Phantoms (31 page)

Frank could see that the condition of the two bodies—especially the woman’s nightmarish expression—had had an effect on the general and his people. The fear in everyone’s eyes was sharper now. Although they didn’t want to admit it, they had encountered something beyond their experience. They were still clinging to explanations that made sense to them—nerve gas, virus, poison—but they were beginning to have doubts.

 

 

Copperfield’s people had brought a zippered plastic body bag with them. In the kitchen, they slipped the pajama-clad corpse into the bag, then carried it out of the building and left it on the sidewalk, intending to pick it up again on the way back to the mobile labs.

Bryce led them to Gilmartin’s Market. Inside, back by the milk coolers where it had happened, he told them about Jake Johnson’s disappearance. “No screams. No sound at all. Just a few seconds of darkness.
A few seconds.
But when the lights came on again, Jake was gone.”

Copperfield. said, “You looked—”

“Everywhere.”

“He could have run away,” Roberts said.

“Yes,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Maybe he deserted. Considering the things he’d seen . . .”

“My God,” Goldstein said, “what if he left Snowfield? He might be beyond the quarantine line, carrying the infection—”

“No, no, no. Jake wouldn’t desert,” Bryce said. “He wasn’t exactly the most aggressive officer on the force, but he wouldn’t run out on me. He wasn’t irresponsible.”

“Definitely not,” Tal agreed. “Besides, Jake’s old man was once county sheriff, so there’s a lot of family pride involved.”

“And Jake was a cautious man,” Frank said. “He didn’t do anything on impulse.”

Bryce nodded. “Anyway, even if he was spooked enough to run, he’d have taken a squad car. He sure wouldn’t have
walked
out of town.”

“Look,” Copperfield said, “he’d have known they wouldn’t let him past the roadblock, so he’d have avoided the highway altogether. He might have gone off through the woods.”

Jenny shook her head. “No, General. The land is
wild
out there. Deputy Johnson would’ve known he’d get lost and die.”

“And,” Bryce said, “would a frightened man plunge pellmell into a strange forest at night? I don’t think so, General. But I
do
think it’s time you heard about what happened to my other deputy.”

Leaning against a cooler full of cheese and lunchmeat, Bryce told them about the moth, about the attack on Wargle and the bloodcurdling condition of the corpse. He told them about Lisa’s encounter with a resurrected Wargle and about the subsequent discovery that the body was missing.

Copperfield and his people expressed astonishment at first, then confusion, then fear. But during most of Bryce’s tale, they stared at him in wary silence and glanced at one another knowingly.

He finished by telling them about the child’s voice that had come from the kitchen drain just moments before their arrival. Then, for the third time, he said, “Well, General, do you
still
think it looks like a simple incident of CBW?”

Copperfield hesitated, looked around at the littered market, finally met Bryce’s eyes, and said, “Sheriff, I want Dr. Roberts and Dr. Goldstein to give complete physical examinations to you and to everyone who saw this . . . uh. .. moth.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Oh, I believe that you genuinely, sincerely
think
you saw all of those things.”

“Damn,” Tal said.

Copperfield said, “Surely, you can understand that, to us, it sounds as if you’ve all been contaminated, as if you’re suffering from hallucinations.”

Bryce was weary of their disbelief and frustrated by their intellectual rigidity. As scientists, they were supposed to be receptive to new ideas and unexpected possibilities. Instead, they appeared determined to
force
the evidence to conform to their preconceived notions of what they would find in Snowfield.

“You think we all could’ve had the
same
hallucination?” Bryce asked.

“Mass hallucinations aren’t unknown,” Copperfield said.

“General,” Jenny said, “there was absolutely nothing hallucinatory about what we saw. It had the gritty texture of reality.”

“Doctor Paige, I would ordinarily accord considerable weight to any observation you cared to make. But as one of those who claim to have
seen
this moth, your medical judgment in the matter simply isn’t objective.”

