Phantoms (30 page)

“Good. Keep close to the others. And I mean
close.
Not just in the same room. Stay in the same
part
of the room. Promise?”

“Promise.”

Jenny thought about the two telephone calls from Wargle this morning. She thought of the gross threats he’d made. Although they had been the threats of a dead man and should have been meaningless, Jenny was frightened.

“You be careful, too,” Lisa said.

Jenny kissed the girl on the cheek. “Now hurry and catch up with Gordy before he turns the corner.”

Lisa ran, calling ahead: “Gordy! Wait up!”

The tall young deputy stopped at the corner and looked back.

Watching Lisa sprint along the cobblestone sidewalk, Jenny felt her heart tightening.

She thought: What if, when I come back, she’s gone? What if I never see her alive again?

Liebermann’s Bakery.

Bryce, Tal, Frank, and Jenny entered the kitchen. General Copperfield and the nine scientists on his team followed closely, and four soldiers, toting submachine guns, brought up the rear.

The kitchen was crowded. Bryce felt uncomfortable. What if they were attacked while they were all jammed together? What if they had to get out in a hurry?

The two heads were exactly where they had been last night: in the ovens, peering through the glass. On the worktable the severed hands still clutched the rolling pin.

Niven, one of the general’s people, took several photographs of the kitchen from various angles, then about a dozen closeups of the heads and hands.

The others kept edging around the room to get out of Niven’s way. The photographic record had to be completed before the forensic work could begin, which was not unlike the routine policemen followed at the scene of a crime.

As the spacesuited scientists moved, their rubberized clothing squeaked. Their heavy boots scraped noisily on the tile floor.

“You still think it looks like a simple incident of CBW?” Bryce asked Copperfield.

“Could be.”

“Really?”

Copperfield said, “Phil, you’re the resident nerve gas specialist. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

The question was answered by the man whose helmet bore the name HOUK. “It’s much too early to tell anything for certain, but it seems as if we could be dealing with a neuroleptic toxin. And there are some things about this—most notably, the extreme psychopathic violence—that lead me to wonder if we’ve got a case of T-139.”

“Definitely a possibility,” Copperfield said. “Just what I thought when we walked in.”

Niven continued to snap photographs, and Bryce said, “So what’s this T-139?”

“One of the primary nerve gases in the Russian arsenal,” the general said. “The full moniker is Timoshenko-139. It’s named after Ilya Timoshenko, the scientist who developed it.”

“What a lovely monument,” Tal said sarcastically.

“Most nerve gases cause death within thirty seconds to five minutes after skin contact,” Houk said. “But T-139 isn’t that merciful.”

“Merciful!” Frank Autry said, appalled.

“T-139 isn’t just a killer,” Houk said. “That
would
be merciful by comparison. T-139 is what military strategists call a demoralizer.”

Copperfield said, “It passes through the skin and enters the bloodstream in ten seconds or less, then migrates to the brain and almost instantly causes irreparable damage to cerebral tissues.”

Houk said, “For a period of about four to six hours, the victim retains full use of his limbs and a hundred percent of his normal strength. At first, it’s only his mind that suffers.”

“Dementia paranoides,” Copperfield said. “Intellectual confusion, fear, rage, loss of emotional control, and a very strongly held feeling that everyone is plotting against him. This is combined with a fierce compulsion to commit violent acts. In essence, Sheriff, T-139 turns people into mindless killing machines for four to six hours. They prey on one another and on unaffected people outside the area of the gas attack. You can see what an extremely demoralizing effect it would have on an enemy.”

“Extremely,” Bryce said. “And Dr. Paige theorized just such a disease last night, a mutant rabies that would kill some people while turning others into demented murderers.”

“T-139 isn’t a disease,” Houk said quickly. “It’s a nerve gas. And if I had my choice, I’d rather this was a nerve gas attack. Once gas has dissipated, the threat is over. A biological threat is considerably harder to contain.”

