Phantoms

should have called to tell us what we can do.”
    “There’s the rub,” Bryce said.
    “What do you mean?” Jenny asked.
    Bryce sighed. “Well, I have a hunch that Flyte would have called if he could’ve told us how to protect ourselves. Yeah, I think maybe he knows exactly what sort of creature or force we’re dealing with, but I strongly suspect he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it. Regardless of how much he can tell us, I suspect he won’t be able to tell us the one thing we need to know the most— how to save our asses .”
     
    Jenny and Bryce were having coffee at the operations desk. They were talking about what they had discovered during today’s search, trying to make sense of senseless things: the mocking crucifixion of the priest; the bullets all over the kitchen floor of the Sheffield house; the bodies in the locked cars…
    Lisa was sitting nearby. She appeared to be totally involved in a crossword puzzle magazine, which she had picked up somewhere along the search route. Suddenly she looked up and said, “I know why the jewelry was piled in those two sinks.”
    Jenny and Bryce looked at her expectantly.
    “First,” the girl said, bending forward on her chair, “you’ve got to accept that all the people who’re missing are really dead. And they are. Dead. No question about that.”
    “But there is some question about that, honey,” he said.
    “They’re dead,” Lisa said softly. “I know it. So do you.” Her vivid green eyes were almost feverish. “It took them, and it ate them.”
    Jenny recalled Lisa’s response last night, at the substation, after Bryce had told them about hearing tortured screams on the phone, when it had been in control of the line. Lisa had said, Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it’s just saving them until it gets hungry again .
    Last night, everyone had stared at the girl, wanting to laugh, but realizing there could be a crazy sort of truth to what she said. Not necessarily a web or cocoons or a giant spider. But something. None of them had wanted to admit it, but the possibility was there. The unknown. The unknown thing . The unknown thing that ate people.
    And now Lisa returned to the same theme. “It ate them.”
    “But how does that explain the jewelry?” Bryce asked.
    “Well,” Lisa said, “after it ate the people, maybe it… maybe it just spit out all that jewelry… the same way you would spit out cherry pits.”
     
    Dr. Sara Yamaguchi walked into the Hilltop Inn, paused to answer a question from one of the guards at the front door, and came across the lobby toward Jenny and Bryce. She was still dressed in her decontamination suit, but she was no longer wearing the helmet, the tank of compressed air, or the waste recycling unit. She was carrying some folded clothes and a thick sheaf of pale green papers.
    Jenny and Bryce rose to meet her, and Jenny said, “Doctor, has the quarantine been lifted already?”
    “Already? Seems like I’ve been trapped inside this suit for years .” Dr. Yamaguchi’s voice was different from what it had sounded like through the squawk box. It was fragile and sweet. Her voice was even more diminutive than she was. “It feels good to breathe air again.”
    “You’ve run bacteria cultures, haven’t you?” Jenny asked.
    “Started to.”
    “Well, then… doesn’t it take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to get results?”
    “Yes. But we’ve decided it’s pointless to wait for the cultures. We’re not going to grow any bacteria on them—neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.”
    Neither benign bacteria nor otherwise . That peculiar statement intrigued Jenny, but before she could ask about it, the geneticist said:
    “Besides, Meddy told us it was safe.”
    “Meddy?”
    “That’s shorthand for Medanacomp,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Which is itself short for Medical Analysis and Computation Systems. Our computer. After Meddy assimilated all the data from the autopsies and tests, she gave us a probability figure for biological causation. Meddy says there’s a zero point zero chance that a biological agent is involved here.”
    “And you trust a computer’s analysis enough to breathe air,” Bryce said, clearly surprised.
    “In over eight hundred trial runs, Meddy’s never been wrong.”
    “But this isn’t just a trial run,” Jenny