Phantoms

to turn away from the hanging man—and then realized it wasn’t really Harker. It was only the sergeant’s decontamination suit and helmet, hanging slack, empty. The tough vinyl fabric was slashed. The plexiglass faceplate was broken and torn half out of the rubber gasket into which it had been firmly set. Harker had been pulled from the suit before it had been impaled.
    But where was Harker?
    Gone.
    Another one. Just gone.
    Pascalli and Fodor were out on the loading platform, looking up and down the alleyway.
    “All that screaming,” Jenny said, stepping up beside Bryce, “yet there’s no blood on the floor or on the suit.”
    Tal Whitman scooped up several expended shell casings that had been spat out by the submachine gun; scores of them littered the floor. The brass casings gleamed in his open palm. “Lots of these, but I don’t see many slugs. Looks like the sergeant hit what he was shooting at. Must’ve scored at least a hundred hits. Maybe two hundred. How many rounds are in one of those big magazines, General?”
    Copperfield stared at the shiny casings but didn’t answer.
    Pascalli and Fodor came back in from the loading platform, and Pascalli said, “There’s no sign of him out there, sir. You want us to search farther along the alley?”
    Before Copperfield could respond, Bryce said, “General, you’ve got to write off Sergeant Harker, painful as that might be. He’s dead. Don’t hold out any hope for him. Death is what this is all about. Death . Not hostage-taking. Not terrorism. Not nerve gas. There’s nothing halfway about this. We’re playing for all the marbles. I don’t know exactly what the hell’s out there or where it came from, but I do know that it’s Death personified. Death is out there in some form we can’t even imagine yet, driven by some purpose we might never understand. The moth that killed Stu Wargle—that wasn’t even the true appearance of this thing. I feel it. The moth was like the reanimation of Wargle’s body, when he went after Lisa in the restroom: It was a bit of misdirection… sleight-of-hand.”
    “A phantom,” Tal said, using the word that Copperfield had introduced with somewhat different meaning.
    “A phantom, yes,” Bryce said. “we haven’t yet encountered the real enemy. It’s something that just plain likes to kill. It can kill quickly and silently, the way it took Jake Johnson. But it killed Harker more slowly, hurting him real bad, making him scream. Because it wanted us to hear those screams. Harker’s murder was sort of like what you said about T-139: It was a demoralizer. This thing didn’t carry Sergeant Harker away. It got him, General. It got him. Don’t risk the lives of more men searching for a corpse.”
    Copperfield was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But the voice we heard. It was your man, Jake Johnson.”
    “No,” Bryce said. “I don’t think it really was Jake. It sounded like him, but now I’m beginning to suspect we’re up against something that’s a terrific mimic.”
    “Mimic?” Copperfield said.
    Jenny looked at Bryce. “Those animal sounds on the telephone.”
    “Yeah. The cats, dogs, birds, rattlesnakes, the crying child… It was almost like a performance. As if it were bragging: ‘Hey, look what I can do; look how clever I am.’ Jake Johnson’s voice was just one more impersonation in its repertoire.”
    “What are you proposing?” Copperfield asked. “Something supernatural?”
    “No. This is real.”
    “Then what? Put a name to it,” Copperfield demanded.
    “I can’t , damn it,” Bryce said. “Maybe it’s a natural mutation or even something that came out of a genetic engineering lab somewhere. You know anything about that, General? Maybe the army’s got an entire goddamned division of geneticists creating biological fighting machines, man-made monsters designed to slaughter and terrorize, creatures stitched together from the DNA of half a dozen animals. Take some of the genetic structure of the tarantula and combine it with some of the genetic structure of the crocodile, the cobra, the wasp, maybe even the grizzly bear, and then insert the genes for human intelligence just for the hell of it. Put it all in a test tube; incubate it; nurture it. What would you get? What would it look like? Do I sound like a raving lunatic for even proposing such a thing? Frankenstein with a modern twist? Have they actually gone that far with recombinant DNA research? Maybe I shouldn’t even