Phantoms (53 page)

As they closed on Kale, one of them spoke: “Baby killer.”

Kale screamed, dropped the HK91, and ran. Stopped short when he saw two more Johnson look-alikes approaching from behind, from the cabin. Nowhere to run. Except up toward the high limestone outcroppings above the cabin. He bolted that way, gasping and wheezing, reached the brush, whimpering, waded through it to the mouth of the cave, glanced behind, saw that the six were still coming after him, and he plunged into the cave, into darkness, wishing he’d held onto his flashlight, and he put one hand against the wall, shuffled along, feeling his way, trying to recall the layout, remembering it was more or less a long tunnel ending in a series of doglegs—and suddenly he realized this might not be a safe place; it might be a trap, instead; yes, he was sure of it; they
wanted
him to come here—and he looked back, saw two decomposing men at the entrance, heard himself wail, and hurried faster, faster, into the deep blackness because there was nowhere else to go, even if it was a trap, and he scraped his hand on a sharp projection of rock, stumbled, flailed, charged on, reached the doglegs, one after the other, and then the door, and he went through, slammed it behind him, but he knew it wouldn’t keep them out, and then he was aware of light, in the next chamber, toward which he now began to move in a dreamlike haze of terror, passing stacks of supplies and equipment.

The light came from a Coleman lantern.

Kale stepped into the third chamber.

In the frost-pale glow, he saw something that made him freeze. It had risen from the subterranean river, up through the cave floor, out of the hole in which Jake Johnson had rigged a water pump. It writhed. It churned, pulsated, rippled. Dark, blood-mottled flesh. Shapeless.

Wings began to form. Then melted away.

A sulphurous odor, not strong yet nauseating.

Eyes opened all over the seven-foot column of slime. They focused on Kale.

He shrank from them, backed into a wall, held on to the stone as if it were reality, a last place to grip on the precipice of madness.

Some of the eyes were human. Some were not. They fixed on him—then closed and disappeared.

Mouths opened where no mouths had been. Teeth. Fangs. Forked tongues lolled over black lips. From other mouths, wormlike tentacles erupted, wriggled in the air, withdrew. Like the wings and eyes, the mouths eventually vanished into the formless .

A man sat on the floor. He was a few feet from the pulsing thing that had come up from beneath the cave, and he was seated in the penumbra of the lantern’s glow, his face in shadow.

Aware that Kale had noticed him, the man leaned forward slightly, putting his face in the light. He was six feet four or taller, with long curly hair and a beard. He wore a rolled bandanna around his head. One gold earring dangled. He smiled the most peculiar smile Kale had ever seen, and he raised one hand in greeting, and on the palm of the hand was a red and yellow tattoo of an eyeball.

It was Gene Terr.

The army helicopter arrived three and a half hours after Sara spoke to Daniel Tersch in Dugway, two hours earlier than promised. Evidently, it had been dispatched from a base in California, and evidently her colleagues in the CBW program had figured out her war plan. They had realized she didn’t actually need most of the equipment she had asked for, and they had collected only what she required for the attack on the shape-changer. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been so quick.

Please, God, let it be true, Sara thought. They must have brought the right stuff. They
must
have.

It was a large, camouflage-painted chopper with two full sets of whirling blades. Hovering sixty to seventy feet above Skyline Road, it stirred the morning air, created a turbulent downdraft, and sliced up what little mist remained. It sent waves of hard sound crashing through the town.

A door slid open on the side of the helicopter, and a man leaned out of the cargo hold, looked down. He made no attempt to call to them, for the chattering rotors and roaring engines would have scattered his words. Instead, he used a series of incomprehensible hand signals.

Finally Sara realized that the crew was waiting for some indication that this was the drop spot. With hand signals of her own, she urged everyone to form a circle with her, in the middle of the street. They didn’t join hands, but stood with a couple of yards between each of them. The circle had a diameter of twelve to fifteen feet.

