Minutes after leaving Barstow, she passed the exit for Calico. Once the
service stations and motels and restaurants at that turnoff were behind
her, virtually unpeopled emptiness lay ahead for the next sixty miles,
until the tiny town of Baker. The interstate and the traffic upon it
were the only proof that this was an inhabited planet rather than a
sterile, lifeless hunk of rock orbiting silently in a sea of cold space.
As this was a Tuesday, traffic was light, more trucks than cars.
Thursday through Monday, tens of thousands of people were on their way
to and from Vegas. Frequently, fury filled him, making him forget the
hunger that had driven him in search of eggs. In the darkness, he and
his adversary bit, tore, and lashed at each other. Eric hissedthe other
squealed and spat-and he inflicted more ruinous wounds than he received,
until the burrow filled with the exciting stink of blood and feces and
urine..
Regaining human consciousness, Eric realized that the car was no longer
moving. He had no idea how long it had been stopped-maybe only a minute
or two, maybe hours. Struggling against the hypnotic pull of the
dreamworld that he’d just left, wanting to retreat back into that
thrillingly violent and reassuringly simple place of primal needs and
pleasures, he bit down on his lower lip to clear his head and was
startled-but, on consideration, not surprised-to find that his teeth
seemed sharper than they had been previously. He listened for a moment,
but he heard no voices or other noises outside. He wondered if they had
gone all the way to Vegas and if the car was now parked in the motel
garage where Shadway had told Rachael to put it.
The cold, inhuman rage that he had felt in his dream was in him still,
although redirected now from an ambereyed, burrow-dwelling little mammal
to Rachael. His hatred of her was overwhelming, and his need to get his
hands on her-tear out her throat, rip open her gutswas building toward a
frenzy.
He fumbled in the pitch-black trunk for the screwdriver. Though there
was no more light than before, he did not seem quite as blind as he had
been. If he was not actually seeing the vague dimensions of his Stygian
cell, then he was evidently apprehending them with some newfound sixth
sense, for he possessed at least a threshold awareness of the position
and features of each metal wall.
He also perceived the screwdriver lying against the wall near his knees,
and when he reached down to test the validity of that perception, he put
his hand on the ribbed Lucite handle of the tool.
He popped the trunk lid.
Light speared in. For a moment his eyes stung, then adjusted.
ammunition hidden under the driver’s seat, where she had put them when
she stopped for gas at the entrance to 1-15. She closed the door,
locked it more from habit than out of necessity.
For a moment she looked up at the sky, which was ninety percent
concealed behind steel-gray clouds, as if it were girdling itself in
armor. The day remained very hot, between ninety and one hundred
degrees, although two hours ago, before the cloud cover settled in, the
temperature had surely been ten or even twenty degrees higher.
Out on the interstate, two enormous eighteen-wheelers roared by, heading
east, ripping apart the desert’s quiet fabric but laying down an even
more seamless cloth of silence in their wake.
Walking to the door of the women’s rest room, she passed a sign that
warned travelers to watch out for rattlesnakes. She supposed they liked
to slither in from the desert and stretch full-length on the sunbaked
concrete sidewalks.
The rest room was hot, ventilated only by jalousie windows set high in
the walls, but at least it had been cleaned recently. The place smelled
of pine-scented disinfectant. She also detected the limey odor of
concrete that had cooked too long in the fierce desert sun.
I, I.
Eric ascended slowly from an intense and vivid dreamr perhaps an
unthinkably ancient racial memory-in which he was something other than a
man. He was crawling inside a rough-walled burrow, not his own but that