leaping reflection of the lightning that flashed along the eastern
horizon. Tall and well-muscled, the cowboy would have been a dangerous
adversary in a fight with an ordinary man, but Eric Leben was no longer
an ordinary man-or even quite a man at all. And the cowboy’s shock at
his attacker’s appearance was a grave disadvantage, for it paralyzed
him. Eric slammed into his prey and drove all five talons of his right
hand into the man’s belly, very deep. At the same time, seizing his
prey’s throat with his other hand, he destroyed the windpipe, ripping
out the voice box and vocal cords, ensuring instant silence. Blood
spurted from severed carotid arteries. Death glazed the cowboy’s eyes
even before Eric tore open his belly. Steaming guts cascaded onto
rain-wet concrete, and the dead man collapsed into his own hot entrails.
Feeling wild and free and powerful, Eric settled down atop the warm
corpse. Strangely, killing no longer repulsed or frightened him. He
was becoming a primal beast who took a savage delight in slaughter.
However, even the part of him that remained civilizedthe Eric Leben
part-was undeniably exhilarated by the violence, as well as by the
enormous power and catlike quickness of his mutant body. He knew he
should have been shocked, nauseated, but he was not. All his life, he
had needed to dominate others, to crush his adversaries, and now the
need found expression in its purest form, cruel, merciless, violent
murder.
He was also, for the first time, able to remember clearly the murder of
the two young women whose car he had stolen in Santa Ana on Monday
evening.
He felt no burdensome responsibility for their deaths, no rush of guilt,
only a sweet dark satisfaction and a fierce sort of glee.
Indeed, the memory of their spilled blood, the memory of the naked woman
whom he had nailed to the wall, only contributed to his exhilaration
over the murder of the cowboy, and his heart pounded out a rhythm of icy
joy.
Then, for a while, lowering himself onto the corpse by the men’s-room
door, he lost all conscious awareness of himself as a creature of
intellect, as a creature with a past and a future. He descended into a
dreamy state where the only sensations were the smell and taste of
blood. The drumming and gurgling of rain continued to reach him, too,
but it seemed now that it was an internal rather than external noise,
perhaps the sound of change surging through his arteries, veins, bones,
and tissues.
He was jolted out of his trance by a scream. He looked up from the
ruined tItroat of his prey, where he’d buried his muzzle. A woman was
standing at the corner of the building, wide-eyed, one arm held
defensively across her breasts. Judging by her boots, jeans, and cowboy
shirt, she was with the man whom Eric had just killed.
Eric realized that he had been feeding on his prey, and he was neither
startled nor appalled by that realization.
A lion would not be surprised or dismayed by its own savagery. His
racing metabolism generated hunger unlike any he had ever known, and he
needed rich nutrients to allay those pangs. In the meat of his prey, he
found the food he required, just as the lion found what it needed in the
flesh of the gazelle.
The woman tried to scream again but could not make a sound.
Eric rose from the corpse. He licked his blood-slicked lips.
The woman ran into the wind-driven rain. Her Stetson flew off, and her
yellow hair streamed behind her, the only brightness in the
storm-blackened day.
Eric pursued her. He found indescribable pleasure in the feel of his
feet pounding on the hard concrete, then on waterlogged sand. He
splashed across the flooded macadam parking lot, gaining on her by the
second.
She was heading toward a dull red pickup truck. She glanced back and
saw him drawing nearer. She must have realized that she would not reach
the pickup in time to start it and drive away, so she turned toward the
interstate, evidently hoping to get help from the driver of one of the