Phantoms

by Dean Koontz

  “Most nerve gases cause death within thirty seconds to five minutes after skin contact,” Houk said. “But T-139 isn’t that merciful.”

  “Merciful!” Frank Autry said, appalled.

  “T-139 isn’t just a killer,” Houk said. “That would be merciful by comparison. T-139 is what military strategists call a demoralizer.”

  Copperfield said, “It passes through the skin and enters the bloodstream in ten seconds or less, then migrates to the brain and almost instantly causes irreparable damage to cerebral tissues.”

  Houk said, “For a period of about four to six hours, the victim retains full use of his limbs and a hundred percent of his normal strength. At first, it’s only his mind that suffers.”

  “Dementia paranoides,” Copperfield said. “Intellectual confusion, fear, rage, loss of emotional control, and a very strongly held feeling that everyone is plotting against him. This is combined with a fierce compulsion to commit violent acts. In essence, Sheriff, T-139 turns people into mindless killing machines for four to six hours. They prey on one another and on unaffected people outside the area of the gas attack. You can see what an extremely demoralizing effect it would have on an enemy.”

  “Extremely,” Bryce said. “And Dr. Paige theorized just such a disease last night, a mutant rabies that would kill some people while turning others into demented murderers.”

  “T-139 isn’t a disease,” Houk said quickly. “It’s a nerve gas. And if I had my choice, I’d rather this was a nerve gas attack. Once gas has dissipated, the threat is over. A biological threat is considerably harder to contain.”

  “If it was gas,” Copperfield said, “it’ll have dissipated long ago, but there’ll be traces of it on almost everything. Condensative residue. We’ll be able to identify it in no time at all.”

  They backed against a wall to make way for Niven and his camera.

  Jenny said, “Dr. Houk, in regards to this T-139, you mentioned that the ambulatory stage lasts four to six hours. Then what?”

  “Well,” Houk said, “the second stage is the terminal stage, too. It lasts anywhere from six to twelve hours. It begins with the deterioration of the efferent nerves and escalates to paralysis of the cardiac, vasomotor, and respiratory reflex centers in the brain.”

  “Good God,” Jenny said.

  Frank said, “Once more for us laymen.”

  Jenny said, “It means that during the second stage of the illness, over a period of six to twelve hours, T-139 gradually reduces the brain’s ability to regulate the automatic functions of the body—such as breathing, heartbeat, blood vessel dilation, organ function... The victim starts experiencing an irregular heartbeat, extreme difficulty in breathing, and the gradual collapse of every gland and organ. Twelve hours might not seem gradual to you, but it would seem like an eternity to the victim. There would be vomiting, diarrhea, uncontrollable urination, continuous and violent muscle spasms ... And if only the efferent nerves were damaged, if the rest of the nervous system remained intact, there would be excruciating, unrelenting pain.”

  “Six to twelve hours of hell,” Copperfield confirmed.

  “Until the heart stops,” Houk said, “or until the victim simply stops breathing and suffocates.”

  For long seconds, as Niven clicked the last of his photographs, no one spoke.

  Finally, Jenny said, “I still don’t think a nerve gas could’ve played any part in this, not even something like T-139 that would explain these beheadings. For one thing, none of the victims we found showed any signs of vomiting or incontinence.”

  “Well,” Copperfield said, “we could be dealing with a derivative of T-139 that doesn’t produce those symptoms. Or some other gas.”

  “No gas can explain the moth,” Tal Whitman said.

  “Or what happened to Stu Wargle,” Frank said.

  Copperfield said, “Moth?”

  “You didn’t want to hear about that until you’d seen these other things,” Bryce reminded Copperfield. “But now I think it’s time you—”

  Niven said, “Finished.”

  “All right,” Copperfield said. “Sheriff, Dr. Paige, deputies, if you will please maintain silence until we’ve completed the rest of our tasks here, your cooperation will be much appreciated.”

  The others immediately set to work. Yamaguchi and Bettenby transferred the severed heads into a pair of porcelain-lined specimen buckets with locking, airtight lids. Valdez carefully pried the hands away from the rolling pin and put them in a third specimen bucket. Houk scraped some flour off the table and into a small plastic jar, evidently because dry flour would have absorbed—and would still contain—traces of the nerve gas—if, in fact, there had been any nerve gas. Houk also took a sample of the pie crust dough that lay under the rolling pin. Goldstein and Roberts inspected the two ovens from which the heads had been removed, and then Goldstein used a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner to sweep out the first oven. When that was done, Roberts took the bag of sweepings, sealed it, and labeled it, while Goldstein used the vacuum to collect minute and even microscopic evidence from the second oven.

