Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

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

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *