Phantoms Part 37

"Then what's all this stuff doing here?" Bryce said.

"Beats me," Jenny said.

Tal shrugged.

In the two sinks, the jewelry gleamed and flashed.

The cries of sea gulls.

Dogs barking.

Galen Copperfield looked up from the computer terminal, where he had been reading data. He was sweaty inside his decon suit, tired and achy. For a moment, he wasn't sure he was really hearing the birds and dogs.

Then a cat squealed.

A horse whinnied.

The general glanced around the mobile lab, frowning. Rattlesnakes. A lot of them. The familiar, deadly sound: chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka.

Buzzing bees.

The others heard it, too. They looked at one another uneasily.

Roberts said, "It's coming through the suit-to-suit radio."

"Affirmative," Dr. Bettenby said from over in the second motor home. "We hear it here, too."

"Okay," Copperfield said, "let's give it a chance to perform. If you want to speak to one another, use your external com systems."

The bees stopped buzzing.

A child-the s.e.x indeterminate; androgynous-began to sing very softly, far away: "Jesus loves me, this I know,

for the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to Him are drawn.

They are weak, but He is strong."

The voice was sweet. Melodic.

Yet it was also blood-freezing.

Copperfield had never heard anything quite like it. Although it was a child's voice, tender and fragile, it nevertheless contained... something that shouldn't be in a child's voice. A profound lack of innocence. Knowledge, perhaps. Yes. Too much knowledge of too many terrible things. Menace. Hatred. Scorn. It wasn't audible on the surface of the lilting song, but it was there beneath the surface, pulsing and dark and immeasurably disturbing.

"Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me-

the Bible tells me so."

"They told us about this," Goldstein said. "Dr. Paige and the sheriff. They heard it on the phone and coming out of the kitchen drains at the inn. We didn't believe them; it sounded so ridiculous."

"Doesn't sound ridiculous now," Roberts said.

"No," Goldstein said. Even inside his bulky suit, his shivering was visible.

"It's broadcasting on the same wavelength as our suit radios," Roberts said.

"But how?" Copperfield wondered.

"Velazquez," Goldstein said suddenly.

"Of course," Roberts said. "Velazquez's suit had a radio. It's broadcasting through Velazquez's radio."

The child stopped singing. In a whispery voice, it said, "Better say your prayers. Everyone say your prayers. Don't forget to say your prayers." Then it giggled.

They waited for something more.

There was only silence.

"I think it was threatening us," Roberts said.

"d.a.m.n it, put a lid on that kind of talk right now," Copperfield said. "Let's not panic ourselves."

"Have you noticed we're saying it now?" Goldstein asked.

Copperfield and Roberts looked at him and then at each other, but they said nothing.

"We're saying it the same way that Dr. Paige and the sheriff and the deputies do. So ... have we come completely around to their way of thinking?"

In his mind, Copperfield could still hear the child's haunting, human-yet-not-human voice.

It.

"Come on," he said gruffly. "We've still got a lot of work to get done."

He turned his attention back to the computer terminal, but he had difficulty concentrating.

It.

By 4:30 Monday afternoon, Bryce called off the house-to-house search. A couple of hours of daylight remained, but everyone was bone weary. Weary from climbing up and down stairs. Weary of grotesque corpses. Weary of nasty surprises. Weary of the extent of the human tragedy, of horror that numbed the senses. Weary of the fear knotted in their chests. Constant tension was as tiring as heavy manual labor.

Besides, it had become apparent to Bryce that the job was simply too big for them. In five and a half hours, they had covered only a small portion of the town. At that rate, confined to a daylight schedule, and with their limited numbers, they would need at least two weeks to give Snowfield a thorough inspection. Furthermore, if the missing people didn't turn up by the time the last building was explored, and if a clue to their whereabouts could not be found, then an even more difficult search of the surrounding forest would have to be undertaken.

Last night, Bryce hadn't wanted the National Guard tramping through town. But now he and his people had had the town to themselves for the better part of a day, and Copperfield's specialists had collected their samples and had begun their work. As soon as Copperfield could certify that the town had not been stricken by a bacteriological agent, the Guard could be brought in to a.s.sist Bryce's own men.

Initially, knowing little about the situation here, he had been reluctant to surrender any of his authority over a town in his jurisdiction. But now, although not willing to surrender authority, he was certainly willing to share it. He needed more men. Hour by hour, the responsibility was becoming a crushing weight, and he was ready to shift some of it to other shoulders.

Therefore, at 4:30 Monday afternoon, he took his two search teams back to the Hilltop Inn, placed a call to the governor's office, and spoke with Jack Retlock. It was agreed that the Guard would be placed on standby for a call-up, pending an all-clear signal from Copperfield.

He had no sooner hung up the phone than Charlie Mercer, the desk-sergeant at HQ in Santa Mira, rang through. He had news. Fletcher Kale had escaped while being taken to the county courthouse for arraignment on two charges of murder in the first degree.

Bryce was furious.

Charlie let him rage on for a while, and when Bryce quieted down, Charlie said, "There's worse. He killed Joe Freemont."

"Aw, s.h.i.t," Bryce said. "Has Mary been told?"

"Yeah. I Went over there myself."

"How's she taking it?"

"Bad. They were married twenty-six years."

More death.

Death everywhere.

Christ.

"What about Kale?" Bryce asked Charlie.

"We think he took a car from the apartment complex across the alley. One's been stolen from that lot. So we put up the roadblocks as soon as we knew Kale slipped, but I figure he had almost an hour's lead on us."

"Long gone."

"Probably. If we don't nab the son of a b.i.t.c.h by seven o'clock, I want to call the blocks off. We're so shorthanded-what with everything that's going on-we can't keep tying men up on roadblocks."

"Whatever you think's best," Bryce said wearily. "What about the San Francisco police? You know-about that message Harold Ordnay left on the mirror up here?"

"That was the other thing I called about. They finally got back to us."

"Anything useful?"

"Well, they talked to the employees at Ordnay's bookstores. You remember, I told you one of the shops deals strictly in out-of-print and rare books. The a.s.sistant manager at that store, name of Celia Meddock, recognized the Timothy Flyte moniker."

"He's a customer?" Bryce asked.

"No. An author."

"Author? Of what?"

"One book. Guess the t.i.tle."

"How the devil could I ... Oh. Of course. The Ancient Enemy."

"You got it," Charlie Mercer said.

"What's the book about?"

"That's the best part. Celia Meddock says she thinks it's about ma.s.s disappearances throughout history."

For a moment, Bryce was speechless. Then: "Are you serious? You mean there've been a lot of others?"

"I guess so. At least a bookful of 'em."

"Where? When? How come I've never heard about them?"

"Meddock said something about the disappearance of ancient Mayan populations-"

Something stirred in Bryce's mind. An article he had read in an old science magazine. Mayan civilizations. Abandoned cities.

"-and the Roanoke Colony, which was the first British settlement in North America," Charlie finished.