Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  about this, especially not the newspapers. That’ll just bring the IRS down on you. No, you don’t need to know my name, and there’s no need to thank me. Just be kind to each other, all right? Always be kind to each other, because we never know how much time we have on this world.”

  In less than an hour, Jack gave away the entire hundred thousand that he had taken from the secret compartment in the back of his bedroom closet. With plenty of time on his hands, he bought a bouquet of coral-red roses and drove out to Westchester County, an hour from the city, to the memorial park in which Jenny had been buried over two weeks ago.

  Jack had not wanted to put her to rest in one of the city’s crowded and grim cemeteries. Although he knew he was being sentimental, he felt that the only suitable resting place for his Jenny was in open country, where there would be expansive green grassy slopes and shade trees in the summer and peaceful vistas of snow in the winter.

  He arrived at the memorial park shortly before twilight. Although the uniform headstones were set flush with the earth, with no features to distinguish one from another, and although most of them were covered with snow, Jack went directly to Jenny’s plot, the location of which was branded on his heart.

  While the dreary day faded into a drearier dusk, in a world colorless except for the blazing roses, Jack sat in the snow, oblivious of the dampness and cold, and spoke to Jenny as he had spoken to her during her years in a coma. He told her about the Guardmaster heist yesterday, about giving away all the money. As the curtain of twilight pulled down the heavier drape of night, the memorial park’s security guard began driving slowly around the grounds, warning the few late visitors that the gates would soon close. Finally Jack stood and took one last look at Jenny’s name cast in bronze letters on the headstone plaque, now illuminated by the vaguely bluish light of one of the streetlamps that lined the park’s main drive. “I’m changing, Jenny, and I’m still not sure why. It feels good, right ... but also sort of strange.” What he said next surprised him: “Something big is going to happen, Jenny. I don’t know what, but something big is going to happen to me.” He suddenly sensed that his newfound guilt and subsequent peace with society were only the beginning steps of a great journey that would take him places he could not yet imagine. “Something big is going to happen,” he repeated, “and I sure wish you were here with me, Jenny.”

  The blue Nevada sky had been armoring itself with dark storm clouds ever since Ernie, Ned, and Dom had begun boarding up the diner’s broken windows. Hours later, when Dom drove his rental car to the Elko airport to pick up Ginger Weiss, the world turned under a gloomy light, girdled in battlefield gray. He was too restless to wait inside the small terminal. He stood on the windswept tarmac, huddled in his heavy winter jacket, so he heard the twin engines of the ten-seat commuter craft even before he saw it descend through the low clouds. The roar of the engines contributed to the mood of impending warfare, and Dom realized uneasily that, in a sense, they were assembling their army; war against their unknown enemy loomed nearer day by day.

  The plane taxied within eighty feet of the terminal, and Dr. Weiss was the fourth passenger to disembark. Even in a bulky, thoroughly unattractive carcoat, she looked petite and beautiful. The wind made a streaming banner of her silky silver-blond hair.

  Dom hurried toward her; she stopped and put down her bags. They hesitated, staring at each other in silence, with a peculiar mixture of amazement, excitement, pleasure, and apprehension. Then with an impulsiveness that obviously surprised her as much as it did him, they virtually threw themselves at each other, embracing as if they were old and dear friends too long apart. Dom held her close, and she held him tightly, and he felt her heart pounding as hard and as fast as his.

  What the hell is happening here? he wondered.

  But he was in too much turmoil to analyze the situation. For the moment, he could feel but not think.

  Neither of them wanted to let go, and when they finally separated, neither could speak. She tried to say something, but her voice cracked with emotion, and Dom was incoherent. So she picked up one of her bags, and he picked up the other, and they went out to the parking lot.

  In the car, with the engine running and the heater blowing warm air in their faces, Ginger said, “What was that all about?”

  Still shaken, but curiously not embarrassed by the bold greeting he had given her, Dom cleared his throat. “Don’t really know. But I think maybe, together, you and I went through something so shattering that the experience created a special bond between us, a powerful bond we weren’t entirely aware of until we saw each other in the flesh.”

