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Gordy stared in shock at the thing in his hands

A lizard head icked yellow eyes began to take forenerated The lizard’s ue flickered, and there were lots of pointy little teeth

Gordy tried to throw the thing down, but it clung to hiht to him, as if it had reshaped itself around his hands and arms, as if his hands were actually inside of it now

Then it ceased to be cold Suddenly it arm And then hot Painfully hot

Before the lizard had coan to dissolve, and a new anienerated before it was entirely formed, and it became squirrels, a pair of them, their bodies joined like Siaan to screa off

The heat was like a fire now The pain was unbearable

Jesus, please

Pain ate its way up his arms, across his shoulders

He screaered forward one step, shook his ar to hian to appear in the amorphous tissue that he held and that held hi else arose Jesus, no, no, Jesus, no-soht eyes across the top of its hateful head and a lot of spiky legs and-

Pain roared through him He stumbled sideways, fell to his knees, then onto his side He kicked and twisted in agony, writhed and heaved on the sidewalk

Sara Ya Gordy seee its shape at will and with astonishing speed

No such creature could exist She should know; she was a biologist, a geneticist Ienerated, and no new phantom shape took its place In a natural state, the creature seeray-usting fungus It oozed up over Gordy’s arms-

–and suddenly, one of Gordy’s hands poked through the slime that had sheathed it But it wasn’t a hand any ers, stiff and white, picked clean The flesh had been eaten away

She gagged, stuutter, vomited

Jenny pulled Lisa two steps back, farther away froirl was screa

The sliers, enfolded the tissue In a couple of seconds, the bones were gone as well, dissolved, and the glove folded up into a ball andwrithed obscenely, churned within itself, swelled, bulged here, fore had been, noelling nodule where the concavity had been, feverishly changing, as if even a moment’s stillness meant death, It pulled itself up Gordy’s arled desperately to rid hiressed toward his shoulders, it left nothing behind it, nothing, no stuan to spread across his chest, too, and wherever it went, Gordy simply disappeared into it and did not co into a vat of fiercely corrosive acid

Lisa looked away fro

Gordy’s screams were unbearable

Tal’s revolver was already in his hand He hurried toward Gordy

Bryce stopped hi we can do"

"We can put hiet too close to that daood shot"

Gordy’s eyes becaan to scream for Jesus’s help, and he drummed his heels on the pave to push up frohtht Quickly"

They both edged nearer to the thrashing, dying deputy and opened fire Several shots struck hi stopped

They quickly backed off

They didn’t try to kill the thing that was feeding on Gordy They knew bullets had no effect on it, and they were beginning to understand why Bullets killed by destroying vital organs and essential blood vessels But froans and no conventional circulatory system No skeleton, either It seehly sophisticated-protoplasly malleable flesh would flow into the channel carved by the bullet, and the wound would heal in an instant

The beast fed more frantically than before, in a silent frenzy, and in seconds there was no sign of Gordy at all He had ceased to exist There was only the shape-changer, grown larger, er than Gordy, whose substance it now incorporated

Tal and Bryce rejoined the others, but they didn’t run for the inn As the twilight was slowly squeezed out of the sky in a vise of darkness, they watched the thing on the sidewalk

It began to take a new shape In only seconds, all of the free-for timber wolf, and the creature threw its head back and howled at the sky

Then its face rippled, and elements of its ferocious countenance shifted, and Tal could see hue of a wolf Human eyes replaced the animal’s eyes, and there was part of a human chin Gordy’s eyes? Gordy’s chin? The lycanthropic ’s features flowed back into the wolf forht

But he kneasn’t anything like that It wasn’t anything The wolf identity, as real and frightening as it looked, was as false as all the other identities

For aits enorreater in size than any wolf that had ever stalked the plains and forests of this world Its eyes blazed with theto attack, Tal thought

He fired at it The bullets penetrated but left no visible wound, drew no blood, caused no apparent pain

The wolf turned away frounfire, and trotted toward the open manhole, into which the field lab’s electric power cables disappeared

Abruptly, so rose out of that hole, came from the storht, shuddering, s up into the air with tre e, except that it was not a fluid but a jellied substance that formed itself into a column almost as wide as the hole from which it continued to extrude itself in an obscene, rhythht…

So struck Tal in the back He jumped, tried to turn, and realized that he had only collided with the wall of the inn He hadn’t been aware he’d been backing away fro that had soared out of thecolumn was another body of freeform protoplasm like the ani was considerably larger than the first creature Immense Tal wondered how much of it was still hidden below the street, and he had a hunch that the stor here was only a sht of ten feet, it stopped rising and began to change The upper half of the colu now resembled the head of a cobra Then listening, shifting colureider, wider, until it was not a hood at all anys, dark ’ andout of the central (and still shapeless) trunk And then the body segan to acquire a texture-coarse, overlapping scales-and s a winged serpent

The wings flapped

The sound was like a whip cracking