Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  effect. I have a hunch ... if we’re ever going to find out what happened to us—what’s still happening—we’re going to have to dig into the activities up on Thunder Hill.”

  They were all silent. Though everyone was finished with dinner, no one was ready for dessert. Marcie was using her spoon to draw circles in the greasy residue of turkey gravy on her plate, creating fluid and temporary moon-forms. No one moved to clear away the dirty dishes, for at this point in the discussion, no one wanted to miss a word. They were at the crux of their dilemma: How were they to move against enemies as mighty as the U.S. Government and Army? How were they to penetrate an iron wall of secrecy that had been forged in the name of national security, with the full power of the state and the law behind it?

  “We’ve put together enough to go public,” Jorja Monatella said. “The deaths of Zebediah Lomack and Alan, the murder of Pablo Jackson. The similar nightmares that many of you have shared. The Polaroids. It’s the kind of sensational stuff the media thrives on. If we let the world know what we think happened to us, we’ll have the power of the press and public opinion on our side. We won’t be alone.”

  “No good,” Ernie said. “That kind of pressure’ll just make the military stonewall like hell. They’ll construct an even more confusing and impenetrable cover-up. They don’t crack under pressure the way politicians do. On the other hand, as long as they see us stumbling around on our own, fumbling for explanations, they’ll be confident—which might give us time to probe for their weak spots.”

  “And don’t forget,” Ginger warned, “apparently Colonel Falkirk advocated killing us instead of just blocking our memories, and we’ve no reason to believe he’s mellowed since then. He was obviously overruled, but if we tried to go public, he might be able to persuade his superiors that a final solution is required, after all.”

  “But even if it’s dangerous, maybe we’ve got to go public,” Sandy said. “Maybe Jorja’s right. I mean, there’s no way we can get inside the Thunder Hill Depository to see what’s going on. They’ve got lots of security and a pair of blast-doors built to take a nuclear hit.”

  Dom said, “Well, it’s like Ernie told us ... we’ll have to just stay loose and search for their weaknesses until we find a way.”

  “But it looks like they don’t have any weaknesses,” Sandy said.

  “Their cover-up has been falling apart ever since they brainwashed us and let us go,” Ginger said. “Each time one of us remembers another detail, that’s another gaping hole in their cover-up.”

  “Yeah,” Ned said, “but seems to me they’re in a better position to keep patching the holes than we are to keep poking new ones.”

  “Let’s can the goddamn negative thinking,” Ernie said gruffly.

  Smiling beatifically, Brendan Cronin said, “He’s right. We must not be negative. We need not be negative because we’re meant to win.” His voice was again infused with the eerie serenity and certitude which arose from his belief that the revelation of their special fate was inevitable. At moments like this, however, the priest’s tone and manner did not comfort Dom, as they were meant to but, for some odd reason, stirred up a sediment of fear and muddied his emotions with anxiety.

  “How many men are stationed at Thunder Hill?” Jorja asked.

  Before Dom or Ginger could respond with information they’d gleaned from the Sentinel, a stranger appeared in the doorway at the head of the stairs that led up from the motel office. He was in his late thirties, lean and tough-looking, dark-haired, dark-complexioned, with a crooked left eye that was not coordinated with his right. Though the downstairs door was locked, and although the linoleum on the stairs did nothing to quiet ascending footsteps, the intruder appeared with magical silence, as if he were not a real man but an ectoplasmic visitation.

  “For God’s sake, shut up,” he said, sounding every bit as real as anyone else in the room. “If you think you can plot in privacy here, you’re badly mistaken.”

  Eighteen miles southwest of the Tranquility Motel, at Shenkfield Army Testing Grounds, all the buildings—laboratories, administration offices, security command center, cafeteria, recreation lounge, and living quarters—were underground. In the blazing summers on the edge of the high desert and in the occasionally bitter winters, it was easier and more economical to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity level in underground rooms than in structures erected on the less-than-hospitable Nevada barrens. But a more important consideration was the frequent open-air testing of chemical—and occasionally even biological—weapons. The tests were conducted to study the effects of sunlight, wind, and other natural forces on the distribution patterns and potency of those deadly gases, powders, and superdiffusible mists. If the buildings were aboveground, any unexpected shift in the wind would contaminate them, making unwilling guinea pigs of base personnel.

  No matter how involved they became in work or leisure, the staff of Shenkfield never forgot they were beneath the earth, for they had two constant reminders of their condition: the lack of windows; plus the susurration of the piped-in air coming through the wall vents, and the echoing hum of the motors that fanned the air along the pipes.

  Sitting alone at a metal desk in the office to which he had been temporarily assigned, waiting impatiently and worriedly for the phone to ring, Colonel Leland Falkirk thought: God, I hate this place!