Scowling at Copperfield, Frank Autry said, “But, sir, if it was all just something we hallucinated—then where is Stu Wargle?”

“Maybe both he
and
this Jake Johnson ran out on you,” Roberts said. “And maybe you’ve merely incorporated their disappearances into your delusions.”

From long experience, Bryce knew that a debate was always lost the moment you became emotional. He forced himself to remain in a relaxed position, leaning against the cooler. Keeping his voice soft and slow, he said, “General, from the things you and your people have said, someone could get the idea that the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department is staffed exclusively by cowards, fools, and goldbrickers.”

Copperfield made placating gestures with his rubber-sheathed hands. “No, no, no. We’re not saying anything of the kind. Please, Sheriff, try to understand. We’re only being straightforward with you. We’re telling you how the situation looks to us—how it would look to
anyone
with any specialized knowledge of chemical and biological warfare. Hallucination is one of the things we expect to find in survivors. It’s one of the things we
have
to look for. Now, if you could offer us a logical explanation for the existence of this eagle-size moth... well, maybe then we could come to believe in it ourselves. But you can’t. Which leaves our suggestion—that you merely hallucinated it—as the only explanation that makes sense.”

Bryce noticed the four soldiers staring at him in a much different way now that he was thought to be a victim of nerve gas. After all, a man suffering from bizarre hallucinations was obviously unstable, dangerous, perhaps even violent enough to cut off people’s heads and pop them into bakery ovens. The soldiers raised their submachine guns an inch or two, although they didn’t actually aim at Bryce. They regarded him—and Jenny and Tal and Frank—with a new and unmistakable air of suspicion.

Before Bryce could respond to Copperfield, he was startled by a loud noise at the back of the market, beyond the butcher’s-block tables. He stepped away from the cooler, turned toward the source of the commotion, and put his right hand on his holstered revolver.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two soldiers reacting to him rather than to the noise. When he had put his hand on his revolver, they had instantly raised their submachine guns.

It was a hammering sound that had drawn his attention. And a voice. Both were coming from within the walk-in meat locker, on the other side of the butcher’s work area, no more than fifteen feet away, almost directly opposite the point at which Bryce and the others were gathered. The thick, insulated door of the locker muffled the blows that were being rained on it, but they were still loud. The voice was muffled, too, the words unclear, but Bryce thought he could hear someone shouting for help.

“Somebody’s trapped in there,” Copperfield said.

“Can’t be,” Bryce said.

Frank said, “Can’t be locked in because the door opens from both sides.”

The hammering and shouting ceased abruptly.

A clatter.

A rattle of metal on metal.

The handle on the large, burnished-steel door moved up, down, up, down, up. . .

The latch clicked. The door swung open. But only a couple of inches. Then it stopped.

The refrigerated air inside the locker rushed out, mixing with the warmer air in the market. Tendrils of frosty vapor rose along the length of the open door.

Although the light was on in the room beyond the door, Bryce couldn’t see anything through the narrow gap. Nevertheless, he knew what the refrigerated meat locker looked like. During last night’s search for Jake Johnson, Bryce had been in there, poking around. It was a frigid, windowless, claustrophobic place, about twelve by fifteen feet. There was one other door—equipped with two deadbolt locks—that opened onto the alley for the easy receival of meat deliveries. A painted concrete floor. Sealed concrete walls. Fluorescent lights. Vents in three of the walls circulated cold air around the sides of beef, veal, and slabs of pork that hung from the ceiling racks.

Bryce could hear nothing except the amplified breathing of the scientists and soldiers in the decontamination suits, and even that was subdued; some of them seemed to be holding their breath.

Then from within the locker came a groan of pain. A pitifully weak voice cried out for help. Rebounding from the cold concrete walls, carried on the spiraling thermals of air that escaped through the narrowly opened door, the voice was shaky, echodistorted, yet recognizable.

It was Jake Johnson.

Bryce, Jenny, Tal, and Frank stood very still, listening.

