Phantoms (18 page)

“I’ve got a hell of a lot to do in the next hour or two, Gary. If I live long enough to do it, that is. I can’t spend fifteen minutes laying this whole thing out for you and then another fifteen laying it out again for Jack. Listen, I’m in Snowfield. It appears as if everyone who lived here is dead, Gary.”

“What?”

“Five hundred people.”

“Bryce, if this is some sort of joke or—”

“Five hundred dead. And that’s the least of it. Now will you for Christ’s sake get Jack?”

“But Bryce, five hundred—”

“
Get Jack
,
damn it!
”

Poe hesitated, then said, “Old buddy, this better be the straight shit.” He dropped the phone and went for the governor.

Bryce had known Jack Retlock for seventeen years. When he joined the Los Angeles police, he had been assigned to Jack for his rookie year. At that time, Jack was a seven-year veteran of the force, a seasoned hand. Indeed, Jack had seemed so savvy and streetwise that Bryce had despaired of ever being even half as good at the job. In a year, however, he was better. They voted to stay together, partners. But eighteen months later, fed up with a legal system that regularly turned loose the punks he worked so hard to imprison, Jack quit police work and went into politics. As a cop, he’d collected a fistful of citations for bravery. He parlayed his hero image into a seat on the L.A. city council, then ran for mayor, winning in a landslide. From there, he’d jumped into the governor’s chair. It was a far more impressive career than Bryce’s own halting progress to the sheriff’s post in Santa Mira, but Jack always was the more aggressive of the two.

“Doody? Is that you?” Jack asked, picking up the phone in Sacramento.

Doody was his nickname for Bryce. He’d always said that Bryce’s sandy hair, freckles, wholesome face, and marionette eyes made him look like Howdy Doody.

“It’s me, Jack.”

“Gary’s raving some lunatic nonsense—”

“It’s true,” Bryce said.

He told Jack all about Snowfield.

After listening to the entire story, Jack took a deep breath and said, “I wish you were a drinking man, Doody.”

“This isn’t booze talking, Jack. Listen, the first thing I want is—”

“National Guard?”

“No!” Bryce said. “That’s exactly what I want to avoid as long as we have any choice.”

“If I don’t use the Guard and every agency at my disposal, and then if it later turns out I should’ve sent them in first thing, my ass will be grass, and there’ll be a herd of hungry cows all around me.”

“Jack, I’m counting on you to make the right decisions, not just the right
political
decisions. Until we know more about the situation, we don’t want hordes of Guardsmen tramping around up here. They’re great for helping out in a flood, a postal strike, that sort of thing. But they’re not full-time military men. They’re salesmen and attorneys and carpenters and schoolteachers. This calls for a tightly controlled, efficient little police action, and that sort of thing can be conducted only by real cops, full-time cops.”

“And if your men can’t handle it?”

“Then I’ll be the first to yell for the Guard.”

Finally Retlock said, “Okay. No Guardsmen. For now.”

Bryce sighed. “And I want to keep the State Health Department out of here, too.”

“Doody, be reasonable. How can I do that? If there’s any chance that a contagious disease has wiped out Snowfield—or some kind of environmental poisoning—”

“Listen, Jack, Health does a fine job when it comes to tracking down and controlling vectors for outbreaks of plague or mass food poisoning or water contamination. But essentially, they’re bureaucrats; they move slowly. We can’t
afford
to move slowly on this. I have the gut feeling that we’re living strictly on borrowed time. All hell could break loose at any time; in fact, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t. Besides, the Health Department doesn’t have the equipment to handle it, and they don’t have a contingency plan to cover the death of an entire town. But there’s someone who does, Jack. The Army Medical Corps’ CBW Division has a relatively new program they call the Civilian Defense Unit.”

“CBW Division?” Retlock asked. There was a new tension in his voice. “You don’t mean the chemical and biological warfare boys?”

“Yes.”

