Phantoms

broke out in pustulelike sores, leaking a thin yellow fluid. The thing spasmed violently. 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 drainpipe 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 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,