  “When I first came across your picture on the book jacket, it had a very odd effect on me, but nothing like this. Stepping off the plane, seeing you there ... it was as if we’d known each other all our lives. No, not exactly that. More precisely ... it was as if we’d known each other far better, more completely, than we’d ever known anyone else, as if we shared some tremendous secret that all the world might want to know but that only we possessed. Does that sound crazy?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not at all. You’ve put into words what I was feeling ... as nearly as words can explain it.”

  “You’ve met some of the others,” Ginger said. “Was it like this when you first encountered them?”

  “No. I instantly felt ... a certain warmth toward them, a strong sense of community, but nothing a fraction as powerful as what I felt when you got off that plane. All of us went through something unusual that linked our lives, our futures, but evidently you and I shared an experience even stranger and more affecting than anything we shared with them. Damn. It’s as layered as an onion, one strangeness on another.”

  For half an hour they sat in the car, in the airport parking lot, talking. Outside, cars and pickups came and went around them, and the January wind buffeted the Chevy and moaned at the windows; however, they were seldom aware of anything but each other.

  She told him about her fugues, the hypnotic regression sessions with Pablo Jackson, and the mind-control technique known as the Azrael Block. She told him about Pablo’s murder and her own narrow escape.

  Although, clearly, Ginger sought neither sympathy for her suffering nor praise for the way she had handled herself in trying circumstances, Dom’s respect and admiration for her grew by the minute. She was only five-two, a hundred pounds, but somehow she had a physical presence more imposing than many men twice her size.

  Dom recounted the events of the past twenty-four hours, and when Ginger heard about his dream of the previous night and about the new memories that surfaced in it, she appeared immensely relieved. In Dom’s dream, there was proof of Pablo Jackson’s theory: Her fugues were not caused by mental aberration; they were, instead, always triggered by objects associated with her imprisonment at the motel two summers ago. The black gloves and dark-visored helmet had terrified her because they made a direct connection with the repressed memories of the people in decontamination suits who tended her while she underwent brainwashing. The drain in the hospital scrub sink threw the panic switch because she probably had been one of those “detainees” poisoned by Colonel Falkirk (whoever the hell he was), then forced to vomit up the deadly substance, just as Dom had been. While strapped in the motel bed, she must have undergone many eye examinations to determine the depth of her drug-induced trance, which was why an ophthalmoscope had sent her reeling away in a dark terror that night in George Hannaby’s office. Dom saw a relaxation of the tension at this irrefutable evidence that her blackouts were not a sign of madness and were, in fact, a desperate but entirely rational method of avoiding the repressed memories that the mind-control experts had forbidden her to recall.

  She said, “But what about the brass buttons on the coat of the man who killed Pablo? And on the policeman’s uniform? Why did they terrify me and throw me into a fugue?”

  “We know the military is involved in this cover-up,” Dom said, turning up the heater to counteract the cold air pouring off t
he car’s wind-buffeted windows, “and officers’ uniforms have.brass buttons like that, though not a lion passant. Most likely ... raised images of eagles. The buttons on the killer’s and cop’s coats were probably similar to the buttons on the uniforms of those who imprisoned us in the motel.”

  “Okay, but you said they wore decontamination suits, not uniforms.”

  “Maybe they didn’t wear the decon suits for the entire three and a half days. At some point they decided it was safe to take them off.”

  She nodded. “I’m sure that’s right. Which leaves only one thing. Those carriage lamps behind the house on Newbury Street, the day Pablo was murdered. I told you about them: black iron with pebbled amber panes of glass. They had those bulbs that flickered like a gas flame. Perfectly innocent lamps. But they kicked me into another blackout.”

  “The bases of the lamps in the rooms at the Tranquility Motel are designed like hurricane lamps, with little windows of amber glass.”

  “I’ll be damned. So every blackout was triggered by an object that reminded me of something from those days when I was being brainwashed.”

  Dom hesitated, then reached inside his sweater and withdrew the Polaroid photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  She paled and shuddered when she saw herself staring up with vacant eyes at the camera. “Gevalt!” She looked away from the picture.

  Dom gave her time to recover from the shock of the snapshot.

