Phantoms

Page 31

And it was getting closer. Much closer.
Ron Peake reached the ladder, started up, dropped his flashlight, didn't bother to return for it.
Peake was too slow, and Billy shouted at him: “Move your ass!”
The scream of the unknown beast had become an eerie ululation that filled the subterranean storm drains as completely as floodwater. Billy couldn't even hear himself shouting.
Peake was halfway up the ladder.
There was almost enough room for Billy to slip in under him and start up. He put one hand on the ladder.
Peake's foot slipped. He dropped down a rung.
Billy cursed and snatched his hand out of the way.
The banshee keening grew louder.
Closer, closer.
Peake's fallen flashlight was pointing off toward the Skyline drain, but Billy didn't look back that way. He stared only up toward the sunlight. If he glanced behind and saw something hideous, his strength would flee him, and he would be unable to move, and it would get him, by God, it would get him.
Peake scrambled upwards again. His feet stayed on the rungs this time.
The concrete drain was transmitting vibrations that Billy could feel through the soles of his boots. The vibrations were like heavy, lumbering, yet lightning-quick footsteps.
Don't look, don't look!
Billy grabbed the sides of the ladder and clawed his way up as rapidly as Peake's progress would allow. One rung. Two. Three.
Above, Peake passed through the manhole and into the street.
With Peake out of the way, a fall of autumn sunlight splashed down over Billy Velazquez, and there was something about it that was like light piercing a church window-maybe because it represented hope.
He was halfway up the ladder.
Going to make it, going to make it, definitely going to make it, he told himself breathlessly.
But the shrieking and howling, Jesus, like being in the center of a cyclone! Another rung.
And another one.
The decontamination suit felt heavier than it had ever felt before. A ton. A suit of armor. Weighing him down.
He was in the vertical pipe now, moving out of the horizontal drain that ran beneath the street. He looked up longingly at the light and the faces peering down at him, and he kept moving.
Going to make it.
His head rose through the manhole.
Someone reached out, offering a hand. It was Copperfield himself.
Behind Billy, the shrieking stopped.
He climbed another rung, let go of the ladder with one hand, and reached for the general-
–but something seized his legs from below before he could grasp Copperfield's hand.
“No!”
Something grabbed him, wrenched his feet off the ladder, and yanked him away. strangely, he heard himself screaming for his mother-Billy went down, cracking his helmet against the wall of the pipe and then against a rung of the ladder, scratching his elbows and knees, trying desperately to catch hold of a rung but failing, finally collapsing into the powerful embrace of an unspeakable something that began to drag him backwards toward the Skyline conduit.
He twisted, kicked, struck out with his fists, to no effect. He was held tightly and dragged deeper into the drains.
In the backsplash of light coming through the manhole, then in the rapidly dimming beam of Peake's discarded flashlight, Billy saw a bit of the thing had him in its grasp. Not much. Fragments looming out of the shadows, then vanishing into darkness again. He saw just enough to make his bowels and bladder loosen. It was lizardlike. But not a lizard. Insectlike. But not an insect. It whaled and mewled and snarled. It snapped and tore at his suit as it pulled him along. It had cavernous jaws and teeth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph-the teeth! A double row of razor-edge spikes. It had claws, and it was huge, and its eyes were smoky red with elongated pupils as black as the bottom of a grave. He had scales of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout redder than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all dim deadly fangs, and something that looked like the stinger on a wasp or maybe a pincer.
It dragged Billy Velazquez into the Skyline conduit. He clawed at the concrete, desperately seeking something to hold on to, but he only succeeded in abrading away the fingers and palms of his gloves. He felt the cool underground air on his hands, and he realized he might now be contaminated, but that wasn't the end of his worries.
It dragged him into the tunnel of darkness. Then stopped, and held him tightly. Then tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexiglass faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard shell.
