Phantoms

Page 34

Kale knew, with his hands cuffed, he couldn't wrestle the gun away. As soon as the revolver was drawn, the fight was finished.
So Kale went for the other man's throat. Went for it with his teeth. He bit deep, felt blood gushing, bit again, pushed his mouth into the wound, like an attack dog, and bit again, and the deputy screamed, but it was only a yelp-rattle-sigh that no one could have heard, and the gun fell out of the holster and out of the deputy's spasming hand, and both men went down hard, with Kale on top, and the deputy tried to scream again, so Kale rammed a knee into his crotch, and blood was pump-pump-pumping out of the man's throat.
“Bastard,” Kale said.
The deputy's eyes froze. The blood stopped spurting from the wound. It was over.
Kale had never felt so powerful, so alive.
He looked around the parking lot. Still no one in sight.
He scrambled to the ring of keys, tried them one by one until he unlocked his handcuffs. He threw the cuffs under the car.
He rolled the dead deputy under the cruiser, too, out of sight.
He wiped his face on his sleeve. His shirt was spotted and stained with blood. There was nothing he could do about that. Nor could he change the fact that he was wearing baggy, blue, woven institutional clothing and a pair of canvas and rubber slip-on shoes.
Feeling conspicuous, he hurried along the fence, through the open gate. He crossed the alley and went into another parking lot behind a large, two-story apartment complex. He glanced up at all the windows and hoped no one was looking.
There were perhaps twenty cars in the lot. A yellow Datsun had keys in the ignition. He got behind the wheel, closed the door, and sighed with relief. He was out of sight, and he had transportation.
A box of Kleenex stood on the console. Using paper tissues and spit, he cleaned his face. With the blood removed, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror-and grinned.
Chapter 28 – Body Count
While General Copperfield's unit was conducting the autopsy and tests in the mobile field lab, Bryce Hammond formed two search teams and began a building-by-building inspection of the town. Frank Autry led the first group, and Major Isley went along as an observer for Project Skywatch. Likewise, Captain Arkham joined Bryce's group. Block by block and street by street, the two teams were never more than one building apart, remaining in close touch with walkie-talkies.
Jenny accompanied Bryce. More than anyone else, she was familiar with Snowfield's residents, and she was the one most likely to identify any bodies that were found. In most cases, she could also tell them who had lived in each house and how many people had been in each family-information they needed to compile a list of the missing.
She was troubled about exposing Lisa to more gruesome scenes, but she couldn't refuse to assist the search team. She couldn't leave her sister behind at the Hilltop Inn, either. Not after what had happened to Harker. And to Velazquez. But the girl coped well with the tension of the house-to-house search. She was still proving herself to Jenny, and Jenny was increasingly proud of her.
They didn't find any bodies for a while. The first businesses and houses they entered were deserted. In several houses, tables were set for Sunday dinner. In others, tubs were filled with bathwater that had grown cold. In a number of places, television sets were still playing, but there was no one to watch them.
In one kitchen they discovered Sunday dinner on the electric stove. The food in the three pots had cooked for so many hours that all of the water content had evaporated. The remains were dry, hard, burnt, blistered, and unidentifiable. The stainless steel pots were ruined; they had turned bluish-black both inside and out. The plastic handles of the pots had softened and partially melted. The entire house reeked with the most acrid, nauseating stench Jenny had ever encountered.
Bryce switched off the burners. “It's a miracle the whole place wasn't set on fire.”
“It probably would've been if that were a gas stove,” Jenny said.
Above the three pots, there was a stainless-steel range hood with an exhaust fan. When the food had burned, the hood had contained the short-lived flash of flames and had prevented the fire from spreading to the surrounding cabinetry.
Outside again, everyone (except Major Arkham in his decontamination suit) took deep breaths of the clean mountain air. They needed a couple of minutes to purge their lungs of the vile stuff they had breathed inside that house.
