Shadowfires

into the motel parking lot and stopped.
    Rachael glanced worriedly at the barricaded door.
    In the still desert air, a car door opened, closed.
    Ben sat up straighter in his chair, tense.
    Footsteps echoed softly through the empty night. They were heading
away from Rachael's and Ben's room. In another part of the motel, the
door to another room opened and closed.
    With visible relief Rachael let her shoulders sag. “Mice are
natural-born cowards, of course. They never fight their enemies.
They're not equipped to. They survive by running, dodging, hiding. They don't
even fight among themselves for supremacy or territory.
They're meek, timid. But the mice who came back weren't meek at all.
They fought one another, and they attacked mice that had not been resurrected-and they even tried to nip at the researchers
handling them, though a mouse has no hope of hurting a man and is
ordinarily acutely aware of that. They flew into rages, clawing at
the floors of their cages, pawing at the air as if fighting imaginary
enemies, sometimes even clawing at themselves. Occasionally these
fits lasted less than a minute, but more often went on until the
mouse collapsed in exhaustion.”
    For a moment, neither spoke.
    The silence in the motel room was sepulchral, profound.
    At last Ben said, “In spite of this strangeness in the mice, Eric
and his researchers must've been electrified. Dear God, they'd hoped
to extend the life span-and instead they defeated death altogether!
So they were eager to move on to development of similar methods of
genetic alteration for human beings.”
    “Yes.”
    “In spite of the mice's unexplained tendency to frenzies, rages, random violence.”
    “Yes.”
    “Figuring that problem might never arise in a human subject… or
could be dealt with somewhere along the way.”
    “Yes.”
    Ben said, “So… slowly the work progressed, but too slowly for
Eric. Youth-oriented, youth -obsessed, and inordinately afraid
of dying, he decided not to wait for a safe and proven process.”
    “Yes.”
    “That's what you meant in Eric's office tonight, when you asked
Baresco if he knew Eric had broken the cardinal rule. To a genetics
researcher or other specialist in biological sciences, the cardinal
rule would be-what?-that he should never experiment with human beings
until • all encountered problems and unanswered questions are dealt
with at the test-animal level or below.”
    “Exactly,” she said. She had folded her hands in her lap to keep
them from shaking, but her fingers kept picking at one another. “And
Vincent
didn't know Eric had broken the cardinal rule, I knew, but it must've
come as a nasty shock to them when they heard
Eric's body was missing. The moment they heard, they knew he'd done
the craziest, most reckless, most unforgivable thing he possibly
could've done.”
    “And now what?” Ben asked. “They want to help him?”
    “No. They want to kill him. Again.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he won't come back all the way, won't ever be exactly
like he was. This stuff wasn't perfected yet.”
    “He'll be like the lab animals?”
    “Probably. Strangely violent, dangerous.”
    Ben thought of the mindless destruction in the Villa Park house,
the blood in the trunk of the car.
    Rachael said, “Remember-he was a ruthless man all his life and
troubled by barely suppressed violent urges even before this. The
mice started out meek, but Eric didn't, so what might he be like now? Look what he did to Sarah Kiel.”
    Ben remembered not only the beaten girl but the wrecked kitchen in
the Palm Springs house, the knives driven into the wall.
    “And if Eric murders someone in one of these rages,” Rachael said,
“the police are more likely to learn
he's alive, and Wildcard will be blown wide open. So his partners want to kill him in some very final manner that'll
rule out another resurrection. I wouldn't be surprised if they dismembered the corpse or burned it to ashes and then disposed of the remains in several locations.”
    Good God, Ben thought, is this reality or Chiller Theater?
    He said, “They want to kill you because you know about
Wildcard?”
    “Yes, but that's not the only reason they'd like to get their
hands on me. They've got two others at least. For one thing, they probably think I know where Eric will go to ground.”
    “But you don't?”
    “I had some ideas. And Sarah Kiel gave me another one. But I don't know for sure.”
    “You said there's a third reason they'd want you?”
    She nodded. “I'm