His hold on sanity was tenuous at best, but he struggled to keep his wits about him, tried to understand. At first, it seemed to him that this was a prehistoric creature, something millions of years old that had somehow dropped through a time warp into the storm drains. But that was crazy. He felt a silvery, high-pitched, lunatic giggle coming over him, and he knew he would be lost if he gave voice to it. The beast tore away most of his decontamination suit. It was on him now, pressing hard, a cold and disgustingly slick thing that seemed to pulse and somehow to change when it touched him. Billy, gasping and weeping, suddenly remembered an illustration in an old catechism text. A drawing of a demon. That was what this was. Like the drawing. Yes, exactly like it. The horns. The dark, forked tongue. The red eyes. A demon risen from Hell. And then he thought: No, no; that's crazy, too! And all the while that those thoughts raced through his mind, the ravenous creature stripped him and pulled his helmet almost completely apart. In the unrelieved darkness, he sensed its snout pressing through the halves of the broken helmet, toward his face, sniffing. He felt its tongue fluttering against his mouth and nose. He smelled a vague but repellent-odor, like nothing he had ever smelled before. The beast gouged at his belly and thighs, and then he felt a strange and brutally painful fire eating into him; acid fire. He writhed, twisted, bucked, strained-all to no avail. Billy heard himself cry out in terror and pain and confusion: “It's the Devil, it's the Devil!” He realized he had been shouting and screaming things almost continuously, from the moment he had been dragged off the ladder. Now, unable to speak as the flameless fire burned his lungs to ash and churned into his throat, he prayed in a silent singsong chant, warding off fear and death and the terrible feeling of smallness and worthlessness that had come over him: Mary, Mother of God, Mary, hear my plea… hear my plea, Mary, pray for me… pray, pray for me, Mary, Mother of God, Mary, intercede for me and-
His question had been answered.
He knew what had happened to Sergeant Harker.
Galen Copperfield was an outdoorsman, and he knew a great deal about the wildlife of North America. One of the creatures he found most interesting was the trap-door spider. It was a clever engineer who created a deep, tubular nest in the ground with a hinged lid at the top. The lid blended so perfectly with the soil in which it was set that whatever wandered across it, unaware of the danger below, were instantly dropped into the opening, dragged down, and devoured. It was horrifying and fascinating. One instant, the prey was dying, and the next instant it was gone, as if it had never been.
Corporal Velazquez was gone as sudden as if he had stepped upon the lid of a spider's lair.
Gone.
Copperfield's men were already edgy about Harker's disappearance and were frightened by the howling that ceased just before Velazques was dragged down. When the corporal was taken, they all spread back across the street, afraid that something was about to launch itself out of the manhole.
Copperfield, in the act of grieving for Velazquez when he was snatched, jumped back. Then froze. That was not like him. He had never before been indecisive in a crisis.
Velazquez was screaming through the suit-to-suit radio.
Breaking the ice that locked his joints, Copperfield went to the manhole and looked down. Peake's flashlight lay on the floor of the drain. But there was nothing else. No sign of Velazquez.
Copperfield hesitated.
The Corporal continued to scream.
Send other men down after the poor bastard?
No. It would be a suicide mission. Remember Harker. Cut the losses here, now.
But, good God, the screaming was horrible. Not as awful as Harker's. Those had been screams born of excruciating pain. These were screams of torment. Not as bad, but bad enough. As bad as anything Copperfield had seen on the battlefield.
There were words among the screams, spat out in explosive gasps. The corporal was making a desperate, babbling attempt to explain to those above-ground-and maybe to himself-just what he was seeing.
“… lizard… “
“… bug… ”
“… dragon… ”
“… prehistoric… “
“… demon… ”
And finally, with both physical pain and anguish of the soul in his voice, the corporal cried out, “It's the Devil, it's the Devil!”
After that, the screams were every bit as bad as Harker's. At least he didn't last as long.
When there was only silence, Copperfield slid the manhole cover back into place. Because of the power cable, the metal plate didn't fit tightly and was tilted up at one end, but it covered most of the hole.
He stationed two men on the sidewalk, ten feet from the rim, and ordered them to shoot anything that came out.
Because a gun had been of no help to Harker, Copperfield and a few other men collected everything needed to manufacture Molotov cocktails. They got a couple of dozen bottles of wine from Brookhart's liquor store on Vail Lane, emptied them, put an inch of soap powder in the bottom of each, filled them with gasoline, and twisted rag fuses into the necks of them until they were snugly stoppered.
Would fire succeed where bullets had failed?
What had happened to Harker?
What had happened to Velazquez?
What will happen to me? Copperfield wondered.
The first of the two mobile field units cost more than twenty million dollars, and the Defense Department had gotten its money's worth.
