Phantom invasion

I was watching television coverage of the war in some distant country.  Which one was never mentioned but it seemed to be very hot and sandy.  Even though it was a colour signal everything on the screen was yellowish tan.  The mistress of the generalissimo at the head of one of the factions, had herself become an important figure in commanding troops and resolving what was going on.  The television people had somehow gotten a camera into an important hideout of one of the factions and were broadcasting live video of her meeting with other officers.  As I watched, the location suffered an attack and I saw them all grabbing weapons and running out the door.

I lived in a townhouse that was part of a very big plain building, probably built by the government.  The building itself was part of a huge residential development of hundreds of identical townhouse blocks laid out in a strict grid for a long distance in every direction, providing housing for hundreds of thousands of people.  I got a call from a boy who lived in a building adjacent to mine - that being a nontrivial distance just because the buildings were so big.

I walked over to visit him and we sat at a wooden picnic table in front of the building.  He had a newspaper page of classified ads listing opportunities for citizens to help the war effort.  He asked me about one, which was to think up names for grid squares on military maps.  I explained that the grid squares were currently identified by alphabetic codes expressing their location, but that had a lot of problems.  If they just read the names of the letters over the radio there would be confusion between letters like "M" and "N" which sound too much alike.  The boy suggested using phonetic words for the letters - like the standard "Mike" and "November." I explained that they'd tried that but it still led to confusion because with a grid square with repeated letters like "MMMMMM" people could lose count while reading it.  He asked why not just use computers to send the message in some kind of unambiguous code and have it appear on soldiers' electronic maps automatically.  The problem there would be that there were too many different kinds of computers in use in the military, so there'd be too much compatibility trouble even for soldiers who actually had computerized radios; and many of them didn't.  So it was necessary to give the grid squares names as such, that humans could handle without needing much technology.

Suddenly we heard a lot of sirens and banging and crashing noises that started all at once and kept going.  I knew that something terrible was happening and I had to hurry back home.  It was hard to find my way because it was night and all the buildings looked the same, and the residential complex was being locked down and fortified agaisnt invasion.  Already we were past the point where anyone still outdoors would be suspect.  I'm not sure I made it home at all.

People were turning into what we called "phantoms." They would become unresponsive to normal stimuli, with stupid grins on their faces, repeating a few words uncomprehendingly.  Usually it would be the last sentence they had spoken before the disease or curse or whatever it was struck them.  They would grab onto long, thin objects such as brooms, and hold those against their chests with their arms folded, standing in place or walking around aimlessley, and swivelling from side to side so that the sticks would flail around striking nearby people and objects.  The phantoms' appearance and behaviour were very much like that of puppets in a Punch and Judy show, now that I think of it, though I didn't notice that at the time.  Because they didn't move around much nor attack in any coordinated way, the phantoms were not very dangerous directly, but there was a lot of fear and horror in the air.  We didn't know what was causing it, we didn't know any way to prevent it, it seemed like it might be contagious, it seemed to be permanent, with the victims as good as dead, and it seemed like it might be the leading edge of something even worse.  That was why the residential complex had been locked down; to keep out the phantoms.  But people inside were turning into phantoms anyway, at random without warning.

Almost everybody had become a phantom and any possibility of keeping the place locked down was gone.  I and a few others who seemed to be immune to the effect were tying phantoms together to act as shields.  We each would stand in the middle of a cluster of seven or eight phantoms, with them shielding us on all sides.  The next wave of the invasion came in the form of new phantoms who still seemed to have no minds of their own, but were centrally controlled in some way so that they could mount a real attack.  They wore bulbous green armour over their heads and shoulders, which gave them a reptilian appearance, but it was clear they still had human bodies underneath.  They were the ones we were hiding from in our clusters of old-style phantoms.  There were long flexible ribbed black tubes hanging from the ceiling almost down to the floor, always in groups of four, with rotary cutters at the ends.  Most of the time they hung limply, but if you went too close they would become animate, grab you, cut into your head, and turn you into a new-style phantom.