Phantoms (33 page)

“Chemical or biological agents might be involved,” Copperfield said. “As you observed, we can’t rule out anything. But it’s not a simple case. You’re right about that, Sheriff. I’m sorry for suggesting you were only hallucinating and—”

“Apology accepted,” Bryce said.

“Any theories?” Jenny asked.

“Well,” Copperfield said, “I want to start the first autopsy and pathology tests right away. Maybe we won’t find a disease or a nerve gas, but we still might find something that’ll give us a clue.”

“You’d better do that, sir,” Tal said. “Because I have a hunch that time is running out.”

Corporal Billy Velazquez, one of General Copperfield’s support troops, climbed down through the manhole, into the storm drain. Although he hadn’t exerted himself, he was breathing hard. Because he was scared.

What had happened to Sergeant Harker?

The others had come back, looking stunned. Old man Copperfield said Harker was dead. He said they weren’t quite sure what had killed Sarge, but they intended to find out. Man, that was bullshit. They must know what killed him. They just didn’t want to say. That was typical of the brass, making secrets of everything.

The ladder descended through a short section of vertical pipe, then into the main horizontal drain. Billy reached the bottom. His booted feet made hard, flat sounds when they struck the concrete floor.

The tunnel wasn’t high enough to allow him to stand erect. He crouched slightly and swept his flashlight around.

Gray concrete walls. Telephone and power company pipes. A little moisture. Some fungus here and there. Nothing else.

Billy stepped away from the ladder as Ron Peake, another member of the support squad, came down into the drain.

Why hadn’t they at least brought Harker’s body back with them when they’d returned from Gilmartin’s Market?

Billy kept shining his flashlight around and glancing nervously behind him.

Why had old Iron Ass Copperfield kept stressing the need to be watchful and careful down here?

Sir, what’re we supposed to be on the lookout for?
Billy had asked.

Copperfield had said,
Anything. Everything. I don’t know if there’s any danger or not. And even if there is, I don’t know exactly what to tell you to look for. Just be damned cautious. And if anything moves down there, no matter how innocent it looks, even if it’s just a mouse, get your asses out of there fast.

Now what the hell kind of answer was that?

Jesus.

It gave him the creeps.

Billy wished he’d had a chance to talk to Pascalli or Fodor. They weren’t the damned brass. They would give him the whole story about Harker—if he ever got a chance to ask them about it.

Ron Peake reached the bottom of the ladder. He looked anxiously at Billy.

Velazquez directed the flashlight all the way around them in order to show the other man there was nothing to worry about.

Ron switched on his own flash and smiled self-consciously, embarrassed by his jumpiness.

The men above began to feed a power cable through the open manhole. It led back to the two mobile laboratories, which were parked a few yards from the entrance to the drain.

Ron took the end of the cable, and Billy, shuffling forward in a crouch, led the way east. On the street above, the other men paid out more cable into the drain.

This tunnel should intersect an equally large or perhaps larger conduit under the main street, Skyline Road. At that point there ought to be a power company junction box where several strands of the town’s electrical web were joined together. As Billy proceeded with all the caution that Copperfield, had suggested, he played the beam of his flashlight over the walls of the tunnel, looking for the power company’s insignia.

The junction box was on the left, five or six feet this side of the intersection of the two conduits. Billy walked past it, to the Skyline Road drain, leaned out into the passageway, and pointed his light to the right and to the left, making sure there was nothing lurking around. The Skyline Road pipe was the same size as the one in which he now stood, but it followed the slope of the street above it, plunging down the mountainside. There was nothing in sight.

Looking downhill, into the dwindling gray bore of the tunnel, Billy Velazquez was reminded of a story he’d read years ago in a horror comic. He’d forgotten the title of it. The tale was about a bank robber who killed two people during a holdup and then, fleeing police, slipped into the city’s storm drain system. The villain had taken a downward-sloping tunnel, figuring it would lead to the river, but where it had led, instead, was to Hell. That was what the Skyline Road drain looked like as it fell down, down, down: a road to Hell.

Billy turned to peer uphill again, wondering if it would look like a road to Heaven. But it looked the same both ways. Up or down, it looked like a road to Hell.

What had happened to Sergeant Harker?

Would the same thing happen to everyone, sooner or later?

Even to William Luis Velazquez, who had always been so sure (until now) that he would live forever?

His mouth was suddenly dry.

He turned his head inside his helmet and put his parched lips on the nipple of the nutrient tube. He sucked on it, drawing a sweet, cool, carbohydrate-packed, vitamin-and-mineral-rich fluid into his mouth. What he wanted was a beer. But until he could get out of this suit, the nutrient solution was the only thing available. He carried a forty-eight-hour supply—if he didn’t take more than two ounces an hour.

Turning away from the road to Hell, he went to the junction box. Ron Peake was at work already. Moving efficiently despite their bulky decon suits and the cramped quarters, they tapped into the power supply.

The unit had brought its own generator, but it would be used only if the more convenient municipal power were lost.

In a few minutes, Velazquez and Peake were finished. Billy used his suit-to-suit radio to call up to the surface. “General, we’ve made the tap. You should have power now, sir.”

The response came at once: “We do. Now get your asses out of there on the double!”

“Yes, sir,” Billy said.

Then he heard . . . something.

Rustling.

Panting.

And Ron Peake grabbed Billy’s shoulder. Pointed. Past him. Back toward the Skyline drain.

Billy whirled around, crouched down even farther, and shone his flashlight out into the intersection, where Peake’s flash was focused.

Animals were streaming down the Skyline Road tunnel. Dozens upon dozens. Dogs. White and gray and black and brown and rust-red and golden, dogs of all sizes and descriptions: mostly mutts but also beagles, toy poodles, full-size poodles, German shepherds, spaniels, two Great Danes, a couple of Airedales, a schnauzer, a pair of coal-black Dobermans with brown-trimmed muzzles. And there were cats, too. Big and small. Lean cats and fat cats. Black and calico and white and yellow and ring-tailed and brown and spotted and striped and gray cats. None of the dogs barked or growled. None of the cats meowed or hissed. The only sounds were their panting and the soft padding and scraping of their paws on the concrete. The animals poured down through the drain with a curious intensity, all of them looking straight ahead, none of them even glancing into the intersecting drain, where Billy and Peake stood.

“What’re they doing down here?” Billy wanted to know. “How’d they get here?”

From the street above, Copperfield radioed down: “What’s wrong, Velazquez?”

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. Raccoons. 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 Hell, 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, raccoons, 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, goddamnit!” 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 asses 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 Hell. 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 God’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. Encumbered 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 God-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. Modern Catholicism tended to downplay the sulphurous-pits-of-Hell stories in favor of emphasizing God’s great mercy and infinite compassion. 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 associate supernatural Satanic forces with the chilling cry of this unknown beast—not even though he so vividly remembered that old road-to-Hell 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 ass!”

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 snatched 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 God, 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.

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 passed 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.