She came off the porch, her hands back at her sides, her head bent low, smelling Remo's scent.
"You know, you can't get away," she yelled out. "Your trying to is just going to make it easier to eat you."
She moved along the line of Remo's scent, trotting briskly, moving so quickly it was as if she was following a paved path through the field.
Remo crouched low, keeping out of sight. He ran toward the house. He felt the breeze touch the right side of his body and knew his fresh scent was not being carried toward her.
At the side of the house, he found the gasoline generator that powered the house's lights and refrigerator. There were two full five-gallon, gasoline cans. Remo grabbed one in each hand and began to retrace his path to the field.
Sheila was still calling him. Her voice echoed in the still day with an almost inhuman volume.
She paused at the first clump of bushes where Remo had left his scent and sniffed around it.
"How did you guess," she called, "that your work here was done?" She straightened up and began following Remo's old path through the field. "No use hopping around," she called. "You can't hide from me."
As she reached the second cluster of greenery where Remo had paused, she said, "It's sort of a shame, isn't it, that you won't be around to see the race you helped create?"
Remo was pouring gasoline along the path he had followed near the far side of the field. Staying low, one gas can on its side under his arm, he ran along. The gas spilled out splashing bushes and dead, dry grass.
It took one full can and more than half the other. By the time Sheila had reached the sixth cluster of cane and weed Remo had scented, he had finished circling the field with gasoline and was back near the porch of the house.
He was out of shape. He could feel it. The ripped stomach muscles had knitted and the skin had healed without much of a scar, but muscle tone had deteriorated. He could feel strain from having run with the two five-gallon cans under his arms. Remo dropped the cans and shrugged.
He could see Sheila rising from the crouch where she had been sniffing his trail around the sixth cluster of bushes he had reached. Before she could follow him back to the house, Remo dashed forward into the center of the field and called out, "Hey, pussycat, where are you?"
Sheila stood up tall, a growl rumbling deep in her throat. She saw Remo and smiled, a broad predator's smile, that expressed neither happiness nor joy, merely satisfaction over finding the next meal so neatly served.
She moved toward him slowly, body bent from the waist, her full and shapely breasts pointing toward the ground, their tips hardened with a passion that had nothing to do with sex. They seemed smaller than they had been.
"I thought you'd give me a better chase than this," she said.
"It's too hot to play," Remo said.
"Even with the mother of your child?" Sheila asked.
The words hit Remo like a hammer, triggering years of frustrated knowledge that he would never have a home, never have children, never have a place of his own that he didn't have to pay for by the night.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"I'm carrying your baby. That's what you were here for, stupid." Sheila was only twenty yards from him now.
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to make more and more of my new people. Someday my son will lead them. He'll have the world."
It wasn't his baby, Remo thought. A baby was made by love between two people. Two humans. This thing, if it existed, would be a grotesque mimicry of an infant, half human, half animal, a snarling vicious beast of a killer.
If he ever had a baby with those traits, he wanted them to come from him, not from its mother. In that moment, for the first time, he hated Sheila Feinberg, hated her for the mockery she had made of his fatherhood, using him as a stud horse, not knowing or caring how much a child would mean to Remo.
In his anger Remo called back, "Have the world? He'll sleep in a tree, eat scraps from the butcher shop and be lucky if he doesn't spend his days in a zoo. With you, you half-witted, half-breed, half-assed alley cat."
Sheila shivered with anger. "I might even have kept you alive," she said. "But you just don't understand. I'm the new breed of man."
"You're the same old breed of lunatic," Remo said.
She was ten yards from him now and charged, ringers raised over her head, head tilted toward the side, mouth open and long, white teeth glistening with saliva.
Her speed surprised Remo, she was almost on him before he could react. Just as she closed the space between them, Remo ducked low, rolled on the ground to the left and came up running.
Sheila's charge missed Remo and carried her forward into the bushes. She pulled herself back and ran after Remo.
Remo knew. He was far from what he had been. He had hoped he was 100 percent, but he wasn't even 50. Sheila was an animal at the peak of her strength, in the prime of her power and youth.
But Remo had something else. He had man's intelligence. It was that intelligence that enabled man to conquer the world by using the bestial instincts of animals as weapons against those same animals.
He reached the edge of the field, and turned to face Sheila's charge. He pulled the book of matches from his back pocket and waited. When she reached him she feinted left, then came right. He could feel her long nails rake down his left shoulder and knew he was bleeding. At the same time, he went down, under her body, and came up into the pit of her stomach with the stiffened heel of the hand.
"Ooooof," she hissed as the air rushed out of her body.
He had missed. The blow would have killed if he had been on target. Sheila hit the ground, rolled to her feet, and spun to face Remo. Her glistening white skin was now caked with dirt and bits of dried grass. She looked like an animal that had taken a mud bath, then rolled in straw.
Before she could charge again, Remo struck a match and threw it past her. It landed in the gasoline line Remo had spilled and erupted into flame with a whoosh. The dried cane and weeds crackled. Like a fuse lit in the center, the fire sped in both directions circling the two fighters in the field.
Sheila's eyes widened with fear and shock. Remo knew he had been right. Of all animals on earth, only man had conquered the fire fear. Her stubbing out of cigarettes, her refusal to use a simple, kitchen stove, had told him Sheila too feared the flame.
She jumped away from the fire crackling behind her. Now she was in a pocket, surrounded on three sides by flames with Remo standing in front of her.
She charged him again and Remo executed a slow rolling movement of his upper body that carried her by him. As he tried to back off again toward the flames, he was too slow. She slapped out a hand. It caught his ankle and tripped him into the dirt. Then she was on him. Remo could feel her weight on his back, her claws trying to tear out his neck.
Without panic, knowing what he was doing, Remo scurried forward, carrying Sheila Feinberg on his back. When he reached the ring of fire, she dropped off and fell away from him. Her eyes glistened with hatred as she faced him over a distance of only ten feet.
"That fire won't burn forever," she hissed. "Then you'll die. You can't keep running from me."
"Don't jump to conclusions," Remo said. "That's the trouble with you cats, always jumping to conclusions. Now I'm going to attack."
Remo had taken Sheila's three charges and knew the pattern now. She came in with arms raised, head tilted, belly an open invitation to attack. It was time to accept that invitation before she wore him down.
Remo darted out of the little cul-de-sac of flame, moving around Sheila, circling her, until there was no flame directly behind him and she felt safe to charge.
She came in again, arms raised, head tilted. As she neared, Remo went to the ground and came up with the heels of both feet, burying them deep into her soft white belly.