The unbearable pain of immolation had jolted what remained of his human
consciousness, had bestirred him from the trancelike state into which he
had retreated when the savage alien part of him had gained dominance.
For a moment he knew who he was, what he had become, and what was
happening to him. But he also knew that the knowledge was tenuous, that
awareness would fade, that the small remaining portion of his intellect
and personality would eventually be completely destroyed in the process
of growth and change, and that the only hope for him was death.
Death.
He had striven hard to avoid death, had taken insane risks to save
himself from the grave, but now he welcomed Charon.
Eaten alive by fire, he dragged himself down, down toward the shadowfire
beneath the water, the strange fire burning on a far shore.
He stopped screaming. He had traveled beyond pain and terror, into a
great lonely calm.
He knew that the flaming gasoline would not kill him, not that alone.
The changefire within him was worse than the external fire. The
changefire was blazing very brightly now, burning in every cell, rnging,
and he was overwhelmed by a painful hunger a thousand times more
demanding and excruciating than any he had known before. He was
desperate for fuel, for carbohydrates and proteins and vitamins and
minerals with which to support his uncontrolled metabolism. But because
he was in no condition to stalk and kill and feed, he could not provide
his system with the fuel it needed. Therefore, his body started to
cannibalize itself, the changefire did not subside but began to burn up
some of his tissues in order to obtain the enormous amounts of energy
required to transform those tissues that it did not consume as fuel.
Second by sec6nd, his body weight rapidly declined, not because the
gasoline was feeding on it but because he was feeding on himself,
devouring himself from within.
He felt his head changing shape, felt his arms shrinking and a second
pair of arms extruding from his lower rib cage. Each change consumed
more of him, yet the fires of mutation did not subside.
At last he could not pull himself any closer to the shadowfire that
burned beneath the water. He stopped and lay still, choking and
twitching.
But to his surprise, he saw the shadowfire rise out of the water ahead.
It moved toward him until it encircled him, until his world was all
aflame, inside and out.
In his dying agony, Eric finally understood that the mysterious
shadowfires had been neither gateways to hell nor merely meaningless
illusions generated by misfiring synapses in the brain. They were
illusions, yes. Or, more accurately, they were hallucinations cast off
by his subconscious, meant to warn him of the terrible destiny toward
which he had been plunging ever since he had arisen from that slab in
the morgue. His damaged brain had functioned too poorly for him to
grasp the logical progression of his fate, at least on a conscious
level. But his subconscious mind had known the truth and had tried to
provide clues by creating the phantom shadowfires, fire (his
subconscious had been telling him), fire is your destiny, the insatiable
inner fire of a superheated metabolism, and sooner or later it is going
to burn you up alive.
His neck dwindled until his head sat almost directly upon his shoulders.
He felt his spine lengthening into a tail.
His eyes sank back under a suddenly more massive brow.
He sensed that he had more than two legs.
Then he sensed nothing at all as the changefire swept through him,
consuming the last fuel it could find. He descended into the many kinds
of fire.
Before Ben’s eyes, in only a minute or less, the creature burned-the
flames leaped high into the air, seethed, roared-until there was nothing
left of the corpse but a small bubbling pool of sludge, a few little
flickering flames down there in the darkness that reclaimed the empty
swimming pool. Uncomprehending, Ben stood in silence, unable to speak.
Lieutenant Verdad and Rachael seemed equally amazed, for they did not
break the silence, either.
It was broken, at last, by Anson Sharp. He was coming slowly around the