“Christ, you don’t think it has anything to do with nerve gas or germ war—”

“Probably not,” Bryce said, thinking of the Liebermanns’ severed heads, of the creepy feeling that had overcome him inside the covered passageway, of the incredible suddenness with which Jake Johnson had vanished. “But I don’t know enough about it to rule out CBW or anything else.”

A hard edge of anger had crystallized in the governor’s voice. “If the damned army has been careless with one of its fucking doomsday viruses, I’m going to have their heads!”

“Easy, Jack. Maybe it’s not an accident. Maybe it’s the work of terrorists who got their hands on a sample of some CBW agent. Or maybe it’s foreign agents running a little test of our CBW analysis and defense system. It was to handle those kinds of situations that the Army Medical Corps instructed its CBW Division to create General Copperfield’s office.”

“Who’s Copperfield?”

“General Galen Copperfield. He’s the commanding officer of the Civilian Defense Unit of the CBW Division. This is precisely the kind of situation they want to be notified about. Within hours, Copperfield can put a team of well-trained scientists into Snowfield. First-rate biologists, virologists, bacteriologists, pathologists with training in the very latest forensic medicine, at least one immunologist and biochemist, a neurologist—and even a neuropsychologist. Copperfield’s department has designed elaborate mobile field laboratories. They’ve got them garaged at depots all over the country, so there must be one relatively close to us. Hold off the State Health gang, Jack. They don’t have people of the caliber that Copperfield. can provide, and they don’t have state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment as mobile as Copperfield’s. I want to call the general; I
am
going to call him, in fact, but I’d prefer to have your agreement and your guarantee that state bureaucrats won’t be tramping around here, interfering.”

After a brief hesitation, Jack Retlock said, “Doody, what kind of world have we let it become when things like Copperfield’s department are even necessary?”

“You’ll hold off Health?”

“Yes. What else do you need?”

Bryce glanced down at the list in front of him. “You could approach the telephone company about pulling the Snowfield circuits off automatic switching. When the world finds out what’s happened up here, every phone in town will be ringing off the hook, and we won’t be able to maintain essential communications. If they could route all calls to and from Snowfield through a few special operators and weed out the crank stuff and—”

“I’ll handle it,” Jack said.

“Of course, we could lose the phones at any time. Even cell phones. Dr. Paige had trouble getting a call out when she first tried, so I’ll need a shortwave set. The one here at the substation seems to’ve been sabotaged.”

“I can get you a mobile shortwave unit, a van that has its own gasoline generator. The Office of Earthquake Preparedness has a couple. Anything else?”

“Speaking of generators, it’d be nice if we didn’t have to depend on the public power supply. Evidently, our enemy here can tamper with it at will. Could you get two big generators for us?”

“Can do. Anything else?”

“If I think of anything, I won’t hesitate to ask.”

“Let me tell you, Bryce, as a friend, I hate like hell to see you in the middle of this one. But as a governor, I’m damned glad it fell in your jurisdiction, whatever the hell it is. There are some prize assholes out there who’d already have screwed it up if it’d fallen in
their
laps. By now, if it was a disease, they’d have spread it to half the state. We sure can use you up there.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

They were both silent for a moment.

Then Retlock said, “Doody?”

“Yeah, Jack?”

“Watch out for yourself.”

“I will, Jack,” Bryce said. “Well, I’ve got to get on to Copperfield. I’ll call you later.”

The governor said, “Please do that, Bryce. Call me later. Don’t
you
vanish, old buddy.”

Bryce put down the phone and looked around the substation. Stu Wargle and Frank were removing the front access plate from the radio. Tal and Dr. Paige were loading guns. Gordy Brogan and young Lisa Paige, the biggest and the smallest of the group, were making coffee and putting food on one of the worktables.

Even in the midst of disaster, Bryce thought, even here in the Twilight Zone, we have to have our coffee and supper. Life goes on.

He picked up the receiver to call Copperfield’s number out at Dugway, Utah.

There was no dial tone. He jiggled the disconnect button.

“Hello,” he said.

Nothing.

Bryce sensed someone or something listening. He could feel the presence, just as Dr. Paige had described it.

“Who is this?” he asked.

