Beastchild by Dean Koontz

programming board around and looked at the typewriter keys. He thought for a moment, then punched out:
        
        CALIFORNIA. SHORTEST ROUTE.
        
        The computer gurgled, buzzed, and chimed three times. It said: "Destination acknowledged. Route established. Proceeding on command."
        He typed:
        
        PROCEED.
        
        Laboriously, the Bluebolt built speed, pulling out of the darkened yards, faster and faster, until it was barreling past the empty city, moving quietly on polished rails and its almost frictionless, rollamite processed wheels. David fought an urge to pull the silver cord of the train whistle. He wished to make as unspectacular a departure as possible.
        Eventually, he was torn between two desires. He wanted to watch the landscape flash by, wanted to see the dawn from his command chair. Yet he felt like some time with a cartridge. At last, he went back and brought an adventure novel up front to plug in his ear. The sound and the visions came-the sound deep in his ear, the visions behind his eyeballs. Whenever he could no longer contain himself, he stopped the sound and the pictures and watched the Bluebolt gobble rails toward California and the Haven…
        It was forty-nine minutes before dawn of that day.
        Soon, the Hunter would rise.
        And dress in the hides of a hunter.
        And make his prayers and set forth to do vengeance…

Chapter Six
        
        Hulann's overmind had to wait only a few moments for his organic brain to come to life. When he was fully alert once again, he was immediately conscious of the cold. For a naoli to feel such a sharp sensation of temperature, the situation had to be drastic.
        As it was.
        He had been flung free of the shuttlecraft, slid along the snowy mountainside, scraping even his tough naoli hide raw in places. He came to a rest in a deep drift sloping into a row of seven, thick-boled pines. He was looking out of a depression in the drift now, up the well his body had made by falling in. His body heat had melted the crystals, and the severe cold had re-frozen them. He was coated in ice that kept melting the re-freezing. The bitterness was worst on the torn patches where he would have bled if the blood had not been frozen solid.
        Even a naoli could not survive for long in a situation such as this. He pushed up, stumbled erect, and wearily slapped and kicked his way free of the drift. He stood in the early morning air, half an hour before dawn, scanning the darkness for a sign of Leo or the shuttle.
        He could see neither.
        Indeed, much of what he could see was blurred by the great clouds of ghostly vapor spouting from his four nostrils, especially from the lower, secondary set which, when operative, did the greatest amount of respiratory work. He was annoyed at this, yet he could not close the secondary nostrils without operating on a semi-dormant level. And he presently needed to move as fast and wisely as possible.
        He looked up the side of the mountain, but he could not see the top. A combination of darkness and shifting snow kept his range of vision down to thirty feet. How far down the slope had they come, then? At what point had he been thrown free of the shuttlecraft? Had the car gone to the bottom of the mountain, or had it too come to a stop only part way down? Was Leo alive-or dead? Or dying?
        He felt a rising panic at the last few questions. If Leo were dead or dying, then what purpose was there? If Leo were dead or beyond Hulann's help, then this entire flight, and the crime which had given it genesis, was without meaning. He might just as well turn himself in. The point was lost. The symbol had evaporated.
        "Leo!" He called loudly, but his words were torn away by the wind, lost in the howling of the natural elements.
        He turned and huddled against the wind, cupped his hands on either side of his mouth, shouted