“Phelps Fire Observation Station,” Albright said over his shoulder. “Abandoned, of course.”
Crossing the clearing, the moon above them bright with a surrounding swath of clouds, they entered the woods on the far side. Logan could no longer hear any sound ahead. Despite the occasional slowdown or false lead, he was truly impressed by Albright’s knowledge of woodcraft. Whether through the tutelage of his father, Nahum Blakeney, his own youthful experience, or a combination of all three, he was somehow able to follow a trail that, to Logan, looked invisible.
The stand of beech gave way once again to pine, even thicker than before. “Strange,” Albright said, stopping to examine a newly broken branch at shoulder height, fragrant with sap. “He’s circling around to the south. It’s almost as if he’s doubling back—”
And at just that moment there came a sudden burst of sound to their right; the pine trees shook violently; and a creature of nightmare exploded out of the forest and onto them.
38
Laura Feverbridge stood in the doorway of the hidden lab. For a moment, she gathered herself to run after the others, but she remained immobile; it was as if the shocks of the last several minutes had left her paralyzed. She heard the sound of running footsteps, quickly receding; the squeal of brakes; a brief, urgent conversation — and then, silence.
Now, slowly, she turned around and walked back into the main room of the lab. Logan’s insinuations—accusations—were crazy. She had worked with her father for months, trying to reverse the effects of the serum. True, most of the work had been done by her father — that was necessary, since she had to maintain a presence in the primary lab during the day, with the two lab assistants — but she’d seen enough of his work, helped with enough of it. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, deceive her — not after the sacrifices she’d made for him.
“Father,” she murmured. “What have they done to you?”
At first, her steps had been slow, faltering, like a sleepwalker’s, as she wandered aimlessly from table to table. But the more she thought about this awful turn of events, the more agitated her movements became. What to do? What to do?
There had to be something she could do.
This was the worst development imaginable. She’d trusted Logan, let him in on their secret… and he had betrayed her. Worse, he’d betrayed her father. God knew what he would do with that knowledge. But there was one thing she was certain of: these kind of gross accusations, on top of all the scorn her father had endured already, would have the worst possible effect on him.
As she paced, her eye fell on the door to his private room — the room where he did his own research, where she was forbidden to go.
She stopped. Of course. There would be proof in there; proof that he was doing his best to undo the dreadful affliction he was suffering, that this talk of his efforts being nothing but pretense was the vilest kind of slander.
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.