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 edge of the pool. He had a gun, and he looked as if he would use it. “What the hell happened to him? What the hell?”
Startled, not having seen the DSA agents until now, Ben stared at his old enemy and said, “Same thing that's going to happen to you, Sharp. He did to himself what you'll do to yourself sooner or later, though in a different way.”
“What're you talking about?” Sharp demanded.
Holding Rachael and trying to ease his body between her and Sharp, Ben said, “He didn't like the world the way he found it, so he set out to make it conform to his own twisted expectations. But instead of making a paradise for himself, he made a living hell. It's what you'll make for yourself, given time.”
“Shit,” Anson Sharp said, “you've gone off the deep end, Shadway. Way off the deep end.” To Verdad, he said, “Lieutenant, please put down your revolver.”
Verdad said, “What? What're you talking about? I—”
Sharp shot Verdad, and the detective was flung off the concrete into the mud by the impact of the bullet.
Jerry Peake — a devoted reader of mysteries, given to dreams of legendary achievement — had a habit of thinking in melodramatic terms. Watching Eric Leben's monstrously mutated body burning away to nothing in the empty swimming pool, he was shocked, horrified, and frightened; but he was also thinking at an unusually furious pace for him. First, he made a mental list of the similarities between Eric Leben and Anson Sharp: They loved power, thrived on it; they were cold-blooded and capable of anything; they had a perverse taste for young girls… Then Jerry listened to what Ben Shadway said about how a man could make his own hell on earth, and he thought about that, too. Then he looked down at the smoldering remnants of the mutant Leben, and it seemed to him that he was at a crossroads between his own earthly paradise and helclass="underline" He could cooperate with Sharp, let murder be done, and live with the guilt forever, damned in this life as well as in the next; or he could resist Sharp, retain his integrity and self-respect, and feel good about himself no matter what happened to his career in the DSA. The choice was his. Which did he want to be — the thing down there in the pool or a man?
Sharp ordered Lieutenant Verdad to put down the gun, and Verdad began to question the order, and Sharp shot him, just shot him, with no argument or hesitation.
So Jerry Peake drew his own gun and shot Sharp. The slug hit the deputy director in the shoulder.
Sharp seemed to have sensed the impending betrayal, because he had started to turn toward Jerry even as Jerry shot him. He squeezed off a round of his own, and Jerry took the bullet in the leg, though he fired simultaneously. As he fell, he had the enormous pleasure of seeing Anson Sharp's head explode.
Rachael stripped the jacket and shirt off Lieutenant Verdad and examined the bullet wound in his shoulder.
“I'll live,” he said. “It hurts like the devil, but I'll live.”
In the distance, the mournful sound of sirens arose, drawing rapidly nearer.
“That'll be Reese's doing,” Verdad said. “As soon as he got Gavis to the hospital, he'll have called the locals.”
“There really isn't too much bleeding,” she said, relieved to be able to confirm his own assessment of his condition.
“I told you,” Verdad said. “Heck, I can't die. I intend to stay around long enough to see my partner marry the pink lady.” He laughed at her puzzlement and said, “Don't worry, Mrs. Leben. I'm not out of my head.”
Peake was flat on his back on the concrete decking, his head raised somewhat on the hard pillow of the pool coping.
With a wide strip of his own torn shirt, Ben had fashioned a tourniquet for Peake's leg. The only thing he could find to twist it with was the barrel of Anson Sharp's discarded, silencer-equipped pistol, which was perfect for the job.
“I don't think you really need a tourniquet,” he told Peake as the sirens drew steadily nearer, gradually overwhelming the patter of the rain, “but better safe than sorry. There's a lot of blood, but I didn't see any spurting, no torn artery. Must hurt like the devil, though.”
“Funny,” Peake said, “but it doesn't hurt much at all.”
“Shock,” Ben said worriedly.
“No,” Peake said, shaking his head. “No, I don't think I'm going into shock. I've got none of the symptoms — and I know them. You know what I think maybe it is?”
“What?”
“What I just did — shooting my own boss when he went bad — is going to make me a legend in the agency. Damned if it isn't. I didn't see it that way until he was dead. So, anyway, maybe a legend just doesn't feel pain as much as other people do.” He grinned at Ben.
Ben returned a frown for the grin. “Relax. Just try to relax—”
Jerry Peake laughed. “I'm not delirious, Mr. Shadway. Really, I'm not. Don't you see? Not only am I a legend, but I can still laugh at myself! Which means that maybe I really do have what it takes. I mean, see, maybe I can make a big reputation for myself and not let it go to my head. Isn't that a nice thing to learn about yourself?”
“It's a nice thing,” Ben agreed.
The night was filled with screaming sirens, then the bark of brakes, and then the sirens died as running footsteps sounded on the motel driveway.
Soon there would be questions — thousands of them — from police officers in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Lake Arrowhead, Santa Ana, Placentia, and other places.