calf burned where the claws had cut through her jeans.
Her mouth was drier than ever, and her throat was cracking. Her lungs
felt seared by her deep shuddering gasps of hot desert air.
She didn’t succumb to the agony, couldn’t afford to succumb, just kept
on running, not as fast as before but as fast as she could.
Ahead, the land became less flat than it had been, began to roll in a
series of low hills and hollows. She ran up a hill and down, up
another, on and on, trying to put concealing barriers between herself
and Eric before he crawled out of the arroyo. Eventually, deciding to
stay in one of the hollows, she turned in a direction that she thought
was north, though her sense of direction might have become totally
fouled up during the chase, she believed she had to go north first, then
east, if she hoped to circle around to the Mercedes, which was now at
least a mile away, probably much farther.
Lightning… lightning.
This time, an incredibly long-lived bolt glimmered between the
thunderheads and the ground below for at least ten seconds,
racing-jigging south to north, like a gigantic needle trying to sew the
storm tight to the land forever.
That flash and the empyrean blast that followed were sufficient to bring
the rain at last. It fell hard, pasting Rachael’s hair to her skull,
stinging her face. It was cool, blessedly cool. She licked her chapped
lips, grateful for the moisture.
Several times she looked back, dreading what she would see, but Eric was
never there.
She had lost him. And even if she’d left footprints to mark her flight,
the rain would swiftly erase them. In his alien incarnation, he might
somehow be able to track her by scent, but the rain would provide cover
in that regard as well, scrubbing her odor from the land and air. Even
if his strange eyes provided better vision than the human eyes they had
once been, he would not be able to see far in this heavy rain and gloom.
You’ve escaped, she told herself as she hurried north.
You’re going to be safe.
It was probably true.
But she didn’t believe it.
By the time Ben Shadway drove just a few miles east of Barstow, the rain
not only filled the world but became the world. Except for the
metronomic thump of the windshield wipers, all sounds were those of
water in motion, drowning out everything else, a ceaseless drumming on
the roof of the Merkur, the snap-snapsnap of droplets hitting the
windshield at high speed, the slosh and hiss of wet pavement under the
tires. Beyond the comfortablethough abruptly humidonfines of the car,
most of the light had bled out of the bruised and wounded storm-dark
sky, and little remained to be seen other than the omnipresent rain
falling in millions of slanting gray lines. Sometimes the wind caught
sheets of water the same way it might catch sheer curtains at an open
window, blowing them across the vast desert floor in graceful, undulant
patterns, one filmy layer after another, gray on gray. When the
lightning flashed-which it did with unnerving frequency-billions of
drops turned bright silver, and for a second or two, it appeared as if
snow were falling on the Mojave, at other times, the
lightning-transformed rain seemed more like glittery, streaming tinsel.
The downpour grew worse until the windshield wipers could not keep the
glass clear. Hunching over the steering wheel, Ben squinted into the
storm-lashed day.
The highway ahead was barely visible. He had switched on the
headlights, which did not improve visibility.
But the headlights of oncoming cars-though fewwere refracted by the film
of water on the windshield, stinging his eyes.
He slowed to forty, then thirty. Finally, because the nearest rest area
was over twenty miles ahead, he drove onto the narrow shoulder of the
highway, stopped, left the engine running, and switched on the Merkur’ 5
emergency blinkers. Since he had failed to reach Whitney Gavis, his
concern for Rachael was greater than ever, and he was more acutely aware
of his inadequacies by the minute, but it would be foolhardy to do