Shadowfires

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.
    Ahead, the land became less flat than it had been, began to roll
in a series of low hills and hollows. She ran up a hill and down, up
another, on and on, trying to put concealing barriers between herself
and Eric before he crawled out of the arroyo. Eventually, deciding to
stay in one of the hollows, she turned in a direction that she
thought was north; though her sense of direction might have become
totally fouled up during the chase, she believed she had to go north
first, then east, if she hoped to circle around to the Mercedes,
which was now at least a mile away, probably much farther.
    Lightning… lightning.
    This time, an incredibly long-lived bolt glimmered between the
thunderheads and the ground below for at least ten seconds, racing-
jigging south to north, like a gigantic needle trying to sew the
storm tight to the land forever.
    That flash and the empyrean blast that followed were sufficient to
bring the rain, at last. It fell hard, pasting Rachael's hair to her skull, stinging her face. It was cool, blessedly cool. She licked her chapped lips, grateful for the moisture.
    Several times she looked back, dreading what she would see, but
Eric was never there.
    She had lost him. And even if she'd left footprints to mark her flight, the rain would swiftly erase them. In his alien incarnation, he might somehow be able to track her by scent, but the rain would provide cover in that regard as well, scrubbing her odor from the land and air. Even if his strange eyes provided better vision than the human eyes they had once been, he would not be able to see far in this heavy rain and gloom.
    You've escaped, she told herself as she hurried north. You're
going to be safe.
    It was probably true.
    But she didn't believe it.
By the time Ben Shadway drove just a few
miles east of Barstow, the rain not only filled the world but became
the world. Except for the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers,
all sounds were those of water in motion, drowning out everything
else: a ceaseless drumming on the roof of the Merkur, the snap-snap-
snap of droplets hitting the windshield at high speed, the slosh and
hiss of wet pavement under the tires. Beyond the comfortable-though
abruptly humid-confines of the car, most of the light had bled out of
the bruised and wounded storm-dark sky, and little remained to be
seen other than the omnipresent rain falling in millions of slanting
gray lines. Sometimes the wind caught sheets of water the same way it
might catch sheer curtains at an open window, blowing them across the
vast desert floor in graceful, undulant patterns, one filmy layer
after another, gray on gray. When the lightning flashed-which it did
with unnerving frequency-billions of drops turned bright silver, and
for a second or two, it appeared as if snow were falling on the
Mojave; at other times, the lightning-transformed rain seemed more
like glittery, streaming tinsel.
    The downpour grew worse until the windshield wipers could not keep
the glass clear. Hunching over the steering wheel, Ben squinted into
the storm-lashed day. The highway ahead was barely visible. He had
switched on the headlights, which did not improve visibility. But the
headlights of oncoming cars-though few-were refracted by the film of
water on the windshield, stinging his eyes.
    He slowed to forty, then thirty. Finally, because the nearest rest
area was over twenty miles ahead, he drove onto the narrow shoulder
of the highway, stopped, left the engine running, and switched on the
Merkur's emergency blinkers. Since he had failed to reach Whitney Gavis, his concern for Rachael was greater