  All of the scientists were busy except for the two men who were wearing the suits that had no names on the helmets. They stood to one side, merely watching.

  Bryce watched the watchers, wondering who they were and what function they performed.

  As the others worked, they described what they were doing and made comments about what they found, always speaking in a jargon that Bryce couldn’t follow. No two of them spoke at once; that fact—when coupled with Copperfield’s request for silence from those who were not team members—made it seem as if they were speaking for the record.

  Among the items that hung from the utility belt around Copperfield’s waist there was a tape recorder wired directly into the communications system of the general’s suit. Bryce saw that the reels of tape were moving.

  When the scientists had gotten everything they wanted from the bakery kitchen, Copperfield said, “All right, Sheriff. Where now?”

  Bryce indicated the tape recorder. “Aren’t you going to switch that off until we get there?”

  “Nope. We started recording from the moment we were allowed past the roadblock, and we’ll keep recording until we’ve found out what’s happened to this town. That way, if something goes wrong, if we all die before we find the solution, the new team will know every step we took. They won’t have to start from scratch, and they might even have a detailed record of the fatal mistake that got us killed.”

  The second stop was the arts and crafts gallery into which Frank Autry had led the three other men last night. Again, he led the way through the showroom, into the rear office, and up the stairs to the second-floor apartment.

  It seemed to Frank that there was almost something comic about the scene: all these spacemen lumbering up the narrow stairs, their faces theatrically grim behind Plexiglas faceplates, the sound of their breathing amplified by the closed spaces of their helmets and projected out of the speakers on their chests at an exaggerated volume, an ominous sound. It was like one of those 1950s science fiction movies—Attack of the Alien Astronauts or something equally corny—and Frank couldn’t help smiling.

  But his vague smile vanished when he entered the apartment kitchen and saw the dead man again. The corpse was where it had been last night, lying at the foot of the refrigerator, wearing only blue pajama bottoms. Still swollen, bruised, staring wide-eyed at nothing.

  Frank moved out of the way of Copperfield’s people and joined Bryce beside the counter where the toaster oven stood.

  As Copperfield again requested silence from the uninitiated, the scientists stepped carefully around the sandwich fixings that were scattered across the floor. They crowded around the corpse.

  In a few minutes they were finished with a preliminary examination of the body.

  Copperfield turned to Bryce and said, “We’re going to take this one for an autopsy.”

  “You still think it looks as if we’re de
aling with just a simple incident of CBW?” Bryce asked, as he had asked before.

  “It’s entirely possible, yes,” the general said.

  “But the bruising and swelling,” Tal said.

  “Could be allergic reactions to a nerve gas,” Houk said.

  “If you’ll slide up the leg of the pajamas,” Jenny said, “I believe you’ll find that the reaction extends even to unexposed skin.”

  “Yes, it does,” Copperfield said. “We’ve already looked.”

  “But how could the skin react even where no nerve gas came into contact with it?”

  “Such gases usually have a high penetration factor,” Houk said. “They’ll pass right through most clothes. In fact, about the only thing that’ll stop many of them is vinyl or rubber garments.”

  Just what you’re wearing, Frank thought, and just what we’re not.

  “There’s another body here,” Bryce told the general. “Do you want to have a look at that one, too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It’s this way, sir,” Frank said.

  He led them out of the kitchen and down the hall, his gun drawn.

  Frank dreaded entering the bedroom where the dead woman lay naked in the rumpled sheets. He remembered the crude things that Stu Wargle had said about her, and he had the terrible feeling that Stu was going to be there now, coupled with the blonde, their dead bodies locked in cold and timeless passion.

  But only the woman was there. Sprawled on the bed. Legs still spread wide. Mouth open in an eternal scream.

  When Copperfield and his people had finished a preliminary examination of the corpse and were ready to go, Frank made sure they had seen the .22 automatic which she had apparently emptied at her killer. “Do you think she would have shot at just a cloud of nerve gas, General?”

  “Of course not,” Copperfield said. “But perhaps she was already affected by the gas, already brain damaged. She could have been shooting at hallucinations, at phantoms.”

  “Phantoms,” Frank said. “Yes, sir, that’s just about what they would’ve had to’ve been. Because, see, she fired all ten shots in the clip, yet we found only two expended slugs—one in that highboy over there, one in the wall where you see the hole. That means she mostly hit whatever she was shooting at.”

  “I knew these people,” Doc Paige said, stepping forward. “Gary and Sandy Wechlas. She was something of a marks-woman. Always target shooting. She won several competitions at the county fair last year.”

  “So she had the skill to make eight hits out of ten,” Frank said. “And even eight hits didn’t stop the thing she was trying to stop. Eight hits didn’t even make it bleed. Of course, phantoms don’t bleed. But, sir, would a phantom be able to walk out of here and take those eight slugs with it?”

  Copperfield stared at him, frowning.

  All the scientists were frowning, too.

  The soldiers weren’t only frowning, they were looking around uneasily.

  Frank could see that the condition of the two bodies—especially the woman’s nightmarish expression—had had an effect on the general and his people. The fear in everyone’s eyes was sharper now. Although they didn’t want to admit it, they had encountered something beyond their experience. They were still clinging to explanations that made sense to them—nerve gas, virus, poison—but they were beginning to have doubts.

  Copperfield’s people had brought a zippered plastic body bag with them. In the kitchen, they slipped the pajama-clad corpse into the bag, then carried it out of the building and left it on the sidewalk, intending to pick it up again on the way back to the mobile labs.

  Bryce led them to Gilmartin’s Market. Inside, back by the milk coolers where it had happened, he told them about Jake Johnson’s disappearance. “No screams. No sound at all. Just a few seconds of darkness. A few seconds. But when the lights came on again, Jake was gone.”

  Copperfield said, “You looked—”

  “Everywhere.”

  “He could have run away,” Roberts said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Maybe he deserted. Considering the things he’d seen...”

  “My God,” Goldstein said, “what if he left Snowfield? He might be beyond the quarantine line, carrying the infection—”

  “No, no, no. Jake wouldn’t desert,” Bryce said. “He wasn’t exactly the most aggressive officer on the force, but he wouldn’t run out on me. He wasn’t irresponsible.”

  “Definitely not,” Tal agreed. “Besides, Jake’s old man was once county sheriff, so there’s a lot of family pride involved.”

  “And Jake was a cautious man,” Frank said. “He didn’t do anything on impulse.”

  Bryce nodded. “Anyway, even if he was spooked enough to run, he’d have taken a squad car. He sure wouldn’t have walked out of town.”

  “Look,” Copperfield said, “he’d have known they wouldn’t let him past the roadblock, so he’d have avoided the highway altogether. He might have gone off through the woods.”

  Jenny shook her head. “No, General. The land is wild out there. Deputy Johnson would’ve known he’d get lost and die.”

  “And,” Bryce said, “would a frightened man plunge pell-mell into a strange forest at night? I don’t think so, General. But I do think it’s time you heard about what happened to my other deputy.”

  Leaning against a cooler full of cheese and lunchmeat, Bryce told them about the moth, about the attack on Wargle and the bloodcurdling condition of the corpse. He told them about Lisa’s encounter with a resurrected Wargle and about the subsequent discovery that the body was missing.

  Copperfield and his people expressed astonishment at first, then confusion, then fear. But during most of Bryce’s tale, they stared at him in wary silence and glanced at one another knowingly.

  He finished by telling them about the child’s voice that had come from the kitchen drain just moments before their arrival. Then, for the third time, he said, “Well, General, do you still think it looks like a simple incident of CBW?”

  Copperfield hesitated, looked around at the littered market, finally met Bryce’s eyes, and said, “Sheriff, I want Dr. Roberts and Dr. Goldstein to give complete physical examinations to you and to everyone who saw this ... uh... moth.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe that you genuinely, sincerely think you saw all of those things.”

  “Damn,” Tal said.

  Copperfield said, “Surely, you can understand that, to us, it sounds as if you’ve all been contaminated, as if you’re suffering from hallucinations.”

  Bryce was weary of their disbelief and frustrated by their intellectual rigidity. As scientists, they were supposed to be receptive to new ideas and unexpected possibilities. Instead, they appeared determined to force the evidence to conform to their preconceived notions of what they would find in Snowfield.

  “You think we all could’ve had the same hallucination?” Bryce asked.

  “Mass hallucinations aren’t unknown,” Copperfield said.

  “General,” Jenny said, “there was absolutely nothing hallucinatory about what we saw. It had the gritty texture of reality.”

  “Doctor Paige, I would ordinarily accord considerable weight to any observation you cared to make. But as one of those who claim to have seen this moth, your medical judgment in the matter simply isn’t objective.”

  Scowling at Copperfield, Frank Autry said, “But, sir, if it was all just something we hallucinated—then where is Stu Wargle?”

  “Maybe both he and this Jake Johnson ran out on you,” Roberts said. “And maybe you’ve merely incorporated their disappearances into your delusions.”

  From long experience, Bryce knew that a debate was always lost the moment you became emotional. He forced himself to remain in a relaxed position, leaning against the cooler. Keeping his voice soft and slow, he said, “General, from the things you and your people have said, someone could get the idea that the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department is staf
fed exclusively by cowards, fools, and goldbrickers.”

  Copperfield made placating gestures with his rubber-sheathed hands. “No, no, no. We’re not saying anything of the kind. Please, Sheriff, try to understand. We’re only being straightforward with you. We’re telling you how the situation looks to us—how it would look to anyone with any specialized knowledge of chemical and biological warfare. Hallucination is one of the things we expect to find in survivors. It’s one of the things we have to look for. Now, if you could offer us a logical explanation for the existence of this eagle-size moth ... well, maybe then we could come to believe in it ourselves. But you can’t. Which leaves our suggestion—that you merely hallucinated it—as the only explanation that makes sense.”

  Bryce noticed the four soldiers staring at him in a much different way now that he was thought to be a victim of nerve gas. After all, a man suffering from bizarre hallucinations was obviously unstable, dangerous, perhaps even violent enough to cut off people’s heads and pop them into bakery ovens. The soldiers raised their submachine guns an inch or two, although they didn’t actually aim at Bryce. They regarded him—and Jenny and Tal and Frank—with a new and unmistakable air of suspicion.

  Before Bryce could respond to Copperfield, he was startled by a loud noise at the back of the market, beyond the butcher’s-block tables. He stepped away from the cooler, turned toward the source of the commotion, and put his right hand on his holstered revolver.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two soldiers reacting to him rather than to the noise. When he had put his hand on his revolver, they had instantly raised their submachine guns.

  It was a hammering sound that had drawn his attention. And a voice. Both were coming from within the walk-in meat locker, on the other side of the butcher’s work area, no more than fifteen feet away, almost directly opposite the point at which Bryce and the others were gathered. The thick, insulated door of the locker muffled the blows that were being rained on it, but they were still loud. The voice was muffled, too, the words unclear, but Bryce thought he could hear someone shouting for help.

  “Somebody’s trapped in there,” Copperfield said.

  “Can’t be,” Bryce said.

  Frank said, “Can’t be locked in because the door opens from both sides.”

  The hammering and shouting ceased abruptly.

  A clatter.

  A rattle of metal on metal.

  The handle on the large, burnished-steel door moved up, down, up, down, up ...

  The latch clicked. The door swung open. But only a couple of inches. Then it stopped.

  The refrigerated air inside the locker rushed out, mixing with the warmer air in the market. Tendrils of frosty vapor rose along the length of the open door.

  Although the light was on in the room beyond the door, Bryce couldn’t see anything through the narrow gap. Nevertheless, he knew what the refrigerated meat locker looked like. During last night’s search for Jake Johnson, Bryce had been in there, poking around. It was a frigid, windowless, claustrophobic place, about twelve by fifteen feet. There was one other door—equipped with two deadbolt locks—that opened onto the alley for the easy receival of meat deliveries. A painted concrete floor. Sealed concrete walls. Fluorescent lights. Vents in three of the walls circulated cold air around the sides of beef, veal, and slabs of pork that hung from the ceiling racks.

  Bryce could hear nothing except the amplified breathing of the scientists and soldiers in the decontamination suits, and even that was subdued; some of them seemed to be holding their breath.

  Then from within the locker came a groan of pain. A pitifully weak voice cried out for help. Rebounding from the cold concrete walls, carried on the spiraling thermals of air that escaped through the narrowly opened door, the voice was shaky, echo-distorted, yet recognizable.

  “Bryee ... Tal ... ? Who’s out there? Frank? Gordy? Is somebody out there? Can ... somebody ... help me?”

  It was Jake Johnson.

  Bryce, Jenny, Tal, and Frank stood very still, listening.

  Copperfield said, “Whoever it is, he needs help badly.”

  “Bryce ... please ... somebody...”

  “You know him?” Copperfield asked. “He’s calling your name—isn’t he, Sheriff?”

  Without waiting for an answer, the general ordered two of his men—Sergeant Harker and Private Pascalli—to look in the meat locker.

  “Wait!” Bryce said. “Nobody goes back there. We’re keeping these coolers between us and that locker until we know more.”

  “Sheriff, while I fully intend to cooperate with you as far as possible, you have no authority over my men or me.”

  “Bryce ... it’s me ... Jake ... For God’s sake, help me. I broke my damned leg.”

  “Jake?” Copperfield asked, squinting curiously at Bryce. “You mean that man in there is the same one you said was snatched away from here last night?”

  “Somebody ... help ... Jesus, it’s c-cold... so c-c-cold. ”