The thing in the pilot’s seat shimmered like a mirage and dissolved. Wayne’s face was set in a rigid grin, the flesh of his cheeks pushed back by the intense g-forces. Now he’d show them, he thought. He’d show all the liars. He laughed aloud and cut back on his airspeed, rolling the jet over; the Challenger responded immediately. A loose clipboard smacked him in the middle of his head; a pencil and paper clips danced around him. He pushed the control column forward, putting the Challenger into a shallow dive toward the dark plain below. There was a high whine of air around the nose cone. He watched the altimeter falling. Thirteen thousand. Twelve thousand. Eleven thousand. Ten.
“WAYNE!” Niles shrieked from his seat behind Billy. “STOP IT!” He started to unstrap his belt, but he saw Coombs’s corpse folded over a teakwood table, blood leaking from the cracked skull, and he realized with a cold certainty that he was a dead man if he left the safety of his seatbelt.
Wayne grinned, his eyes filling with tears. Up here, at the throttle of this fantastic machine, he was in full control. He saw the altimeter reach four thousand feet, and then he whipped the jet off to the right. Airspeed fell dramatically; the control column shivered in his grip. He had never felt so free and full of power before in his life. The engines moaned; the entire plane began shuddering, straining to its limits. He couldn’t breathe, and black motes danced before his eyes.
With an effort that almost tore his arms from their sockets, Billy unsnapped his belt. Instantly he was pushed over the top of his seat, almost into Niles’s lap; he clutched at the seat in front of him, trying to pull himself toward the flight deck.
Wayne leveled the Challenger off and then threw it into a dive again. Billy was tossed like a cork inside the cabin; he rolled head over heels, trying to grab anything to steady himself. His chin cracked against a table; dazed, he tumbled forward. His left shoulder smashed into something, and white-hot pain filled him. Then he gripped the plastic curtain around Krepsin’s seat; it ripped down, and through the haze of pain Billy saw feral fear stitched across Augustus Krepsin’s pallid face.
At less than five hundred feet, Wayne wrenched back on the control column. The Challenger shuddered and leveled off; the altimeter read four-nine-two. He was aware of strange shapes on the landscape before him, bathed in amber moonlight; he pulled the throttles back, cutting airspeed. Something huge and dark and jagged passed to the right, barely fifty yards away.
Billy was at the flight deck, and Wayne looked over his shoulder with a half-snarl, half-grin.
And then Billy saw it; it loomed up, filling the windshield. Moonlight glinted off wind-etched rock. Wayne twisted around, and instinctively tried to lift the jet over the mountain peak they were almost upon. The Challenger shuddered, caught by an updraft. Then there was a banshee scream of ripping metal as the right wingtip was clipped by rock. The violent motion of collision threw Billy against a bulkhead; he heard bone snap, and then he was on his knees watching blood drip from his nostrils.
The underside of the fuselage scraped rock, splitting open like a sardine can; sparks and fire rippled along the seam, being sucked upward into the starboard jet engine. It exploded, first crumpling the starboard fuselage wall and then bursting through with the scream and whine of popping rivets. Red-hot daggers of metal impaled Niles from behind, going through him and into the seat Billy had left. A flying sheet of metal, rippling with flame, took off the top of Niles’s head and splattered Dora with brains.
Warning buzzers went off all over the instrument panel. The rear of the plane was on fire, the starboard engine gone, the starboard wingtip and ailerons mangled. The rudder wouldn’t respond. Wayne saw the airspeed falling. They were going down, toward a wide flat plain rimmed with mountains. Fuses were burning, the cockpit filling with acrid smoke. The ground was coming up fast, a blur of amber-colored earth strewn with sparse vegetation.
Wayne had time only to cut the remaining engine’s power. The jet hit, and bounced. Hit again. Dust boiled up, obscuring his vision. He was thrown forward and then backward, the belt almost squeezing him in two, and he lost his grip on the yoke. The jet ground forward on a sizzling sheet of sparks. It split in half, lost its wings, spun, and careened onward over a rough runway of pebbled desert. Wayne’s head rocked forward, slamming into the yoke. The skeletal remains of the jet slid on a hundred more yards, then lay still.
