He was kneeling at the entrance to a den of the deadly creatures, a nest
that was apparently flooding with the runoff from the storm. The
rattlers wriggled forth and, finding the man-thing in their midst,
immediately struck at his thighs and arms, biting him repeatedly.
Though Eric neither cried out nor flinched, Rachael was filled with
relief, knowing that he would soon collapse from the effects of the
venom.
He threw aside the half-eaten snake and seized another.
With no diminishment of his perverse hunger, he sank his pointed,
razored teeth into the snake’s living flesh and tore loose one dripping
gobbet after another. Maybe his altered metabolism was capable of
dealing with the potent venom of the rattlersither breaking it down into
an array of harmless chemicals, or repairing tissues as rapidly as the
venom damaged them.
Chain lightning flashed back and forth across the malevolent sky, and in
that incandescent flare, Encs long sharp teeth gleamed like shards of a
broken mirror.
His strangely shining eyes cast back a cold reflection of the celestial
fire. His wet, tangled hair streamed with short-lived silvery
brightness, the rain glistered like molten silver on his face, and all
around him the earth sizzled as if the lightning-lined water was
actually melted fat bubbling and crackling in a frying pan.
At last, Rachael broke the mesmeric hold that the scene exerted, turned
from the flute hole, and ran back the way she had come. She sought
another hollow between other low hills, a different route that would
lead her to the roadside comfort station and the Mercedes.
Leaving the hilly area and recrossing the sandy plains, she was
frequently the tallest thing in sight, much taller than the desert
scrub. Once more, she worried about being struck by lightning. In the
eerie stroboscopic light, the bleak and barren land appeared to leap and
fall and leap again, as if eons of geological activity were being
compressed into a few frantic seconds.
She tried to enter an arroyo, where she might be safe from the
lightning. But the deep gulch was two-thirds full of muddy, churning
water. Flotillas of whirling tumbleweed boats and bobbing mesquite
rafts were borne on the water’s rolling back.
She was forced to find a route around the network of flooded arroyos.
But in time she came to the rest area where she had first encountered
Eric. Her purse was still where she had dropped it, and she picked it
up. The Mercedes was also exactly where she’d left it.
A few steps from the car, she halted abruptly, for she saw that the
trunk lid, previously open, was now closed. She had the dreadful
feeling that Ericr the thing that had once been Eric-had returned ahead
of her, had climbed into the trunk again, and had pulled the lid shut
behind him.
Shaking, indecisive, afraid, Rachael stood in the drenching rain,
reluctant to go closer to the car. The parking lot, lacking adequate
drainage, was being transformed into a shallow lake. She stood in water
that came over the tops of her running shoes.
The thirty-two pistol was under the driver’s seat. If she could reach
it before Eric threw open the trunk lid and came out…
Behind her, the staccato plop-plop-p10P of water dripping off the
picnic-table cover sounded like scurrying rats.
More water sheeted off the comfort-station roof, splashing on the
sidewalk. All around, the falling rain slashed into the pools and
puddles with a acklingcellophane sound that seemed to grow louder by the
second.
She took a step toward the car, another, halted again.
He might not be in the trunk but inside the car itself.
He might have closed the trunk and slipped into the back seat or even
into the front, where he could be lying nowsilent, still, unseenwaifing
for her to open the door.
Waiting to sink his teeth into her the way he’d sunk them into the
snakes…
Rain streamed off the roof of the Mercedes, rippled down the windows,
blurring her view of the car’s shadowy interior.
Scared to approach the car but equally afraid of turning back, Rachael
at last took another step forward.
Lightning flashed. Looming large and ominous in the stuttering light,