Eric's eerie whisper-shriek rose behind her, closer.
She dared not look back.
Fifteen feet farther to the top.
Her progress was maddeningly hampered every foot of the way by the softness of the earth face she was climbing. In spots, it tended to crumble under her as she tried to find or make handholds and footholds. She required all the tenacity of a spider to retain what ground she gained, and she was terrified of suddenly slipping back all the way to the bottom.
The top of the arroyo was less than twelve feet away, so she must be about two stories above the floor of it.
“Rachael,” the Eric-thing said behind her in a raspy voice like a rat-tail file drawn across her spine.
Don't look down, don't, don't, for God's sake, don't…
Vertical erosion channels cut the wall from top to bottom, some only a few inches wide and a few inches deep, others a foot wide and two feet deep. She had to stay away from those; for, where they scored the slope too close to one another, the earth was especially rotten and most prone to collapse under her.
Fortunately, in some places there were bands of striated stone — pink, gray, brown, with veins of what appeared to be white quartz. These were the outer edges of rock strata that the eroding arroyo had only recently begun to uncover, and they provided firmer footholds.
“Rachael …”
She grabbed a foot-deep rock ledge that thrust out of the soft earth above her, intending to pull and kick her way onto it, hoping that it would not break off, but before she could test it, something grabbed at the heel of her right shoe. She couldn't help it: she had to look down this time, and there he was, dear God, the Eric-thing, on the arroyo wall beneath her, holding himself in place with one hand, reaching up with the other, trying to get a grip on her shoe, coming up only an inch short of his goal.
With dismaying agility, more like an animal than a human being, he flung himself upward. His hands and knees and feet refastened to the earthen wall with frightening ease. He reached eagerly for her again. He was now close enough to clutch at her calf instead of at the bottom of her shoe.
But she was not exactly moving like a sloth. She was damn fast, too, responding even as he moved toward her. Reflexes goosed by a flood of adrenaline, she let go of the wall with her knees and feet, holding on only to the rock ledge an arm's length above her head, dangling, recklessly letting the untested stone support her entire weight. As he reached for her, she pulled her legs up, then kicked down with both feet, putting all the power of her thighs into it, striking his grasping hand, smashing his long bony, mutant fingers.
He loosed an inhuman wail.
She kicked again.
Instead of slipping back down the wall, as Rachael had hoped he would, Eric held on to it, surged upward another foot, shrieking in triumph, and took a swipe at her.
At the same moment she kicked out again, smashing one foot into his arm, stomping the other squarely into his face.
She heard her jeans tear, then felt a flash of pain and knew that he had hooked claws through the denim even as her kick had landed.
He bellowed in pain, finally lost his hold on the wall, and hung for an instant by the claws in her jeans. Then the claws snapped, and the cloth tore, and he fell away into the arroyo.
Rachael didn't wait long enough to watch him tumble two stories to the bottom of the gulch, but turned at once to the demanding task of heaving herself onto the narrow stone ledge from which she hung precariously. Pulsations of pain, throbbing in time with her wildly pounding heart, coursed through her arms from wrists to shoulders. Her straining muscles twitched and rebelled at her demands. Clenching her teeth, breathing through her nose so hard that she snorted like a horse, she struggled upward, digging at the wall beneath the ledge with her feet to provide what little thrust she could. By sheer perseverance and determination — spiced with a generous measure of motivating terror — she clambered onto the ledge at last.
Exhausted, suffering several pains, she nevertheless refused to pause. She dragged herself up the last eight feet of the arroyo wall, finding handholds in a few final outcroppings of rock and among the erosion-exposed roots of the mesquite bushes that grew at — the brink. Then she was at the edge, over the top, pushing through a break in the mesquite, and she rolled onto the surface of the desert.
Lightning stepped down the sky as if providing a staircase for some descending god, and all around Rachael the low desert scrub threw short-lived, giant shadows.
Thunder followed, hard and flat, and she felt it reverberate in the ground against her back.
She dragged herself back to the brink of the arroyo, praying that she would see the Eric-thing still at the bottom, motionless, dead a second time. Maybe he'd fallen on a rock. There were a few rocks on the floor of the gulch. It was possible. Maybe he had landed on one of them and had snapped his spine.
She peered over the edge.
He was more than halfway up the wall again.
Lightning flashed, illuminating his deformed face, silvering his inhuman eyes, plating an electric gleam to his too-sharp teeth.
Leaping up, Rachael started kicking at the loose earth along the brink and at the brush that grew there, knocking it down on top of him. He hung from the quartz-veined ledge, keeping his head under it for protection, so the sandy earth and brush cascaded harmlessly over him. She stopped kicking dirt, looked around for some stones, found a few about the size of eggs, and hurled them down at his hands. When the stones connected with his grotesque fingers, he let go of the ledge and moved entirely under it, clinging to the earth in the shadow of that stone shelf, where she could not hit him.
She could wait for him to reappear, then pelt him again. She could keep him pinned there for hours. But nothing would be gained. It would be a tense, wearying, futile enterprise; when she exhausted the supply of stones within her reach and had only dirt to throw, he would ascend with animal quickness, undeterred by that pathetic bombardment, and he would finish her.
A white-hot celestial cauldron tipped, spilling forth a third molten streak of lightning. It made contact with the earth much closer than the two before it, no more than a quarter of a mile away, accompanied by a simultaneous crash worthy of Armageddon, and with a crackle-sizzle that was the voice of Death speaking in the language of electricity.
Below, unfazed by the lightning, emboldened by the cessation of the attack Rachael had been waging, the Eric-thing put one monstrous hand over the edge of the ledge.
She kicked more dirt down on him, lots of it. He withdrew his hand, taking shelter again, but she continued to stomp away at the rotten brink of the embankment. Suddenly an enormous chunk collapsed directly under her feet, and she nearly fell into the arroyo. As the ground began to shift, she threw herself backward just in time to avoid catastrophe, and landed hard on her buttocks.
With so much dirt pouring down over him, he might hesitate longer before making another attempt to pull himself across the overhanging ledge. His caution might give her an extra couple of minutes' lead time. She got up and sprinted off into the forbidding desert.
The overused muscles in her legs were repeatedly stabbed and split by cleaver-sharp pains. Her right ankle remained tender, and her right calf burned where the claws had cut through her jeans.
Her mouth was drier than ever, and her throat was cracking. Her lungs felt seared by her deep shuddering gasps of hot desert air.
She didn't succumb to the agony, couldn't afford to succumb, just kept on running, not as fast as before but as fast as she could.