Phantoms

eight slugs with it? ”
    Copperfield stared at him, frowning.
    All the scientists were frowning, too.
    The soldiers weren’t only frowning, they were looking around uneasily.
    Frank could see that the condition of the two bodies—especially the woman’s nightmarish expression—had had an effect on the general and his people. The fear in everyone’s eyes was sharper now. Although they didn’t want to admit it, they had encountered something beyond their experience. They were still clinging to explanations that made sense to them—nerve gas, virus, poison—but they were beginning to have doubts.
     
    Copperfield’s people had brought a zippered plastic body bag with them. In the kitchen, they slipped the pajama-clad corpse into the bag, then carried it out of the building and left it on the sidewalk, intending to pick it up again on the way back to the mobile labs.
    Bryce led them to Gilmartin’s Market. Inside, back by the milk coolers where it had happened, he told them about Jake Johnson’s disappearance. “No screams. No sound at all. Just a few seconds of darkness. A few seconds . But when the lights came on again, Jake was gone.”
    Copperfield said, “You looked—”
    “Everywhere.”
    “He could have run away,” Roberts said.
    “Yes,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Maybe he deserted. Considering the things he’d seen…”
    “My God,” Goldstein said, “what if he left Snowfield? He might be beyond the quarantine line, carrying the infection—”
    “No, no, no. Jake wouldn’t desert,” Bryce said. “He wasn’t exactly the most aggressive officer on the force, but he wouldn’t run out on me. He wasn’t irresponsible.”
    “Definitely not,” Tal agreed. “Besides, Jake’s old man was once county sheriff, so there’s a lot of family pride involved.”
    “And Jake was a cautious man,” Frank said. “He didn’t do anything on impulse.”
    Bryce nodded. “Anyway, even if he was spooked enough to run, he’d have taken a squad car. He sure wouldn’t have walked out of town.”
    “Look,” Copperfield said, “he’d have known they wouldn’t let him past the roadblock, so he’d have avoided the highway altogether. He might have gone off through the woods.”
    Jenny shook her head. “No, General. The land is wild out there. Deputy Johnson would’ve known he’d get lost and die.”
    “And,” Bryce said, “would a frightened man plunge pell-mell into a strange forest at night? I don’t think so, General. But I do think it’s time you heard about what happened to my other deputy.”
    Leaning against a cooler full of cheese and lunchmeat, Bryce told them about the moth, about the attack on Wargle and the bloodcurdling condition of the corpse. He told them about Lisa’s encounter with a resurrected Wargle and about the subsequent discovery that the body was missing.
    Copperfield and his people expressed astonishment at first, then confusion, then fear. But during most of Bryce’s tale, they stared at him in wary silence and glanced at one another knowingly.
    He finished by telling them about the child’s voice that had come from the kitchen drain just moments before their arrival. Then, for the third time, he said, “Well, General, do you still think it looks like a simple incident of CBW?”
    Copperfield hesitated, looked around at the littered market, finally met Bryce’s eyes, and said, “Sheriff, I want Dr. Roberts and Dr. Goldstein to give complete physical examinations to you and to everyone who saw this… uh… moth.”
    “You don’t believe me.”
    “Oh, I believe that you genuinely, sincerely think you saw all of those things.”
    “Damn,” Tal said.
    Copperfield said, “Surely, you can understand that, to us, it sounds as if you’ve all been contaminated, as if you’re suffering from hallucinations.”
    Bryce was weary of their disbelief and frustrated by their intellectual rigidity. As scientists, they were supposed to be receptive to new ideas and unexpected possibilities. Instead, they appeared determined to force the evidence to conform to their preconceived notions of what they would find in Snowfield.
    “You think we all could’ve had the same hallucination?” Bryce asked.
    “Mass hallucinations aren’t unknown,” Copperfield said.
    “General,” Jenny said, “there was absolutely nothing hallucinatory about what we saw. It had the gritty texture of reality.”
    “Doctor Paige, I would ordinarily accord considerable weight to any