He snatched the tubing off the hook and hastily stuffed one end into the
Mercedes’s fuel tank. He sucked on the other end and barely avoided
getting a mouthful of gasoline.
Rachael had been busy searching through the junk for a container without
a hole in the bottom. She slipped a galvanized bucket under the siphon
only seconds before the gasoline began to flow.
“I never knew gas fumes could smell so sweet,” he said as he watched the
golden fluid streaming into the bucket.
“Even this might not stop it,” she said worriedly.
“If we saturate it, the damage from fire will be much more extensive
than-” “You have matches?” Rachael interrupted.
He blinked. “No.”
“Me neither.”
“Damn.”
Looking around the cluttered garage, she said, “Would there be any
here?”
Before he could answer, the knob on the side door of the garage rattled
violently. Evidently the Leben-thing had seen them go around the motel
or had followed their trail by scentnly God knew what its capabilities
were, and in this case maybe even God was in the dark-and already it had
arrived.
“The kitchen,” Ben said urgently. “They didn’t bother taking anything
or cleaning out the drawers. Maybe you’ll find some matches there.”
Rachael ran to the end of the garage and disappeared into the apartment.
The beast threw itself against the outside door, which was not a
hollow-core model like the one it had easily smashed through in the
bedroom. This more solid barrier would not immediately collapse, but it
shuddered and clattered in its loosely fitted jamb. The mutant hit it
again, and the door gave out a dry-wood splintering sound but still
held, and then it was hit a third time.
footsteps. He knew that Ben would never bug out on him, so he figured
they’d thought of something else that might stop Leben. The problem was
that, weak as he felt, he did not know if he was going to last long
enough to find out what new strategy they had devised.
He saw another car coming west on Tropicana. He tried to call out but
failed, he tried to raise one arm from his lap so he could wave to
attract attention, but the arm seemed nailed to his thigh.
Then he noticed this car was moving far slower than previous traffic,
and it was approaching half in its lane and half on the shoulder of the
road. The closer it got, the slower it moved.
Medevac, he thought, and that thought spooked him a little because this
wasn’t Nam, for God’s sake, this was Vegas, and they didn’t have Medevac
units in Vegas.
Besides, this was a car, not a helicopter.
He shook his head to clear it, and when he looked again the car was
closer.
They’re going to pull right into the motel, Whit thought, and he would
have been excited except he suddenly didn’t have sufficient energy for
excitement. And the already deep black night seemed to be getting
blacker.
As soon as Ben and Rachael had entered the garage, they’d closed and
locked the outer door. She did not have the keys with her, and there
was no thumb latch on this side of the kitchen door, so they had to
leave that one standing open and just hope that Leben came at them from
the other direction.
“No door will keep it out, anyway,” Rachael said. “It’ll get in if it
knows we’re here.”
Ben had recalled garden hoses among the heaps ofjunk that the former
owners had left behind, “Existing supplies, tools, materials, and sundry
useful items,” they had called the trash when trying to boost the sales
price of the place.
He found a pair of rusted hedge clippers, intending to use them to chop
a length of hose that might work as a siphon, but then he saw a coil of
narrow, flexible rubber tubing Half a minute, Ben thought, glancing back
and forth from the door to the gasoline collecting in the bucket.
Please, God, let it hold just half a minute more.
The beast hit the door again.
Whit Gavis didn’t know who the two men were.
They had stopped their car along the boulevard and had run to him. The