Shadowfires

thumb when they were finished growing. Horns would have made no sense at all to her if the patches of scaly flesh on his hands had not been matched by patches on his face and by wattles of dark leathery skin under his jaw and along his neck in the manner of certain reptiles; a few lizards had horns, and perhaps at some point in mankind's
distant beginnings, evolution had included an amphibian stage
boasting such protuberances (though that seemed unlikely). Other
elements of his tortured visage were human, while still others were
apelike. She dimly began to perceive that tens of millions of years
of genetic heritage had been unleashed within him, that every stage
of evolution was fighting for control of him at the same time; long-
abandoned forms-a multitude of possibilities-were struggling to
reassert themselves as if his tissues were just so much putty.
    “Rachael,” he repeated but still did not move. “I want… I want…”
He could not seem to find the words to finish the thought, or perhaps
he simply did not know what it was he wanted.
    She could not move, either, partly because she was paralyzed by
terror but partly because she desperately wanted to understand what
had happened to him. If in fact he was being pulled in opposing
directions by the many racial memories within his genes, if he was
devolving toward a subhuman state while his modern form and intellect
strove to retain dominance of its tissues, then it seemed every
change in him should be functional, with a purpose obviously
connected to one prehuman form or another. However, that did not
appear to be the case. In his face, pulsing arteries and gnarled
veins and bony excrescences and random concavities seemed to exist
without reason, with no connection to any known creature on the
evolutionary ladder. The same was true of the hump on his back. She
suspected that, in addition to the reassertion of various forms from
human biological heritage, mutated genes were causing
purposeless changes in him or, perhaps, were pushing him toward some
alien life-form utterly different from the human species.
    “Rachael…”
    His teeth were sharp.
    “Rachael…”
    The gray-blue irises of his eyes were no longer perfectly round
but were tending toward a vertical-oval shape like those in the eyes
of serpents. Not all the way there, yet. Apparently still in the
middle of metamorphosis. But no longer quite the eyes of a man.
    “Rachael…”
    His nose seemed to have collapsed part of the way into his face,
and the nostrils were more exposed than before.
    “Rachael… please… please…” He held one monstrous hand toward her
in a pathetic gesture, and in his raspy voice was a note of misery
and another of self-pity. But there was an even more obvious and more
affecting note of love and longing that seemed to surprise him every
bit as much as it surprised her. “Please… please… I want…”
    “Eric,” she said, her own voice almost as strange as his, twisted
by fear and weighted down with sadness. “What do you want?”
    “I want… I… I want… not to be…”
    “Yes?”
    “… afraid…”
    She did not know what to say.
    He took one step toward her.
    She immediately backed up.
    He took another step, and she saw that he was having a little
trouble with his feet, as if they had changed within his boots and
were no longer comfortable in that confinement.
    Again she retreated to match his advance.
    Squeezing the words out as if it were agony to form and expel
them, he said, “I want… you…”
    “Eric,” she said softly, pityingly.
    “… you… you…”
    He took three quick, lurching steps; she scampered four
backward.
    In that voice fit for a man trapped in hell, he said,
“Don't… don't reject me… don't… Rachael, don't…”
    “Eric, I can't help you.”
    “Don't reject me.”
    “You're beyond help, Eric.”
    “Don't reject me… again.”
    She had no weapons, just her car keys in one hand and her purse in
the other, and she cursed herself for leaving the pistol in the
Mercedes. She backed farther away from him.
    With a savage cry of rage that made Rachael go cold in the late-
June heat, Eric came at her in a headlong rush.
    She threw her purse at his head, turned, and sprinted into the
desert behind the comfort station. The soft sand shifted under her
feet, and a couple of times she almost twisted an ankle, almost fell,
and the sparse scrub brush whipped at her legs and almost tripped
her, but she did not fall, kept going, ran fast as the wind, tucked