Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

the heel of her right shoe. She couldn’t help it, she had to look down

this time, and there he was, dear God, the Eric-thing, on the arroyo

wall beneath her, holding himself in place with one hand, reaching up

with the other, trying to get a grip on her shoe, coming up only an inch

short of his goal.

With dismaying agility, more like an animal than a human being, he flung

himself upward. His hands and knees and feet refastened to the earthen

wall with frightening ease. He reached eagerly for her again.

He was now close enough to clutch at her calf instead of at the bottom

of her shoe.

But she was not exactly moving like a sloth. She was damn fast, too,

responding even as he moved toward her.

Reflexes goosed by a flood of adrenaline, she let go of wall of the

arroyo did not give way entirely. In a minute he would reach the bottom

and then, in ten steps, would be on top of her.

Rachael pushed up from the ground, ran toward the other wall of the

gulch, intending to climb it, but realized she had dropped her car keys.

She might never find her way back to the car, in fact, she’d probably

either be brought down by Eric or get lost in the wasteland, but if by

some miracle she did reach the Mercedes, she had to have the keys.

Eric was almost halfway down the slope, descending through dust that

rose from the slide he had started.

Frantically looking for the keys, she returned to the place where she’d

fallen, and at first she couldn’t see them. Then she glimpsed the shiny

notched edges poking out of the powdery brown silt, almost entirely

buried.

Evidently she’d fallen atop the keys, pressing them into the soft soil.

She snatched them up.

Eric was more than halfway to the arroyo floor.

He was making a strange sound, a thin, shrill cryhalf stage whisper,

half shriek.

Thunder pounded the sky, somewhat closer now.

Still pouring sweat, gasping for breath, her mouth seared by the hot

air, her lungs aching, she ran to the far wall again, shoving the car

keys into a pocket of her jeans. This embankment had the same degree of

slope as the one Eric was descending, but Rachael discovered that

ascending on her feet was not as easy as coming down that way, the angle

worked against her as much as it would have worked for her if she’d been

going the other direction. After three or four yards, she had to drop

forward against the bank, desperately using hands and knees and feet to

hold on and thrust herself steadily up the incline.

Eric’s eerie whisper-shriek rose behind her, closer.

She dared not look back.

Fifteen feet farther to the top.

Her progress was maddeningly hampered every foot of the way by the

softness of the earth face she was climbing. In spots, it tended to

crumble under her as the wall with her knees and feet, holding on only

to the rock ledge an arm’s length above her head, dangling, recklessly

letting the untested stone support her entire weight. As he reached for

her, she pulled her legs up, then kicked down with both feet, putting

all the power of her thighs into it, striking his grasping hand,

smashing his long bony, mutant fingers.

He loosed an inhuman wail.

She kicked again.

Instead of slipping back down the wall, as Rachael had hoped he would,

Eric held on to it, surged upward another foot, shrieking in triumph,

and took a swipe at her.

At the same moment she kicked out again, smashing one foot into his arm,

stomping the other squarely into his face.

She heard her jeans tear, then felt a flash of pain and knew that he had

hooked claws through the denim even as her kick had landed.

He bellowed in pain, finally lost his hold on the wall, and hung for an

instant by the claws in her jeans. Then the claws snapped, and the

cloth tore, and he fell away into the arroyo.

Rachael didn’t wait long enough to watch him tumble two stories to the

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