Phantoms Read online

  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 emptoyer—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.”

  Something ... something ...

  “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—”

  Coming, coming...

  “... 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.

  God help us, Sara thought.

  “Something’s coming,” Lisa said softly, and Bryce felt it, too. A sense of onrushing horror. A thickening and cooling of the air. A new predatory quality to the stillness. Reality? Imagination? He could not be certain. He only knew that he felt it.

  The noise burst forth again, a sustained squeal, not just a short blast. Bryce winced. It was piercingly shrill. Buzzing. Whining. Like a power drill. But he knew it wasn’t anything as harmless and ordinary as that.

  Insects. The coldness of the sound, the metallic quality made him think of insects. Bees. Yes. It was the greatly amplified buzzing-screeching of hornets.

  He said, “The three of you who aren’t armed with sprayers, get in the middle here.”

  “Yeah,” Tal said. “We’ll circle around, give you a little protection.”

  Very damned little if this Biosan doesn’t work, Bryce thought.

  The strange noise grew louder.

  Sara, Lisa, and Dr. Flyte stood together, while Bryce and Jenny and Tal ringed them, facing outward.

  Then, down the street, near the bakery, something monstrous appeared in the sky, skimming over the tops of the buildings, hovering for a few seconds above Skyline Road. A wasp. A phantom the size of a German shepherd. Nothing remotely like this insect had ever existed during the tens of millions of years that the shape-changer had been alive. This was surely something that had sprung from its vicious imagination, a horrible invention. Six-foot, opalescent wings beat furiously upon the air, glimmered with rainbow color. The multifaceted black eyes were slant-set in the narrow, pointed, wicked
head. There were four twitching legs with pincered feet. The curled, segmented, mold-white body terminated in a foot-long stinger with a needle-sharp point.

  Bryce felt as if his intestines were turning to ice water.

  The wasp stopped hovering. It struck.

  Jenny screamed as the wasp streaked toward them, but she didn’t run. She aimed the nozzle of the sprayer and squeezed the pressure-release lever. A cone-shaped, milky mist erupted for a distance of about six feet.

  The wasp was twenty feet away and closing fast.

  Jenny squeezed the lever all the way down. The mist became a stream, arcing fifteen or sixteen feet out from the nozzle.

  Bryce loosed a stream from his sprayer. The two trails of Biosan played across each other, steadied, took the same aim, flowed together in midair.

  The wasp came within range. The high-pressure streams struck it, dulled the rainbow color of the wings, soaked the segmented body.

  The insect stopped abruptly, hesitated, dipped lower, as if unable to maintain altitude. Hovered. Its attack had been arrested, although it still regarded them with hate-filled eyes.

  Jenny felt a surge of relief and hope.

  “It works!” Lisa cried.

  Then the wasp came at them again.

  Just when Tal thought they were safe, the wasp came at them again, through the mist of Biosan-4, flying slow but still flying.

  “Down!” Bryce shouted.

  They crouched, and the wasp swept over them, dripping milky fluid from its grotesque legs and from the tip of its stinger.

  Tal stood again, so that he could give the thing a long squirt now that it was within range.

  It swung toward him, but before he could give it a shot, the wasp faltered, fluttered wildly, then plummeted to the pavement. It flopped and buzzed angrily. It tried to rise up. Couldn’t. Then it changed.

  It changed.

  With the others, Timothy Flyte edged closer to the wasp and watched as it melted into a shapeless mass of protoplasm. The hind legs of a dog began to form. And the snout. It was going to be a Doberman, judging by that snout. One eye began to open. But the shape-changer couldn’t complete the transformation; the dog’s features vanished. The amorphous tissue shuddered and pulsed in a manner unlike anything that Timothy had seen it do before.

  “It’s dying,” Lisa said.

  Timothy stared in awe as the strange flesh convulsed. This heretofore immortal being now knew the meaning and the fear of death.

  The unformed mass broke out in pustulelike sores, leaking a thin yellow fluid. The thing spasmed violendy. Additional sores opened in hideous profusion, lesions of all shapes and sizes that split and cracked and popped across the pulsating surface. Then, just as the tiny wad of tissue in the petri dish had done, this phantom degenerated into a lifeless pool of stinking, watery mush.

  “By God, you’ve done it!” Timothy said, turning toward Sara.

  Tentacles. Three of them. Behind her.

  They rose out of a drain grating in the gutter, fifteen feet away. Each was as big around as Timothy’s wrist. Already, the questing tips of them had slithered across the pavement, within a yard of Sara.

  Timothy shouted a warning, but he was too late.

  Flyte shouted, and Jenny whirled. It was among them.

  Three tentacles whipped up from the pavement with shocking speed, surged forward with sinuous malevolence, and dropped onto Sara. In an instant, one lashed around the geneticist’s legs, one around her waist, and the third around her slender neck.

  Christ, it’s too fast, too fast for us! Jenny thought.

  She pointed the nozzle of her sprayer even as she turned, cursing, squeezing the lever, spewing Biosan-4 over Sara and the tentacles.

  Bryce and Tal stepped in, using their sprayers, but they were all too slow, too late.

  Sara’s eyes widened; her mouth opened in a silent scream. She was lifted into the air and—

  No! Jenny prayed.

