But Malcolm felt no fear. There was recognition. A kinship. As the eyes of the creature held his own, the boy sensed the message in his mind: Flee!
When he looked down at his hands there were again smooth, smallish, normal boy's hands. He touched his face. It was his own unmarked, beardless face.
Flee! The message sounded again in his mind. A command. Malcolm squeezed his slim body through the split he had torn in the steel mesh.
"Hey! Where d'you think you're goin'?" Kruger, remembering his orders, turned his attention for a moment from the towering beast to the boy.
The beast opened its great jaws and roared. Kruger whirled to face the menace. Malcolm, compelled by the telepathic command, slipped past Kruger and the beast to the open door. There he stopped and looked down at Holly.
Conscious now, she raised herself on an elbow. She shuddered at the sight of the beast but saw that its full attention was given to Kruger. She looked to Malcolm, who hesitated in the doorway. Unable to find her voice, she motioned with a hand for him to run. Malcolm opened his mouth as though he would speak, then turned and vanished through the doorway.
The beast roared again and advanced on Kruger.
The big man, his mouth loose and drooling with fear, backed away. He stumbled, and remembered suddenly the cattle prod hanging by the wires from his belt pack. He seized the leather-wrapped grip and switched the current to its highest level. He thrust the rod out before him like a rapier.
"Awright," he babbled, "you want some of this? Come on, I'll give you some. I'll give you all you want."
He stabbed the metallic tip of the prod at the advancing creature.
The beast swatted at the measly weapon the man brandished and felt the electric shock that coursed all the way up to the hump of shoulder muscle. The shock was no more than a tickle to the beast, but it knew now what had been done to the boy Malcolm. It understood what had driven Malcolm to change as much as he had. The tiny shock was exactly what the beast needed to rekindle the bloodlust that had been so recently satisfied in the cabin outside Pinyon.
Kruger literally did not know what hit him. One moment he was holding the cattle prod, jabbing it at the huge, hairy thing that had burst through the window. The next moment his arm, fingers still twitching on the leather grip, was lying on the floor at his feet. He stared dumbly at the empty shoulder socket, where arterial blood pumped out in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Sitting now on the floor, Holly sucked in her breath as the beast cleaved Kruger's arm from his shoulder with one swift blow. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned away, unable to watch any more. She heard, however, Kruger's mewling little cries, and the crackle of teeth on bone.
Gavin Ramsay kept the accelerator to the floor all the way from Pinyon to Bear Paw. He did not bother with red lights and siren. There was not enough traffic along the way to make any difference. By the time he hit the brakes at the faint logging trail that led up to Pastory's clinic, the three-year-old Plymouth Fury bought by the taxpayers of La Reina County was sweating and snorting like a used-up racehorse.
He jounced up the grade, swerving against the brush on both sides, finally jamming to a stop when he came suddenly upon the old high-roofed house among the pines. Louis Zeno's orange Datsun was parked at an angle out in front, one door hanging open as though the driver had abandoned it hastily. Tucked neatly under a tree-was Holly's little Volkswagen.
A sound came from inside the house that raised the short hairs at the back of Ramsay' s neck. A snarling growl that reminded him of nothing so much as the feeding of big, dangerous animals at the zoo.
A door banged at the rear of the house. Ramsay galloped around the side of the building in time to see a figure running swiftly away, darting between the trees.
"Halt!" he called, unholstering his revolver.
The running figure never slowed down, vanishing as Ramsay watched. A shot would be fruitless at that range and with all the trees between him and the target. Anyway, Ramsay never fired his piece without knowing what he was shooting at. Another growl came from inside the house, and he abandoned any thought of giving chase.
He started in through the open back door, then came to a stop. He thumbed the catch and rolled out the cylinder of his revolver, ejecting the copper-jacketed .38 cartridges onto the ground. Sweating with concentration, he jammed a hand into his jacket pocket and dug out six of the silver bullets. He slipped them into the cylinder, locked it in place, and ran into the house.
Ramsay almost fell down several steps into a semi-sunken room but caught his balance in time to stumble upright through the door. He took in the scene with a fast, sweeping glance. Against one wall stood a ruined cage. Rising shakily from the floor, clad in a sweater and bikini underpants, was Holly Lang. But dominating the room was a huge, wolf-like beast that stood upright holding the armless, headless body of a man.
"Holly!" he called.
She looked up at him, dazed and unbelieving for a moment, then scrambled toward him.
The beast, still holding the dismembered body, glared at him with bright green eyes. Ramsay raised the pistol.
At the moment he fired, Holly Lang stumbled into him, throwing off his aim. The soft silver bullet smacked into the far wall. Where an ordinary slug would have bitten out a chunk of concrete, the silver bullet flattened on impact and bounced to the floor.
The beast looked down at the bright blob of metal, then back at Gavin. A flash of understanding passed between them. The beast let the mangled body fall, dropped to all fours, and bounded past Ramsay and out the door before he could bring the revolver back into play.
Ramsay did not try to go after the thing. He stood where he was and wrapped both arms around Holly. He held her close to him until she finally stopped shivering. Then, supporting her with one arm, he picked up her jeans and her boots and led her gently out into the clean air.
Several minutes later they sat together in the front seat of the sheriff's car, which was still parked before the peaceful-looking house that Dr. Pastory's clinic. As Holly calmed down she told him all that had happened to her since she had left his office early that morning.
"Then that was Malcolm I saw running into the woods," he said.
"Yes. We've got to find him, Gavin, and help him."
"I'm not sure we can."
"We've got to try. If you won't help me, I'll go after him alone."
"No you won't," Ramsey said quietly. "We're together in this thing now. Wherever it leads."
"You know what we're up against?"
"I know," he said. "I saw it in there. But I'm not going to try and convince anybody else. I would suggest that you don't either, unless you want to locked in a rubber room."
"No," she said. "I don't imagine we could get anybody to believe us. Not anybody who could help."
"I'm afraid that's it," he said gently. "It will have to be you and me, Holly, and that's it."
She laid her head against his shoulder for a moment, then looked up at him. "I think I'd like to be kissed now," she said.
He complied.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
He was alone again.
Alone and running.
Malcolm stumbled blindly through the forest, tears blurring his vision. Only an ancient instinct saved him from repeated collisions with the trees. He ran on tirelessly with no thought of direction or destination. He knew only that he could get away, far away from the terrible house where the men had done hurtful things to him. He blanked all thoughts from his mind except escape.
And he ran.
Alone and crying through the forest.