limits-he made an exception in this case and pushed the big rig up to
sixty-five and seventy miles an hour, which was as fast as he felt he
dared go in this foul weather.
Huddled under the warm wool blanket, sipping coffee, chewing the sweet
granola bar and thinking bitter thoughts of death and loss, Ben was
grateful to Amos Tate, but he wished they could make even better speed.
If love was the closest that human beings could hope to come to
immortality-which was what he’d thought when in bed with Rachael-then he
had been given a key to life everlasting when he had found her.
Now, at the gates of that paradise, it seemed the key was being snatched
out of his hand. When he considered the bleakrless of life without her,
he wanted to seize control of the truck from Amos, push the driver
aside, get behind the wheel, and make the rig fly to Vegas.
But all he could do was pull the blanket a little tighter around himself
and, with growing trepidation, watch the dark miles go by.
The manager’s apartment at the Golden Sand Inn had been unused for a
month or more, and it had a stale smell. Although the odor was not
strong, Rachael repeatedly wrinkled her nose in distaste. There was a
quality of putrescence in the smell which, over time, would probably
leave her nauseated.
The living room was large, the bedroom small, the bathroom minuscule.
The tiny kitchen was cramped and dreary but completely equipped. The
walls did not look as if they had been painted in a decade. The carpets
were threadbare, and the kitchen linoleum was cracked and discolored.
The furniture was sagging and scarred and splitting at the seams, and
the major kitchen appliances were dented and scraped and yellowing with
age.
“Not a layout you’re ever going to see in Architectural Digest,” Whitney
Gavis said, hracing himself against the refrigerator with the stump of
his left arm and reaching behind with his one good hand to insert the
plug in the wall socket. The motor came on at once. “But the stuff
works, pretty much, and it’s unlikely anyone’s going to look for you
here.”
As they had gone through the apartment, turning on lights, she had begun
to tell him the real story behind the warrants for her and Benny’s
arrest. Now they pulled up chairs at the Formica-topped kitchen table,
which was filmed with gray dust and ringed with a score of cigarette
scars, and she told him the rest of it as succinctly as she could.
Outside, the moaning wind seemed like a sentient beast, pressing its
featureless face to the windows as if it wanted to hear the tale she
told or as if it had something of its own to add to the story.
Standing at the window of room 15, waiting for Rachael to arrive, Eric
had felt the changefire growing hotter within him. He began to pour
sweat, it streamed off his brow and down his face, gushed from every
pore as if trying to match the rate at which the rain ran off the awning
of the promenade beyond the window. He felt as if he were standing in a
furnace, and every breath he drew seared through his lungs. All around
him now, in every corner, the room was filled with the phantom flames of
shadowfires, at which he dared not look. His bones felt molten, and his
flesh was so hot that he would not have been surprised to see real
flames spurt from his fingertips.
“Melting.. .” he said in a voice deep and guttural and thoroughly
inhuman. …. …… melting man.”
His face suddenly shzfted A terrible crunchingsplintering noise filled
his ears for a moment, issuing – from within his skull, but it turned
almost at once into a sickening, spluttering, oozing liquid sound. The
process was accelerating insanely. Horrified, terrified-but also with a
dark exhilaration and a wild demonic joy-he sensed his face changing
shape. For a moment he was aware of a gnarled brow extending so far out
over his eyes that it penetrated his peripheral vision, but then it was
gone, subsiding, the new bone melting into his nose and mouth and