He turned quickly, cried out, and stumbled backward when he saw the thing looming over him in the gloom. Incomprehensibly strange eyes looked down at him from a height of six and a half feet or more. They were bulging, mismatched eyes, each as large as an egg, one pale green and the other orange, iridescent like the eyes of some animals, one rather like the eye of a hyperthyroid cat, the other featuring a mean slit-shaped iris reminiscent of a serpent, both beveled and many-faceted, for God's sake, like the eyes of an insect.
For a moment Whit stood transfixed. Suddenly a powerful arm lashed out at him, backhanded him across the face, and knocked him down. He fell onto the concrete walk, hurting his tailbone, and rolled into mud and weeds.
The creature's arm—Leben's arm, Whit knew that it had to be Eric Leben transformed beyond understanding — had appeared not to be hinged like a human arm. It seemed to be segmented, equipped with three or four smaller, elbowlike joints that could lock in any combination and that gave it tremendous flexibility. Now, stunned by the vicious blow he had taken, half paralyzed by terror, looking up at the beast as it approached him, he saw that it was slump-shouldered and hunchbacked yet possessed a queer sort of grace, perhaps because its legs, mostly concealed by tattered jeans, were similar in design to the powerful, segmented arms.
Whit realized he was screaming. He had screamed—really screamed — only once before in his life, in Nam, when the antipersonnel mine had blown up beneath him, when he had Iain on the jungle floor and had seen the bottom half of his own leg lying five yards away, the bloody mangled toes poking through burnt and blasted boot leather. Now he screamed again and could not stop.
Over his own screams, he heard a shrill keening sound from his adversary, what might have been a cry of triumph.
Its head rolled and bobbled strangely, and for a moment Whit had a glimpse of terrible hooked teeth.
He tried to scoot backward across the sodden earth, propelling himself with his good right arm and the stump of the other, but he was unable to move fast. He did not have time to get his legs under him. He managed to retreat only a couple of yards before Leben reached him and bent down and grabbed him by the foot of his left leg, fortunately the artificial leg, and began to drag him toward the open door of the garage.
Even in the night shadows and rain, Whit could see enough of the man-thing's hand to know that it was as thoroughly inhuman as the rest of the beast. And huge. And powerful.
Frantically Whit Gavis kicked out with his good foot, putting all the force he had into the blow, and connected solidly with Leben's leg. The man-thing shrieked, though apparently not in pain as much as in anger. In response, it wrenched his artificial leg so hard that the securing straps tore loose of their buckles. With a brief agony that robbed Whit of breath, the prosthetic limb came loose, leaving him at an even greater disadvantage.
In the cramped kitchen of the motel manager's apartment, Rachael had just opened the plastic garbage bag and had removed one handful of rumpled, soiled Xeroxes from the disorganized Wildcard file when she heard the first scream. She knew immediately that it was Whitney, and she also knew instinctively that there could be only one cause of it: Eric.
She threw the papers aside and plucked the thirty-two pistol off the table. She went to the rear door, hesitated, then unlocked it.
Stepping into the dank garage, she paused again, for there was movement on all sides of her. A strong draft swept in through the open side door from the raging night beyond, swinging the single dirty light bulb on its cord. The motion of the light made shadows leap up and fall back and leap up again in every corner. She looked around warily at the stacks of eerily illuminated trash and old furniture, all of which seemed alive amidst the animated shadows.
Whitney's screaming was coming from outside, so she figured that Eric was out there, too, rather than in the garage. She abandoned caution and hurried past the black Mercedes, stepping over a couple of paint cans and around a pile of coiled garden hoses.
A piercing, blood-freezing shriek cut through Whitney's screams, and Rachael knew without doubt that it was Eric, for that shrill cry was similar to the one he'd made while pursuing her across the desert earlier in the day. But it was more fierce and furious than she remembered, more powerful, and even less human and more alien than it had been before. Hearing that monstrous voice, she almost turned and ran. Almost. But, after all, she was not capable of abandoning Whitney Gavis.
She plunged through the open door, into the night and tempest, the pistol held out in front of her. The Eric-thing was only a few yards away, its back to her. She cried out in shock because she saw that it was holding Whitney's leg, which it seemed to have torn from him.
An instant later, she realized that it was the artificial leg, but by then she had drawn the beast's attention. It threw the fake limb aside and turned toward her, its impossible eyes gleaming.
Its appearance was so numbingly horrific that 'she, unlike Whitney, was unable to scream; she tried, but her voice failed her. The darkness and rain mercifully concealed many details of the mutant form, but she had an impression of a massive and misshapen head, jaws that resembled a cross between those of a wolf and a crocodile, and an abundance of deadly teeth. Shirtless and shoeless, clad only in jeans, it was a few inches taller than Eric had been, and its spine curved up into hunched and deformed shoulders. There was an immense expanse of breastbone that looked as if it might be covered with horns or spines of some sort, and with rounded knobby excrescences. Long and strangely jointed arms hung almost to its knees. The hands were surely just like the hands of demons who, in the fiery depths of hell, cracked open human souls and ate the meat of them.
“Rachael… Rachael… come for you… Rachael,” the Eric-thing said in a vile and whispery voice, slowly forming each word with care, as if the knowledge and use of language were nearly forgotten. The creature's throat and mouth and tongue and lips were no longer designed for the production of human speech; the formation of each syllable obviously required tremendous effort and perhaps some pain. “Come… for… you…”
It took a step toward her, its arms swinging against its sides with a scraping, clicking, chitinous sound.
It.
She could no longer think of him as Eric, as her husband. Now, he was just a thing, an abomination, that by its very existence made a mockery of everything else in God's creation.
She fired point-blank at its chest.
It did not even flinch at the impact of the slug. It emitted a high-pitched squeal that seemed more an expression of eagerness than pain, and it took another step.
She fired again, then a third time, and a fourth.
The multiple impacts of the slugs made the beast stagger slightly to one side, but it did not go down.
“Rachael… Rachael…”
Whitney shouted, “Shoot it, kill it!”
The pistol's clip held ten rounds. She squeezed off the last six as fast as she could, certain that she hit the thing every time in the gut and chest and even in the face.
It finally roared in pain and collapsed onto its knees, then toppled facedown in the mud.
“Thank God,” she said shakily, “thank God,” and she was suddenly so weak that she had to lean against the outside wall of the garage.