Billy stirred from the floor of the flight deck, where he’d been pinned against the back of the pilot’s seat. He saw that the cabin was a mangled mass of burning cables and furniture. Where the jet had cracked in half he could see out across the desert plain—for over three hundred yards there was a litter of burning debris and a trail of flaming jet fuel. The rear section had been ripped away. Through a haze of eye-stinging smoke, Billy saw that Krepsin’s seat had been torn away, too. The man was gone.
He tried to stand. There was no feeling in his left arm; looking at it, he saw white bone gleaming at the severe break of his left wrist. A wave of pain and nausea passed over him, and cold sweat broke out on his face. Wayne moaned softly and began sobbing. In the remains of the passenger cabin, the carpet and seats were on fire. The plastic curtain that had hung around Krepsin’s seat was melting. Billy forced himself up, cradling his injured arm against his chest. He grasped Wayne’s shoulder and eased the boy back; Wayne’s head lolled. There was a purple lump over his right eye, and the eye itself was swelling shut.
Moving as if in agonized slow motion, Billy unstrapped Wayne’s seatbelt and managed to haul him from the seat. “Wake up, wake up,” he kept saying as he dragged Wayne out through the burning cabin with his good arm. With the last of his ebbing strength, Billy half carried, half dragged Wayne as far as he could before his legs gave out. He fell to the ground, smelling his own burned flesh and hair. Then the long, terrible pain racked him and he curled up like a fetus against the oncoming darkness.
62
HE KNEW HE WAS MOVING. Hurtling rapidly through darkness. He was in a tunnel, he thought, and soon he’d reach the far end. He wasn’t hurting anymore. He was afraid, but he felt fine.
In the distance there was a sudden glint of bright, hazy golden light. As if a door were slowly being opened.
For him, he realized. For him.
It was the most beautiful light he’d ever seen. It was all the sunrises and sunsets he’d ever witnessed, all the golden sunny summer days of his childhood, all the colors of sunlight streaming through the multicolored leaves of an autumn forest. He’d soon reach that light, if he hurried; he desperately wanted to get there, to feel that warmth on his body, to bask in it and just let everything go. He was able to turn his head—or he thought he turned his head, but he wasn’t sure—and looked back along the tunnel at what he was leaving behind. There was something back there on fire.
The door was opening wider, flooding the tunnel with that wonderful glow. He had to reach it, he knew, before it closed again. His forward progress seemed to be slowing…slowing…
The door was wide open, the light so bright it stung his eyes. Beyond the doorway was a suggestion of blazing blue sky, green fields, and hills and forest stretching on as far as he could see. There were wonders over there, a beautiful place of peace and rest. There would be new paths to explore, new secret places, new journeys to be made. Joy surged through him, and he stretched out his arm to reach the opening.
A figure stepped into the threshold. A woman, with long russet hair that flowed over her shoulders. He knew instantly who it was, and she looked at him with an expression of sadness and compassion.
“No,” she said softly. “You can’t give it up yet. It’s too soon.”
And the door began closing.
“Please!” Billy said. “Help me…let me stay!”
“Not yet,” she replied.
He shouted, “No!” but he was already falling away from it, falling faster and faster as the door closed and the light faded. He sobbed and fought as he tumbled along the tunnel, returning to the place where pain waited to g
rip into him again. Memory ripped through him: Wayne at the controls, Krepsin screaming, the jet skidding along the ground while flames chewed at the cabin, a shriek of metal as the wings tore away, the final violent thrashing of the fuselage…
He moaned and opened his eyes. Two dark forms that had been poised near his head spread their wings, making startled cries as they flew away. They circled overhead in the graying sky, then dropped down onto something about a hundred yards away.
I’m not dead, Billy thought. But the memory of the golden light and the beautiful landscape almost cracked his heart; his mother had been there, waiting for him, but had turned him away instead. Why? Because his Mystery Walk wasn’t yet finished?
He braced himself with his right arm and tried to sit up. Pain pounded through his head, broken bones grinding in his jaw where his head had struck the table. Then he had forced himself into a sitting position, and he looked across the desert.
The first orange rays of the sun were slicing the sky over a line of purple mountains to the east. Small fires still flickered everywhere; a large section of the jet—the rear of the cabin and the tail—had burned itself out into a black mass of tangled metal. Debris was scattered for more than a mile. Billy watched sunlight explode over the mountains. The heat was already stifling; in another hour or so it would be unbearable, and there wasn’t a scrap of shelter.
