Shadowfires

concentration required
to study the tree-shadowed road for advancing enemies. If it became
unbearable, he would have to lie down, though he was loath to leave
his post. He sensed danger approaching.
    He kept the ax and the two knives on the floor beside the chair.
Each time he glanced down at those sharp blades, he felt not only
reassured but strangely exultant. When he put his fingertips to the
handle of the ax, a dark and almost erotic thrill coursed through
him.
    Let them come, he thought. I'll show them Eric Leben is still a man to be reckoned with. Let them come.
    Though he still had difficulty understanding who might be seeking
him, he somehow knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Then names
popped into his mind: Baresco, Seitz, Geffels, Knowls, Lewis. Yes, of
course, his partners in Geneplan. They would know what he'd done. They would decide that he had to be found quickly and terminated in order to protect the secret of Wildcard. But they were not the only men he had to fear. There were others… shadowy figures he could not recall, men with more power than the partners in Geneplan.
    For a moment he felt that he was about to break through a wall of
mist into a clear place. He was on the verge of achieving a clarity
of thought and a fullness of memory that he had not known since
rising from the gurney in the morgue. He held his breath and leaned
forward in his chair with tremulous anticipation. He almost had it,
all of it: the identity of the other pursuers, the meaning of the
mice, the meaning of the hideous image of the crucified woman that
kept recurring to him…
    Then the unremitting pain in his head knocked him back from the
brink of enlightenment, into the mist again. Muddy currents invaded
the clearing stream of his thoughts, and in a moment all was clouded
as before. He let out a thin cry of frustration.
    Outside, in the forest, movement caught his attention. Squinting
his hot watery eyes, Eric slid forward to the chair's edge, leaned toward the large window, peered intently at the tree-covered slope and the shadow-dappled dirt lane. No one there. The movement was simply the work of a sudden breeze that had finally broken the summer stillness. Bushes stirred, and the evergreen boughs lifted slightly, drooped, lifted, drooped, as if the trees were fanning themselves.
    He was about to ease farther back in the chair when a scintillant
blast of pain, shooting across his forehead, virtually threw him back. For a moment he was in such horrendous agony that he
could not move or cry out or breathe. When at last breath could be
drawn, he screamed, though by then it was a scream of anger rather
than pain, for the pain went as abruptly as it had come.
    Afraid that the bright explosion of pain had signified a sudden
turn for the worse, perhaps even a coming apart of his broken skull,
Eric raised one shaky hand to his head. First he touched his damaged
right ear, which had nearly been torn off yesterday morning but which
was now firmly attached, lumpish and unusually gristly to the touch
but no longer drooping and raw.
    How could he heal so fast? The process was supposed to take a few
weeks, not a few hours.
    He slowly slipped his fingers upward and gingerly explored the
deep depression along the right side of his skull, where he had made
contact with the garbage truck. The depression was still there. But
not as deep as he remembered it. And the concavity was solid. It had
been slightly mushy before. Like bruised and rotting fruit. But no
longer. He felt no tenderness in the flesh, either. Emboldened, he
pressed his fingers harder into the wound, massaged, probed from one
end of the indentation to the other, and everywhere he encountered
healthy flesh and a firm shell of bone. The cracked and splintered
skull had already knit up in less than a day, and the holes had
filled in with new bone, which was flat-out impossible, damn it,
impossible, but that was what had happened. The wound was healed, and
his brain tissue was once more protected by a casing of unbroken
bone.
    He sat stupefied, unable to comprehend. He remembered that his
genes had been edited to enhance the healing process and to promote
cell rejuvenation, but damned if he remembered that it was supposed
to happen this fast. Grievous wounds closing in mere hours? Flesh,
arteries, and veins reconstituted at an almost visible rate?
Extensive bone re-formation completed in less than a day? Christ, not
even