Shadowfires

first in line to inherit Geneplan, and they don't
trust me to continue pumping enough money into Wildcard. By removing
me, they stand a much better chance of retaining control of the
corporation and of keeping Wildcard secret. If I
could've gotten to Eric's safe ahead of them and
could've put my hands on his project diary, I would've had solid
proof that Wildcard exists, and then they
wouldn't have dared touch me. Without proof, I'm vulnerable.”
    Ben rose and began to move restlessly around the room, thinking
furiously.
    Somewhere in the night, not far beyond the motel walls, a cat
cried either in anger or in passion. It went on a long time, rising
and falling, an eerie ululation.
    Finally Ben said, “Rachael, why are you pursuing Eric? Why
this desperate rush to reach him before the others? What'll you do if you find him?”
    “Kill him,” she said without hesitation, and the bleakness in her
green eyes was now complemented by a Rachael-like determination and
iron resolve. “Kill him for good. Because if I don't kill him, he's
going to hide out until he's in better condition, until he's a bit
more in control of himself, and then
he's going to come kill me. He died furious with me, consumed by such hatred for me that he dashed blindly out into traffic, and I'm
sure that same hatred was seething in him the moment awareness
returned to him in the county morgue. In his clouded and twisted
mind, I'm very likely his primary obsession, and I don't think
he'll rest until I'm dead. Or until he's dead, really dead this time.”
    He knew she was right. He was deeply afraid for her.
    His preference for the past was as strong in him now as it had
ever been, and he longed for simpler times. How mad had the modern
world become? Criminals owned the city streets at night. The whole
planet could be utterly destroyed in an hour with the pressing of a
few buttons. And now… now dead men could be reanimated. Ben
wished for a time machine that could carry him back to a better age:
say the early 1920s, when a sense of wonder was still alive and when
faith in the human potential was unsullied and unsurpassed.
    Yet… he remembered the joy that had surged in him when Rachael had
first said that death had been beaten, before she had explained that
those who came back from beyond were frighteningly changed. He had
been thrilled. Hardly the response of a genuine stick-in-the-
mud reactionary. He might peer back at the past and long for it with
full-blown sentimentalism, but in his heart he was, like others of
his age, undeniably attracted to science and its potential for
creating a brighter future. Maybe he was not such a misfit in the
modern world as he liked to pretend. Maybe this experience was
teaching him something about himself that he would have preferred not
to learn.
    He said, “Could you really pull the trigger on Eric?”
    “Yes.”
    “I'm not sure you could. I suspect you'd freeze up when you were
really confronted with the moral implications of murder.”
    “This wouldn't be murder. He's no longer a human being.
He's already dead. The living dead. The walking dead. He's not a man
anymore.
He's different. Changed. Just as those mice were changed. He's
only a thing now, not a man, a dangerous thing, and I
wouldn't have any qualms about blowing his head off. If the authorities ever found out, I don't
think they'd even try to prosecute me. And I see no moral questions that would put me on trial in my own mind.”
    “You've obviously thought hard about this,” he said. “But why not hide out, keep a low profile, let Eric's
partners find him and kill him for you?”
    She shook her head. “I
can't bet everything on their success. They might fail. They might not get to him before he finds me. This is my life we're
talking about, and by God I'm not trusting in anyone but me to protect it.”
    “And me,” he said.
    “And you, yes. And you, Benny.”
    He came to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, beside her. “So
we're chasing a dead man.”
    “Yes.”
    “But we've got to get some rest now.”
    “I'm beat,” she agreed.
    “Then where will we go tomorrow?”
    “Sarah told me about a cabin Eric has in the mountains near Lake
Arrowhead. It sounded secluded. Just what he needs now, for the next
few days, while the initial healing's going on.”
    Ben sighed. “Yeah, I think we might find him in a place like
that.”
    “You don't have to come with me.”
    “I will.”
    “But you don't have to.”
    “I know. But