Shadowfires

had tried to remake himself into a different man-student of the past, train fancier. He had failed in that remake, a failure that recent events had made eminently clear: He could not just stop being the man he had once been. He accepted that now. And he had thought that he had lost none of his edge. But he realized that all those years of pretending to be someone else had dulled him. His failure to look in the Mercedes's
trunk before sending Rachael away, his current despair, his
confusion, his sudden lack of direction were all proof that too much
pretending had its deadly effect.
    Lightning sizzled across the swollen black heavens, but even that
scalpel of light did not split open the belly of the storm.
    He decided there was nothing to be done but hit the road, head for
Vegas, hope for the best, though hope seemed futile now. He could
stop in Baker, sixty miles ahead, and try Whit's number again.
    Maybe his luck would change.
    It had to change.
    He opened the door of the booth and ran to the stolen Merkur.
    Again, lightning blasted the charred sky.
    A cannonade of thunder volleyed back and forth between the sky and
the waiting earth.
    The air stank of ozone.
    He got in the car, slammed the door, started the engine, and the
storm finally broke, throwing a million tons of water down upon the
desert in a sudden deluge.

----
30 RATTLESNAKES
    Rachael had been following the bottom of the
wide arroyo for what seemed miles but was probably only a few hundred
yards. The illusion of greater distance resulted partly from the hot
pain in her twisted ankle, which was subsiding but only slowly.
    She felt trapped in a maze through which she might forever search
futilely for a nonexistent exit. Narrower arroyos branched off the
primary channel, all on the right-hand side. She considered pursuing
another gulch, but each intersected the main run at an angle, so she
couldn't see how far they extended. She was afraid of deviating into one, only to encounter a dead end within a short distance.
    To her left, three stories above, Eric hurried along the brink of
the arroyo, following her limping progress as if he were the mutant
master of the maze in a Dungeons and Dragons game. If and when he
started down the arroyo wall, she would have to turn and immediately
climb the opposite wall, for she now knew she could not hold her own
in a chase. Her only chance of survival was to get above him and find
some rocks to hurl down on him as he ascended in her wake. She hoped
he would not come after her for a few more minutes, because she
needed time for the pain in her ankle to subside further before
testing it in a climb.
    Distant thunder sounded from Barstow in the west: one long peal,
another, then a third that was louder than the first two. The sky
over this part of the desert was gray and soot-black, as if heaven
had caught fire, burned, and was now composed only of ashes and cold
black coals. The burnt-out sky had settled lower as well, until it
almost seemed to be a lid that was going to come down all the way and
clamp tightly over the top of the arroyo. A warm wind whistled
mournfully and moaned up there on the surface of the Mojave, and some
gusts found their way down into the channel, flinging bits of sand in
Rachael's face. The storm already under way in the west had not reached here yet, but it would arrive soon; a pre-storm scent was heavy in the air, and the atmosphere had the electrically charged feeling that preceded a hard rain.
    She rounded a bend and was startled by a pile of dry tumbleweeds
that had rolled into the gulch from the desert above. Stirred by a
downdraft, they moved rapidly toward her with a scratchy sound,
almost a hiss, as if they were living creatures. She tried to
sidestep those bristly brown balls, stumbled, and fell full-length
into the powdery silt that covered the floor of the channel. Falling,
she feared for the ankle she had already hurt, but fortunately she
did not twist it again.
    Even as she fell, she heard more noise behind her. She thought for
a moment that the sound was made by the tumbleweeds still rubbing
against one another in their packlike progress along the arroyo, but
a harder clatter alerted her to the true source of the noise. When
she looked back and up, she saw that Eric had started down the wall
of the gulch. He'd been waiting for her to fall or to encounter an obstacle; now that she was down, he was swiftly taking advantage of her bad luck.