catlike whine, partly a thick and menacing growl, and it put the hair up
on the back of his neck.
He turned quickly, cried out, and stumbled backward when he saw the
thing looming over him in the gloom.
Incomprehensibly strange eyes looked down at him from a height of six
and a half feet or more. They were bulging, mismatched eyes, each as
large as an egg, one pale green and the other orange, iridescent like
the eyes of some animals, one rather like the eye of a hyperthyroid cat,
the other featuring a mean slit-shaped iris reminiscent of a serpent,
both beveled and many-faceted, for God’s sake, like the eyes of an
insect.
For a moment Whit stood transfixed. Suddenly a powerful arm lashed out
at him, backhanded him across the face, and knocked him down. He fell
onto the concrete walk, hurting his tailbone, and rolled into mud and
weeds.
The creature’s arm-Leben’s arm, Whit knew that it had to be Eric Leben
transformed beyond understanding-had appeared not to be hinged like a
human arm. It seemed to be segmented, equipped with three or four
smaller, elbowlike joints that could lock in any combination and that
gave it tremendous flexibility. Now, stunned by the vicious blow he had
taken, half paralyzed by terror, looking up at the beast as it
approached him, he saw that it was slump-shouldered and hunchbacked yet
possessed a queer sort of grace, perhaps because its legs, mostly
concealed by tattered jeans, were similar in design to the powerful,
segmented arms.
Whit realized he was screaming. He had screamedreally screamednly once
before in his life, in Nam, when the antipersonnel mine had blown up
beneath him, when he had lain on the jungle floor and had seen the
bottom half of his own leg lying five yards away, the bloody mangled
toes poking through burnt and blasted boot leather. Now he screamed
again and could not stop.
Over his own screams, he heard a shrill keening sound from his
adversary, what might have been a cry of triumph.
Its head rolled and bobbled strangely, and for a moment Whit had a
glimpse of terrible hooked teeth.
He tried to scoot backward across the sodden earth, propelling himself
with his good right arm and the stump of the other, but he was unable to
move fast.
He did not have time to get his legs under him. He managed to retreat
only a couple of yards before Leben reached him and bent down and
grabbed him by the foot of his left leg, fortunately the artificial the
garage.
Even in the night shadows and rain, Whit could see enough of the
man-thing’s hand to know that it was as thoroughly inhuman as the rest
of the beast. And huge.
And powerful.
Frantically Whit Gavis kicked out with his good foot, putting all the
force he had into the blow, and connected solidly with Leben’s leg.
The man-thing shrieked, though apparently not in pain as much as in
anger. In response, it wrenched his artificial leg so hard that the
securing straps tore loose of their buckles. With a brief agony that
robbed Whit of breath, the prosthetic limb came loose, leaving him at an
even greater disadvantage.
In the cramped kitchen of the motel manager’s apartment, Rachael had
just opened the plastic garbage bag and had removed one handful of
rumpled, soiled Xeroxes from the disorganized Wildcard file when she
heard the first scream. She knew immediately that it was Whitney, and
she also knew instinctively that there could be only one cause of it,
Eric.
She threw the papers aside and plucked the thirty-two pistol off the
table. She went to the rear door, hesitated, then unlocked it.
Stepping into the dank garage, she paused again, for there was movement
on all sides of her. A strong draft swept in through the open side door
from the raging night beyond, swinging the single dirty light bulb on
its cord. The motion of the light made shadows leap up and fall back
and leap up again in every corner. She looked around warily at the
stacks of eerily illuminated trash and old furniture, all of which