  Outside, in the fading dirty-gray light, a score of vehicles waited silently like dark, dumb, brooding beasts. The wind harried collections of litter, dead leaves, and miscellaneous debris across the macadam.

  “It’s meshugge,” she said, lowering her troubled gaze to the photo again. “It’s crazy. What could possibly have happened to us that would justify this elaborate, risky conspiracy? What could we have seen that was so dreadfully goddamned important?”

  “We’ll find out,” he promised.

  “Will we? Will they let us? They killed Pablo. Won’t they do whatever’s necessary to keep us from uncovering the truth?”

  Adjusting the heater again, Dom said, “Well, I figure there’re two factions among the conspirators. There are the hard-asses represented by Colonel Falkirk and his people, and the better guys—can’t call them good guys exactly—represented by the fella who sent us these snapshots and by the two men in decontamination suits in my dream last night. The hard-asses wanted to kill all of us right at the start, so there’d never be any doubt that the cover-up would be permanent. But the better guys wanted to scrub our memories, use mind-control techniques instead of violence, so we could go on living, and the better guys must be the stronger of the two factions because they got their way.”

  “The gunman who killed Pablo was most likely one of the hard-asses.”

  “Yeah. Working for Falkirk. The colonel’s evidently still willing to kill anyone who jeopardizes the cover-up, which means none of us is safe. But there’s the other faction that doesn’t believe in Falkirk’s ultimate solution, and they’re still trying to protect us, I think. So we have a chance. Anyway, we can’t walk away. We can’t go home and try to get on with our lives just because the enemy looks formidable.”

  “No,” Ginger agreed, “we can’t. Because until we find out what happened, we don’t really have lives to get on with.” The wind blew withered leaves against the windshield, over the roof. Ginger swept the parking lot with her gaze. “They must know we’re gathering at the motel, that things are falling apart. Do you think they’re watching us now?”

  “Very likely they’ve got the motel under surveillance,” Dom said. “But no one followed me to the airport. I watched for a tail.”

  “They wouldn’t need to tail you here,” she said grimly. “They knew where you were going. They knew who you were picking up.”

  “Are we laboring under a delusion of free will? Are we only bugs on a giant’s palm, and can the giant crush us whenever he wants?”

  “Maybe,” Ginger Weiss said. “But by God, we can at least give him a couple of nasty bites before he smashes us.”

  She spoke with a fierce determination that was convincing but also amusing in the context of a metaphor as basically comic as a giant and a bunch of bugs. Though he was pleased by her fierce resolution in the face of such overwhelmingly poor odds, Dom could not help laughing.

  Blinking at him in surprise, she laughed too. “Hey, am I spunky, or what? Might be smashed by a giant, but I feel triumphant ’cause I’ll be able to bite him just before he reduces me to a bloody smear.”

  “Spunky should be your middle name,” Dom agreed, laughing harder.

  As he watched Ginger laughing at her own expense, Dom was again stricken by her beauty. His response to her, on seeing her disembark from the plane, had been instant and powerful because of unremembered experiences they shared. But even if they had been complete strangers whose lives had never crossed, he would have felt something more at the sight of her than he felt when he saw other beautiful women. Under any circumstances, she would have turned his head. She was special.

  He drew a deep breath. “Shall I take you to meet the others?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, dabbing her slender fingers at the corners of her eyes to wipe away tears that her graveyard laughter had occasioned. “Yes, I’m eager to meet them. The other bugs on the giant’s hand.”

  Less than half an hour before nightfall, the shadows on the high plains were long, and the muddy gray light of the overcast dusk lent an air of mystery even to such ordinary objects as clumps of sagebrush, rock formations, and twisted mounds of dead brown bunch-grass.

  Before taking her to the motel, Dom Corvaisis had brought Ginger to what he called “the special place,” more than two hundred yards south of Interstate 80. The wind rustled half-seen vegetation. The ice on the grass and sagebrush, when glimpsed at all, looked black, shiny black.

  The writer stood away from her, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, silent. He had told her that he did not want to influence her reaction to the place or color her first feelings with a description of his own.

