Dean Koontz - Phantoms

of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout redder than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all dim deadly fangs, and something that looked like the stinger on a wasp or maybe a pincer.

It dragged Billy Velazquez into the Skyline conduit. He clawed at the concrete, desperately seeking something to hold on to, but he only succeeded in abrading away the fingers and palms of his gloves. He felt the cool underground air on his hands, and he realized he might now be contaminated, but that wasn't the end of his worries.

It dragged him into the tunnel of darkness. Then stopped, and held him tightly. Then tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexiglass faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard shell.

His hold on sanity was tenuous at best, but he struggled to keep his wits about him, tried to understand. At first, it seemed to him that this was a prehistoric creature, something millions of years old that had somehow dropped through a time warp into the storm drains. But that was crazy. He felt a silvery, high-pitched, lunatic giggle coming over him, and he knew he would be lost if he gave voice to it. The beast tore away most of his decontamination suit. It was on him now, pressing hard, a cold and disgustingly slick thing that seemed to pulse and somehow to change when it touched him. Billy, gasping and weeping, suddenly remembered an illustration in an old catechism text. A drawing of a demon. That was what this was.

Like the drawing. Yes, exactly like it. The horns. The dark, forked tongue. The red eyes. A demon risen from Hell. And then he thought: No, no; that's crazy, too! And all the while that those thoughts raced through his mind, the ravenous creature stripped him and pulled his helmet almost completely apart.

In the unrelieved darkness, he sensed its snout pressing through the halves of the broken helmet, toward his face, sniffing. He felt its tongue fluttering against his mouth and nose. He smelled a vague but repellent-odor, like nothing he had ever smelled before. The beast gouged at his belly and thighs, and then he felt a strange and brutally painful fire eating into him; acid fire.

He writhed, twisted, bucked, strained-all to no avail. Billy heard himself cry out in terror and pain and confusion: "It's the Devil, it's the Devil!" He realized he had been shouting and screaming things almost continuously, from the moment he had been dragged off the ladder. Now, unable to speak as the flameless fire burned his lungs to ash and churned into his throat, he prayed in a silent singsong chant, warding off fear and death and the terrible feeling of smallness and worthlessness that had come over him: Mary, Mother of God, Mary, hear my plea… hear my plea, Mary, pray for me… pray, pray for me, Mary, Mother of God, Mary, intercede for me and His question had been answered.

He knew what had happened to Sergeant Harker.

Galen Copperfield was an outdoorsman, and he knew a great deal about the wildlife of North America. One of the creatures he found most interesting was the trap-door spider. It was a clever engineer who created a deep, tubular nest in the ground with a hinged lid at the top.

The lid blended so perfectly with the soil in which it was set that whatever wandered across it, unaware of the danger below, were instantly dropped into the opening, dragged down, and devoured. it was horrifying and fascinating. One instant, the prey was dying, and the next instant it was gone, as if it had never been.

Corporal Velazquez was gone as sudden as if he had stepped upon the lid of a spider's lair.

Gone.

Copperfield's men were already edgy about Harker's disappearance and were frightened by the howling that ceased just before Ve was dragged down. When the corporal was taken, they all spread back across the street, afraid that something was about to launch itself out of the manhole.

Copperfield, in the act of grieving for Velazquez when he was snatched, jumped back. Then froze. That was not like him. He had never before been indecisive in a crisis.

Velazquez was screaming through the suit-to-suit radio.

Breaking the ice that locked his joints, Copperfield went to the manhole and looked down. PUM's flashlight lay on the floor of the drain. But there was nothing else. No sign of Velazquez.

Copperfield hesitated.

The Corporal continued to scream.

Send other men down after the poor bastard?

No. It would be a suicide mission. Remember Harker. Cut the losses here, now.

But, good God, the screaming was horrible. Not as awful as Harker's.

Those had been screams born of excruciating pain.

These were screams of torment. Not as bad, but bad enough. As bad as anything Copperfield had seen on the battlefield.

There were words among the screams, spat out in explosive gasps. The cry was making a, begging plea.

"…bug… — …dragon…… prehistoric…

And finally, with both physical pain and anguish of the soul in his voice, the corporal cried out, "It's the Devil, it's the Devil!”

After that, the were every bit as bad as Harker's.

At least he didn't last as long.

When there was only silence, Copperfield slid the manhole cover back into place. Because of the power cable, the metal plate didn't fit tightly and was tilted up at one end, but it covered most of the hole.

He stationed two men on the sidewalk, ten feet from the rim, and ordered them to shoot anything that came out.

Because a gun had been of no help to Harker, Copperfield and a few other men collected everything needed to manufacture Molotovcocktails. They got a couple of dozen bottles of wine from Brookhart's liquor store on Vail Lane, emptied them, put an inch of soap powder in the bottom of each, filled them with gasoline, and twisted rag fuses into the necks of them until they were snug.

What had happened to Harker?

What had happened to Velazquez?

What will happen to me? Copperfield wondered.

The two mobile field units cost more than twenty million dollars, and the Defense Department had gotten its money's worth.

One lab was a marvel of technological microminiaturization.

For one. thing, its computer-based on a trio of intel 432 micromainfranes; 690,000 amistors squeezed onto only nine silicon chips-took up no more room than a couple of suitcases, yet it was a highly sophisticated system that was capable of complex medical analyses. in fact, it was a more system-with general logic and memory capacity than could be found in most major university hospitals’

pathology labs.

was a great deal of It stacked up into the motor home, all of it designed and positioned for maximum utility of the limited space. In addition to a pair of computer access terminals along one wall, there were a number of devices and machines: a centrifuge that would be used to separate the major components of biM, urine, and other fluid samples; a spectrophotometer; a spectrograph; an el microscope with an image interpretation-enhancement mad-out link to one of the computer screens; a compact appliance that would quick-freeze blood and tissue samples for storage and for use in tests in which element extractions were mom easily performed on frozen materials; and much, much more.

Toward the front of the vehicle, behind the drivers' compartment, was an autopsy table that collapsed into the wall when not in use. At the moment, the table was down, and the body of Gary Wechlasthirty-seven, Caucasian-lay on the stainless-steel surface. The blue pajama bottoms had been scissored away from the corpse and set aside for later examination.

Dr. Seth Goldstein, one of the three leading forensic medicine specialists on the West Coast, would perform the autopsy.