anything other than wait for the blinding storm to subside. He would be
of no help whatsoever to Rachael if he lost control of the car on the
rain-greased pavement, slid into one of the big eighteen-wheelers that
constituted most of the sparse traffic, and got himself killed.
After Ben had waited through ten minutes of the hardest rain he had ever
seen, as he was beginning to wonder if it would ever let up, he saw that
a sluice of fast-moving dirty water had overflowed the drainage channel
beside the road. Because the highway was elevated a few feet above the
surrounding land, the water could not flow onto the pavement, but it did
spill into the desert beyond. As he looked out the side window of the
Merkur, he saw a sinuous dark form gliding smoothly across the surface
of the racing yellow-brown torrent, then another similar form, then a
third and a fourth.
For a moment he stared uncomprehendingly before he realized they were
rattlesnakes driven out of the ground when their dens flooded. There
must have been several nests of rattlers in the immediate area, for in
moments two score of them appeared. They made their way across the
steadily widening spate to higher and drier ground, where they came
together, coiling among one anotherweaving, tangling, knotting their
long bodiesforming a writhing and fluxuous mass, as if they were not
individual creatures but parts of one entity that had become detached in
the deluge and was now struggling to re-form itself.
Lightning flashed.
The squirming rattlers, like the mane of an otherwise buried Medusa,
appeared to churn with greater fury as the stroboscopic storm light
revealed them in stuttering flashes.
The sight sent a chill to the very marrow of Ben’s bones. He looked
away from the serpents and stared straight ahead through the rain-washed
windshield. Minute by minute, his optimism was fading, his despair was
growing, his fear for Rachael had attained such depth and intensity that
it began to shake him, physically shake him, and he sat shivering in the
stolen car, in the blinding rain, upon the somber storm-hammered desert.
The cloudburst erased whatever trail Rachael might have left, which was
good, but the storm had drawbacks, too. Though the downpour had reduced
the temperature only a few degrees, leaving the day still very warm, and
although she was not even slightly chilled, she was nevertheless soaked
to the skin. Worse, the drenching rain fell in cataracts which,
combined with the midday gloom that the gray-black clouds had imposed
upon the land, made it difficult to maintain a good sense of direction,
even when she risked ascending from one of the hollows onto a hill, to
get a fix on her position, the poor visibility left her less than
certain that she was heading back toward the rest area and the Mercedes.
Worse still, the lightning shattered through the malignant bellies of
the thunderheads and crashed to the ground with such frequency that she
figured it was only a matter of time until she was struck by one of
those bolts and reduced to a charred and smoking corpse.
But worst of all, the loud and unrelenting noise of the rain-the
hissing, chuckling, sizzling, crackling, gurgling, dripping, burbling,
and hollow steady drummingblotted out any warming sounds that the
Eric-thing might have made in pursuit of her, so she was in greater
danger of being set upon by surprise. She repeatedly looked behind her
and glanced worriedly at the tops of the gentle slopes on both sides of
the shallow little hollow through which she hurried. She slowed every
time she approached a turn in the course of the hollow, fearing that he
would be just around the bend, would loom out of the rain, strange eyes
radiant in the gloom, and would seize her in his hideous hands.
When, without warming, she encountered him at last, he did not see her.
She turned one of those bends that she found so frightening, and Eric
was only twenty or thirty feet away, on his knees in the middle of the
hollow, preoccupied with some task that Rachael could not at first
understand. A wind-carved, flute-holed rock formation projected out