The first one ascended through the open trap. It was Dr. Worthy, the town’s youngest physician.
Harry considered shooting him while he was still on the ladder. But he hadn’t fired a gun in twenty years, and he didn’t want to waste his limited ammunition. Better to wait for a closer shot.
Worthy didn’t have a flashlight. Didn’t seem to need one. He looked straight toward the darkest corner, where Harry was propped, and said, “How did you know we were coming, Harry?”
“Cripple’s intuition,” Harry said sarcastically.
Along the center of the attic, there was plenty of headroom to allow Worthy to walk upright. He rose from a crouch as he came out from under the sloping rafters near the trap, and when he had taken four steps forward, Harry fired twice at him.
The first shot missed, but the second hit low in the chest.
Worthy was flung backward, went down hard on the bare boards of the attic floor. He lay there for a moment, twitching, then sat up, coughed once, and got to his feet.
Blood glistened all over the front of his torn white shirt. He had been hit hard, yet he had recovered in seconds.
Harry remembered what Sam had said about how the Coltranes had refused to stay dead. Go for the data processor.
He aimed for Worthy’s head and fired twice again, but at that distance—
about twenty-five feet—and at that angle, shooting up from the floor, he couldn’t hit anything. He hesitated with only four rounds left in the pistol’s clip.
Another man was climbing through the trap.
Harry shot at him, trying to drive him back down.
He came on, unperturbed.
Three rounds in the pistol.
Keeping his distance, Dr. Worthy said, “Harry, we’re not here to harm you. I don’t know what you’ve heard or how you’ve heard about the project, but it isn’t a bad thing. …”
His voice trailed off, and he cocked his head as if to listen to the un-human cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar look of longing, visible even in the dim wash of light from the open trap, crossed Worthy’s face.
He shook himself, blinked, and remembered that he had been trying to sell his elixir to a reluctant customer. “Not a bad thing at all, Harry. Especially for you. You’ll walk again, Harry, walk as well as anyone. You’ll be whole again. Because after the Change, you’ll be able to heal yourself. You’ll be free of paralysis.”
“No, thanks. Not at that price.”
“What price, Harry?” Worthy asked, spreading his arms, palms up. “Look at me. What price have I paid?”
“Your soul?” Harry said.
A third man was coming up the ladder.
The second man was listening to the ululant cries that came in through the attic vents. He gritted his teeth, ground them together forcefully, and blinked very fast. He raised his hands and covered his face with them, as if he were suddenly anguished.
Worthy noticed his companion’s situation. “Vanner, are you all right?”
Vanner’s hands … changed. His wrists swelled and grew gnarly with bone, and his fingers lengthened, all in a couple of seconds. When he took his hands from his face, his jaw was thrusting forward like that of a werewolf in midtransformation. His shirt tore at the seams as his body reconfigured itself. He snarled, and teeth flashed.
“… need,” Vanner said, “… need, need, want, need …”
“No!” Worthy shouted.
The third man, who had just come out of the trap, rolled onto the floor, changing as he did so, flowing into a vaguely insectile but thoroughly repulsive form.
Before he quite knew what he was doing, Harry emptied the .38 at the insect-thing, pitched it away, snatched the .45 revolver off the board floor beside him, also fired three rounds from that, evidently striking the thing’s brain at least once. It kicked, twitched, fell back down through the trap, and did not clamber upward again.
Vanner had undergone a complete lupine metamorphosis and seemed to have patterned himself after something that he had seen in a movie, because he looked familiar to Harry, as if Harry had seen that same movie, though he could not quite remember it. Vanner shrieked in answer to the creatures whose cries pealed through the night outside.
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