“If it was gas,” Copperfield said, “it’ll have dissipated long ago, but there’ll be traces of it on almost everything. Condensative residue. We’ll be able to identify it in no time at all.”

They backed against a wall to make way for Niven and his camera.

Jenny said, “Dr. Houk, in regards to this T-139, you mentioned that the ambulatory stage lasts four to six hours. Then what?”

“Well,” Houk said, “the second stage is the terminal stage, too. It lasts anywhere from six to twelve hours. It begins with the deterioration of the efferent nerves and escalates to paralysis of the cardiac, vasomotor, and respiratory reflex centers in the brain.”

“Good God,” Jenny said.

Frank said, “Once more for us laymen.”

Jenny said, “It means that during the second stage of the illness, over a period of six to twelve hours, T-139 gradually reduces the brain’s ability to regulate the automatic functions of the body—such as breathing, heartbeat, blood vessel dilation, organ function. . . The victim starts experiencing an irregular heartbeat, extreme difficulty in breathing, and the gradual collapse of every gland and organ. Twelve hours might not seem gradual to you, but it would seem like an eternity to the victim. There would be vomiting, diarrhea, uncontrollable urination, continuous and violent muscle spasms. . . And if only the efferent nerves were damaged, if the rest of the nervous system remained intact, there would be excruciating, unrelenting pain.”

“Six to twelve hours of hell,” Copperfield confirmed.

“Until the heart stops,” Houk said, “or until the victim simply stops breathing and suffocates.”

For long seconds, as Niven clicked the last of his photographs, no one spoke.

Finally, Jenny said, “I still don’t think a nerve gas could’ve played any part in this, not even something like T-139 that would explain these beheadings. For one thing, none of the victims we found showed any signs of vomiting or incontinence.”

“Well,” Copperfield said, “we could be dealing with a derivative of T-139 that doesn’t produce those symptoms. Or some other gas.”

“No gas can explain the moth,” Tal Whitman said.

“Or what happened to Stu Wargle,” Frank said.

Copperfield said, “Moth?”

“You didn’t want to hear about that until you’d seen these other things,” Bryce reminded Copperfield. “But now I think it’s time you—”

Niven said, “Finished.”

“All right,” Copperfield said. “Sheriff, Dr. Paige, deputies, if you will please maintain silence until we’ve completed the rest of our tasks here, your cooperation will be much appreciated.”

The others immediately set to work. Yamaguchi and Bettenby transferred the severed heads into a pair of porcelainlined specimen buckets with locking, airtight lids. Valdez carefully pried the hands away from the rolling pin and put them in a third specimen bucket. Houk scraped some flour off the table and into a small plastic jar, evidently because dry flour would have absorbed—and would still contain—traces of the nerve gas—if, in fact, there had
been
any nerve gas. Houk also took a sample of the pie crust dough that lay under the rolling pin. Goldstein and Roberts inspected the two ovens from which the heads had been removed, and then Goldstein used a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner to sweep out the first oven. When that was done, Roberts took the bag of sweepings, sealed it, and labeled it, while Goldstein used the vacuum to collect minute and even microscopic evidence from the second oven.

All of the scientists were busy except for the two men who were wearing the suits that had no names on the helmets. They stood to one side, merely watching.

Bryce watched the watchers, wondering who they were and what function they performed.

As the others worked, they described what they were doing and made comments about what they found, always speaking in a jargon that Bryce couldn’t follow. No two of them spoke at once; that fact—when coupled with Copperfield’s request for silence from those who were not team members—made it seem as if they were speaking for the record.

Among the items that hung from the utility belt around Copperfield’s waist there was a tape recorder wired directly into the communications system of the general’s suit. Bryce saw that the reels of tape were moving.

When the scientists had gotten everything they wanted from the bakery kitchen, Copperfield. said, “All right, Sheriff. Where now?”

Bryce indicated the tape recorder. “Aren’t you going to switch that off until we get there?”

