Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

ax, a dark and almost erotic thrill coursed through him.

Let them come, he thought. I’ll show them Eric Leben is still a man to

be reckoned with. Let them come.

Though he still had difficulty understanding who might be seeking him,

he somehow knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Then names popped

into his mind, Baresco, Seitz, Geffels, Knowls, Lewis. Yes, of course,

his partners in Geneplan. They would know what he’d done. They would

decide that he had to be found quickly and terminated in order to

protect the secret of Wildcard.

But they were not the only men he had to fear. There were others…

shadowy figures he could not recall, men with more power than the

partners in Geneplan.

For a moment he felt that he was about to break through a wall of mist

into a clear place. He was on the verge of achieving a clarity of

thought and a fullness of memory that he had not known since rising from

the gurney in the morgue. He held his breath and leaned forward in his

chair with tremulous anticipation. He almost had it, all of it, the

identity of the other pursuers, the meaning of the mice, the meaning of

the hideous image of the crucified woman that kept recurring to him…

Then the unremitting pain in his head knocked him back from the brink of

enlightenment, into the mist again. Muddy currents invaded the clearing

stream of his thoughts, and in a moment all was clouded as before.

He let out a thin cry of frustration.

Outside, in the forest, movement caught his attention.

Squinting his hot watery eyes, Eric slid forward to the chair’s edge,

leaned toward the large window, peered intently at the tree-covered

slope and the shadow-dappled dirt lane. No one there. The movement was

simply the work of a sudden breeze that had finally broken the summer

stillness. Bushes stirred, and the evergreen boughs lifted slightly,

drooped, lifted, drooped, as if the trees were fanning themselves.

He was about to ease farther back in the chair when a scintillant blast

of pain, shooting across his forehead, virtually threw him back. For a

moment he was in such horrendous agony that he could not move or cry out

or breathe. When at last breath could be drawn, he screamed, though by

then it was a scream of anger rather than pain, for the pain went as

abruptly as it had come.

Afraid that the bright explosion of pain had signified a sudden turn for

the worse, perhaps even a coming apart of his broken skull, Eric raised

one shaky hand to his head. First he touched his damaged right ear,

which had nearly been torn off yesterday morning but which was now

firmly attached, lumpish and unusually gristly to the touch but no

longer drooping and raw.

How could he heal so fast? The process was supposed to take a few

weeks, not a few hours.

He slowly slipped his fingers upward and gingerly explored the deep

depression along the right side of his skull, where he had made contact

with the garbage truck. The depression was still there. But not as

deep as he remembered it. And the concavity was solid. It had been

slightly mushy before. Like bruised and rotting fruit. But no longer.

He felt no tenderness in the flesh, either. Emboldened, he pressed his

fingers harder into the wound, massaged, probed from one end of the

indentation to the other, and everywhere he encountered healthy flesh

and a firm shell of bone. The cracked and splintered skull had already

knit up in less than a day, and the holes had filled in with new bone,

which was flat-out impossible, damn it, impossible, but that was what

had happened.

The wound was healed, and his brain tissue was once more protected by a

casing of unbroken bone.

He sat stupefied, unable to comprehend. He remembered that his genes

had been edited to enhance the healing process and to promote cell

rejuvenation, but damned if he remembered that it was supposed to happen

this fast. Grievous wounds closing in mere hours?

Flesh, arteries, and veins reconstituted at an almost visible rate?

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