Copperfield said, “Whoever it is, he needs help badly.”

“Bryce . . . please. . . somebody
. . .”

“You know him?” Copperfield asked. “He’s calling your name—isn’t he, Sheriff?”

Without waiting for an answer, the general ordered two of his men—Sergeant Harker and Private Pascalli—to look in the meat locker.

“Wait!” Bryce said. “Nobody goes back there. We’re keeping these coolers between us and that locker until we know more.”

“Sheriff, while I fully intend to cooperate with you as far as possible, you have no authority over my men or me.”

“Jake?” Copperfield asked, squinting curiously at Bryce. “You mean that man in there is the same one you said was snatched away from here last night?”

“It sounds like him,” Bryce admitted.

“Well, there you are!” Copperfield said. “Nothing mysterious about it, after all. He’s been right here all this time.”

Bryce glared at the general. “I told you we searched everywhere last night. Even in the goddamned meat locker. He wasn’t there.”

“Well, he is now,” the general said.

Jenny touched Bryce’s arm. “It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.”

Copperfield said, “Sheriff, we can’t just stand here and allow an injured man to suffer.”

“If Jake had really been in there all night,” Frank Autry said, “he would’ve frozen to death by now.”

“Well, if it’s a meat locker,” Copperfield said, “then the air inside isn’t freezing. It’s just cold. If the man was warmly dressed he might easily have survived this long.”

“But how’d he get in there in the first place?” Frank asked. “What the devil’s he been
doing
in there?”

“And he wasn’t in there last night,” Tal said impatiently.

Jake Johnson called for help again.

“There’s danger here,” Bryce told Copperfield. “I sense it. My men sense it. Dr. Paige senses it.”

“I don’t,” Copperfield said.

“General, you just haven’t been in Snowfield long enough to understand that you’ve got to expect the utterly unexpected.”

“Like moths the size of eagles?”

Biting back his anger, Bryce said, “You haven’t been here long enough to understand that. . . well. . . nothing’s quite what it seems.”

Copperfield studied him skeptically. “Don’t get mystical on me, Sheriff.”

In the meat locker, Jake Johnson began to cry. His whimpering pleas were awful to hear. He sounded like a pain-racked, terrified old man. He didn’t sound the least bit dangerous.

“We’ve got to help that man
now,”
Copperfield. said.

“I’m not risking my men,” Bryce said. “Not yet.”

Copperfield again ordered Sergeant Harker and Private Pascalli to look in the meat locker. Although it was obvious from his demeanor that he didn’t think there was much danger for men armed with submachine guns, he told them to proceed with caution. The general still believed the enemy was something as small as a bacterium or a molecule of nerve gas.

The two soldiers hurried along the rows of coolers toward the gate that led into the butcher’s work area.

Frank said, “If Jake could open the door, why couldn’t he push it
completely
open and let us see him?”

“He probably used up the last of his strength just getting the door unlatched,” Copperfield said. “You can hear it in his voice, for God’s sake. Utter exhaustion.”

Harker and Pascalli went through the gate, behind the coolers.

Bryce’s hand tightened on the butt of his holstered revolver.

Tal Whitman said, “There’s too much wrong with this setup, damn it. If it’s really Jake, if he needs help, why did he wait until
now
to open the door?”

“The only way we’ll find out is to ask him,” the general said.

“No, I mean, there’s an outside entrance to that locker,” Tal said. “He could’ve opened the door earlier and shouted out into the alley. As quiet as this town is, we’d have heard him all the way over at the Hilltop.”

“Maybe he’s been unconscious until now,” Copperfield said.

Harker and Pascalli were moving past the worktables and the electric meat saw.

Jake Johnson called out again:
“Is someone. . . coming? Is someone. . . coming now?”

Jenny began to raise another objection, but Bryce said, “Save your breath.”

“Doctor,” Copperfield said, “can you actually expect us to just ignore the man’s cries for help?”