counter and slammed backward into the refrigerator hard enough to send a
brief though intense current of pain from the small of her back to the
base of her neck.
It came in from the garage. In the kitchen light, it appeared immense
and was more hideous than she had wanted to believe.
For a moment, it stood just inside the door, glaring across the small
dusty kitchen. It lifted its head and each syllable obviously required
tremendous effort and perhaps some pain. “Come… for… you…
It took a step toward her, its arms swinging against its sides with a
scraping, clicking, chitinous sound.
It.
She could no longer think of him as Eric, as her husband. Now, he was
just a thing, an abomination, that by its very existence made a mockery
of everything else in God’s creation.
She fired point-blank at its chest.
It did not even flinch at the impact of the slug. It emitted a
high-pitched squeal that seemed more an expression of eagerness than
pain. and it took another step.
She fired again, then a third time, and a fourth.
The multiple impacts of the slugs made the beast stagger slightly to one
side, but it did not go down.
“Rachael . . . Rachael .
Whitney shouted, “Shoot it, kill it!”
The pistol’s clip held ten rounds. She squeezed off the last six as
fast as she could, certain that she hit the thing every time in the gut
and chest and even in the face.
It finally roared in pain and collapsed onto its knees, then toppled
facedown in the mud.
“Thank God,” she said shakily, “thank God,” and she was suddenly so weak
that she had to lean against the outside wall of the garage.
The Eric-thing retched, gagged, twitched, and pushed up onto hands and
knees.
“No,” she said disbelievingly.
It raised its grisly head and stared fiercely at her with cold,
mismatched lantern eyes. Slowly lids slid down over the eyes, then
slowly up, and when revealed again, those radiant ovals seemed brighter
than before.
Even if its altered genetic structure provided for incredibly rapid
healing and for resurrection after death, surely it could not recover
this fast. If it could repair and reanimate itself in seconds after
succumbing to ten bullet wounds, it was not just a quick healer, and not
just potentially immortal, but virtually invincible.
“Die, damn you,” she said.
expanded its chest as if giving her an opportunity to admire it. Its
flesh was mottled brown-gray-green-black, with lighter patches that
almost resembled human skin, though it was mostly pebbled like elephant
hide and scaly in some places. The head was pear-shaped, set at a slant
on the thick muscular neck, with the round end at the top and the
slimmer end at the bottom of the face. The entire narrow part of the
“pear” was composed of a snoutlike protrusion and jaws. When it opened
its enormous mouth to hiss, the pointed teeth within were sharklike in
their sharpness and profusion. The darting tongue was dark and quick
and utterly inhuman. Its entire face was lumpy, in addition to a pair
of hornlike knobs on its forehead, there were odd convexities and
concavities that seemed to have no biological purpose, plus tumorous
knots of bone or other tissue. On its brow and radiating downward from
its eyes, throbbing arteries and swollen veins shone just beneath the
skin.
In the Mojave, earlier in the day, she had thought that Eric was
undergoing retrograde evolution, that his genetically altered body was
becoming a sort of patchwork of ancient racial forms. But this thing
owed nothing to human physiological history. This was the nightmare
product of genetic chaos, a creature that went neither backward nor
forward along the chain of human evolution. It was embarked upon a
sidewise biological revolution and had severed most if not all links
with the human seed from which it sprang. Some of Eric’s consciousness
evidently still existed within the dreadful hulk, although Rachael
suspected only the faintest trace of his personality and intellect
remained and that soon even this spark of Eric would be extinguished
forever.
“See. . . me it said, reinforcing her feeling that it was preening