Shadowfires

her legs up, then kicked down with both feet, putting all the power of her thighs into it, striking his grasping hand, smashing his long bony, mutant fingers.
    He loosed an inhuman wail.
    She kicked again.
    Instead of slipping back down the wall, as Rachael had hoped he
would, Eric held on to it, surged upward another foot, shrieking in
triumph, and took a swipe at her.
    At the same moment she kicked out again, smashing one foot into
his arm, stomping the other squarely into his face.
    She heard her jeans tear, then felt a flash of pain and knew that
he had hooked claws through the denim even as her kick had landed.
    He bellowed in pain, finally lost his hold on the wall, and hung
for an instant by the claws in her jeans. Then the claws snapped, and
the cloth tore, and he fell away into the arroyo.
    Rachael didn't wait long enough to watch him tumble two stories to the bottom of the gulch, but turned at once to the demanding task of heaving herself onto the narrow stone ledge from which she hung precariously. Pulsations of pain, throbbing in time with her wildly pounding heart, coursed through her arms from wrists to shoulders. Her straining muscles twitched and rebelled at her demands. Clenching her teeth, breathing through her nose so hard that she snorted like a horse, she struggled upward, digging at the wall beneath the ledge with her feet to provide what little thrust she could. By sheer perseverance and determination-spiced with a generous measure of motivating terror-she clambered onto the ledge at last.
    Exhausted, suffering several pains, she nevertheless refused to
pause. She dragged herself up the last eight feet of the arroyo wall,
finding handholds in a few final outcroppings of rock and among the
erosion-exposed roots of the mesquite bushes that grew at -the brink.
Then she was at the edge, over the top, pushing through a break in
the mesquite, and she rolled onto the surface of the desert.
    Lightning stepped down the sky as if providing a staircase for
some descending god, and all around Rachael the low desert scrub
threw short-lived, giant shadows.
    Thunder followed, hard and flat, and she felt it reverberate in
the ground against her back.
    She dragged herself back to the brink of the arroyo, praying that
she would see the Eric-thing still at the bottom, motionless, dead a
second time. Maybe he'd fallen on a rock. There were a few rocks on the floor of the gulch. It was possible. Maybe he had landed on one of them and had snapped his spine.
    She peered over the edge.
    He was more than halfway up the wall again.
    Lightning flashed, illuminating his deformed face, silvering his
inhuman eyes, plating an electric gleam to his too-sharp teeth.
    Leaping up, Rachael started kicking at the loose earth along the
brink and at the brush that grew there, knocking it down on top of
him. He hung from the quartz-veined ledge, keeping his head under it
for protection, so the sandy earth and brush cascaded harmlessly over
him. She stopped kicking dirt, looked around for some stones, found a
few about the size of eggs, and hurled them down at his hands. When
the stones connected with his grotesque fingers, he let go of the
ledge and moved entirely under it, clinging to the earth in the
shadow of that stone shelf, where she could not hit him.
    She could wait for him to reappear, then pelt him again. She could
keep him pinned there for hours. But nothing would be gained. It
would be a tense, wearying, futile enterprise; when she exhausted the
supply of stones within her reach and had only dirt to throw, he
would ascend with animal quickness, undeterred by that pathetic
bombardment, and he would finish her.
    A white-hot celestial cauldron tipped, spilling forth a third
molten streak of lightning. It made contact with the earth much
closer than the two before it, no more than a quarter of a mile away,
accompanied by a simultaneous crash worthy of Armageddon, and with a
crackle-sizzle that was the voice of Death speaking in the language
of electricity.
    Below, unfazed by the lightning, emboldened by the cessation of
the attack Rachael had been waging, the Eric-thing put one monstrous
hand over the edge of the ledge.
    She kicked more dirt down on him, lots of it. He withdrew his
hand, taking shelter again, but she continued to stomp away at the
rotten brink of the embankment. Suddenly an enormous chunk collapsed
directly under her feet, and she nearly fell into the arroyo. As the