  The never-ending whine and hiss of the air-supply system gave him a headache. Since his arrival on Saturday, Falkirk had been eating aspirin as though they were candy. Now he tipped two more out of a small bottle. He poured a glass of ice-water from the metal carafe that stood on the desk, but he did not use it to wash down the pills. Instead, he popped the dry aspirin into his mouth and chewed them.

  The taste was bitter, disgusting, and he almost gagged.

  But he did not reach for the water.

  He did not spit out the aspirin, either.

  He persevered.

  A lonely, miserable childhood filled with uncertainty and pain, followed by an even worse adolescence, had taught Leland Falkirk that life was hard, cruel, and utterly unjust, that only fools believed in hope or salvation, and that only the tough survived. From an early age, he had forced himself to do things that were emotionally, mentally, and physically painful, for he had decided that self-inflicted pain would toughen him and make him less vulnerable. He tempered the steel of his will with challenges that ranged from chewing dry aspirin to major tests like the outings that he called “desperation survival treks.” Those expeditions lasted two weeks or longer, and they put him face-to-face with death. He parachuted into a forest or jungle wilderness, far from the nearest outpost, without supplies, with only the clothes on his back. He carried no compass or matches. His only weapons were his bare hands and what he could fashion with them. The goal: reach civilization alive. He spent many vacations in that self-imposed suffering, which he judged worthwhile because he came back a harder and more self-reliant man than he’d been at the start of each adventure.

  Now he crunched dry aspirin. The tablets were reduced to powder, and the powder turned his saliva to an acidic paste.

  “Ring, damn you,” he said to the telephone on the desk. He was hoping for news that would get him out of this hole in the ground.

  In DERO, the Domestic Emergency Response Organization, a colonel was less a desk-jockey and more a field officer than in any other branch of the Army. Falkirk’s home base was in Grand Junction, Colorado, not Shenkfield, but even in Colorado, he spent little time in his office. He thrived on the physical demands of the job, so the low-ceilinged, windowless rooms of Shenkfield felt like a many-chambered coffin.

  If he had been engaged upon any mission but this one, he might have established temporary unit headquarters up at Thunder Hill Depository. That place was also underground but its caves were huge, high-ceilinged, not like these tomb-sized rooms.

  But there were two reasons he had to keep his men away from Thunder Hill. First, he dared not draw attention to the
place because of the secret it harbored. Several ranchers lived in the highlands along the road leading to the gated Thunder Hill turnoff. If they spotted a fully equipped DERO company moving into the Depository, they’d speculate about it. Locals must not start wondering about Thunder Hill. Two summers ago, he’d used Shenkfield as a red herring to divert attention from the Depository. Now, with another crisis building, he would stay here at Shenkfield again, so he would be in position to spread the same kind of disinformation to the press and public that he’d spread before. The second reason he set up HQ at Shenkfield was because he had certain dark suspicions about everyone in the Depository: He trusted none of them, would not feel safe among them. They might be ... changed.

  The residue of crushed aspirin had been in his mouth so long that he had adjusted to the bitter taste. He was no longer sickened, no longer had to struggle against the gag reflex, so it was all right to drink the water now. He drained the glass in four swallows.

  Leland Falkirk suddenly wondered if he had crossed the line that separated the constructive use of pain from the enjoyment of it. Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer: Yes, to some degree, he had become a masochist. Years ago. He was a very well-disciplined masochist, one who benefited from the pain he inflicted on himself, one who controlled the pain instead of letting it control him, but a masochist nonetheless. At first he subjected himself to pain strictly to make himself tough. But along the way, he began to enjoy it, too. That insight left him blinking in surprise at the empty water-glass.

  An outrageous image formed in his mind: himself more than a decade from now, a sixty-year-old pervert sticking bamboo shoots under his fingernails every morning for the thrill and to get his heart running. That grotesque picture was grim. It was also funny, and he laughed.

  As recently as a year ago, Leland would not have been capable of self-critical insights of this nature. He had never been much of a laugher, either. Until recently. Lately, he was not merely noticing—and being amused by—traits in himself that he had never noticed before, but he was also becoming aware that he could and should change some of his attitudes and habits. He saw that he could become a better and more satisfied person, without losing the toughness he prized. This was a strange state of mind for him, but he knew the cause of it. After what had happened to him two summers ago, after all the things that he had seen, and considering what was happening right now up at Thunder Hill, he could not possibly go on with his life exactly as before.

  The telephone rang. He grabbed it, hoping it was news about the situation in Chicago. But it was Henderson from Monterey, California, reporting that the operation at the Salcoe house was going smoothly.

  The summer before last, Gerald Salcoe, with his wife and two daughters, rented a pair of rooms at the Tranquility Motel. On the wrong night. Recently, all of the Salcoes had experienced marked deterioration of their memory blocks.

