simply did not know what it was he wanted.
She could not move, either, partly because she was paralyzed by terror
but partly because she desperately wanted to understand what had
happened to him. If in fact he was being pulled in opposing directions
by the many racial memories within his genes, if he was devolving toward
a subhuman state while his modern form and intellect strove to retain
dominance of its tissues, then it seemed every change in him should be
functional, with a purpose obviously connected to one prehuman form or
another. However, that did not appear to be the case.
In his face, pulsing arteries and gnarled veins and bony excrescences
and random concavities seemed to exist without reason, with no
connection to any known creature on the evolutionary ladder. The same
was true of the hump on his back. She suspected that, in addition to
the reassertion of various forms from human biological heritage, mutated
genes were causing purposeless changes in him or, perhaps, were pushing
him toward some alien life-form utterly different from the human
species.
“Rachael..
His teeth were sharp.
“Rachael…
The gray-blue irises of his eyes were no longer perfectly round but were
tending toward a vertical-oval shape like those in the eyes of serpents.
Not all the way there, yet. Apparently still in the middle of
metamorphosis. But no longer quitethe eyes of a man.
“Rachael…
His nose seemed to have collapsed part of the way into his face, and the
nostrils were more exposed than before.
Rachael… please… please He held one monstrous hand toward her in a
pathetic gesture, and in his raspy voice was a note of misery and
another of self-pity.
But there was an even more obvious and more affecting note of love and
longing that seemed to surprise him every bit as much as it surprised
her. “Please . . . please . . .I want…
“Eric,” she said, her own voice almost as strange as his, twisted by
fear and weighted down with sadness.
“What do you want?”
“I want… I. .. I want… not to be…”
“Yes?” afraid…”
She did not know what to say.
He took one step toward her.
She immediately backed up.
He took another step, and she saw that he was having a little trouble
with his feet, as if they had changed within his boots and were no
longer comfortable in that confinement.
Again she retreated to match his advance.
Squeezing the words out as if it were agony to form and expel them, he
said, “I want… you.
“Eric,” she said softly, pityingly.
… you… you…
He took three quick, lurching steps, she scampered four backward.
In that’ voice fit for a man trapped in hell, he said, “Don’t. ..
don’t reject me . . don’t. . .Rachael, don’t…”
“Eric, I can’t help you.”
“Don’t reject me.”
“You’re beyond help, Eric.”
“Don’t reject me… again.”
She had no weapons, just her car keys in one hand and her purse in the
other, and she cursed herself for leaving the pistol in the Mercedes.
She backed farther away from him.
With a savage cry of rage that made Rachael go cold in the late-June
heat, Eric came at her in a headlong rush.
She threw her purse at his head, turned, and sprinted into the desert
behind the comfort station. The soft sand shifted under her feet, and a
couple of times she almost twisted an ankle, almost fell, and the sparse
scrub brush whipped at her legs and almost tripped her, but she did not
fall, kept going, ran fast as the wind, tucked her head down, drew her
elbows in to her sides, ran, ran for her life.
When confronting Rachael on the walk beside the rest rooms, Eric’s
initial reaction had surprised him. Seeing her beautiful face, her
titian hair, and her lovely body beside which he had once lain, Eric was
unexpectedly overcome with remorse for the way he had treated her and
was filled with an unbearable sense of loss. The primal fury that had
been churning in him abruptly subsided, and more human emotions held
sway, though tenuously. Tears stung his eyes. He found it difficult to