Phantoms (27 page)

But first, he would go up into the mountains. That’s where the hideout was. The mountains offered him the best chance of eluding the cops once he’d escaped. He had a hunch about it. The mountains. Yeah. He felt
drawn
to the mountains.

 

 

Dawn came to the mountains, spreading like a bright stain across the sky, soaking into the darkness and discoloring it.

The forest above Snowfield was quiet. Very quiet.

In the underbrush, the leaves were beaded with morning dew. The pleasant odor of rich humus rose up from the spongy forest floor.

The air was chilly, as if the last exhalation of the night still lay upon the land.

The fox stood motionless on a limestone formation that thrust up from an open slope, just below the treeline. The wind gently ruffled his gray fur.

His breath made a small phosphoric plume in the crisp air.

The fox was not a night hunter, yet he had been on the prowl since an hour before dawn. He had not eaten in almost two days.

He had been unable to find game. The woods had been unnaturally silent and devoid of the scent of prey.

In all his seasons as a hunter, the fox had never encountered such barren quietude as this. The most bitter days of midwinter were filled with more promise than this. Even in the windwhipped snows of January, there was always the blood scent, the game scent.

Not now.

Now there was nothing.

Death seemed to have claimed all the creatures in this part of the forest—except for one small, hungry fox. Yet there was not even the scent of death, not even the ripe stench of a carcass moldering in the underbrush.

But at last, as he had scampered across the low limestone formation, being careful not to set foot in one of the crevices or flute holes that dropped down into the caves beneath, the fox had seen something move on the slope ahead of him, something that had not merely been stirred by the wind. He had frozen on the low rocks, staring uphill at the shadowy perimeter of this new arm of the forest.

A squirrel. Two squirrels. No, there were even more of them than that—five, ten, twenty. They were lined up side by side in the dimness along the treeline.

At first there had been no game whatsoever. Now there was an equally strange abundance of it.

The fox sniffed.

Although the squirrels were only five or six yards away, he could not get their scent.

The squirrels were looking directly at him, but they didn’t seem frightened.

The fox cocked his head, suspicion tempering his hunger.

The squirrels moved to their left, all at once, in a tight little group, and then came out of the shadows of the trees, away from the protection of the forest, onto open ground, straight toward the fox. They roiled over and under and around one another, a frantic confusion of brown pelts, a blur of motion in the brown grass. When they came to an abrupt halt, all at the same instant, they were only three or four yards from the fox. And they were no longer squirrels.

The fox twitched and made a hissing sound.

The twenty small squirrels were now four large raccoons.

The fox growled softly.

Ignoring him, one of the raccoons stood on its hind feet and began washing its paws.

The fur along the fox’s back bristled.

He sniffed the air.

No scent.

He put his head low and watched the raccoons closely. His sleek muscles grew even more tense than they had been, not because he intended to spring, but because he intended to flee.

Something was very wrong.

All four raccoons were sitting up now, forepaws tucked against their chests, tender bellies exposed.

They were watching the fox.

The raccoon was not usually prey for the fox. It was too aggressive, too sharp of tooth, too quick with its claws. But though it was safe from foxes, the raccoon never enjoyed confrontation; it never flaunted itself as these four were doing.

The fox licked the cold air with his tongue.

He sniffed again and finally
did
pick up a scent.

His ears snapped back flat against his skull, and he snarled.

It wasn’t the scent of raccoons. It wasn’t the scent of any denizen of the forest that he had ever encountered before. It was an unfamiliar, sharp, unpleasant odor. Faint. But repellent.

This vile odor wasn’t coming from any of the four raccoons that posed in front of the fox. He wasn’t quite able to make out where it was coming from.

Sensing grave danger, the fox whipped around on the limestone, turning away from the raccoons, although he was reluctant to put his back to them.

His paws scraped and his claws clicked on the hard surface as he launched himself down the slope, across the flat weatherworn rock, his tail streaming out behind him. He leaped over a foot-wide crevice in the stone—

—and in midleap he was snatched from the air by something dark and cold and pulsing.

The thing burst up out of the crevice with brutal, shocking force and speed.

The agonized squeal of the fox was sharp and brief.

As quickly as the fox was seized, it was drawn down into the crevice. Five feet below, at the bottom of the miniature chasm, there was a small hole that led into the caves beneath the limestone outcropping. The hole was too small to admit the fox, but the struggling creature was dragged through anyway, its bones snapping as it went.

Gone.

All in the blink of an eye. Half a blink.

Indeed, the fox had been
sucked
into the earth before the echo of its dying cry had even pealed back from a distant hillside.

The raccoons were gone.

Now, a flood of field mice poured onto the smooth slabs of limestone. Scores of them. At least a hundred.

They went to the edge of the crevice.

They stared down into it.

One by one, the mice slipped over the edge, dropped to the bottom, and then went through the small natural opening into the cavern below.

Soon, all the mice were gone, too.

Once again, the forest above Snowfield was quiet.

Santa Mira.

Monday—1:02 A.M.

“Hello?”

“Is this the
Santa Mira Daily News?”

“Yeah.”

“The newspaper?”

“Lady, the paper’s closed. It’s after one in the morning.”

“Closed? I didn’t know a newspaper ever closed.”

“This isn’t the
New York Times.”

“But aren’t you printing tomorrow’s edition now?”

“The printing’s not done here. These are the business and editorial offices. Did you want the printer or what?”

“Well . . . I have a story.”

