Phantoms

Billy was so amazed by the procession of animals that he didn"t immediately respond.

Other animals began to appear, mixed in among the cats and dogs. Squirrels. Rabbits. A gray fox. Racc.o.o.ns. More foxes and more squirrels. Skunks. All of them were staring straight ahead, oblivious of everything except the need to keep moving. Possums and badgers. Mice and chipmunks. Coyotes. All rushing down the road to h.e.l.l, swarming over and around and under one another, yet never once stumbling or hesitating or snapping at one another. This strange parade was as swift, continuous, and harmonious as flowing water.

"Velazquez! Peake! Report in!"

"Animals," Billy told the general. "Dogs, cats, racc.o.o.ns, all kinds of things. A river of "em."

"Sir, they"re running down the Skyline tunnel, just beyond the mouth of the pipe," Ron Peake said.

"Underground," Billy said, baffled. "It"s crazy."

"Retreat, G.o.dd.a.m.nit!" Copperfield said urgently. "Get out of there now. Now!"

Billy remembered the general"s warning, issued just before they had descended through the manole: If anything moves down there ... even if it"s just a mouse, get your a.s.ses out of there fast.

Initially, the subterranean parade of animals had been startling but not particularly frightening. Now, the bizarre procession was suddenly eerie, even threatening.

And now there were snakes among the animals. Scores of them. Long blacksnakes, slithering fast, with their heads raised a foot or two above the floor of the storm drain. And there were rattlers, their flat and evil heads held lower than those of the longer blacksnakes, but moving just as fast and just as sinuously, swarming with mysterious purpose toward a dark and equally mysterious destination.

Although the snakes paid no more attention to Velazquez and Peake than the dogs and cats did, their slithering arrival was enough to snap Billy out of his trance. He hated snakes. He turned back the way he had come, prodded Peake. "Go. Go on. Get out of here. Run!"

Something shrieked-screamed-roared.

Billy"s heart pounded with jackhammer ferocity.

The sound came from the Skyline drain, from back there on the road to h.e.l.l. Billy didn"t dare look back.

It was neither a human scream nor like any animal sound, yet it was unquestionably the cry of a living thing. There was no mistaking the raw emotions of that alien, blood-freezing bleat. It wasn"t a scream of fear or pain. It was a blast of rage, hatred, and feverish blood-hunger.

Fortunately, that malevolent roar didn"t come from nearby, but from farther up the mountain, toward the uppermost end of the Skyline conduit. The beast-whatever in G.o.d"s name it was-was at least not already upon them. But it was coming fast.

Ron Peake hurried back toward the ladder, and Billy followed. Enc.u.mbered by their bulky decontamination suits, slowed by the curved floor of the pipe, they ran in a lurching shuffle. Although they hadn"t far to go, their progress was maddeningly slow.

The thing in the tunnel cried out again.

Closer.

It was a whine and a snarl and a howl and a roar and a petulant squeal all tangled together, a barbed-wire sound that punctured Billy"s ears and raked cold metal spikes across his heart.

Closer.

If Billy Velazquez had been a G.o.d-fearing Nazarene or a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone, fundamentalist Christian, he would have known what beast might make such a cry. If he had been taught that the Dark One and his wicked minions stalked the earth in fleshy forms, seeking unwary souls to devour, he would have identified this beast at once. He would have said, "It"s Satan." The roar echoing through the concrete tunnels was truly that terrible.

And closer.

Getting closer.

Coming fast.

But Billy was a Catholic. Modem Catholicism tended to downplay the sulphurous-pits-of-h.e.l.l stories in favor of emphasizing G.o.d"s great mercy and infinite compa.s.sion. Extremist Protestant fundamentalists saw the hand of the Devil in everything from television programming to the novels of R. L. Stine to the invention of the push-up bra. But Catholicism struck a quieter, more light-hearted note than that. The Church of Rome now gave the world such things as singing nuns, Wednesday Night Bingo, and priests with degrees in psychology. Therefore, Billy Velazquez, raised a Catholic, did not immediately a.s.sociate supernatural Satanic forces with the chilling cry of this unknown beast-not even though he so vividly remembered that old road-to-h.e.l.l comic book story. Billy just knew that the bellowing creature approaching through the bowels of the earth was a bad thing. A very bad thing.

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 a.s.s!"

The scream of the unknown beast had become an eerie ululation that filled the subterranean warren of 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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. Screaming-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, stunning himself, smashing 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 that 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 hissed 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. It had scales instead of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout rather than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all those 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 was the least of his worries.

It dragged him into the hammering heart of darkness. It stopped, held him tightly. It tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexigla.s.s faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard sh.e.l.l.

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 ill.u.s.tration 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 h.e.l.l. 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 G.o.d, Mary, hear my plea ... hear my plea, Mary, pray for me ... pray, pray for me, Mary, Mother of G.o.d, 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, constructing 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 other insects wandered across it, unaware of the danger below, and were instantly s.n.a.t.c.hed into the nest, dragged down, and devoured. The suddenness of it was horrifying and fascinating. One instant, the prey was there, standing atop the trap-door, and the next instant it was gone, as if it had never been.

Corporal Velazquez"s disappearance was as sudden as if he had stepped upon the lid of a trap-door spider"s lair.

Gone.

Copperfield"s men were already edgy about Harker"s disappearance and were frightened by the nightmarish howling that ceased just before Velazquez was dragged down. When the corporal was taken, they all stumbled back across the street, afraid that something was about to launch itself out of the manhole.

Copperfield, in the act of reaching for Velazquez when he was s.n.a.t.c.hed, jumped back. Then froze. Indecisive. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d?

No. It would be a suicide mission. Remember Harker. Cut the losses here, now.

But, good G.o.d, the screaming was terrible. Not as awful as Harker"s. Those had been screams born of excruciating pain. These were screams of mortal terror. Not as bad, perhaps, but bad enough. As bad as anything Copperfield had heard 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 aboveground-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 these 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 entrance to the drain, 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 c.o.c.ktails. 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 laboratories had 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 micro-mainframes with ten gigabytes of capacity-took up no more room than a couple of suitcases, yet it was a highly sophisticated system that was capable of complex medical a.n.a.lyses. In fact, it was a more elaborate system-with greater logic and memory capacities-than could be found in most major university hospitals" pathology labs.

There was a great deal of diagnostic equipment in the motor home, all of it designed and positioned for maximum utilization of the limited s.p.a.ce. 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 electron microscope with an image interpretation-enhancement read-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 more 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-male, 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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton 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 vechicle-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.