Dean Koontz - Phantoms

Tears of relief and happiness. He was overwhelmed by the mercy of God.

There was no doubt what he must do. He hurried toward the Airedale, which was about twenty feet away.

At first, Jenny was dumbstruck by the dog. She gaped at it. And then a fierce joy began to swell within her. Life had somehow triumphed over death. It hadn't gotten every living thing in Snowfield, after all.

This dog (which sat down wearily when Gordy started toward it) had survived, which meant maybe they, themselves, would manage to leave this town alive-and then she thought of the moth.

The moth had been a living thing. But it hadn't been friendly.

And Stu Wargle's reanimated corpse.

Back there on the sidewalk, at the edge of shadows, the dog put its head down on the pavement and whimpered, begging to be comforted.

Gordy approached it, crouching, speaking in encouraging, loving tones: "Don't be afraid, boy. Easy, boy. Easy now.

What a nice dog you are. Everything'll be okay. Everything'll be all right, boy. Easy…”

Horror rose in Jenny. She opened her mouth to scream, but others beat her to it.

"Gordy, no!" Lisa cried.

"Get back!" Bryce shouted, as did Frank Autry.

Tal shouted: "Get away from it, Gordy!”

But Gordy didn't seem to hear them.

As Gordy drew near the Airedale, it lifted its chin off the sidewalk, raised its square head, and made soft, ingratiating noises. It was a fine specimen. With its leg mended, with its coat washed and brushed and shining, it would be beautiful.

He put a hand out to the dog.

It nuzzled him but didn't lick.

He stroked it. The poor thing was cold, incredibly cold, and slightly damp.

"Poor baby," Gordy said.

The dog had an odd smell, too. Acrid. Nauseating, really.

Gordy had never smelled anything quite like it.

"Where on earth have you been?" he asked the dog." What kind of muck have you been rolling around in?”

The pooch whined and shivered.

Behind him, Gordy heard the others shouting, but he was much too involved with the Airedale to listen. He got both hands around the dog, lifted it off the pavement, stood up, and held it close to his chest, with its injured leg dangling.

He had never felt an animal this cold. It wasn't just that its coat was wet, and therefore, cold; there didn't seem to be any heat rising from beneath the coat, either.

It licked his hand.

Its tongue was cold.

Frank stopped shouting. He just stared.,Gordy had picked up the mutt, had begun cuddling it and fussing over it, and nothing terrible had happened. So maybe it was just a dog, after all. Maybe it Then.

The dog licked Gordy's hand, and a strange expression crossed Gordy's face, and the dog began to… change.

Christ.

It was like a lump of putty being reshaped under an invisible sculptor's swiftly working hands. The matted hair appeared to change color, then the texture changed, too, until it looked more like scales than anything else, greenish scales, and the head began to sink back into the body, which wasn't really a body any more, just a shapeless thing, a lump of writhing tissue, and the legs shortened and grew thicker, and all this happened in just five or six seconds, and then Gordy stared in shock at the thing in his hands.

A lizard head with wicked yellow eyes began to take form in the enormous mass into which the dog had degenerated.

The lizard's mouth appeared in the puddinglike tissue, and a forked tongue flickered, and their were lots of pointy little teeth.

Gordy tried to throw the thing down, but it clung to him, Jesus, clung tight to him, as if it had reshaped itself around his hands and arms, as if his hands were actually inside of it now.

Then it ceased to be cold. Suddenly it was warm. And then hot.

Painfully hot.

Before the lizard had completely risen out of the throbbing mass of tissue, it began to dissolve, and a new animal started to take shape, a fox, but the fox quickly degenerated before it was entirely formed, and it became squirrels, a pair of them, their bodies joined like Siamese twins but swiftly separating, and Gordy began to scream. He shook his arms up and down, trying to throw the thing off.

The heat was like a fire now. The pain was unbearable.

Jesus, please.

Pain ate its way up his arms, across his shoulders.

He screamed and sobbed and staggered forward one step, shook his arms again, tried to pull his hands apart, but the thing clung to him.

The half-formed squirrels melted away, and a cat began to appear in the amorphous tissue that he held and that held him, and then the cat swiftly faded, and something else arose Jesus, no, no, Jesus, no-something insectile, big as an Airedale but with six or eight eyes across the top of its hateful head and a lot of spiky legs and Pain roared through him. He stumbled sideways, fell to his knees, then onto his side. He kicked and twisted in agony, writhed and heaved on the sidewalk.

Sara Yamaguchi stared in disbelief. The beast attacking Gordy seemed to have total control of its DNA. It could change its shape at will and with astonishing speed.

No such creature could exist. She should know; she was a biologist, a geneticist. Impossible. Yet here it was.

The spider form degenerated, and no new phantom shape took its place. In a natural state, the creature seemed to be simply a mass of jellied tissue, gray-maroonered, a cross between an enlarged amoeba and some disgusting fungus.

It oozed up over Gordy's arms — and suddenly, one of Gordy's hands poked through the slime that had sheathed it. But it wasn't a hand any more.

God, no. It was only bones. Skeletal fingers, stiff and white, picked clean. The flesh had been eaten away.

She gagged, stumbled backwards, turned to the gutter, vomited.

Jenny pulled Lisa two steps back, farther away from the thing with which Gordy was grappling.

The girl was screaming.

The slime oozed around the bony hand, reclaimed those denuded fingers, enfolded them, sheathed them in a glove of pulsing tissue. In a couple of seconds, the bones were gone as well, dissolved, and the glove folded up into a ball and melted back into the main body of the organism. The thing writhed obscenely, churned within itself, swelled, bulged here, formed a concavity there, now a concavity where the bulge had been, now a swelling nodule where the concavity had been, feverishly changing, as if even a moment's stillness meant death, It pulled itself up Gordy's arms, and he struggled desperately to rid himself of it, and as it progressed toward his shoulders, it left nothing behind it, nothing, no stumps, no bones; it devoured everything. It began to spread across his chest, too, and wherever it went, Gordy simply disappeared into it and did not come out, as if he were sinking into a vat of fiercely corrosive acid.

Lisa looked away from the dying man and clung to Jenny, sobbing.

Gordy's screams were unbearable.

Tal's revolver was already in his hand. He hurried toward Gordy.

Bryce stopped him." Are you crazy? Tal, damn it, there's nothing we can do.”

"We can put him out of his misery.”

"Don't get too close to that damned thing!”

"We don't have to get too close to get a good shot.- Gordy's eyes became more tortured by the second, and now he began to scream for Jesus's help, and he drummed his heels on the pavement, arched his back, vibrated with the strain, trying to push up from under the growing weight of the nightmarish assailant.

Bryce winced." All right. Quickly.”

They both edged nearer to the thrashing, dying deputy and opened fire.

Several shots struck him. His screaming stopped.

They quickly backed off.

They didn't try to kill the thing that was feeding on Gordy.

They knew bullets had no effect on it, and they were beginning to understand why. Bullets killed by destroying vital organs and essential blood vessels. But from the look of it, this thing had no organs and no conventional circulatory system. No skeleton, either. It seemed to be a mass of undifferentiated highly sophisticated-protoplasm. A bullet would pierce it, but the amazingly malleable flesh would flow into the channel carved by the bullet, and the wound would heal in an instant.