“Nope. We started recording from the moment we were allowed past the roadblock, and we’ll keep recording until we’ve found out what’s happened to this town. That way, if something goes wrong, if we all die before we find the solution, the new team will know every step we took. They won’t have to start from scratch, and they might even have a detailed record of the fatal mistake that got
us
killed.”

 

 

The second stop was the arts and crafts gallery into which Frank Autry had led the three other men last night. Again, he led the way through the showroom, into the rear office, and up the stairs to the second-floor apartment.

It seemed to Frank that there was almost something comic about the scene: all these spacemen lumbering up the narrow stairs, their faces theatrically grim behind Plexiglas faceplates, the sound of their breathing amplified by the closed spaces of their helmets and projected out of the speakers on their chests at an exaggerated volume, an ominous sound. It was like one of those 1950s science fiction movies—
Attack of the Alien Astronauts
or something equally corny—and Frank couldn’t help smiling.

But his vague smile vanished when he entered the apartment kitchen and saw the dead man again. The corpse was where it had been last night, lying at the foot of the refrigerator, wearing only blue pajama bottoms. Still swollen, bruised, staring wide-eyed at nothing.

Frank moved out of the way of Copperfield’s people and joined Bryce beside the counter where the toaster oven stood.

As Copperfield again requested silence from the uninitiated, the scientists stepped carefully around the sandwich fixings that were scattered across the floor. They crowded around the corpse.

In a few minutes they were finished with a preliminary examination of the body.

Copperfield turned to Bryce and said, “We’re going to take this one for an autopsy.”

“You still think it looks as if we’re dealing with just a simple incident of CBW?” Bryce asked, as he had asked before.

“It’s entirely possible, yes,” the general said.

“But the bruising and swelling,” Tal said.

“Could be allergic reactions to a nerve gas,” Houk said.

“If you’ll slide up the leg of the pajamas,” Jenny said, “I believe you’ll find that the reaction extends even to unexposed skin.”

“Yes, it does,” Copperfield said. “We’ve already looked.”

“But how could the skin react even where no nerve gas came into contact with it?”

“Such gases usually have a high penetration factor,” Houk said. “They’ll pass right through most clothes. In fact, about the only thing that’ll stop many of them is vinyl or rubber garments.”

Just what you’re wearing, Frank thought, and just what we’re not.

“There’s another body here,” Bryce told the general. “Do you want to have a look at that one, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“It’s this way, sir,” Frank said.

He led them out of the kitchen and down the hall, his gun drawn.

Frank dreaded entering the bedroom where the dead woman lay naked in the rumpled sheets. He remembered the crude things that Stu Wargle had said about her, and he had the terrible feeling that Stu was going to be there now, coupled with the blonde, their dead bodies locked in cold and timeless passion.

But only the woman was there. Sprawled on the bed. Legs still spread wide. Mouth open in an eternal scream.

When Copperfield and his people had finished a preliminary examination of the corpse and were ready to go, Frank made sure they had seen the .22 automatic which she had apparently emptied at her killer. “Do you think she would have shot at just a cloud of nerve gas, General?”

“Of course not,” Copperfield said. “But perhaps she was already affected by the gas, already brain damaged. She could have been shooting at hallucinations, at phantoms.”

“Phantoms,” Frank said. “Yes, sir, that’s just about what they would’ve had to’ve been. Because, see, she fired all ten shots in the clip, yet we found only two expended slugs—one in that highboy over there, one in the wall where you see the hole. That means she mostly hit whatever she was shooting at.”

“I knew these people,” Doc Paige said, stepping forward. “Gary and Sandy Wechlas. She was something of a markswoman. Always target shooting. She won several competitions at the county fair last year.”

“So she had the skill to make eight hits out of ten,” Frank said. “And even eight hits didn’t stop the thing she was trying to stop. Eight hits didn’t even make it bleed. Of course, phantoms don’t bleed. But, sir, would a phantom be able to walk out of here
and take those 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.