A canvas-wrapped bundle, somewhat larger than a man, was pushed out of the chopper. It was attached to a cable, which was reeled out by an electric winch. Initially, the bundle descended slowly, then slower still, at last settling to the pavement in the center of the circle, so gently that it seemed the chopper crewmen thought they were delivering raw eggs.

Bryce broke out of the formation before the package touched down and was the first to reach it. He located the snaplink and released the cable by the time Sara and the others joined him.

As the chopper reeled in the line, it swung toward the valley below, moved off, out of the danger zone, gaining altitude as it went.

Sara crouched beside the bundle and started loosening the nylon rope that was threaded through the eyelets in the canvas. She worked feverishly and, in a few seconds, unpacked the contents.

There were two blue cannisters bearing white stenciled words and numbers. She sighed with relief when she saw them. Her message had been properly interpreted. There were also three aerosol tank sprayers similar in size and appearance to those used to spread weed killer and insecticide on a lawn, except that these were not powered by a hand pump but by cylinders of compressed air. Each tank was equipped with a harness that made it easy to carry on the back. A flexible rubber hose, ending in a four-foot metal extension with a high-pressure nozzle, made it possible to stand twelve to fourteen feet from the target that you wished to spray.

Sara lifted one of the pressurized tanks. It was heavy, already filled with the same fluid that was in the two spare, blue cannisters.

The helicopter dwindled into the Western sky, and Lisa said, “Sara, this isn’t everything you asked for—is it?”

“This is everything we need,” Sara said evasively.

She looked around nervously, expecting to see the shape-changer rushing toward them. But there was no sign of it.

She said, “Bryce, Tal, if you’d take two of these tanks . . .”

The sheriff and his deputy grabbed two of the units, slipped their arms through the harness loops, buckled the chest straps, shrugged their shoulders to settle the tanks as comfortably as possible.

Without having been told, both men clearly realized the tanks contained a weapon that might destroy the shape-changer. Sara knew they must be eaten by curiosity, and she was impressed that they asked no questions.

She had intended to handle the third sprayer herself, but it was considerably heavier than she’d expected. Straining, she would be able to carry it, but she wouldn’t be able to maneuver quickly. And during the next hour or so, survival would depend on speed and agility.

Someone else would have to use the third unit. Not Lisa; she was no bigger than Sara. Not Flyte; he had some arthritis in his hands, of which he’d complained last night, and he seemed frail. That left Jenny. She was only three or four inches taller than Sara, only fifteen or twenty pounds heavier, but she appeared to be in excellent physical condition. She almost certainly would be able to handle the sprayer.

Flyte protested but then relented after trying to heft the tank. “I must be older than I think,” he said wearily.

Jenny agreed that she was the one best suited, and Sara helped her get into the harness, and they were ready for the battle.

Still no sign of the shape-changer.

Sara wiped sweat from her brow. “All right. The instant it shows itself, spray it. Don’t waste a second. Spray it, saturate it, keep backing away if possible, try to draw more of it out of hiding, and spray, spray, spray.”

“Is this some sort of acid—or what?” Bryce asked.

“Not acid,” Sara said. “Although the effect will be something very like acid—if it works at all.”

“So if it’s not an acid,” Tal said, “what is it?”

“A unique, highly specialized microorganism,” Sara said.

“Germs?” Jenny asked, eyes widening in surprise.

“Yes. They’re suspended in a liquid growth culture.”

“We’re gonna make the shape-changer
sick?”
Lisa asked, frowning.

“I sure to God hope so,” Sara said.

Nothing moved. Nothing. But something was out there, and it was probably listening. With the ears of the cat. With the ears of the fox. With highly sensitive ears of its own special design.

“Very, very sick, if we’re lucky,” Sara said. “Because disease would seem to be the only way to kill it.”

Now their lives were at risk because
it
knew they had tricked it.

Flyte shook his head. “But the ancient enemy’s so utterly alien, so different from man and animals . . . diseases dangerous to other species would have no effect whatsoever on it.”