  Ginger wandered slowly back and forth, feeling slightly foolish, as if taking part in a half-baked experiment in psychic perception, seeking clairvoyant vibrations. But she quickly stopped feeling foolish when the vibrations actually began to shake her. A queer uneasiness arose, and she found herself staying away from the deeper pockets of shadows, as if something hostile lurked in them. Her heart pounded. Uneasiness became fear, and she heard the tempo of her breathing change.

  “It’s inside me. It’s inside me.”

  She whirled toward that voice. It was Dom’s voice, but it had not come from him. The words had been spoken behind her. But no one was there: only dry sagebrush and a thin patch of snow glowing softly, luminously within a nest of shadows.

  “What’s the matter?” Dom asked, moving toward her.

  She was wrong. Dom’s other voice, the ghostly-sounding voice, had not come from behind her. It had come from within her. She heard that other Dom again, and she realized she was hearing a fragment of memory, an echo from the past, something he had said to her that Friday night, July 6, perhaps when they had both stood in this same place. The scrap of memory came with no visual or olfactory element because it was part of the events locked behind the Azrael Block. There were just those three urgent words repeated twice: “It’s inside me. It’s inside me.”

  Abruptly, her simmering fear flashed bright. The landscape around her seemed to embody a nameless but monstrous threat. She started back toward the highway, walking fast, and Dom asked what was wrong, and she walked even faster, unable to answer because fear was like a paste in her mouth and throat. He called her name, and she began to run. Every object in sight seemed to have been wounded on its eastern flank, for black blood-shadows spilled in that direction.

  She was not able to speak until they were back in the Chevy, with the doors locked, the engine running, and the heater blowing warm air on her chilled f
ace. Shakily, she told him about the nameless threat she had felt on that ordinary-looking piece of ground, and about the memory of his urgent voice and the three-word sentence.

  “‘It’s inside me,’ ” he said thoughtfully. “You’re sure it’s really something I said to you that night?”

  “Yes.” She shivered.

  “‘It’s inside me.’ What in the world did I mean by that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ginger said. “But it gives me the creeps.”

  He was silent a moment. Then he said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

  That evening, at the motel, Ginger Weiss felt almost as if she was with her family on a holiday gathering like Thanksgiving. In spite of the difficulties in which they found themselves, their spirits were high; for in the manner of a real family, they drew strength from one another. The six of them crowded into the kitchen and prepared dinner together, and through that domestic labor, Ginger got to know the others better and felt a strengthening of the ties that bound her to them.

  Ned Sarver, being a professional cook, prepared the main dish—chicken breasts baked in a spicy green tomatillo sauce with sour cream. Initially, Ginger mistakenly thought Ned was a brooding, unfriendly sort, but she soon changed her opinion. Taciturnity sometimes could be a sign of a healthy ego that did not require constant gratification, which was the case with Ned. Besides, Ginger could not help but like a man who loved his wife as deeply as Ned loved Sandy, a love apparent in every word he spoke to her, in every glance he cast her way.

  Sandy, the only one of them to be affected only positively by their mysterious ordeal, was so sweet-tempered, so delighted with the recent changes in herself, that she was especially good company. Together, she and Ginger prepared the dinner salad and vegetables, and as they worked, an almost sisterly affection developed between them.

  Faye Block made the dessert, a refrigerator pie with a chocolate crust and banana-cream filling. Ginger liked Faye, who reminded her of Rita Hannaby. That cultured society woman was different from Faye in many ways, but in fundamental respects they were alike: efficient, take-charge types, tough of mind, tender of spirit.

  Ernie Block and Dom Corvaisis put the extra leaf in the table and arranged six place settings. Ernie had seemed gruff and intimidating at first, but now she saw he was a sweetheart. He inspired much affection because of his fear of darkness, which made him seem boyish in spite of his size and age.

  Of the five people among whom Ginger found herself, only Dominick Corvaisis stirred emotions that she could not understand. For him, she felt the same friendship that she felt for the others, and she was aware of a special bond between them related to an unremembered experience just the two of them had shared. But she was also sexually attracted to him. That surprised her because she never felt desire for a man until she knew him for several weeks, at least, and knew him well. Wary of her romantic yearnings, Ginger kept a tight rein on her emotions, and she tried hard to convince herself that Dom did not feel a similar attraction for her, which he so patently did.

