Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

if he’s there.”

“But the warrants for our arrest… people wanting to kill us…

doesn’t that change everythingT’ “Not much.” He discarded the shredded

plastic and looked the gun over. It came fully assembled, a nice piece

of work, and it felt good and reliable in his hands.

“Originally we wanted to get to Eric and finish him before he healed

entirely and came looking to finish you. Now maybe what we’ll have to

do is capture him instead of kill him-” “Take him alive?” Rachael said,

alarmed by that suggestion.

“Well, he’s not exactly alive, is he? But I think we’re going to have

to take him in whatever condition he’s in, tie him up, drive him

someplace like. .. well, someplace like the offices of the Los Angeles

Times. Then we can hold a real shocker of a press conference.”

“Oh, Benny, no, no, we can’t.” She shook her head adamantly. “That’s

crazy. He’s going to be violent, extremely violent. I tojd you about

the mice. You saw the blood in the trunk of the car, for God’s sake.

The destruction everywhere he’s been, the knives in the wall of the Palm

Springs house, the beating he gave Sarah.

We can’t risk getting close to him. He won’t respect the gun, if that’s

what you’re thinking. He won’t have any fear of it at all. You get

close enough to try to capture him, and he’ll take your head off in

spite of the gun.

He might even have a gun of his own. No, no, if we see him, we’ve got

to finish him right away, shoot him without any hesitation, shoot him

again and again, do so much ,l,amage to him that he won’t be able to

come back again.

A panicky note had entered her voice, and she had spoken faster and

faster as she strove to convince Ben.

Her skin was powder-white, and her lips had acquired a bluish tint.

She was shivering.

Even considering their precarious situation and the admittedly hideous

nature of their quarry, her fear seemed too great to Ben, and he

wondered how much her reaction to Eric’s resurrection was heightened by

the ultrareligious childhood that had formed her. Without fully

understanding her own feelings, perhaps she was afraid of Eric not

merely because she knew his potential for violence, and not merely

because he was a walking dead man, but because he had dared to seize the

power of God by defeating death and thereby had become not simply a

zombie but some hellborn creature returned from the realm of the damned.

Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his, he

said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him, I’ve handled worse than him,

much worse-” “Don’t be so confident! That’s what’ll get you killed.”

“I’m trained for war, well trained to take care of myself-” “Please!”

“And I’ve kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that

the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can’t count on

anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a nasty lesson

about the modern world that I didn’t want to admit I’d learned, which is

why I’ve spent so much time immersed in the past. But the very fact

that I’ve kept in shape and kept practicing my fighting skills is proof

of the lesson. Tip-top shape, Rachael. And I’m well armed.” He hushed

her when she tried to object. “We have no choice, Rachael. That’s what

it comes down to. No other choice. If we just kill him, blast the

sucker with twenty or thirty rounds from the shotgun, kill him so bad he

stays dead for good this time-then we have no proof of what he did to

himself.

We just have a corpse. Who could prove he’d been reanimated? It’d look

as if we stole his body from the morgue, pumped it full of buckshot, and

concocted this crazy story, maybe concocted it to cover the very crimes

the government is accusing us of.”

“Lab tests of his cell structure would prove something,” Rachael said.

“Examination of his genetic material-” “That would take weeks. Before

then, the government would’ve found a way to claim the body, eliminate

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