Phantoms

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 wall, 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 flesh.
    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.
     

Chapter 40
    Biological Warfare
     
    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 stiffed 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