radiant pale green orb was undergoing changes that would no doubt make
it more like the orange serpent’s eye. She was so close that she could
see the unspeakable hatred in that alien gaze. It.
it was no more than six feet from her.
Its breath reeked.
She somehow knew that it could see her clearly.
And it was reaching for her in the darkness.
She sensed its grotesque hand straining toward her.
She pressed back against the concrete blocks.
Think, think.
Cornered, she could do nothing except embrace one of the very dangers
that she had thus far been striving to avoid, Instead of clinging
precariously to the beams, she threw herself to one side, into the
insulated hollow between a pair of two-by-fours, and the old Sheetrock
cracked and collapsed beneath her. She fell straight out of the attic,
down through the ceiling of one of the motel rooms, praying that she
would not land on the edge of a dresser or chair, would not break her
back, praying that she would not become easy meat -and she dropped smack
into the middle of a bed with broken springs and a mattress that had
become a breeding ground for mold and fungus. Those cold and slimy
growths burst beneath her, spewing spores, oozing sticky fluids, and
exuding a noxious odor almost as bad as rotten eggs, though she breathed
deeply of it without complaint because she was alive and unhurt.
had become, he understood as much as he needed to understand for the
moment. Leben was both Dr. Frankenstein and the Frankenstein monster,
both the experimenter and the unlucky subject of the experiment, a
genius and a damned soul.
Rachael reached Ben, grabbed him by the arm, and said, “Come on, come
on, hurry.”
“I can’t leave Whit,” he said. “Stand back. Let me get a clear shot at
it.”
“No! That’s no good, no gc,d. Jesus, I shot it ten times, and it got
right up again.
“This is a hell of a lot more powerful weapon than yours,” he insisted.
The hideous Grendelesque figure raced toward then virtually galloped in
long graceful stridesalong the canopied promenade, not in the awkward
shamble that Ben had expected when first catching sight of it, but with
startling and dismaying speed. Even in the weak gray light, parts of
its body appeared to glisten like polished obsidian armor, not unlike
the shells of certain insects, while in other places there was the
scintillant silvery sheen of scales.
Ben barely had time to spread his legs in a shooter’s stance, raise the
Combat Magnum in both hands, and squeeze off a shot. The revolver
roared, and fire flashed from its muzzle.
Fifteen feet away, the creature was jolted by the impact of the slug,
stumbled, but did not go down. Hell, it didn’t even stop, it came
forward with less speed but still too fast.
He squeezed off a second shot, a third.
The beast screamed-a sound like nothing Ben had ever heard, and like
nothing he wanted to hear again-and was at last halted. It fell against
one of the steel poles that held up the aluminum awning and clung to
that support Ben fired again, hitting it in the throat this time.
The impact of the .357 Magnum blew it away from the awning pest and sent
it staggering backward.
The fifth shot knocked it down at last, although only to its knees. It
put one shovel-size hand to the front Above, the Eric-thing started down
through the ceiling in a less radical fashion than she had chosen,
clinging to the ceiling beams and kicking out more Sheetrock to make a
wider passageway for itself.
She rolled off the bed and stumbled across the dark motel room in search
of the door.
b In the manager’s apartment, Ben found the shattered bedroom door, but
the bedroom itself was deserted, as were the living room and the
kitchen. He looked in the garage as well, but neither Rachael nor Eric
was there.
Finding nothing was better than finding a lot of blood or her battered
corpse, though not mucJi better.
With Whitney’s urgent warnings still echoing in his mind, Ben quickly