He heard a soft, shuddered moan behind him. With an effort, he turned his head and saw Wayne Falconer—his face swollen, his hair scorched, his clothes ripped and burned—lying about ten feet away, his back supported by part of a seat that had been blown out of the aircraft. There was crusted blood all over Wayne’s face, and one eye was swollen shut. The other was deep-sunken, bright blue, and was fixed on the Challenger’s strewn wreckage. The eye moved and came to rest on Billy.
Wayne whispered, “The beautiful eagle. It’s dead. It’s all torn up and dead.” A tear glittered in his eye, overflowed, and ran down his blood-streaked cheek.
Billy watched the vultures circle and swoop. A few of them were fighting over something that lay about thirty yards or so away—something twisted and charred black. “Do you know where we are?” he asked Wayne.
“No. What does it matter? Krepsin’s dead; they’re all dead…except you.”
“Can you move?”
“My head hurts. And so does my side. But I landed her, didn’t I? We were on fire, and I put her right down. What did we hit?”
“One of those, I think.” Billy motioned toward the peaks with his right hand. “Somebody’ll help us. They’ll see the smoke.”
Wayne watched the smoke rising. The sun painted his bruised face bright orange. “I wanted them all dead…but you, most of all. I wanted to die, too. I don’t remember much after we hit the ground; but I remember somebody pulling me out of the flight deck.” He turned his head, the single eye unblinking. “Why didn’t you leave me there to burn?”
“I don’t hate you,” Billy said. “No matter what you think, I’m not your enemy. Krepsin was, because he wanted to own you—and he wanted to own me, too. They brought me here from Chicago, to make me do…awful things. If you hate me, it’s because J.J. Falconer owned you, and he taught you how to hate.”
“Daddy…” Wayne said softly. “He used to visit me, all the time. Late at night, just before I slept. But…he lied to me, didn’t he? No, no; it wasn’t my daddy. It was…something else, something that…looked like an animal. I saw it, in the flight deck, just before we went down. It was lying to me, all the time, making me think my…my daddy was still alive. And it told me to trust Mr. Krepsin, to stay with him and do whatever he wanted. They hurt Henry Bragg. They hurt him bad, and I had to heal him.” Wayne lifted his hands and looked at them. “I just wanted to do good,” he said. “That’s all. Why was it always so hard?” There was pleading in his voice.
Billy slowly rose to his feet. He was still wearing the cotton slippers that had been issued to him at Krepsin’s hacienda. The ground was a pavement of rough pebbles, interrupted here and there by gnarled growths of cactus and spikes of palmetto. “We’ve got to find some shade,” he told Wayne. “Can you walk?”
“I don’t want to move.”
“The sun’s still low. In a couple of hours it’s going to be over a hundred degrees out here. Maybe we can find a village. Maybe…” His gaze passed across the rise of mountains that stood to the north, and he squinted in the fierce, hot glare. The mountains seemed to be only a mile or so away, shimmering in the heat waves. There were rippled outcrops of rock that might throw enough shade to keep them alive. “Up there,” he said, and pointed. “It’s not too far. We can make it.”
Wayne balked for another moment, then stood up. He grasped Billy’s shoulder for support, and something like a charge of electricity passed between them, stunning and energizing both of them. The pain seemed to drain out of Billy’s body; Wayne’s head was cleared as if he’d inhaled pure oxygen. Startled, Wayne drew his hand back.
“We can make it,” Billy said firmly. “We have to.”
“I don’t understand you. Why don’t you just leave me and walk away? Whenever I saw you and your mother, whenever I heard your names, I was afraid; and I was ashamed, too, because I liked the power I had.” His face was agonized. “But I had to start lying about the healing, because I couldn’t heal everybody. I had to make them think I could, or they wouldn’t listen to me anymore. I wouldn’t have the power anymore. Even when I was a child, I was lying about it…and I knew it. And somehow, you and she knew it too, right from the start. You could see right through me. I… I hated both of you, and I wanted to see you dead.” He squinted up toward the sun. “But maybe it was because I hated what I was, and I wanted to die… I still want to die. Just leave me here. Let me rest.”
