Phantoms

he fell on his side, rolled onto his back, brought up the HK91.
    He was prepared to kill, but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. It was Jake Johnson, about twenty-five feet away, coming out of the trees and fog, grinning. Naked. Utterly bareassed.
    Other movement. To the left of Johnson. Farther along the treeline.
    Kale caught it from the corner of his eye and whipped his head around, swung the rifle in that direction.
    Another man came out of the woods, through the mist, with the tall grass fluttering around his bare legs. He was also naked. And grinning broadly.
    But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was that the second man was also Jake Johnson.
    Kale looked from one to the other, startled and baffled. They were as perfectly alike as a set of identical twins.
    But Jake was an only child—wasn’t he? Kale had never heard anything about a twin.
    A third figure advanced from the shadows beneath the spreading boughs of a huge spruce. This one, too, was Jake Johnson.
    Kale couldn’t breathe.
    Maybe there was an outside chance that Johnson had a twin, but he damned well wasn’t one of triplets.
    Something was horribly wrong. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the impossible triplets that frightened Kale. Suddenly, everything seemed menacing: the forest, the mist, the stony contours of the mountainside…
    The three look-alikes walked slowly up the slope on which Kale was sprawled, closing in from different angles. Their eyes were strange, and their mouths were cruel.
    Kale scrambled to his feet, heart lurching. “Stop right there!”
    But they didn’t stop, even though he brandished the assault rifle.
    “Who are you? What are you? What is this?” Kale demanded.
    They didn’t answer. Kept coming. Like zombies.
    He grabbed the bag that was filled with guns, and he backed rapidly and clumsily away from the nightmarish trio.
    No. Not a trio any more. A quartet. Downslope, a fourth Jake Johnson came out of the trees, stark naked like the rest.
    Kale’s fear trembled on the edge of panic.
    The four moved toward Kale with hardly a sound; dried leaves underfoot; nothing else. They made no complaint about the stones and sharp weeds and prickly burrs that must have hurt their feet. One of them began to lick his lips hungrily. The others immediately began to lick their lips, too.
    A quiver of icy dread went through Kale’s bowels, and he wondered if he had lost his mind. But that thought was short-lived. Unfamiliar with self-doubt, he didn’t know how to entertain it for long.
    He dropped the laundry bag, clutched the HK91 in both hands, and opened fire, describing an arc with the spurting muzzle of the gun. The bullets hit. He saw them tear into the four men, saw the wounds burst open. But there was no blood. And as soon as the wounds blossomed, they withered; they healed, vanished within seconds.
    The men kept coming.
    No. Not men. Something else.
    Hallucinations? Years ago, in high school, Kale had dropped a lot of acid. Now he remembered that flashbacks could plague you months—even years—after you stopped using LSD. He’d never had acid flashbacks before, but he’d heard about them. Was that what was happening here? Hallucinations?
    Perhaps.
    On the other hand… all four of the men were glistening, as if the morning mists were condensing on their bare skin, and that wasn’t the sort of detail you usually noticed in a hallucination. And this entire situation was very different from any drug experience he’d ever known.
    Still grinning, the nearest Doppelganger raised one arm, pointed at Kale. Incredibly, the flesh of that hand split and peeled away from the fingers, from the palm. The flesh actually appeared to ooze bloodlessly back into the arm, as if it were wax melting and running from a flame; the wrist became thicker with this tissue, and then the hand was nothing but bones, white bones. One skeletal finger pointed at Kale.
    Pointed with anger, scorn, and accusation.
    Kale’s mind reeled.
    The other three look-alikes had undergone even more macabre changes. One had lost the flesh from part of his face: A cheekbone shone through, a row of teeth; the right eye, deprived of a lid and of all surrounding tissue, gleamed wetly in the calcimined socket. The third man was missing a chunk of flesh from his torso; you could see his sharp ribs and slick wet organs pulsing darkly inside. The fourth walked on one normal leg and one leg that was only bones and tendons.
    As they closed on Kale, one of them