Shadowfires

marveling over his leanness, testing the rock-hard muscles of his shoulders and arms, kneading the bunched muscles of his back, glorying in the silken smoothness of his skin, the rocking motion of his hips against hers, pelvis to pelvis, the hot touch of his hands, the branding heat of his lips upon her cheeks, her mouth, her throat, her breasts.
    Until this interlude with Benny, Rachael had not made love in
almost fifteen months. And never in her life had she made love like
this: never this good, this tender or exciting, never this
satisfying. She felt as if she had been half dead heretofore and this
was the hour of her resurrection.
    Finally spent, they lay in each other's arms for a while, silent, at peace, but the soft afterglow of lovemaking slowly gave way to a curious disquiet. At first she was not certain what disturbed her, but soon she recognized it as that rare and peculiar feeling that someone had just walked over her grave, an irrational but convincingly instinctive sensation that brought a vague chill to her bare flesh and a colder shiver to her spine.
    She looked at Benny's gentle smile, studied every much-loved line of his face, stared into his eyes-and had the shocking, unshakable feeling that she was going to lose him.
    She tried to tell herself that her sudden apprehension
was 1 the understandable reaction of a thirty-year-old
woman who, having made one bad marriage, had at last miraculously
found the right man. Call it the I-don't-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome. When life finally hands us a beautiful bouquet of flowers, we usually peer cautiously among the petals in expectation of a bee. Superstition-evinced especially in a distrust of good fortune-was perhaps the very core of human nature, and it was natural for her to fear losing him.
    That was what she tried to tell herself, but she knew her sudden
terror was something more than superstition, something darker. The
chill along her spine deepened until she felt as if each vertebra had
been transformed into a lump of ice. The cool breath that had touched
her skin now penetrated deeper, down toward her bones.
    She turned from him, swung her legs out of the bed, stood up,
naked and shivering.
    Benny said, “Rachael?”
    “Let's get moving,” she said anxiously, heading toward the bathroom through the golden light and palm shadows that came through the single, undraped window.
    “What's wrong?” he asked.
    “We're sitting ducks here. Or might be. We've got to keep moving.
We've got to keep on the offensive. We've got to find him before he
finds us-or before anyone else finds us.”
    Benny got out of bed, stepped between her and the bathroom door,
put his hands on her shoulders. “Everything's going to be all right.”
    “Don't say that.”
    “But it will.”
    “Don't tempt fate.”
    “We're strong together,” he said. “Nothing's stronger.”
    “Don't,” she insisted, putting a hand to his lips to silence him. “Please. I… I couldn't
bear losing you.”
    “You won't lose me,” he said.
    But when she looked at him, she had the terrible feeling that he
was already lost, that death was very near to him, inevitable.
    The I-don't-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome.
    Or maybe a genuine premonition.
    She had no way of knowing which it was.
The search for Dr. Eric Leben was getting
nowhere.
    The grim possibility of failure was, for Anson Sharp, like a great
pressure pushing in on the walls of Geneplan's underground labs in Riverside, compressing the window-less rooms, until he felt as if he were being slowly crushed. He could not abide failure; he was a winner, always a winner, superior to all other men, and that was the only way he cared to think of himself, the only way he could bear to think of himself, as the sole member of a superior species, for that image of himself justified anything he wished to do, anything at all, and he was a man who simply could not live with the moral and ethical limitations of ordinary men.
    Yet field agents were filing negative reports from every place
that the walking dead man might have been expected to show up, and
Sharp was getting angrier and more nervous by the hour. Perhaps their
knowledge of Eric Leben was not quite as thorough as they thought. In
anticipation of these events, perhaps the geneticist had prepared a
place where he could go to ground, and had managed to keep it secret
even from the DSA. If that were the case, the failure to apprehend
Leben would be seen as Sharp's personal failure,