He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one. It wasn’t a voice. It was a peculiar yet familiar sound: the cry of birds, perhaps gulls; yes, sea gulls shrieking high above a windswept shoreline.

It changed. It became a clattering sound. A rattle. Like beans in a hollow gourd. The warning sound of a rattlesnake. Yes, no doubt about it. The very distinct sound of a rattlesnake.

And then it changed again. Electronic buzzing. No, not electronic. Bees. Bees buzzing, swarming.

And now the cry of gulls once more.

And the call of another bird, a trilling musical voice.

And panting. Like a tired dog.

And snarling. Not a dog. Something larger.

And the hissing and spitting of fighting cats.

Although there was nothing especially menacing about the sounds themselves—except, perhaps, for the rattlesnake and the snarling—Bryce was chilled by them.

The animal noises ceased.

Bryce waited, listened, said, “Who is this?”

No answer.

“What do you want?”

Another sound came over the wire, and it pierced Bryce as if it were a dagger of ice. Screams. Men and women and children. More than a few of them. Dozens, scores. Not stage screams; not make-believe terror. They were the stark, shocking cries of the damned: screams of agony, fear and soul-searing despair.

Bryce felt sick.

His heart raced.

It seemed to him that he had an open line to the bowels of Hell.

Were these the cries of Snowfield’s dead, captured on a tape recording? By whom? Why? Is it live or is it Memorex?

One final scream. A child. A little girl. She cried out in terror, then in pain, then in unimaginable suffering, as if she were being torn apart. Her voice rose, spiraled up and up—

Silence.

The silence was even worse than the screaming because the unnameable presence was still on the line, and Bryce could feel it more strongly now. He was stricken by an awareness of pure, unrelenting evil.

It
was there.

He quickly put down the phone.

He was shaking. He had not been in any danger—yet he was shaking.

He looked around the bull pen. The others were still busy with the tasks he had assigned to them. Apparently, no one had noticed that his most recent session on the phone had been far different from those that had gone before it.

Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.

Eventually, he would have to tell the others what had happened. But not right now. Because right now he couldn’t trust his voice. They would surely hear the nervous flutter, and they would know that this strange experience had badly shaken him.

Until reinforcements arrived, until their foothold in Snowfield was more firmly established, until they all felt less afraid, it wasn’t wise to let the others see him shaking with dread. They looked to him for leadership, after all; he didn’t intend to disappoint them.

He took a deep, cleansing breath.

He picked up the receiver and immediately got a dial tone.

Immensely relieved, he called the CBW Civilian Defense Unit in Dugway, Utah.

 

 

Lisa liked Gordy Brogan.

At first he had seemed menacing and sullen. He was such a big man, and his hands were so enormous they made you think of the Frankenstein monster. His face was rather handsome, actually, but when he frowned, even if he wasn’t angry, even if he was just worrying about something or thinking especially hard, his brows knitted together in a fierce way, and his black-black eyes grew even blacker than usual, and he looked like doom itself.

A smile transformed him. It was the most astonishing thing. When Gordy smiled, you knew right away that you were seeing the
real
Gordy Brogan. You knew that the other Gordy—the one you
thought
you saw when he frowned or when his face was in repose—was purely a figment of your imagination. His warm, wide smile drew your attention to the kindness shining in his eyes, the gentleness in his broad brow.

When you got to know him, he was like a big puppy, eager to be liked. He was one of those rare adults who could talk to a kid without being self-conscious or condescending or patronizing. He was even better in that regard than Jenny. And even under the current circumstances, he could laugh.

As they put the food on the table—lunch meat, bread, cheese, fresh fruit, doughnuts—and brewed coffee, Lisa said, “You just don’t seem like a cop to me.”

“Oh?” Gordy said. “What’s a cop supposed to seem like?”

“Whoops. Did I say the wrong thing? Is ‘cop’ an offensive word?”

“In some quarters, it is. Like in prisons, for instance.”

She was amazed that she still could laugh after everything that had happened this evening. She said, “Seriously. What do officers of the law prefer to be called? Policemen?”