Strange Highways

get out of this place alive? Look at you - your gun hand isn't even trembling."
     "I've had more frightening experiences than this," Frank said tightly. "I've been through two tax audits."
     Skagg did not laugh. He clearly needed a terrified reaction from an intended victim. Murder was not sufficiently satisfying; evidently he also required the complete humiliation and abasement of his prey.
      Well, you bastard, you're not going to get what you need from me, Frank thought.
     He repeated, "What the hell are you?"
     Clacking the halves of his deadly pincers, slowly taking a step forward, Karl Skagg said, "Maybe I'm the spawn of Hell. Do you think that could be the explanation? Hmmmm?"
     "Stay back," Frank warned.
     Skagg took another step toward him. "Am I a demon perhaps, risen from some sulfurous pit? Do you feel a certain coldness in your soul; do you sense the nearness of something satanic?"
     Frank bumped against one of the forklifts, stepped around the obstruction, and continued to retreat.
     Advancing, Skagg said, "Or am I something from another world, a creature alien to this one, conceived under a different moon, born under another sun?"
     As he spoke, his right eye receded into his skull, dwindled, vanished. The socket closed up as the surface of a pond would close around the hole made by a pebble; only smooth skin lay where the eye had been.
     "Alien? Is that something of which you could conceive?" Skagg pressed. "Have you sufficient wit to accept that I came to this world across an immense sea of space, carried on galactic tides?"
     Frank no longer wondered how Skagg had battered open the door of the warehouse; he would have made hornlike hammers of his hands - or ironlike pry bars. No doubt he had also slipped incredibly thin extensions of his fingertips into the alarm switch, deactivating it.
     The skin of Skagg's left cheek dimpled, and a hole formed in it. The lost right eye flowered into existence within the hole, directly under his left eye. In two winks both eyes re-formed: They were no longer human but insectoid, bulging and multifaceted.
     As if changes were taking place in his throat too, Skagg's voice lowered and became gravelly. "Demon, alien ... or maybe I'm the result of some genetic experiment gone terribly wrong. Hmmmm? What do you think?"
     That laugh again. Frank hated that laugh.
     "What do you think?" Skagg insisted as he approached.
     Retreating, Frank said, "You're probably none of those things. Like you said ... you're stranger and more interesting than that."
     Both of Skagg's hands had become pincers now. The metamorphosis continued up his muscular arms as his human form gave way to a more crustacean anatomy. The seams of his shirt sleeves split; then the shoulder seams also tore as the transformation continued into his upper body. Chitinous accretions altered the size and shape of his chest, and his shirt buttons popped loose.
     Though Frank knew he was wasting ammunition, he fired three shots as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger. One round took Skagg in the stomach, one in the chest, one in the throat. Flesh tore, bones cracked, blood flew. The shapechanger staggered backward but did not go down.
     Frank saw the bullet holes and knew that a man would die instantly of those wounds. Skagg merely swayed. Even as he regained his balance, his flesh began to knit up again. In half a minute the wounds had vanished.
     With a wet cracking noise, Skagg's skull swelled to twice its previous size, though the change had nothing to do with the revolver fire that the shapechanger had absorbed. His face seemed to implode , all the features collapsing inward, but almost at once a mass of tissue bulged outward and began to form queer insectoid features.
     Frank did not wait to see the grotesque details of Skagg's new countenance. He fired two more rounds at the alarmingly plastic face, then ran, leaped over an electric cart, dodged around a big forklift, sprinted into an aisle between tall metal shelves, and tried not to feel pain in his side as he ran back through the long warehouse.
     When that morning had begun, dreary and rain-swept, with traffic moving through the city's puddled streets at a crawl, with the palm trees dripping, with the buildings somber in the gray storm light, Frank had thought that the