Phantoms

the hound spoke in a voice like gravel rolling on a tin chute: “I thought you were my Matthew, but you were my Judas.”
    The mammoth jaws opened.
    Timothy screamed.
    Even as the thing succumbed to the degenerative effects of the bacteria, it snapped its teeth together and savagely bit his face.
     
    As he stood at the edge of the pit, looking down, Tal Whitman’s attention was torn between the gruesome spectacle of Flyte’s murder and Bryce’s suicidal mission with the cannisters.
    Flyte. Although the phantom dog was dissolving as the bacteria had its acidlike effect, it was not dying fast enough. It bit Flyte in the face, then in the neck.
    Bryce. Twenty feet from the Hellhound, Bryce had reached the hole out of which the protoplasm had erupted a couple of minutes ago. He started unscrewing the lid of one of the cannisters.
    Flyte. The hound tore viciously at Flyte’s head. The hindquarters of the beast had lost their shape and were turning as they decomposed, but the phantom struggled hard to retain its shape, so that it could slash and chew at Flyte as long as possible.
    Bryce. He got the lid off the first cannister. Tal heard it ring off a piece of concrete as Bryce tossed it aside. Tal was sure something was going to leap out of the hole, up from the caverns below, and seize Bryce in a deadly embrace.
    Flyte. He had stopped screaming.
    Bryce. He tipped the canister and poured the bacterial solution into the subterranean warren under the floor of the pit.
    Flyte was dead.
    The only thing that remained of the hound was its large head. Although it was disembodied, although it was blistering and suppurating, it continued to snap at the dead archaeologist.
     
    Below, Timothy Flyte lay in bloody ruins.
    He had seemed like a nice old man.
    Shuddering with revulsion, Lisa, who was alone on her side of the pit, backed away from the edge. She reached the gutter, sidled along it, finally stopped, stood there, shaking—
    —until she realized she was standing on a drain grate. She remembered the tentacles that had slithered out of the drain, snaring and killing Sara Yamaguchi. She quickly hopped up onto the sidewalk.
    She glanced at the buildings behind her. She was near one of the covered serviceways between two stores. She stared at the closed gate with apprehension.
    Was something lurking in this passageway? Watching her?
    Lisa started to step into the street again, saw the drain grate, and stayed on the sidewalk.
    She took a tentative step to the left, hesitated, moved to the right, hesitated again. Doorways and serviceway gates lay in both directions. There was no sense in moving. No other place was any safer.
     
    Just as he began to pour the Biosan-4 out of the blue canister, into the hole in the floor of the pit, Bryce thought he saw movement in the gloom below. He expected a phantom to launch itself up and drag him down into its subterranean lair. But he emptied the entire contents of the cylinder into the hole, and nothing came after him.
    Lugging the second canister, pouring sweat, he made his way through the angled slabs and spires of concrete and broken pipe. He stepped gingerly around a torn and sputtering electric power line, leaped across a small puddle that had tunnel beside a leaking water main. He passed Flyte’s mangled body and the stinking remains of the decomposed phantom that had killed him.
    When Bryce reached the next hole in the pit floor, he crouched, unscrewed the lid from the second canister, and dumped the contents into the chamber below. Empty. He discarded it, turned away from the hole, and ran. He was anxious to get out of the pit before a phantom came after him the way one had gone after Flyte.
    He was a third of the way up the sloped wall of the pit, finding the climb considerably more difficult than he had anticipated, when he heard something terrible behind him.
     
    Jenny was watching Bryce claw his way up toward the street. She held her breath, afraid that he wasn’t going to make it.
    Suddenly her eyes were drawn to the first hole into which he had dumped Biosan. The shape-changer surged up from underground, gushed out onto the floor of the pit. It looked like a tide of thick, congealed sewage; except for where it was stained by the bacterial solution, it was now darker than it had been before. It rippled, writhed, and churned more agitatedly than ever, which was perhaps a sign of degeneration. The milky stain of infection was spreading visibly through the creature: