Phantoms

But, again, the town pulled a cloak of silence around itself.

The morning sun cast its fiery reflection in some windows and glinted off the curved glass of the streetlamps. The black slate roofs looked as if they had been polished during the night; the last of the mist had condensed on those smooth surfaces, leaving a moist sheen.

Nothing moved. Nothing happened. The noise did not resume.

Bryce Hammond's face clouded with worry. “This Biosan… I gather it isn't harmful to us.”

“Utterly harmless,” Sara assured him.

The noise again. A short burst. Then silence.

“Something's coming,” Lisa said softly.

God help us, Sara thought.

“Something's coming,” Lisa said softly, and Bryce felt it, too. A sense of on rushing horror. A thickening and cooling of the air. A new predatory quality to the stillness. Reality? Imagination? He could not be certain. He only knew that he felt it.

The noise burst forth again, a sustained squeal, not just a short blast. Bryce winced. It was piercingly shrill. Buzzing. Whining. Like a power drill. But he knew it wasn't anything as harmless and ordinary as that.

Insects. The coldness of the sound, the metallic quality made him think of insects. Bees. Yes. It was the greatly amplified buzzing-screeching of hornets.

He said, “The three of you who aren't armed with spray guns, get in the middle here.”

“Yeah,” Tal said, “We'll circle around, give you a little protection.”

Very damned little if this Biosan doesn't work, Bryce thought.

The strange noise grew louder.

Sara, Lisa, and Dr. Flyte stood together, while Bryce and Jenny and Tal ringed them, facing outward.

Then, down the street, near the bakery, something monstrous appeared in the sky, skimming over the tops of the buildings, hovering for a few seconds above Skyline Road. A wasp. A phantom the size of a German shepherd. Nothing remotely like this insect had ever existed during the tens of millions of years that the shape- changer had been alive. This was surely something that had sprung. from its vicious imagination, a horrible invention. Six-foot, opalescent wings beat furiously upon the air, glimmered with rainbow color. The multifaceted black eyes were slant-set in the narrow, pointed, wicked head. There were four twitching legs with pincered feet. The curled, segmented, mold-white body terminated in a foot-long stinger with a needle-sharp point.

Bryce felt as if his intestines were turning to ice water.

The wasp stopped hovering. It struck.

Jenny screamed as the wasp streaked toward them, but she didn't run. She aimed the nozzle of the sprayer and squeezed the pressure-release lever. A cone-shaped, milky mist erupted for a distance of about six feet.

The wasp was twenty feet away and closing fast.

Jenny squeezed the lever all the way down. The mist became a stream, arcing fifteen or sixteen feet out from the nozzle.

Bryce loosed a stream from his sprayer. The two trails of Biosan played against each other, steadied, took the same aim, flowed together in midair.

The wasp came within range. The high-pressure streams sprayed, dulled the rainbow color of the wings, soaked the segmented body.

The insect stopped abruptly, hesitated, dipped lower, as if unable to maintain altitude. Hovered. Its attack had been arrested, although it still regarded them with hate-filled eyes.

Jenny felt a surge of relief and hope.

“It works!” Lisa cried.

Then the wasp came at them again.

Just when Tal thought they were safe, the wasp came at them again, through the mist of Biosan-4, flying slow but still flying.

“Down!” Bryce shouted.

They crouched, and the wasp swept over them, dripping milky fluid from its grotesque legs and from the tip of its stinger.

Tal stood again, so that he could give the thing a long squirt now that it was within range.

It swung toward him, but before he could give it a shot, the wasp faltered, fluttered wildly, then plummeted to the pavement. It flopped and buzzed angrily. It tried to rise up. Couldn't.

Then it changed.

It changed.

With the others, Timothy Flyte edged closer to the wasp and watched as it melted into a shapeless mass of protoplasm. The hind legs of a dog began to form. And the snout. It was going to be a Doberman, judging by that snout. One eye began to open. But the shape-changer couldn't complete the transformation; the dog's features vanished. The amorphous tissue shuddered and pulsed in a manner unlike anything that Timothy had seen it do before.

“It's dying,” Lisa said.

Timothy stared in awe as the strange flesh convulsed. This heretofore immortal being now knew the meaning and the fear of death.

The unformed mass broke out in pustulelike sores, leaking a thin yellow fluid. The thing spasmed violently. Additional sores opened in hideous profusion, lesions of all shapes and sizes that split and cracked and popped across the pulsating surface. Then, just as the tiny wad of tissue in the petri dish had done, this phantom degenerated into a lifeless pool of stinking, watery mush.

“By God, you've done it!” Timothy said, turning toward Sara.

Tentacles. Three of them. Behind her.

They rose out of a drain grating in the gutter, fifteen feet away. Each was as big around as Timothy's wrist. Already, the questing tips of them had slithered across the pavement, within a yard of Sara.

Timothy shouted a warning, but he was too late.

Flyte shouted, and Jenny whirled. It was among them.

Three tentacles whipped up from the pavement with shocking speed, surged forward with sinuous malevolence, and dropped onto Sara. In an instant, one lashed around the geneticist's legs, one around her waist, and the third around her slender neck.

Christ, it's too fast, too fast for us! Jenny thought.

She pointed the nozzle of her sprayer even as she turned, cursing, squeezing the lever, spewing Biosan-4 over Sara and the tentacles.

Bryce and Tal stepped in, using their sprayers, but they were all too slow, too late.

Sara's eyes widened; her mouth opened in a silent scream. She was lifted into the air and—

No! Jenny prayed

— flung back and forth as if she were a doll

No!

— and then her head fell from her shoulders and struck the street with a hard, sickening crack.

Gagging, Jenny stumbled back.

The tentacles rose twelve feet into the air. They writhed and twisted and foamed, broke open in sores as the bacteria destroyed the binding structure of the amorphous tissue. As Sara had hoped, Biosan affected the shape- changer almost the way sulphuric acid affected human tissue.

Tal darted past Jenny, heading straight toward the three tentacles, and she screamed at him to stop.

What in God's name was he doing?

Tal ran through the weaving shadows cast by the moving tentacles and prayed that none of them would fall on him.

When he reached the drain from which the things were extruded, he could see that the three appendages were separating from the main body of dark, throbbing protoplasm in the drainpipe below. The shape-changer was shedding the infected tissue before the bacteria could reach into the main body mass. Tal poked the nozzle of the sprayer through the grate and released Biosan-4 into the drain below.

The tentacles tore loose from the rest of the creature. They flopped and wriggled in the street. Down in the drain, oozing slime retreated from the spray, shedding another piece of itself, which began to foam and spasm and