Phantoms

Chapter 28

On the Run Driving through Santa Mira in the stolen Datsun, Fletcher Kale heard about Snowfield on the radio.

Although it had captured the rest of the country's attention, Kale wasn't very interested. He was never particularly compassionate about other people's tragedies.

He reached out to switch off the radio, already weary of hearing about Snowfield when he had so many problems of his own-and then he caught a name that did mean something to him. Jake Johnson. Johnson was one of the deputies who had gone up to Snowfield last night. Now he was missing and might even be dead.

Jake Johnson…

A year ago, Kale had sold Johnson a solidly built log cabin on five acres in the mountains.

Johnson had professed to be an avid hunter and had pretended to want the cabin for that purpose. However, from a number of things the deputy let slip, Kate decided dud Johnson was actually a survivalist, one of those doomsayers who believed the would was rushing toward Armageddon and that society was going to collapse either because of runaway inflation or nuclear war or some other Kale became increasingly convinced that Johnson wanted the cabin for a hiding place that could be stocked with food and ammunition then easily defended in times of social upheaval.

The cabin was certainly remote enough for that purpose. it was on Snowtop Mountain, all the way around the other side from the town of Snowfield. To get to the place, you had to go up a county fire road, a narrow dirt track that was passable virtually only to a four-wheel vehicle, then switch to another, even tougher track. The final quarter-mile had to be covered on foot.

Two months after Johnson purchased the mountain property, Kale sneaked up there on a warm June morning when he knew the deputy was on duty in Santa Mira. He wanted to see if Johnson was turning the place into a wilderness fortress, as he suspected.

He found the cabin untouched, but he discovered that Johnson was doing extensive work in some of the limestone caves to which there was an entrance on his land. Outside the caves, there were sacks of cement and sand, a wheelbarrow, and a pile of stones.

Just inside the mouth of the first cave, there had been two Coleman gas lanterns standing on the stone floor, by the wall.

Kale had picked up one of the lanterns and had gone deeper into the subterranean chambers.

The first cave was long and narrow, little more than a tunnel.

At the end of it, he followed a series of doglegs, twisting through irregular limestone antechambers, before he came into the first roomlike cave.

Stacked against one wall were cases of five-pound, vacuum sealed cans of nitrogen-preserved milk powder, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, freeze-dried soup, powdered eggs, cans of honey, drums of whole grain.

An air mattress. And much more. Jake had been busy.

The first underground room led to another. In this one, there was a naturally formed hole in the floor, about ten inches in diameter, and odd noises were rising out of it. Whispering voices. Menacing laughter. Kale almost turned and ran, but then he realized that he was hearing nothing more sinister than the chuckling of running water. An underground stream. Jake Johnson had lowered one-inch rubber tubing into the natural well and had rigged a hand pump beside it.

All the comforts of home.

Kale decided that Johnson was not merely cautious. The man was obsessed.

On another day at the end of that same summer, late in August, Kale returned to the mountain property. To his surprise, the cave mouth-which was about four feet high and five feet wide-was no longer visible. Johnson had created an effective barrier of vegetation to conceal the entrance to his hideaway.

Kale pushed through the brush, careful not to harm it.

He had brought his own flashlight this time. He crawled through the mouth of the cave, stood up once he was inside, followed the tunnel down three doglegs-and suddenly came up against an unexpected dead end. He knew there should be one more short doglegged passageway and then the first of the large caves. Instead, there was only a wall of limestone, a flat face of it that sealed off the rest of the caverns.

For a moment Kale was at the barrier, confused. Then he examined it closely, and in a few minutes he found the hidden release. The rock was actually a thin facade that had been bonded with epoxy to a door that Johnson had cleverly mounted in the natural frame between the final dogleg and the first of the room-size caves.

That day in August, marveling over the hidden door, Kale decided that he would take the retreat for his own if the need ever arose. After all, maybe these survivalists were on to something. Maybe they were right.

Maybe the fools out there would try to blow up the world some day. If so, Kale would get to this retreat first, and when Johnson came through his cleverly hidden door, Kale would simply blow him away.

That thought pleased him.

It made him feel shrewd. Superior.

Thirteen months later, he had, much to his surprise and horror, seen the end of the world coming. The end of his world.

Locked up in the county jail, charged with murder, he knew where he could go if he could only manage to escape: into the mountains, to the caves. He could stay up there for several weeks, until the cops finally stopped looking for him in and around Santa Mira County.

Thank you, Jake Johnson.

Jake Johnson…

Now, in the stolen yellow Datsun, with the county jail only a few minutes behind him, Kale heard about Johnson on the radio. As he listened, he began to smile. Fate was on his side.

After escaping, his biggest problem was disposing of his jail clothes and getting properly outfitted for the mountains.

He hadn't been quite sure how he would do that.

As soon as he heard the radio reporter say that Jake Johnson was dead-or at least out of the way, up there in Snowfield Kale knew he would go straight to Johnson's house, here in Santa Mira. Johnson had no family.

It was a safe, temporary hiding place. Johnson wasn't exactly Kale's size, but they were close enough so that Kale could swap his jail uniform for the most suitable items in the deputy's closet.

And guns. Jake Johnson, survivalist that he was, would surely have a gun collection somewhere in the house.

The deputy lived in the same one-story, three-bedroom house that he had inherited from his father, Big Ralph Johnson. It wasn't what you would call a showplace. Big Ralph hadn't spent his bribe and graft money with reckless abandon; he had known how to keep a low profile when it came to anything that might draw the attention of a passing IRS agent. Not that the Johnson place was a shack. It was in the center block of Pine Shadow Lane, a well-established neighborhood of mostly larger homes, oversized lots, and mature trees. The Johnson house, one of the smaller ones, had a large Jacuzzi sunk in the tile floor of its rear sun porch, an enormous game room with an antique pool table, and a number of other creature comforts not visible from outside.

Kale had been there twice during the course of selling Johnson the mountain property. He had no difficulty finding the house again.

He pulled the Datsun into the driveway, cut the engine, and got out. He hoped no neighbors were watching.

He went around toward the back of the house, broke a kitchen window, and clambered inside.

He went directly to the garage. It was big enough for two cars, but only a four-wheel-drive Jeep station wagon was there.

He had known Johnson owned the Jeep, and he had hoped to find it here.

He opened the garage door and drove the stolen Datsun inside. When the door was closed again and the Datsun could not be seen from the sumt, he felt safer.

In the master bedroom, he went through Johnson's closet and found a pair of sturdy hiking boots only half a size larger than he required. Johnson was a couple of inches shorter than Kale, so the pants weren't the right length, but tucked into the boots, they looked good enough. The waist was too large for Kale, but he cinched it in with a belt. He selected a sports shirt and tried it on. Good enough.

Once dressed, he studied himself in the full-length mirror.

"Looking good," he told his reflection.

Then he went through the house, looking for guns. He couldn't find any.

All right, then they were hidden somewhere. He'd tear the joint to pieces to find them, if it came to that.

He started in the master bedroom. He emptied out the contents of the bureau and dresser drawers. No guns. He went through both nightstands.

No guns. He took everything out of the walk-in closet: clothes, shoes, suitcases, boxes, a steamer trunk. No guns. He pulled up the edges of the carpet and searched under it for a hidden storage area. He found nothing.

Half an hour later, he was sweating but not tired. Indeed, he was exhilarated. He looked around at the destruction he had wrought, and he was strangely pleased. The room appeared to have been bombed.

He went into the next room-probing, ripping, overturning, and smashing everything in his path.

He wanted very much to find those guns.

But he was also having fun.