“Leben,” Sharp said. “Holy shit, it must be Leben.”
Jerry Peake understood at once, even though he didn't want to understand, did not want to know, for this was a secret that it would be dangerous to know, dangerous not only to his physical well-being but to his sanity.
The gasoline seemed to have choked and temporarily blinded it, but Rachael knew that it would recover from this assault as quickly as it had recovered from being shot. So, as Benny dropped the empty bucket and stepped out of the way, she struck the match and only then realized she should have had a torch, something she could have set aflame and then thrown at the creature. Now she had no choice but to step in close with the short-stemmed match.
The Eric-thing had stopped shrieking and, temporarily overcome by the gasoline fumes, was hunched over, wheezing noisily, gasping for air.
She took only three steps toward it before the wind or the rain — or both — extinguished the match.
Making a strange terrified mewling that she could not control, she slid open the box, took out another match, and struck it. This time she had not even taken one step before the flame went out.
The demonic mutant seemed to be breathing easier, and it began to straighten up, raising its monstrous head again.
The rain, Rachael thought desperately, the rain is washing the gasoline off its body.
As she shakily withdrew a third match, Benny said, “Here,” and he turned the empty bucket upright on the concrete at her feet.
She understood. She rasped the third match against the striking pad on the side of the box, couldn't get it to light.
The creature drew in a deep breath at last, another. Recovering, it shrieked at them.
She scraped the match against the box again and let out a cry of relief when the flame spurted up. The instant the match was lit, she dropped it straight into the bucket, and the residue of gasoline burst into flames.
Lieutenant Verdad, who had been waiting to do his part, stepped in fast and kicked the bucket at the Eric-thing.
The flaming pail struck one of the beast's jean-clad thighs, where some of the gasoline had landed when Benny had thrown it. The fire leaped out of the bucket onto the jeans and raced up over the creature's spiny chest, swiftly enveloped the misshapen head.
The fire did not stop it.
Screaming in pain, a pillar of flame, the thing nevertheless came forward faster than Rachael would have believed possible. In the red-orange light of the leaping fire, she saw its outreaching hands, saw what appeared to be mouths in the palms, and then it had its hands on her. Hell could be no worse than having those hands on her; she almost died right there from the horror of it. The thing seized her by one arm and by the neck, and she felt those orifices within its hands eating into her flesh, and she felt the fire reaching out for her, and she saw the spikes on the mutant's huge chest where she could be so quickly and easily impaled — a multitude of possible deaths — and now it lifted her, and she knew she was certainly dead, finished, but Verdad appeared and opened fire with his revolver, squeezing off two shots that hit the Eric-thing in the head, but even before he could pull off a third shot, Benny came in at a flying leap, in some crazy karate movement, airborne, driving both feet into the monster's shoulder, and Rachael felt it let go of her with one hand, so she wrenched and kicked at its flaming chest, and suddenly she was free, the creature was toppling into the shallow end of the empty swimming pool, she fell to the concrete decking, free, free — except that her shoes were on fire.
Ben delivered the kick and threw himself to the left, hit the decking, rolled, and came immediately onto his feet in time to see the creature falling into the shallow end of the empty pool. He also saw that Rachael's shoes were afire from gasoline, and he dove for her, threw himself upon her, and smothered the flames.
For a moment, she clung fiercely to him, and he held her tightly with an equal need of reassurance. He had never before felt anything half as good as her heart's frantic pounding, which was conveyed through her breast to his.
“Are you all right?”
“Good enough,” she said shakily.
He hugged her again, then gave her a quick examination. There was a bleeding circlet on her arm and another on her neck, where the mouths in the mutant's hands had attached themselves to her, but neither wound looked serious.
In the pool, the creature was screaming in a way it had not screamed before, and Ben was sure that these must be its death cries — although he would not have taken any bets on it.
Together, with his arm around her waist and her arm encircling him, they went to the edge of the pool, where Lieutenant Verdad was already standing.
Burning as if it were made of the purest candle tallow, the beast staggered down the sloping floor of the pool, perhaps trying to reach the collected rainwater at the deep end. But the falling rain did nothing to quench the flames, and Ben suspected that the puddle below would be equally ineffective. The fire was inexplicably intense, as if the gasoline were not the only fuel, as if something in the mutant's body chemistry were also feeding the flames. At the halfway point, the creature collapsed onto its knees, clawing at the air and then at the wet concrete before it. It continued to the bottom, crawling, then slithering along on its belly, finally dragging itself laboriously toward hoped-for salvation.
The shadowfire burned within the water, down under the cooling surface, and he was drawn toward it, not merely to extinguish the flames that were consuming his body but to snuff out the changefire within him, too. 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, raging, 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 second, 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.