jawline, pulling his nominally human countenance forward into a
rudimentary, misshapen snout.
His legs began to give way beneath him, so he turned reluctantly from
the window, and with a crash he fell to his knees on the floor.
Something snapped in his chest.
To accommodate the snoutlike restructuring of his visage, his lips split
farther back along his cheeks. He dragged himself onto the bed, rolled
onto his back, giving himself entirely to the devastating yet not
essentially unpleasant process of revolutionary change, and as from a
great distance he heard himself making peculiar sounds, a doglike growl,
a reptilian hiss, and the wordless but unmistakable exclamations of a
man in the throes of sexual orgasm.
For a while, darkness claimed him.
When he came partially to his senses a few minutes later, he found that
he had rolled off the bed and was lying beneath the window, where he had
recently been keeping a watch for Rachael. Although the changefire had
not grown cooler, although he still felt his tissues seeking new forms
in every part of his body, he resolutely pushed aside the drapes and
reached up toward the window. In the dim light, his hands looked
enormous and chitinous, as if they belonged to a crab or lobster that
had been gifted with fingers instead of pincers. He grabbed the sill
and pulled himself off the floor, stood. He leaned against the glass,
his breath coming in great hot gasps that steamed the pane.
Light shone in the windows of the motel office.
Rachael must have arrived.
Instantly he was seething with hatred. The motivating memory-smell of
blood filled his nostrils.
But he also had an immense and strangely formed erection. He wanted to
mount her, then kill her as he had taken and then slain the cowboy’s
woman. In his degenerate and mutant state, he was unsettled to discover
that he was having trouble holding on to an understanding of her
identity. Second by second he was ceasing to care who she was, the only
thing that mattered now was that she was female and prey.
He turned away from the window and tried to reach the door, but his
metamorphosing legs collapsed beneath him. Again, for a time, he
squirmed and writhed upon the motel floor, the changefire hotter than
ever within him.
His genes and chromosomes, once the undisputed regulators-the mastersf
his very form and function, had become plastic themselves. They were no
longer primarily re-creating previous stages in human evolution but were
exploring utterly alien forms that had nothing to do with the
physiological history of the human species. They were mutating either
randomly or in response to inexplicable forces and patterns he could not
perceive. And as they mutated, they directed his body to produce the
mad flood of hormones and proteins with which his flesh was molded.
He was becoming something that had never before walked the earth and
that had never been meant to walk it.
The Marine Corps twin-engine turboprop transport from Twentynine Palms
landed in driving rain at McCarren International Airport in Las Vegas at
9,03 P.M. Tuesday. It was only ten minutes ahead of the estimated time
of arrival for the scheduled airline flight from Orange County on which
Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom were passengers.
Harold Ince, a D.S.A agent in the Nevada office, met Anson Sharp, Jerry
Peake, and Nelson Gosser at the debarkation gate.
Gosser immediately headed for another gate, where the incoming flight
from Orange County would unload.
It would be his job to run a discreet tail on Verdad and Hagerstrom
until they had left the terminal, whereupon they would become the
responsibility of the surveillance team that would be waiting outside.
Ince said, “Mr. Sharp, sir, we’re cutting it awful close.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Sharp said, walking swiftly across the
waiting area that served the gate, toward the long corridor that led to
the front of the terminal.
Peake hurried after Sharp, and Ince-a much shorter man than Shahustled
to stay at his side. “Sir, the car s waiting for you out front,
discreetly at the end of the taxi line, as you requested.”
“Good. But what if they don’t take a cab?”