Shadowfires

chatter-for she assumed the attitude of
a California beach girl airhead-would never have suspected that she
had just listened to a radio reporter describe her as a fugitive
wanted for murder.
    The same slightly pompous-sounding reporter was currently talking
about a terrorist bombing in the Mideast, and Sam, the clerk, clicked
a knob on the radio, cutting him off in midsentence. “I'm plain sick of hearing about those damn A-rabs,” he said to Ben.
    “Who isn't?” Ben said, completing the last line of the form.
    “Far as
I'm concerned,” Sam said, “if they give us any more grief, we should just nuke 'em
and be done with it.”
    “Nuke 'em,” Ben agreed. “Back to the Stone Age.”
    The radio was part of the tape deck, and Sam switched that on,
popped in a cassette. “Have to be farther back than the Stone Age.
They're already living in the damn Stone Age.”
    “Nuke 'em back to the Age of Dinosaurs,” Ben said as a song by the Oak Ridge Boys issued from the cassette player.
    Rachael was making astonished and squeamish sounds as the
fisherman told her how the tattoo needles embedded the ink way down
beneath all three layers of skin.
    “Age of the Dinosaurs,” Sam agreed. “Let 'em try their terrorist crap on a tyrannosaurus, huh?”
    Ben laughed and handed over the completed form.
    The purchases had already been charged to Ben's Visa card, so all Sam had to do was staple the charge slip and the cash-register tape to one copy of the firearms information form and put the paperwork in the bag that held the four boxes of ammunition. “Come see us again.”
    “I'll sure do that,” Ben said.
    Rachael said good-bye to the tattooed fisherman, and Ben said
hello and good-bye to him, and they both said good-bye to Sam.
Ben carried the box containing the shotgun, and Rachael carried the
plastic sack that contained the boxes of ammunition, and they moved
nonchalantly across the room toward the front door, past stacks of
aluminum bait buckets with perforated Styrofoam liners, past furled
minnow-seining nets and small landing nets that looked like tennis
rackets with badly stretched strings, past ice chests and thermos
bottles and colorful fishing hats.
    Behind them, in a voice that he believed to be softer than it
actually was, the tattooed fisherman said to Sam: “Quite a woman.”
    You don't know the half of it, Ben thought as he pushed open the door for Rachael and followed her outside.
    Less than ten feet away, a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy was getting out of a patrol car.
Fluorescent light bounced off the green and
white ceramic tile, bright enough to reveal every hideous detail, too
bright.
    The bathroom mirror, framed in brass, was unmarred by spots or
yellow streaks of age, and the reflections it presented were crisp
and sharp and clear in every detail, too clear.
    Eric Leben was not surprised by what he saw, for while sitting in
the living-room armchair, he had already hesitantly used his hands to
explore the startling changes in the upper portions of his face. But
visual confirmation of what his disbelieving hands had told him was
shocking, frightening, depressing-and more fascinating than anything
else he'd seen in his entire life.
    A year ago, he had subjected himself to the imperfect Wildcard
program of genetic editing and augmentation. Since then, he had
caught no colds, no flu, had been plagued by no mouth ulcers or
headaches, not even acid indigestion. Week by week, he had gathered
evidence supporting the contention that the treatment had wrought a
desirable change in him without negative side effects.
    Side effects.
    He almost laughed. Almost.
    Staring in horror at the mirror, as if it were a window onto hell,
he raised one trembling hand to his forehead and touched, again, the
narrow rippled ridge of bone that had risen from the bridge of his
nose to his hairline.
    The catastrophic injuries he had suffered yesterday had triggered
his new healing abilities in a way and to a degree that invasive cold
and flu viruses had not. Thrown into overdrive, his cells had begun
to produce interferon, a wide spectrum of infection-fighting
antibodies, and especially growth hormones and proteins, at an
astonishing rate. For some reason, those substances were continuing
to flood his system after the healing was complete, after the need
for them was past. His body was no longer merely replacing damaged
tissue but was adding new tissue at an alarming rate, tissue without
apparent