The lab was a marvel of technological microminiaturization. For one. thing, its computer-based on a trio of intel 432 micro-mainframes; 690,000 transistors squeezed onto only nine silicon chips-took up no more room than a couple of suitcases, yet it was a highly sophisticated system that was capable of complex medical analyses. In fact, it was a more system-with general logic and memory capacity than could be found in most major university hospitals' pathology labs.
There was a great deal of it stacked up into the motor home, all of it designed and positioned for maximum utility of the limited space. In addition to a pair of computer access terminals along one wall, there were a number of devices and machines: a centrifuge that would be used to separate the major components of blood, urine, and other fluid samples; a spectrophotometer; a spectrograph; an el microscope with an image interpretation-enhancement mad-out link to one of the computer screens; a compact appliance that would quick-freeze blood and tissue samples for storage and for use in tests in which element extractions were mom easily performed on frozen materials; and much, much more.
Toward the front of the vehicle, behind the drivers' compartment, was an autopsy table that collapsed into the wall when not in use. At the moment, the table was down, and the body of Gary Wechlas-thirty-seven, Caucasian-lay on the stainless-steel surface. The blue pajama bottoms had been scissored away from the corpse and set aside for later examination.
Dr. Seth Goldstein, one of the three leading forensic medicine specialists on the West Coast, would perform the autopsy. He stood at one side of the table with Dr. Daryl Roberts, and General Copperfield stood at the other side, facing them across the dead body.
Goldstein pressed a button on a control panel that was set in the wall to his right. A recording would be made of every word spoken during the autopsy; this was common procedure in even ordinary postmortems. A visual record was also being made: two ceiling-mounted videotape cameras were focused on the corpse; they, too, were activated when Dr. Goldstein pressed the button on the wall panel.
Goldstein began by closely examining and describing the corpse: the unusual facial expression, the universal bruising, the curious swelling. He was especially searching for punctures, abrasions, localized contusions, cuts, lesions, blisters, fractures, and other indications of specific points of injury. He could not find any.
With his gloved hand poised over the instrument tray, Goldstein hesitated, not quite sure where to start. Usually, at the beginning of an autopsy, he already had a pretty good idea of the cause of death, when the deceased had been wasted by a disease, Goldstein usually had seen the hospital report. If death had resulted from an accident, there were visible trauma. If it was death at the hand of another, there were signs of violence. But in this case, the conditions of the corpse raised more questions than it answered, strange questions unlike any he had ever faced before.
As if sensing Goldstein's thoughts, Copperfield said, “You've got to find some answers for us, Doctor. Our lives very probably depend on it.”
The second motor home had many of the same diagnostic machines and instruments that were in the lead vehicle-a test tube centrifuge, an electron microscope, and so forth-in addition to several pieces of equipment that were not duplicated in the other vehicle. It contained no autopsy table, however, and only one videotape system. There were three computer terminals instead of two.
Dr. Enrico Valdez was sitting at one of the programming boards, in a deep-seated chair designed to accommodate a man in a decontamination suit complete with air tank. He was working with Houk and Niven on chemical analysis of samples of various substances collected from several business places and dwellings along Skyline Road and Vail Lane-such as the flour and dough taken from the table in Liebermann's Bakery. They were seeking traces of nerve gas condensate or other chemical substances. Thus far, they had found nothing out of the ordinary.
Dr. Valdez didn't believe that nerve gas or disease would turn out to be the culprit.
He was beginning to wonder if this whole thing might actually be in Isley's and Arkham's territory. Isley and Arkham, the two men without names on their decontamination suits, were not even members of the Civilian Defense Unit. They were from a different project altogether. Just this morning, before dawn, when Dr. Valdez had been introduced to them at the team rendezvous point in Sacramento, when he had heard what kind of research they were doing, he had almost laughed.
He had thought their project was a waste of taxpayers' money. Now he wasn't so sure. Now he wondered…
He wondered… and he worried.
Dr. Sara Yamaguchi was also in the second motor home.
She was preparing bacteria cultures. Using a sample of blood taken from the body of Gary Wechlas, she was methodically contaminating a series of growth media, jellied compounds filled with nutrients on which bacteria generally thrived: horse blood agar, sheep blood agar, simplex, chocolate agar, and many others.