She walked toward the door, hesitating slightly; to enter it felt like a violation, but she was doing so for the best of reasons. After a moment, she stepped through the door. It was furnished with surprising spareness; there was a cot, a sink, a table, and a rack of equipment—but the equipment was simplistic, almost meager; not the kind one would work with to solve this knotty a problem. Of course, he hadn’t asked for anything particularly exotic—naturally, she’d ordered everything herself—but she’d assumed he’d taken what he needed from the main room of the secret lab and then returned it when he was done. She hadn’t kept close tabs on what equipment was on hand at any one moment….After all, he was her father, the senior scientist….
Had he done most of his work in the main lab? Was this room the equivalent, perhaps, of a monk’s cell, where he went to think, perhaps do trivial experiments—and suffer through the nights of the full moon, safely under lock and key?
Her eye fell on a lab journal, covered in green cloth, that lay on the table. The relief that flooded through her as she saw this caused her to realize just how distraught Logan’s assertions had made her. Her father’s private journal! This was exactly the proof she needed. It would contain a record of the attempts he’d made, the things he’d tried, what had been promising and what had not.
She snatched it up from the table and began paging through it quickly. But after only a minute, she stopped. A look of horror came over her face as she stared at the open page.
“No,” she whispered.
With trembling hands, she turned another page; read briefly; turned another…and then let the book drop to the floor.
And now, with no more hesitation, she left the room and ran toward the building’s front door.
39
Logan felt himself go cold at the apparition that now confronted them among the thick pines. It was, without a doubt, Chase Feverbridge—but a Feverbridge who had become an abomination of nature.
He seemed to tower over them, his six-foot-four height increased by some trick of the moonlight. His white hair was matted and caked with dirt, full of twigs and dead leaves. His skin had become a blotchy mahogany color, studded here and there with pustulant boils, and it exuded a foul, animalistic odor, sour and musky. Patchy woolen hair covered his limbs. His mouth hung open avariciously. Huge hands, with long, spadelike, chitinous nails, flexed and clenched. Powerful muscles rippled beneath the woolen shirt. Worst of all were the small red eyes that stared at them with a mixture of hatred and hunger. Logan had seen eyes like those once before: in an emergency ward, where a youth suffering a bad PCP trip was being wheeled in by the staff. The youth had been screaming and frothing at the mouth, and—though a cop had hit him in the arm with a nightstick, causing a compound fracture—he was swinging the exposed bone around like a weapon, heedless of the pain, trying to gouge the orderlies who were rushing him into the hospital.
The ghastly spectacle was like a mindless, violence-mad travesty of Zephraim Blakeney—but an order of magnitude worse. Gone was the diffident man of science; in its place stood a creature of violent needs and animal lust. The feeling of wrongness, of nature twisted and perverted, washed over Logan like a wave.
All this took place in a split second. Then Albright began to free his rifle from his shoulder. With a roar, Feverbridge leapt forward and—with a single blow of a taloned hand—rent Albright from collarbone to sternum. Albright cried out with the pain, but still struggled to free his rifle. Feverbridge reached out and grabbed Albright’s arm, gave it a vicious wrench; there was a pop like a cooked chicken leg being pulled from its carcass, and the arm dangled at a strange angle from the poet’s shoulder, dislocated. Albright screamed in pain just as Feverbridge leapt on top of him, hand raised and fingers splayed wide, readying himself for the killing blow.
Logan realized that he had been instinctively backing up in horror during this one-sided battle. Now he raised his handgun and fired, winging Feverbridge in the shoulder. The man roared out, but remained fixated on the fallen Albright. Logan fired again, this time hitting Feverbridge in the leg. Now the man straightened up, howling in pain. Logan fired a third and fourth time, but his hand was shaking and the shots went wide. Feverbridge tensed himself, preparing to spring, and Logan—without a moment’s additional thought—turned and ran for his life.
He tore mindlessly through the thick pine forest, heedless of the direction he was headed or obstacles in his path, aware of only one thing—the terrific crashing and snapping of branches behind him that made it horrifyingly obvious he was being pursued. He’d hit Feverbridge twice, but the shots hadn’t slowed him down—at least, not by much. The man’s plan was now all too clear. Albright had been correct about the unnaturally slow progress Feverbridge had made as he was being tracked, about how he was apparently doubling back on himself: despite his maddened state, he was aware that the two of them knew too much about him—and so he had laid a trap, waiting to ambush and kill them both.
Logan ran and ran, oblivious to the pine needles that raked his face and the branches that tugged at his limbs. Once he stumbled, but somersaulted forward back onto his feet and kept going without interruption, aware that at any moment he might feel those frightful nails tear across his back.
All of a sudden, the trees parted and a structure reared up ahead of him, spectral in the moonlight: the Phelps Fire Observation Station. The crashing sounds were still coming on, but he seemed to have put some distance between himself and Feverbridge. If he could get to the observation building at the top, he could use it as a blind and shoot Feverbridge when he came into the clearing. Immediately, he ducked between the metal struts that made up the sides of the tower and began climbing, two at a time, the exposed stairs that rose between them.
He made the first landing, started up the second switchback, then the third, before he heard a maddened roaring from below. A patch of thin clouds was now passing over the moon, but he could still make out the form of Feverbridge, crouching at the edge of the clearing below him. He half limped, half leapt for the staircase and began climbing with frenzied speed.
With something like despair, Logan realized he had made a tactical error. He still had two more switchbacks to go before reaching the top—he’d never make it in time. He pointed his gun at the climbing Feverbridge, squeezed off a shot—but the man-beast shrank away and the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off metal. He shot again, and this time Feverbridge grunted as the bullet bit through part of an ear—but it did not slow his frantic climb.
Logan looked around in desperation. There was only one chance. Without giving himself time to reconsider, he leapt from the open staircase onto the metal skeleton that made up the external structure of the station. He hit it with a bone-jarring impact; one hand slipped off the metal framing, but he quickly grasped it again. There was a bellow of anger from below and to one side. Ignoring this as best he could, Logan maneuvered his way crablike along the beam until he reached a corner strut, then began sliding his way as quickly as he dared back down to the ground.
A terrific bang overhead told him that Feverbridge had duplicated his maneuver.