  —flung back and forth as if she were a doll—

  No!

  —and then her head fell from her shoulders and struck the street with a hard, sickening crack.

  Gagging, Jenny stumbled back.

  The tentacles rose twelve feet into the air. They writhed and twisted and foamed, broke open in sores as the bacteria destroyed the binding structure of the amorphous tissue. As Sara had hoped, Biosan affected the shape-changer almost the way sulphuric acid affected human tissue.

  Tal darted past Jenny, heading straight toward the three tentacles, and she screamed at him to stop.

  What in God’s name was he doing?

  Tal ran through the weaving shadows cast by the moving tentacles and prayed that none of them would fall on him. When he reached the drain from which the things were extruded, he could see that the three appendages were separating from the main body of dark, throbbing protoplasm in the drain-pipe below. The shape-changer was shedding the infected tissue before the bacteria could reach into the main body mass. Tal poked the nozzle of the sprayer through the grate and released Biosan-4 into the drain below.

  The tentacles tore loose from the rest of the creature. They flopped and wriggled in the street. Down in the drain, oozing slime retreated from the spray, shedding another piece of itself, which began to foam and spasm and die.

  Even the Devil could be wounded. Even Satan was vulnerable.

  Exhilarated, Tal shot more of the fluid into the drain.

  The amorphous tissue withdrew, out of sight, creeping deeper into the subterranean passageways, no doubt shedding more pieces of itself.

  Tal turned away from the drain and saw the severed tentacles had lost their definition; they were now just long, tangled ropes of suppurating tissue. They lashed themselves and one another in apparent agony and rapidly degenerated into stinking, lifeless slop.

  He looked at another gutter drain, at the silent buildings, at the sky, wondering from where the next attack would come.

  Suddenly the pavement rumbled and heaved under his feet. In front of him, Flyte was thrown to the ground; his glasses shattered. Tal staggered sideways, nearly trampling Flyte.

  The street leaped and shuddered again, harder than before, as if earthquake shockwaves had passed beneath it. But this was not a quake. It was coming—not just a fragment, not just another phantom, but the largest part of it, perhaps the entire great bulk, surging toward the surface with unimaginable destructive power, rising like a god betrayed, bringing its unholy wrath and vengeance to the men and women who had dared to strike at it, forming itself into an enormous mass of muscle fiber and pushing, pushing, until the macadam bulged and cracked.

  Tal was thrown to the ground. His chin snapped hard against the street; he was dazed. He tried to get up, so that he could use the sprayer when the creature appeared. He got as far as his hands and knees. The street was still rocking too much. He lay down again to wait it out.

  We’re going to die, he thought.

  Bryce was flat on his face, hugging the pavement.

  Lisa was beside him. She might have been crying or screaming. He couldn’t hear her; there was too much noise.

  Along this entire block of Skyline Road, an atonal symphony of destruction reached an ear-shattering crescendo: squealing, grinding, cracking, splitting sounds; the world itself coming asunder. The air was filled with dust that spurted up from widening fissures in the pavement.

  The roadbed tilted with tremendous force. Chunks of it spewed into the air. Most were the size of gravel, but some were as large as a fist. A few were even larger than that, fifty-and hundred- and two-hundred-pound blocks of concrete, leaping five or ten feet into the air as the protean creature below rammed relentlessly toward the surface.

  Bryce pulled Lisa against him and tried to shield her. He could feel the violent tremors passing through her.

  The earth under them lifted. Fell with a crash. Lifted and fell again. Gravel-size debris rained down, clanked off the tank sprayer strapped to Bryce’s back, thumped off his legs, snapped agai
nst his head, making him wince.

  Where was Jenny?

  He looked around in sudden desperation.

  The street had hoved up; a ridge had formed down the middle of Skyline. Apparently, Jenny was on the other side of the hump, clinging to the street over there.

  She’s alive, he thought. She’s alive. Damn it, she has to be!

  A huge slab of concrete erupted from the roadbed to their left and was flung eight or ten feet into the air. He was sure it was going to crash down on them, and he hugged Lisa as tight as he could, although nothing he could do would save them if the slab struck. But it hit Timothy Flyte instead. It slammed across the scientist’s legs, breaking them, pinning Flyte, who howled in pain, howled so loudly that Bryce could hear him above the roar of the disintegrating pavement.

  Still, the shaking continued. The street heaved up farther. Ragged teeth of macadam-coated concrete bit at the morning air.

  In seconds, it would break through and be upon them before they had a chance to stand and fight back.

  A baseball-size missile of concrete, spat into the air by the shape-changer’s volcanic emergence from the storm drain, now slammed back to the pavement, impacting two or three inches from Jenny’s head. A splinter of concrete pierced her cheek, drew a trickle of blood.

  Then the ridge-forming pressure from below was suddenly withdrawn. The street ceased shaking. Ceased rising.

  The sounds of destruction faded. Jenny could hear her own raspy, harried breathing.

  A few feet away, Tal Whitman started getting to his feet.

  On the far side of the hoved-up pavement, someone wailed in agony. Jenny couldn’t see who it was.

  She tried to stand, but the street shuddered once more, and she was pitched flat on her face again.

  Tal went down again, too, cursing loudly.