Shadowfires

He had descended a third of the incline and was still on his feet, for the slope was not quite as steep here as it had been where Rachael had rolled over the edge. As he came, he dislodged a minor avalanche of dirt and stones, but the wall of the arroyo did not give way entirely. In a minute he would reach the bottom and then, in ten steps, would be on top of her.
    Rachael pushed up from the ground, ran toward the other wall of
the gulch, intending to climb it, but realized she had dropped her
car keys. She might never find her way back to the car; in fact, she'd probably either be brought down by Eric or get lost in the wasteland, but if by some miracle she did reach the Mercedes, she had to have the keys.
    Eric was almost halfway down the slope, descending through dust
that rose from the slide he had started.
    Frantically looking for the keys, she returned to the place where
she'd fallen, and at first she couldn't see them. Then she glimpsed
the shiny notched edges poking out of the powdery brown silt, almost
entirely buried. Evidently she'd fallen atop the keys, pressing them into the soft soil. She snatched them up.
    Eric was more than halfway to the arroyo floor.
    He was making a strange sound: a thin, shrill cry-half stage
whisper, half shriek.
    Thunder pounded the sky, somewhat closer now.
    Still pouring sweat, gasping for breath, her mouth seared by the
hot air, her lungs aching, she ran to the far wall again, shoving the
car keys into a pocket of her jeans. This embankment had the same
degree of slope as the one Eric was descending, but Rachael
discovered that ascending on her feet was not as easy as coming down
that way; the angle worked against her as much as it would have
worked for her if she'd been going the other direction. After three or four yards, she had to drop forward against the bank, desperately using hands and knees and feet to hold on and thrust herself steadily up the incline.
    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