Shadowfires

than ever, and he was more acutely aware of his inadequacies by the minute, but it would be foolhardy to do anything other than wait for the blinding storm to subside. He would be of no help whatsoever to Rachael if he lost control of the car on the rain-greased pavement, slid into one of the big eighteen-wheelers that constituted most of the sparse traffic, and got himself killed.
    After Ben had waited through ten minutes of the hardest rain he
had ever seen, as he was beginning to wonder if it would ever let up,
he saw that a sluice of fast-moving dirty water had overflowed the
drainage channel beside the road. Because the highway was elevated a
few feet above the surrounding land, the water could not flow onto
the pavement, but it did spill into the desert beyond. As he looked
out the side window of the Merkur, he saw a sinuous dark form gliding
smoothly across the surface of the racing yellow-brown torrent, then
another similar form, then a third and a fourth. For a moment he
stared uncomprehendingly before he realized they were rattlesnakes
driven out of the ground when their dens flooded. There must have
been several nests of rattlers in the immediate area, for in moments
two score of them appeared. They made their way across the steadily
widening spate to higher and drier ground, where they came together,
coiling among one another-weaving, tangling, knotting their long
bodies-forming a writhing and fluxuous mass, as if they were not
individual creatures but parts of one entity that had become detached
in the deluge and was now struggling to re-form itself.
    Lightning flashed.
    The squirming rattlers, like the mane of an otherwise buried
Medusa, appeared to churn with greater fury as the stroboscopic storm
light revealed them in stuttering flashes.
    The sight sent a chill to the very marrow of Ben's bones. He looked away from the serpents and stared straight ahead through the rain-washed windshield. Minute by minute, his optimism was fading; his despair was growing; his fear for Rachael had attained such depth and intensity that it began to shake him, physically shake him, and he sat shivering in the stolen car, in the blinding rain, upon the somber storm-hammered desert.
The cloudburst erased whatever trail Rachael
might have left, which was good, but the storm had drawbacks, too.
Though the downpour had reduced the temperature only a few degrees,
leaving the day still very warm, and although she was not even
slightly chilled, she was nevertheless soaked to the skin. Worse, the
drenching rain fell in cataracts which, combined with the midday
gloom that the gray-black clouds had imposed upon the land, made it
difficult to maintain a good sense of direction; even when she risked
ascending from one of the hollows onto a hill, to get a fix on her
position, the poor visibility left her less than certain that she was
heading back toward the rest area and the Mercedes. Worse still, the
lightning shattered through the malignant bellies of the thunderheads
and crashed to the ground with such frequency that she figured it was
only a matter of time until she was struck by one of those bolts and
reduced to a charred and smoking corpse.
    But worst of all, the loud and unrelenting noise of the rain-the
hissing, chuckling, sizzling, crackling, gurgling, dripping,
burbling, and hollow steady drumming-blotted out any warning sounds
that the Eric-thing might have made in pursuit of her, so she was in
greater danger of being set upon by surprise. She repeatedly looked
behind her and glanced worriedly at the tops of the gentle slopes on
both sides of the shallow little hollow through which she hurried.
She slowed every time she approached a turn in the course of the
hollow, fearing that he would be just around the bend, would loom out
of the rain, strange eyes radiant in the gloom, and would seize her
in his hideous hands.
    When, without warning, she encountered him at last, he did not see
her. She turned one of those bends that she found so frightening, and
Eric was only twenty or thirty feet away, on his knees in the middle
of the hollow, preoccupied with some task that Rachael could not at
first understand. A wind-carved, flute-holed rock formation projected
out from the slope in a wedge-shaped wing, and Rachael quickly took
cover behind it before he saw her. She almost turned at once to creep
back the way she had come, but his peculiar posture and attitude had
intrigued her.