Then, next door, they found the first body of the day. It was John Farley, who owned the Mountain Tavern, which was open only during the ski season. He was in his forties. He had been a striking man, with salt-and pepper hair, a large nose, and a wide mouth that had frequently curved into an immensely engaging smile. Now he was bloated and bruised, his eyes bulging out of his skull, his clothes bursting at the seams as his body swelled.
Farley was sitting at the breakfast table, at one end of his big kitchen. On a plate before him was a meal of cheese-filled ravioli and meatballs. There was also a glass of red wine. On the table, beside the plate, there was an open magazine. Farley was sitting up straight in his chair. One hand lay palm-up in his lap. His other arm was on the table, and in that hand was clenched a crust of bread. Farley's mouth was partly open, and there was a bite of bread trapped between his teeth. He had perished in the act of chewing; his jaw muscles had never even relaxed.
“Good God,” Tal said, “he didn't have time to spit the stuff out or swallow it. Death must've been instantaneous.”
“And he didn't see it coming, either,” Bryce said, “Look at his face. There's no expression of honor or surprise or shock as there is with most of the others.”
Staring at the dead man's clenched jaws, Jenny said, “What I don't understand is why death doesn't bring any relaxation of the muscles whatsoever. It's weird.”
In Our Lady of the Mountains Church, sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows, which were composed predominantly of blues and greens. Hundreds of irregularly shaped patches of royal blue, sky blue, turquoise, aquamarine, emerald green, and many other shades dripped across the polished wooden pews, puddled in the aisles, and shimmered on the walls.
It's like being underwater, Gordy Brogan thought as he followed Frank Autry into the strangely and beautifully illuminated nave.
Just beyond the narthex, a stream of crimson light splashed across the white marble font that contained the holy water. It was the crimson of Christ's blood. The sun pierced a stained glass image of Christ's bleeding heart and sprayed sanguineness rays upon the water that glistened in the pale marble bowl.
Of the five men in the search team, only Gordy was a Catholic. He moistened two fingers in the holy water, crossed himself, and genuflected.
The church was solemn, silent, still.
The air was softened by a pleasant trace of incense.
In the pews, there were no worshipers. At first it appeared as if the church was deserted.
Then Gordy looked more closely at the altar and gasped.
Frank saw it, too. “Oh, my God.”
The chancel was cloaked in more shadows than was the rest of the church, which was why the men hadn't immediately noticed the hideous-and sacrilegious-thing above the altar. The altar candies had burned down all the way and had gone out.
However, as the men in the search team progressed hesitantly down the center aisle, they got a clearer and clearer view of the life-size crucifix that rose up from the center of the altar, along the rear wall of the chancel. It was a wooden cross, with an exquisitely detailed, hand-painted, glazed plaster figure of Christ fixed to it. At the moment, much of the godly image was obscured by another body that hung in front of it. A real body, not another plaster corpus. It was the priest in his robes; he was nailed to the cross.
Two altar boys knelt on the floor in front of the altar. They were dead, bruised, bloated.
The flesh of the priest had begun to darken and to show other signs of imminent decomposition. His body was not in the same bizarre condition as all the others that had been found thus far. In his case, the discoloration was what you would expect of a day-old corpse.
Frank Autry, Major Isley, and the other two deputies continued through the gate in the altar railing and stepped up into the chancel.
Gordy wasn't able to go with them. He was too badly shaken and had to sit in the front pew to keep from collapsing.
After inspecting the chancel and glancing through the sacristy door, Frank used his walkie-talkie to call Bryce Hammond in the building next door. “Sheriff, we've found three here in the church. We need Doc Paige for positive IDs. But it's especially grisly, so better leave Lisa in the vestibule with a couple of the guys.”
“We'll be there in two minutes,” the sheriff said.
Frank came down from the chancel, through the gate in the railing, and sat down beside Gordy. He was holding the walkie talkie in one hand and a gun in the other. “You're a Catholic.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry you had to see this.”
“I'll be okay,” Gordy said, “It's no easier for you just because you're not a Catholic.”
“You know the priest?”