  Through dinner, the six of them continued to discuss their strange predicament and search for clues that might have been overlooked.

  Like Dom, Ginger had no recollection of the toxic spill two years ago, though the Blocks and Sarvers recalled it clearly. 1-80 had really been closed, and an environmental emergency had been declared; there was no doubt about that much. Last night, however, Dom convinced the Blocks that their memories of evacuating to Elroy and Nancy Jamison’s mountain ranch were phony and that both they and the Jamisons had almost surely been kept at the motel. (According to Faye and Ernie, the Jamisons had not mentioned having any nightmares or odd problems lately, so their brainwashing must have been effective, though it would be necessary to talk to them soon.) Likewise, Ned and Sandy had reluctantly concluded that their own recollections of sitting out the crisis at their trailer were too shallow to be real and that they had been strapped into motel beds, drugged, and brainwashed like everyone else in those Polaroids.

  “But,” Faye wondered, “why wouldn’t they give us all approximately the same false memories?”

  Ginger said, “Maybe all you locals have had the toxic spill and the highway closure woven into your false memories. That’d be necessary because, later, people would be asking you where you went during the emergency, and you’d have to know what they were talking about. But Dom and I are from distant places, unlikely ever to return, unlikely to run into anyone who would know that we’d been within the quarantine zone, so they didn’t bother including that bit of reality in the set of fake memories they gave us.”

  Sandy paused with a morsel of chicken on her fork. “But wouldn’t it be safer and easier to make your memories fit the toxic spill, too?”

  “Ever since Pablo Jackson helped me discover that my mind had been tampered with,” Ginger said, “I’ve been reading about brainwashing, and I think maybe it’s a lot less difficult to implant recollections that are entirely false than it is to weave in threads of reality such as the environmental emergency and the road closure. It probably takes a lot longer to construct fake memories that have some reality to them, and maybe they simply didn’t have time to do that with all of us. So they gave the super-deluxe brainwashing job only to you locals.”

  “That feels like the truth,” Ernie said, and everyone agreed.

  Faye said, “But did the toxic spill really happen, or was it just a cover story that gave them an excuse to close 1-80 and bottle us up, a way of preventing us from talking about what we’d seen Friday night?”

  “I suspect there was contamination of some sort,” Ginger said. “In Dom’s nightmare, which we know is really more memory than dream, those men were wearing decontamination suits. Now, when they came into the quarantine zone, maybe they’d wear costumes like that for the benefit of news-men or other onlookers. But once here, where only we could see them, they wouldn’t keep the suits on unless they absolutely had to.”

  Glancing uneasily at the blind-covered window nearest the table, as if he thought he had seen a trickle of darkness dribbling in from the night beyond, Ernie cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, uh ... well, which was it, do you think? You’re the doctor. Does it sound like chemical or biological contamination? The story they gave the media was that it involved chemicals being delivered to Shenkfield’s testing facilities.”

  Ginger had been thinking about this question for some time, long before Ernie asked it. Chemical or biological contamination? She had arrived at an answer that deeply disturbed her. “Generally speaking, the suits required for a chemical spill don’t have to be air-tight. They just have to cover the worker from head to toe in order to prevent any caustic or toxic substance from coming into contact with his skin, and they have to include a respirator, rather like a scuba diver’s tank and mask, so he won’t breathe deadly fumes. They’re usually made of lightweight nonporous cloth, and the headgear consists of a simple cloth hood with a plastic visor. But Dom described heavy-looking suits with an outer level of thick vinyl, with gloves that were of one piece with the sleeves, and a hard helmet that locked into an airtight seal at the collar. That is unquestionably gear that’s been designed to prevent exposure to a dangerous biological agent, microbes.”

  For a while no one said a word, pondering this disquieting news.

  Then Ned took a long swallow of his Heineken for fortification and said, “So we must’ve been infected with something.”

  Faye said, “Some virus they developed for biological warfare.”

  “If it was headed for Shenkfield, that’s the only kind of bug it could’ve been,” Ernie said. “Something mean.”

  “Yet we lived,” Sandy said.

  “Because they were immediately able to quarantine us and treat us,” Ginger