With his dragon hands, Eric shredded the plastic bags and ate the sandwiches almost as fast as he could stuff them into his mouth. Several times he choked on the food, gagged on gummy wads of bread and meat, and had to concentrate on chewing them more thoroughly.
Four of the sandwiches were filled with thick slices of rare roast beef. The taste and smell of the half-cooked flesh excited him almost unbearably. He wished the beef had been raw and dripping. He wished he could have sunk his teeth into the living animal and could have torn loose throbbing chunks of its flesh.
The other two sandwiches were Swiss cheese and mustard, no meat, and he ate them, too, because he needed all the fuel he could get, but he did not like them, for they lacked the delicious and exhilarating flavor of blood. He remembered the taste of the cowboy's blood. Even better, the intensely coppery flavor of the woman's blood, taken from her throat and from her breast… He began to hiss and to twist back and forth in his seat, exhilarated by those memories. Ravenous, he ate the two apples as well, although his enlarged jaws, strangely reshaped tongue, and sharply pointed teeth had not been designed for the consumption of fruit.
He drank all of the beer, choking and spluttering on it as he poured it down. He had no fear of intoxication, for he knew that his racing metabolism would burn off the alcohol before he felt any effect from it.
For a while, having devoured every ounce of food in the cooler, he slumped back in the driver's seat, panting. He stared stupidly at the water-filmed windows, the beast within him temporarily subdued. Dreamy memories of murder and vaguer recollections of coupling with the cowboy's woman drifted like tendrils of smoke across the back of his mind.
Out on the night-clad desert, shadowfires burned.
Doorways to hell? Beckoning him to the damnation that had been his destiny but that he had escaped by beating death?
Or merely hallucinations? Perhaps his tortured subconscious mind, terrified of the changes taking place in the body it inhabited, was trying desperately to externalize the changefire to transfer the heat of metamorphosis out of his flesh and blood and into these vivid illusions.
That was the most intellectual train of thought he had ridden in many hours, and for a moment he felt a heartening resurgence of the cognitive powers that had earned him the reputation of a genius in his field. But only for a moment. Then the memory of blood returned, and a shiver of savage pleasure passed through him, and he made a thick guttural sound in the back of his throat.
A few cars and trucks passed on the highway to his left. Heading east. Heading to Vegas. Vegas…
Slowly he recalled that he was also bound for Vegas, for the Golden Sand Inn, for a rendezvous with revenge.
PART THREE
DARKEST
Night can be sweet as a kiss,
though not a night like this.
34
CONVERGENCE
After washing her face and doing what little she could with her lank and tangled hair, Rachael returned to the vicinity of the public telephones and sat on a red leatherette bench nearby, where she could see everyone who approached from the front of the hotel lobby and from the stairs that led out of the sunken casino. Most people remained down on the bright and noisy gaming level, but the lobby concourse was filled with a steady stream of passersby.
She studied all the men as surreptitiously as possible. She was not trying to spot Whitney Gavis, for she had no idea what he looked like. However, she was worried that someone might recognize her from photographs on television. She felt that enemies were everywhere, all around her, closing in — and while that might be paranoia, it might also be the truth.
If she had ever been wearier and more miserable, she could not remember the time. The few hours of sleep she'd had last night in Palm Springs had not prepared her for today's frantic activity. Her legs ached from all the running and climbing she had done; her arms felt stiff, leaden. A dull pain extended from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. Her eyes were bloodshot, grainy, and sore. Although she had stopped in Baker for a pack of diet sodas and had emptied all six cans during the drive to Vegas, her mouth was dry and sour.
“You look beat, kid,” Whitney Gavis said, stepping up to the bench on which she sat, startling her.
She'd seen him approaching from the front of the lobby, but she had turned her attention to other men, certain that he could not be Whitney Gavis. He was about five nine, an inch or two shorter than Benny, perhaps more solidly built than Benny, with heavier shoulders, a broader chest. He was wearing baggy white pants and a soft pastel-blue cotton-knit shirt, a modified Miami Vice look without the white jacket. However, the left side of his face was disfigured by a web of red and brown scars, as if he'd been deeply cut or burned — or both. His left ear was lumpy, gnarled. He walked with a stiff and awkward gait, laboriously swinging his left hip in a manner that indicated either that the leg was paralyzed or, more likely, that it was an artificial limb. His left arm had been amputated midway between the elbow and the wrist, and the stump poked out of the short sleeve of his shirt.
Laughing at her surprise, he said, “Evidently Benny didn't warn you: as knight-errant riding to the rescue, I leave something to be desired.”
Blinking up at him, she said, “No, no, I'm glad you're here, I'm glad to have a friend no matter… I mean, I didn't… I'm sure that you… Oh, hell, there's no reason to…” She started to get up, then realized he might be more comfortable sitting down, then realized that was a patronizing thought, and consequently found herself bobbing up and down in embarrassing indecision.
Laughing again, taking her by the arm with his one hand, Whitney said, “Relax, kid. I'm not offended. I've never known anyone who's less concerned about a person's appearance than Benny; he judges you by what you are and what you deliver, not by the way you look or by your physical limitations, so it's just exactly like him to forget to mention my… shall we say 'peculiarities'? I refuse to call them handicaps. Anyway, you've every reason to be disconcerted, kid.”
“I guess he didn't have time to mention it, even if he'd given it a thought,” she said, deciding to remain standing. “We parted in quite a hurry.”
She'd been startled because she had known that Benny and Whitney had been in Vietnam together, and on first seeing this man's grievous infirmities, she couldn't understand how he could have been a soldier. Then, of course, she realized he had been a whole man when he had gone to Southeast Asia and that he'd lost his arm and leg in that conflict.
“Ben's all right?” Whitney asked.
“I don't know.”
“Where is he?”
“Coming here to join me, I hope. But I don't know for sure.”
Suddenly she was stricken by the awful realization that it might just as easily have been her Benny who had returned from the war with his face scarred, one hand gone, one leg blown off, and that thought was devastating. Since Monday night, when Benny had taken the.357 Magnum away from Vince Baresco, Rachael had more or less unconsciously thought of him as endlessly resourceful, indomitable, and virtually invincible. She had been afraid for him at times, and since she had left him alone on the mountain above Lake Arrowhead, she had worried about him constantly. But deep down she had wanted to believe that he was too tough and quick to come to any harm. Now, seeing how Whitney Gavis had returned from the war, and knowing that Benny had served at Whitney's side, Rachael abruptly knew and felt — and finally believed — that Benny was a mortal man, as fragile as any other, tethered to life by a thread as pitifully thin as those by which everyone else was suspended above the void.