“I think his name's Father Callahan. I didn't go to this church, though. I attended St. Andrew's, down in Santa Mira.”
Frank put the walkie-talkie down and scratched his chin.
“From all the other indications we've had, it looked like the attack came yesterday evening, not long before Doc and Lisa came back to town. But now this… If these three died in the morning, during Mass”
“It was probably during Benediction,” Gordy said, “Not Mass.”
“Benediction?”
“The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The Sunday evening service.”
“Ah. Then it fits right in with the timing of the others.” He looked around at the empty pews. “What happened to the parishioners? Why are only the altarboys and the priest here?”
“Well, not an awful lot of people come to Benediction,” Gordy said. “There were probably at least two or three others. But it took them.”
“Why didn't it just take everyone?”
Gordy didn't answer.
“Why did it have to do something like this?” Frank pressed.
“To ridicule us. To mock us. To steal our hope,” Gordy sighed miserably.
Frank stared at him.
Gordy said, “Maybe some of us have been counting on God to get us through this alive. Probably most of us have. I know I've sure been praying a lot since we've been here. Probably you have, too. It knew we would do that. It knew we would ask God for help. So this is its way of letting us know that God can't help us. Or at least that's what it would like us to believe. Because that's its way. To instill doubt about God. That's always been its way.”
Frank said, “You sound as if you know exactly what we're up against here.”
“Maybe,” Gordy said. He stared at the crucified priest, then turned to Frank again. “Don't you know? Don't you really, Frank?”
After they left the church and went around the corner onto the cross street, they found two wrecked cars.
A Cadillac Seville had run across the front lawn of the church rectory, mowing down the shrubbery in its path, and had collided with a porch post at one corner of the house. The post was nearly splintered in two. The porch roof was sagging.
Tal Whitman squinted through the side window of the Caddy. “There's a woman behind the wheel.”
“Dead?” Bryce asked.
“Yeah. But not from the accident.”
At the other side of the car, Jenny tried to open the driver's door. It was locked. All of the doors were locked, and all of the windows were rolled up tight.
Nevertheless, the woman behind the wheel-Edna Gower; jenny knew her-was like the other corpses. Darkly bruised. Swollen. A scream of terror frozen on her twisted face.
“How could it get in there and kill her?” Tal wondered aloud. “Remember the locked bathroom at the Candle glow Inn,” Bryce said.
“And the barricaded room at the Oxleys',” Jenny said.
Captain Arkham said, “It's almost an argument for the general's nerve gas theory.”
Then Arkham unclipped a miniaturized geiger counter from his utility belt and carefully examined the car. But it wasn't radiation that had killed the woman inside.
The second car, half a block away, was a pearl-white Lynx. On the pavement behind it were black skid marks. The Lynx was angled across the street, blocking it. The front end was punched into the side of a yellow Chevy van. There wasn't a lot of damage because the Lynx had almost braked to a stop before hitting the parked vehicle.
The driver was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. Jenny knew him, too, Marty Sussman. He had been Snowfield's city manager for the past six years. Affable, earnest Marty Sussman. Dead. Again, the cause of death was clearly not related to the collision.
The doors of the Lynx were locked. The windows were rolled up tight, just as, they had been on the Cadillac.
“Looks like they both were trying to escape from something,” Jenny said.
“Maybe,” Tal said, “Or they might just have been out for a drive or going somewhere on an errand when the attack came. If they were trying to escape, something sure stopped them cold, forced them right off the street.”
“Sunday was a warm day. Warm but not too warm,” Bryce said, “Not hot enough to ride around with the windows closed and the air conditioner on. It was the kind of day when most people keep the windows down, taking advantage of the fresh air. So it looks to me as if, after they were forced to stop, they put up the windows and locked themselves in, trying to keep something out.”
“But it got them anyway,” Jenny said.
It.
Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder “only not blind.” Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.
Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as six and seven thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for four or five hundred dollars apiece.
He was a patient of Jenny's. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.
The ulcer wouldn't be bothering him anymore. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.
Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny's housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not anymore.