“Right,” Sara said. “But this microbe isn’t an ordinary disease. In fact, it isn’t a disease-causing organism at all.”

Snowfield shelved down the mountain, still as a postcard painting.

Looking around uneasily, alert for movement in and around the buildings, Sara told them about Ananda Chakrabarty and his discovery.

In 1972, on behalf of Dr. Chakrabarty, his employer—the General Electric Corporation—applied for the first-ever patent on a man-made bacterium. Using sophisticated cell fusion techniques, Chakrabarty had created a microorganism that could feed upon, digest, and thereby transform the hydrocarbon compounds of crude oil.

Chakrabarty’s bug had at least one obvious commercial application: It could be used to clean up oil spills at sea. The bacteria literally
ate
an oil slick, rendering it harmless to the environment.

After a series of vigorous legal challenges from many sources, General Electric won the right to patent Chakrabarty’s discovery. In June, 1980, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, ruling that Chakrabarty’s discovery was “not nature’s handiwork, but his own; accordingly, it’s patentable subject matter.”

“Of course,” Jenny said, “I know the case. It was a big story once—man competing with God and all that.”

Sara said, “Orginally, GE didn’t intend to market the bug. It was a fragile organism that couldn’t survive outside of strictly controlled lab conditions. They applied for a patent to test the legal question, to settle the matter before other experiments in genetic engineering produced more usable and more valuable discoveries. But after the court’s decision, other scientists spent a few years working with the organism, and now they have a hardier strain that’ll stand up outside the lab for twelve to eighteen hours. In fact it’s been on the market under the trade name Biosan-4, and it’s been used successfully to clean up oil slicks all over the world.”

“And that’s what’s in these tanks?” Bryce asked.

“Yes. Biosan-4. In a sprayable solution.”

The town was funereal. The sun beat down from an azure sky, but the air remained chilly. In spite of the uncanny silence, Sara had the unshakable feeling that
it
was coming, that it had heard and was coming and was very, very near, indeed.

The others felt it, too. They looked around uneasily.

Sara said, “Do you remember what we discovered when we studied the shape-changer’s tissue?”

“You mean the high hydrocarbon values,” Jenny said.

“Yes. But not just hydrocarbons. All forms of carbon. Very high values all across the board.”

Tal said, “You told us something about it being like petrolatum.”

“Not the same. But reminiscent of petrolatum in some respects,” Sara said. “What we have here is living tissue, very alien but complex and alive. And with such extraordinarily high carbon content . . . Well, what I mean is this thing’s tissue seems like an organic, metabolically active cousin of petrolatum. So I’m hoping Chakrabarty’s bug will . . .”

Something is coming
.

Jenny said, “You’re hoping it’ll eat into the shape-changer the same way it would eat into an oil slick.”

“Yes,” Sara said nervously. “I’m hoping it’ll attack the carbon and break down the tissue. Or at least interfere with the delicate chemical balance enough to—”

“. . . uh, enough to destabilize the entire organism,” Sara finished, weighed down by a sense of impending doom.

Flyte said, “Is that the best chance we have? Is it really?”

“I think it is.”

Where is it? Where’s it coming from?
Sara wondered, looking at the deserted buildings, the empty street, the motionless trees.

“Sounds awfully thin to me,” Flyte said doubtfully.

“It is awfully thin,” Sara said. “It’s not much of a chance, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

A noise. A chittering, hissing, hair-raising sound.

They froze. Waited.

But, again, the town pulled a cloak of silence around itself.

The morning sun cast its fiery reflection in some windows and glinted off the curved glass of the streetlamps. The black slate roofs looked as if they had been polished during the night; the last of the mist had condensed on those smooth surfaces, leaving a moist sheen.

Nothing moved. Nothing happened. The noise did not resume.

Bryce Hammond’s face clouded with worry. “This Biosan . . . I gather it isn’t harmful to us.”

“Utterly harmless,” Sara assured him.

The noise again. A short burst. Then silence.

“Something’s coming,” Lisa said softly.