bottom of the gulch, but turned at once to the demanding task of heaving
herself onto the narrow stone ledge from which she hung precariously.
Pulsations of pain, throbbing in time with her wildly pounding heart,
coursed through her arms from wrists to shoulders. Her straining
muscles twitched and rebelled at her demands. Clenching her teeth,
breathing through her nose so hard that she snorted like a horse, she
struggled upward, digging at the wall beneath the ledge with her feet to
provide what little thrust she could. By sheer perseverance and
determination-spiced with a generous measure of motivating terror-she
clambered onto the ledge at last.
Exhausted, suffering several pains, she nevertheless refused to pause.
She dragged herself up the last eight feet of the arroyo wall, finding
handholds in a few final outcroppings of rock and among the
erosion-exposed roots of the mesquite bushes that grew at the brink.
Then she was at the edge, over the top, pushing through a break in the
mesquite, and she rolled onto the surface of the desert.
Lightning stepped down the sky as if providing a staircase for some
descending god, and all around Rachael the low desert scrub threw
short-lived, giant shadows.
Thunder followed, hard and flat, and she felt it reverberate in the
ground against her back.
She dragged herself back to the brink of the arroyo, praying that she
would see the Eric-thing still at the bottom, motionless, dead a second
time. Maybe he’d fallen on a rock. There were a few rocks on the floor
of the gulch. It was possible. Maybe he had landed on one of them and
had snapped his spine.
She peered over the edge.
He was more than halfway up the wall again.
Lightning flashed, illuminating his deformed face, silvering his inhuman
eyes, plating an electric gleam to his too-sharp teeth.
Leaping up, Rachael started kicking at the loose earth along the brink
and at the brush that grew there, knocking it down on top of him. He
hung from the quartz-veined ledge, keeping his head under it for
protection, so the sandy earth and brush cascaded harmlessly over him.
She stopped kicking dirt, looked around for some stones, found a few
about the size of eggs, and hurled them down at his hands. When the
stones connected with his grotesque fingers, he let go of the ledge and
moved entirely under it, clinging to the earth in the shadow of that
stone shell, where she could not hit him.
She could wait for him to reappear, then pelt him again. She could keep
him pinned there for hours. But nothing would be gained. It would be a
tense, wearying, futile enterprise, when she exhausted the supply of
stones within her reach and had only dirt to throw, he would ascend with
animal quickness, undeterred by that pathetic bombardment, and he would
finish her.
A white-hot celestial cauldron tipped, spilling forth a third molten
streak of lightning. It made contact with the earth much closer than
the two before it, no more than a quarter of a mile away, accompanied by
a simultaneous crash worthy of Armageddon, and with a crackle-sizzle
that was the voice of Death speaking in the language of electricity.
Below, unfazed by the lightning, emboldened by the cessation of the
attack Rachael had been waging, the Eric-thing put one monstrous hand
over the edge of the ledge.
She kicked more dirt down on him, lots of it. He withdrew his hand,
taking shelter again, but she continued to stomp away at the rotten
brink of the embankment.
Suddenly an enormous chunk collapsed directly under her feet, and she
nearly fell into the arroyo. As the ground began to shift, she threw
herself backward just in time to avoid catastrophe, and landed hard on
her buttocks.
With so much dirt pouring down over him, he might hesitate longer before
making another attempt to pull himself across the overhanging ledge. His
caution might give her an extra couple of minutes’ lead time. She got
up and sprinted off into the forbidding desert.
The overused muscles in her legs were repeatedly stabbed and split by
cleaver-sharp pains. Her right ankle remained tender, and her right