Phantoms

“Yeah, yeah. What I figure, man, is that they were secretly runnin' a test of some germ weapon on our own people and it got out of hand. Or maybe it was an accidental spill. Somethin' real heavy's going' down, for sure.”

“What's your name, son?”

“Ricky Bettenby. My old man's name is Wilson Bettenby.”

“Stanford, you said?”

“Yeah. You gonna follow up on this, man?”

“Maybe there's something to it. But before I start calling people at Stanford, I need to ask you a lot more questions.”

“Fire away. I'll tell you whatever I can. I want to blast this wide open, man. I want him to pay for sellin' out.”

Throughout the night, the leaks sprung one by one. At Dugway, Utah, an army officer, who should have known better, used a pay phone off the base to call New York and spill the story to a much-loved younger brother who was a cub reporter for the Times. In bed, after sex, an aide to the governor told his lover, a woman reporter. Those and other holes in the dam caused the flow of information to grow from a trickle to a flood.

By three o'clock in the morning, the switchboard at the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Office was overloaded. By dawn, the newspaper, television, and radio reporters were swarming into Santa Mira. Within a few hours of first light, the street in front of the sheriff's offices was crowded with press cars, camera vans bearing the logos of TV stations in Sacramento and San Francisco, reporters, and curiosity seekers of all ages.

The deputies gave up trying to keep people from congregating in the middle of the street, for there were too many of them to be herded onto the sidewalks. They sealed off the block with sawhorses and turned it into a big open-air press compound. A couple of enterprising kids from a nearby apartment building starting selling Tang, cookies, and — with the aid of the longest series of extension cords anyone could remember seeing — hot coffee. Their refreshment stand became the rumor center, where reporters gathered to share theories and hearsay while they waited for the latest official information handouts.

Other newsmen spread out through Santa Mira, seeking people who had friends or relatives living up in Snowfield, or who were in some way related to the deputies now stationed there. Out at the junction of the state route and Snowfield Road, still other reporters were camping at the police roadblock.

In spite of all this hurly-burly, fully half of the press had not yet arrived.

Many representatives of the Eastern media and the foreign press were still in transit. For the authorities who were trying hard to deal with the mess, the worst was yet to come. By Monday afternoon, it would be a circus.

Chapter 22 Morning in Snowfield

Not long after dawn, the shortwave radio and the two gasoline powered electric generators arrived at the roadblock that marked the perimeter of the quarantine zone. The two small vans which bore them were driven by California Highway Patrolmen. They were permitted to pass through the blockade, to a point midway along the four-mile Snowfield Road, where they were parked and abandoned.

When the CHiP officers returned to the roadblock, county deputies radioed a situation report to headquarters in Santa Mira. In turn, headquarters put through a go-ahead call to Bryce Hammond at the Hilltop Inn.

Tal Whitman, Frank Autry, and two other men took a squad car to the midpoint of the Snowfield Road and picked up the abandoned vans. Containment of any possible disease vectors was thus maintained.

The shortwave was set up in one corner of the Hilltop lobby. A message sent to headquarters in Santa Mira was received and answered. Now, if something happened to the telephones, they wouldn't be entirely isolated.

Within an hour, one of the generators had been wired into the circuitry of the streetlamps on the west side of the Skyline Road. The other was spliced into the hotel's electrical system. Tonight, if the main power supply was mysteriously cut off, the generators would kick in automatically. Darkness would last only one or two seconds.

Bryce was confident that not even their unknown enemy could snatch away a victim that fast.

Jenny Paige began the morning with an unsatisfactory sponge bath, followed by a completely satisfactory breakfast of eggs, sliced ham, toast, and coffee.

Then, accompanied by three heavily armed men, she went up the street to her house, where she got some fresh clothes for herself and for Lisa. She also stopped in her office, where she gathered up a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, tongue depressors, cotton pads, gauze, splints, bandages, tourniquets, antiseptics, disposable hypodermic syringes, painkillers, antibiotics, and other instruments and supplies that she would need in order to establish an emergency infirmary in one corner of the Hilltop Inn's lobby.

The house was quiet.

The deputies kept looking around nervously, entering each new room as if they suspected a guillotine was rigged above the door.

As Jenny was finishing packing up supplies in her office, the telephone rang. They all stared at it.

They knew only two phones in town were working, and both were at the Hilltop Inn.

The phone rang again.

Jenny lifted the receiver. She didn't say hello.

Silence.

She waited.

After a second, she heard the distant cries of sea gulls. The buzzing of bees. The mewling of a kitten. A weeping child. Another child: laughing. A panting dog. The chicka-chickachicka-chicka sound of a rattlesnake.

Bryce had heard similar things on the phone last night, in the substation, just before the moth had come tapping at the windows. He had said that the sounds had been perfectly ordinary, familiar animal noises. They had nonetheless, unsettled him. He hadn't been able to explain why.

Now Jenny knew exactly what he meant.

Birds singing.

Frogs croaking.

A cat purring.

The purr became a hiss. The hiss became a cat-shriek of anger. The shriek became a brief but terrible squeal of pain.

Then a voice: “I'm gonna shove my big prick into your succulent little sister.”

Jenny recognized the voice. Wargle. The dead man.

“You hear me, Doc?”

She said nothing.

“And I don't give a rat's ass which end of her I stick it in.” He giggled.

She slammed the phone down.

The deputies looked at her expectantly.

“Uh… no one on the line,” she said, deciding not to tell them what she had heard. They were already too jumpy.

From Jenny's office, they went to Tayton's Pharmacy on Vail Lane, where she stocked up on more drugs: additional painkillers, a wide spectrum of antibiotics, coagulant, anticoagulants, and anything else she might conceivably need.

As they were finishing in the pharmacy, the phone rang.

Jenny was closest to it. She didn't want to answer, but she couldn't resist.

And it was there again.

Jenny waited a moment, then said, “Hello?”

Wargle said, “I'm gonna use your little sister so hard she won't be able to walk for a week.”