Phantoms

afraid he would be forced to shoot someone — either to save his own life, the life of another deputy, or that of a victim.

He didn't think he could do it.

Five months ago, he had discovered a dangerous weakness in himself when he had answered an emergency call from Donner's Sports Shop. A disgruntled former employee, a burly man named Leo Sipes, had returned to the store two weeks after being fired, had beaten up the manager, and had broken the arm of the clerk who had been hired to replace him. By the time Gordy arrived on the scene, Leo Sipes — big and dumb and drunk — was using a woodsman's hatchet to smash and splinter all of the merchandise. Gordy was unable to talk him into surrendering. When Sipes started after him, brandishing the hatchet, Gordy had pulled his revolver. And then found he couldn't use it. His trigger finger became as brinle and inflexible as ice. He'd had to put the gun away and risk a physical confrontation with Sipes. Somehow, he'd gotten the hatchet away from him.

Now, five months later, as he sat in the rear of the patrol car and listened to Jake Johnson talking to Sheriff Hammond, Gordy's stomach clenched and turned sour at the thought of what a .45-caliber hollow-nose bullet would do to a man. It would literally take off his head. It would smash a man's shoulder into rags of flesh and broken needles of bone. It would rip open a man's chest, shattering the heart and everything else in its path. It would blow off a leg if it struck a kneecap, would turn a face to bloody slush. And Gordy Brogan, God help him, was just not capable of doing such a thing to anyone.

That was his terrible weakness. He knew there were people who would say that his inability to shoot another being was not a weakness but a sign of moral superiority. However, he knew that was not always true. There were times when shooting was a moral act. An officer of the law was sworn to protect the public. For a cop, the inability to shoot (when shooting was clearly justified) was not only weakness but madness, perhaps even sinful.

During the past five months, following the unnerving episode at Donner's Sport Shop, Gordy had been lucky. He'd drawn only a few calls involving violent suspects. And fortunately, he had been able to bring his adversaries to heel by using his fists or his nightstick or threats — or by firing warning shots into the air. Once, when it had seemed that shooting someone was unavoidable, the other officer, Frank Autry, had fired first, winging the gunman, before Gordy had been confronted with the impossible task of pulling the trigger.

But now something unimaginably violent had transpired up in Snowfield. And Gordy knew all too well that violence frequently had to be met with violence.

The gun on his hip seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

He wondered if the time was approaching when his weakness would be revealed. He wondered if he would die tonightor if he would cause, by his weakness, the unnecessary death of another.

He ardently prayed that he could beat this thing. Surely, it was possible for a man to be peaceful by nature and still possess the nerve to save himself, his friends, his kind.

Red emergency beacons flashing on their roofs, the three white and green squad cars followed the winding highway into the night-cloaked mountains, up toward the peaks where the moonlight created the illusion that the first snow of the season had already fallen.

Gordy Brogan was scared.

The streetlamps and all other lights went out, casting the town into darkness. Jenny and Lisa bolted up from the wooden bench.

“What happened?”

“Ssshh!” Jenny said, “Listen!”

But there was only continued silence.

The wind had stopped blowing, as if startled by the town's abrupt blackout. The trees waited, boughs hanging as still as old clothes in a closet.

Thank God for the moon, Jenny thought.

Heart thudding, Jenny turned and studied the buildings behind them. The town jail. A small cafe. The shops. The townhouses.

All the doorways were so clotted with shadows that it was difficult to tell if the doors were open or closed — or if, just now, they were slowly, slowly coming open to release the hideous, swollen, demonically reanimated dead into the night streets.

Stop it! Jenny thought. The dead don't come back to life.

Her eyes came to rest on the gate in front of the covered serviceway between the sheriff's substation and the gift shop next door. It was exactly like the cramped, gloomy passageway beside Liebertnann's Bakery.

Was something hiding in this tunnel, too? And, with the lights out, was it creeping inexorably toward the far side of the gate, eager to come out onto the dark sidewalk?

That primitive fear again.

That sense of evil.

That superstitious terror.

“Come on,” she said to Lisa.

“Where?”

“In the street. Nothing can get us out there—”

“—without our seeing it coming,” Lisa finished, understanding.

They went into the middle of the moonlit roadway.

“How long until the sheriff gets here?” Lisa asked.

“At least fifteen or twenty minutes yet.”

The town's lights all came on at once. A brilliant shower of electric radiance stung their eyes with surprise — then darkness again.

Jenny raised the revolver, not knowing where to point it.

Her throat was fear-parched, her mouth dry.

A blast of sound — an ungodly wall — slammed through Snowfield. Jenny and Lisa both cried out in shock and turned, bumping against each other, squinting at the moon-tinted darkness.

Then silence.

Then another shriek. Silence.

“What?” Lisa asked.

“The firehouse!”

It came again: a short burst of the piercing siren from the east side of St. Moritz Way, from the Snowfield Volunteer Fire Company stationhouse.

Bong!

Jenny jumped again, twisted around.

Bong! Bong!

“A church bell,” Lisa said.

“The Catholic church, west on Vail.”

The bell tolled once more — a loud, deep, mournful sound that reverberated in the blank windows along the dark length of Skyline Road and in other, unseen windows throughout the dead town.

“Someone has to pull a rope to ring a bell,” Lisa said, “Or push a button to set off a siren. So there must be someone else here beside us.”

Jenny said nothing.

The siren sounded again, whooped and then died, whooped and died, and the church bell began to toll again, and the bell and the siren cried out at the same time, again and again, as if announcing the advent of someone of tremendous importance.

In the mountains, a mile from the turnoff to Snowfield, the night landscape was rendered solely in black and moon-silver. The looming trees were not green at all; they were somber shapes, mostly shadows, with albescent fringes of vaguely defined needles and leaves.

In contrast, the shoulders of the highway were blood-colored by the light that splashed from the revolving beacons atop the three Ford sedans which all bore the insignia of the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department on their front doors.

Deputy Frank Autry was driving the second car, and Deputy Stu Wargle was slouched down on the passenger's seat.