reckless, and he had to struggle against the urge to rush forward and
throw himself upon her. He sensed that the footing here was perilous,
yet caution had far less appeal than the prospect of sexual release.
Somehow he knew that it was dangerous to stray off the beams and into
the hollow spaces, though he did not know why. Keeping to those safe
tracks was easier for him than for the prey, because in spite of his
size he was more agile than she. Besides, he could see where he was
going, and she could not.
Each time she started to look back, he squinted so she would not be able
to pinpoint his position by spotting his radiant eyes. When she paused
to listen, she could surely hear him coming, but her inability to get a
visual fix had her obviously terrified.
The stink of her acute terror was as strong as her femaleness, though
sour. The former scent sparked his blood lust as effectively as the
latter incited his sexual desire. He longed to feel her blood spurting
against his lips, to taste it on his tongue, to push his mouth within
her slashed abdomen in search of the rich and satisfying flesh of her
liver.
He was twenty feet behind her.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Ben helped Whit sit up against a four-loot-high retaining wall that
enclosed a tangle of weeds where once had been a bed of flowers. Above
them, the motel sign scraped and creaked in the wind.
“Don’t worry about me,” Whit said, pushing him away.
“Your face-” “Help her. Help Rachael.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’ll live, I’ll live. But it’s after Rachael,” Whit said with that
unnervingly familiar note of purest horror and desperation that Ben had
not heard in anyone’s voice since Vietnam. “It left me, and it went
after her.”
“It?”
“You have a gun? Good. A Magnum. Good.”
“It?” Ben repeated.
Abruptly the wind wailed louder, and the rain fell as if a dam had
broken above them, and Whit raised his voice to be heard over the storm.
“Leben. It’s Leben, but he’s changed. My God, he’s changed.
Not really Leben anymore. Genetic chaos, she calls it. Retrograde
evolution, devolution, she says. Massive mutations. Hurry, Ben! The
manager’s apartment!”
Unable to understand what the hell Whit was talking about, but sensing
that Rachael was in even graver danger than he had feared, Ben left his
old friend propped against the retaining wall and ran toward the
entrance to the motel office.
Blind, half deafened by the thunderous impact of the rain upon the roof,
Rachael crawled through the minedark attic as fast as she dared.
Though she was afraid that she was moving too slowly to escape the
beast, she came to the end of the long chamber sooner than she’d
expected, bumping up against the outer wall at the end of the motel’s
first wing.
Crazily, she had given no thought to what she would do when she reached
a dead end. Her mind had been focused so intently upon the need to stay
beyond the reach of the Eric-thing that she had proceeded as if the
attic would go on forever.
She let out a whimper of despair when she discovered that she was
cornered. She shuffled to her right, hoping that the attic made a turn
and continued over the middle wing of the U-shaped building. In fact,
it must have done just that, but she encountered a concrete-block
partition between the two wings, perhaps a fire wall. Searching
frantically in the darkness, she could feel the cool, rough surface of
the blocks and the lines of mortar, and she knew there would be no
pass-through in such a barrier.
Behind her, the Eric-thing issued a wordless cry of triumph and obscene
hunger that pierced the curtain of rain noise and seemed to originate
only inches from her ear.
She gasped and snapped her head around, shocked by the nearness of the
demonic voice. She’d thought she had a minute to scheme, half a minute
at least.
But for the first time since the beast had cast the attic into absolute
darkness by closing the trap door, Rachael saw its murderous eyes. The