“No. I don’t know what Krepsin did to you, but you can get help. Now let’s start walking.” He took the first step, then the next and the next. The pebbles felt like glass under his feet. When he looked back, he saw that Wayne was following, but at a dazed, unsteady pace.
They passed through the wreckage. Puddles of jet fuel still burned. Cocktail napkins with Ten High, Inc. printed on them fluttered past on a hot breath of wind. There was a litter of burned cables, shredded seats, broken glass, and razor-edged sheets of metal. A headless body in a scorched suit lay draped over the crisp remnant of a black leather sofa. The vultures were at work, stopping only to eye Billy and Wayne as they passed.
They found Krepsin’s a few minutes later. The massive body was still strapped in its seat, lying on its side in a thatch of sharp palmettos, which had kept most of the vultures away. Krepsin, the clothes almost all ripped away from his body, was covered with mottled bluish black bruises. The tongue lolled from his head, and his eyes protruded as if they were about to explode. The body was already swelling, the face, neck, and arms grown to even more freakish proportions.
Billy heard the thin, high screaming in his head; the noise grew louder and then ebbed. He said, “Wait,” and Wayne stopped. The screaming was agonized, terrified; Krepsin and the others were still here, caught at the instant of their deaths. Abruptly, the screaming stopped as if it had been squeezed off. Billy listened, feeling a cold chill work through him. Now there was only silence.
Something was different, Billy thought. Something was wrong. The hair at the back of his neck was standing up. He felt danger here. The shape changer, Billy thought, and was suddenly afraid. What had happened to the shape changer? If it fed off the evil in Krepsin, Niles, and Dorn, might it not swell with hideous, consumptive strength?
Billy said, “Let’s get out of here. Right now.” He started off again. Wayne stared down at Krepsin’s corpse for a moment, then followed.
Behind them, one of Krepsin’s swollen, burned hands moved. The fingers crept down and worked the seatbelt loose. It shrugged free of the seat, and grinned with a mouthful of shattered teeth. Its face turned toward the figures who were walking fifty yards away; its eyes had changed, now burning red and
animalish. The reanimated corpse crawled through the palmetto, muttering and chuckling. Powered by a surge of evil stronger than anything it had ever consumed, the shape changer rose slowly on its scorched, swollen legs. Its hands clenched into fists as it watched the figures walking away. This body was still strong, not like the others that had been torn to pieces and gnawed on by the vultures. This body could be used.
The thing prowled through the wreckage, getting used to the feel of its fleshy cocoon. It giggled and muttered, ready now to smash and crush and rip. Vultures squalled and flew away from the lumbering thing; it sought Niles’s headless body, ripped open the coat, and dug a thick hand into the pocket. It brought out a leather pouch, tied with a drawstring. The prize inside wouldn’t fit on the swollen hand; impatiently, the shape changer snapped off the first joints of the fingers and jammed the prize onto the stubs.
Sharp pieces of razor blades gleamed in the sunlight. It was the weapon that Niles had used to slash Henry Bragg’s throat.
Krepsin’s face turned toward the distant figures; the red eyes glared out as if through a bloated, bruised mask of flesh. Now it had human form—and superhuman, evil-charged strength—and it would show them it would not be cheated. The thing swung its arm in a vicious arc and grinned. Now it would show them both.
The corpse waddled after them, with murder flaring in its eyes.
63
THE SUN BURNED DOWN relentlessly. Cradling his injured arm, Billy saw that he’d misjudged the distance to that range of mountains. They’d been walking for over thirty minutes, and still the cactus-covered foothills seemed at least another half-mile away. The mountains were boulder-strewn ridges of tortured earth, red rock shimmering in rising heat waves. He could see a few scattered caves, though; there were maybe twelve, most of them little more than shallow cracks. He was losing liquid in rivulets, his head pounding from the deadly weight of the sun. His feet, bruised and cut by the rough desert pavement, were leaving bloody prints. Wayne staggered, about to pass out. His nose was bleeding again, the liquid attracting a horde of flies. His face felt like a sheet of hot metal, and as he lifted his gaze toward the sky his single eye saw the two vultures that were circling overhead. One for each of them, he thought, and almost giggled. One would get the dark meat, one would get the white. They were going to die out here. It would be soon, and it was no use to keep walking. They might as well just lie down right here and let the vultures go to work. He lagged behind Billy, then abruptly sat down.