meant by that.
AUGUST 20 THROUGH AUGUST 2 Jim Ironheart peered anxiously through the
dirty windshield of the stolen Camaro. The sun was a white ball, and
the light it shed was as white a bitter as powdered lime.
Even with sunglasses, he had to squint. Rising sun-scorched blacktop,
currents of superheated air formed into mirages people and cars and
lakes of water.
He was tired, and his eyes felt abraded. The heat illusions combined
with occasional dust devils to hamper visibility. The endless vistas of
the Mojave Desert made it difficult to maintain an accurate perception
of speed; he didn’t feel as if the car was streaking along at nearly a
hundred miles an hour, but it was. In his condition, he should have
been driving a lot slower.
But he was filled with a growing conviction that he was too late, that
he was going to screw up. Someone was going to die because he had not
been quick enough.
He glanced at the loaded shotgun angled in front of the other bud seat,
its butt on the floor, barrels pointed away from him. A full box of
shells was on the seat.
Half sick with dread, he pressed the accelerator even closer to the
floorboard. The needle on the speedometer dial shivered past the
hundred mark.
He topped a long, gradual rise. Below lay a bowl-shaped valley twenty
or thirty miles in diameter, so alkaline that it was mostly white,
barren but for a few gray tumbleweed and a stubble of desert scrub. It
might have been formed by an asteroid impact eons ago, its outlines
considerably softened by the passage of millennia but otherwise still as
primeval as any place on earth.
The valley was bisected by the black highway on which mirages of water
glistened. Along the shoulders, heat phantoms shimmered and writhed