Phantoms

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.
    Don’t look, don’t look!
    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.
    He was halfway up the ladder.
    Going to make it, going to make it, definitely going to make it, he told himself breathlessly.
    But the shrieking and howling, Jesus, like being in the center of a cyclone!
    Another rung.
    And another one.
    The decontamination suit felt heavier than it had ever felt before. A ton. A suit of armor. Weighing him down.
    He was in the vertical pipe now, moving out of the horizontal drain that ran beneath the street. He looked up longingly at the light and the faces peering down at him, and he kept moving.
    Going to make it.
    His head rose through the manhole.
    Someone reached out, offering a hand. It was Copperfield himself.
    Behind Billy, the shrieking stopped.
    He climbed another rung, let go of the ladder with one hand, and reached for the general—
    —but something seized his legs from below before he could grasp Copperfield’s hand.
    “ No!”
    Something grabbed him, wrenched his feet off the ladder, and yanked him away. Screaming—strangely, he heard himself screaming for his mother—Billy went down, cracking his helmet against the wall of the pipe and then against a rung of the ladder, smashing his elbows and knees, trying desperately to catch hold of a rung but failing, finally collapsing into the powerful embrace of an unspeakable something that began to drag him backwards toward the Skyline conduit.
    He twisted, kicked, struck out with his fists, to no effect. He was held tightly and dragged deeper into the drains.
    In the backsplash of light coming through the manhole, then in the rapidly dimming beam of Peake’s discarded flashlight, Billy saw a bit of the thing that had him in its grasp. Not much. Fragments looming out of the shadows, then vanishing into darkness again. He saw just enough to make his bowels and bladder loosen. It was lizardlike. But not a lizard. Insectlike. But not an insect. It hissed and mewled and snarled. It snapped and tore at his suit as it pulled him along. It had cavernous jaws and teeth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—the teeth! A double row of razor-edge spikes. It had claws, and it was huge, and its eyes were smoky red with elongated pupils as black as the bottom of a grave. It had scales instead of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout rather than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all those deadly fangs, and something that looked like the stinger on a wasp or maybe a pincer.
    It dragged Billy Velazquez into the Skyline conduit. He clawed at the concrete, desperately seeking something to hold on to, but he only succeeded in abrading away the fingers and palms of his gloves. He felt the cool underground air on his hands, and he realized he might now be contaminated, but that wasn’t the least of his worries.
    It dragged him into the hammering heart of darkness. It stopped, held him tightly. It tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexiglass faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard shell.
    His hold on sanity was tenuous at best, but he struggled to keep his wits about him, tried to understand. At first, it seemed to him that this