“If it’s an obituary or a church bake sale or something, what you do is you call back in the morning, after nine o’clock, and you—”

“No, no. This is a
big
story.”

“Oh, a garage sale, huh?”

“What?”

“Never mind. You’ll just have to call back in the morning.”

“Wait, listen, I work for the phone company.”

“That’s not such a big story.”

“No, see, it’s because I work for the phone company that I found out about this thing. Are you the editor?”

“No. I’m in charge of selling ad space.”

“Well . . . maybe you can still help me.”

“Lady. I’m sitting here on a Sunday night—no, a Monday morning now—all alone in a dreary little office, trying to figure out how the devil to drum up enough business to keep this paper afloat. I am tired. I am irritable—”

“How awful.”

“—and I am afraid you’ll have to call back in the morning.”

“But something terrible has happened in Snowfield. I don’t know exactly what, but I know people are dead. There might even be a
lot
of people dead or at least in danger of dying.”

“Christ, I must be tireder than I thought. I’m getting interested in spite of myself. Tell me.”

“We’ve rerouted Snowfield’s phone service, pulled it off the automatic dialing system, and restricted all ingoing calls. You can only reach two numbers up there now, and both of them are being answered by the sheriff’s men. The reason they’ve set it up that way is to seal the place off before the reporters find out something’s up.”

“Lady, what’ve you been drinking?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Then what’ve you been smoking?”

“Listen, I know a little bit more. They’re getting calls from the Santa Mira sheriff’s office all the time, and from the governor’s office, and from some military base out in Utah, and they—”

 

 

San Francisco.

Monday—1:40 A.M.

“This is Sid Sandowicz. Can I help you?”

“I keep tellin’ them I want to talk to a
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter, man.”

“That’s me.”

“Man, you guys have hung up on me three times! What the fuck’s the matter with you guys?”

“Watch your language.”

“Shit.”

“Listen, do you have any idea how many kids like you call up newspapers, wasting our time with silly-ass gags and hot tip hoaxes?”

“Huh? How’d you even know I was a kid?”

“’Cause you sound twelve.”

“I’m fifteen!”

“Congratulations.”

“Shit!”

“Listen, son, I’ve got a boy your age, which is why I’m bothering to listen to you when the other guys wouldn’t. So if you’ve really got something of interest, spill it.”

“Well, my old man’s a professor at Stanford. He’s a virologist and an epidemiologist. You know what that means, man?”

“He studies viruses, disease, something like that.”

“Yeah. And he’s let himself be corrupted.”

“How’s that?”

“He accepted a grant from the fuckin’ military. Man, he’s involved with some biological warfare outfit. It’s supposed to be a peaceful application of his research, but you know that’s a lot of horseshit. He sold his soul, and now they’re finally claimin’ it. The shit’s hit the fan.”

“The fact that your father sold out—if he
did
sell out—might be big news in your family, son, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be of much interest to our readers.”

“Hey, man, I didn’t call up just to jerk you off. I’ve got a real
story.
Tonight they came for him. There’s a crisis of some kind. I’m supposed to think he had to fly back East on business. I snuck upstairs and listened at their bedroom door while he was layin’ it all out for the old lady. There’s been some kind of contamination in Snowfield. A big emergency. Everyone’s tryin’ to keep it secret.”

“Snowfield, California?”

“Yeah, yeah. What I figure, man, is that they were secretly runnin’ a test of some germ weapon
on our own people
and it got out of hand. Or maybe it was an accidental spill. Somethin’ real heavy’s goin’ down, for sure.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Ricky Bettenby. My old man’s name is Wilson Bettenby.”

“Stanford, you said?”

“Yeah. You gonna follow up on this, man?”

“Maybe there’s something to it. But before I start calling people at Stanford, I need to ask you a lot more questions.”

“Fire away. I’ll tell you whatever I can. I want to blast this wide open, man. I want him to
pay
for sellin’ out.”

 

 

Throughout the night, the leaks sprung one by one. At Dugway, Utah, an army officer, who should have known better, used a pay phone off the base to call New York and spill the story to a much-loved younger brother who was a cub reporter for the
Times
. In bed, after sex, an aide to the governor told his lover, a woman reporter. Those and other holes in the dam caused the flow of information to grow from a trickle to a flood.

By three o’clock in the morning, the switchboard at the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Office was overloaded. By dawn, the newspaper, television, and radio reporters were swarming into Santa Mira. Within a few hours of first light, the street in front. of the sheriff’s offices was crowded with press cars, camera vans bearing the logos of TV stations in Sacramento and San Francisco, reporters, and curiosity seekers of all ages.

The deputies gave up trying to keep people from congregating in the middle of the street, for there were too many of them to be herded onto the sidewalks. They sealed off the block with sawhorses and turned it into a big open-air press compound. A couple of enterprising kids from a nearby apartment building starting selling Coke, cookies, and—with the aid of the longest series of extension cords anyone could remember seeing—hot coffee. Their refreshment stand became the rumor center, where reporters gathered to share theories and hearsay while they waited for the latest official information handouts.

Other journalists spread out through Santa Mira, seeking people who had friends or relatives living up in Snowfield, or who were in some way related to the deputies now stationed there. Out at the junction of the state route and Snowfield Road, still other reporters were camping at the police roadblock.

In spite of all this hurly-burly, fully half of the press had not yet arrived. Many representatives of the Eastern media and the foreign press were still in transit. For the authorities’ who were trying hard to deal with the mess, the worst was yet to come. By Monday afternoon, it would be a circus.