  The CIA’s experts in brainwashing, who were usually used only in covert foreign operations, had been borrowed for the Tranquility job that July and had promised to repress witnesses’ memories without fail; now they were embarrassed by the number of subjects whose conditioning was breaking down. The experience these people had undergone was too profound and shattering to be easily repressed; the forbidden memories possessed mythopoeic power and exerted relentless pressure on the memory blocks. The mind-control experts now claimed that another three-day session with the subjects would guarantee their eternal silence.

  In fact, the FBI and CIA, working in conjunction, were illegally holding the Salcoe family incommunicado in Monterey at this very moment, putting them through another intricate program of memory repression and alteration. Although Cory Henderson, the FBI agent on the phone, claimed it was going well, Leland decided it was a lost cause. This was one secret that could not be kept.

  Besides, too many agencies were involved: FBI, CIA, one entire DERO company, others. Which made too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

  But Leland was a good soldier. In charge of the military side of the operation, he’d carry out his assignment even if it was hopeless.

  In Monterey, Henderson said, “When are you moving in on the other witnesses at the motel?”

  That was the word they used for everyone who had been brainwashed that July—witnesses. Leland thought it was apt, for in addition to its obvious meaning, it also embodied mystical and religious overtones. He remembered, as a child, being taken to tent revivals at which scores of Holy Rollers writhed upon the floor while the raving minister screamed at them to “be a witness to the miraculous, be a heartfelt witness for the Lord!” Well, what the witnesses at the Tranquility Motel had seen was every bit as paralyzing, amazing, humbling, and terrifying as the face of God that those spasming Pentecostals had longed to see.

  To Henderson, Leland said, “We’re standing by, ready to seal off the motel with half an hour’s notice. But I’m not giving the go-ahead until someone straightens out the mess in Chicago with Calvin Sharkle. Not until I know for sure what’s going on out in Illinois.”

  “What a screwup! Why was the situation with Sharkle allowed to deteriorate so far? He should’ve been grabbed, put into a new memory-repression program days ago, like we’ve done with the Salcoes here.”

  “Wasn’t my screwup,” Leland said. “Your Bureau is in charge of monitoring the witnesses. I only come in and mop up after you.”

  Henderson sighed. “I wasn’t trying to shift the blame to your men, Colonel. And hell, you can’t blame us, either. The trouble is, even though we’re only doing visual surveillance of each witness four days a month and listening to only about half the tapes of their phone calls, we need twenty-five agents. But we only have twenty. Besides, the damn case is so highly classified that only three of the twenty know why the witnesses have to be watched. A good agent doesn’t like being kept in the dark like that. Makes him feel he’s not trusted. Makes him sloppy. So you get a situation like this Sharkle: The witness starts breaking through his memory block, and nobody notices until it’s at crisis stage. Why’d we ever think we could maintain such an elaborate deception for an unlimited length of time? Nuts. I’ll tell you what our problem was: We believed the CIA’s brain-scrubbers. We believed those motherfuckers could do what they said they could do. That was our mistake, Colonel.”

  “I always said there was a simpler solution,” Leland reminded him.

  “Kill them all? Kill thirty-one of our own citizens just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “I wasn’t proposing it seriously. My point was that, short of barbarism, we couldn’t contain the secret and shouldn’t have tried.”

  Henderson’s silence made it clear he did not believe Leland’s disclaimer. Finally: “You will move on the motel tonight?”

  “If the Chicago situation clears up, if I can figure what’s going on there, we’ll move tonight. But there’re questions need answers. These strange ... psychic phenomena. What’s it mean? We both have ideas, don’t we? And we’re scared puke-sick. No, sir, I’m not moving against the motel and jeopardizing my men until I understand the situation.”

  Leland hung up.

  Thunder Hill. He wanted to believe that what was happening up in the mountains would lead to a better future than mankind deserved. But in his heart he was afraid it was, instead, the end of the world.

  When Jack stepped into the living room—which they had converted to a dining room—and spoke to the group, some gasped in surprise and started to rise, bumping the table in their eagerness to turn around, sending up a clatter of dishes and flatware. Others flinched in their chairs as if they thought he had been sent to kill them. He’d left the Uzi downstairs to avoid causing just such a panic, but his unexpected arrival still scared them. Good. They needed a nasty shock to make them more cautious. Only the little girl, playing in her gravy-smeared plate with a spoon, did not react to his arrival.

  “All right, okay, be calm. Sit down, sit,” Jack said, gesturing impatiently. “I’m on
e of you. That night, I registered at the motel as Thornton Wainwright. Which is how you’ve probably been looking for me. But that’s not my real name. We’ll get into that later. For now—”

  Suddenly, everyone was excitedly pitching questions at him.

  “Where did you—”

  “—scared the bejesus—”

  “How did you—”

  “—tell us if—”

  Raising his voice enough to silence them, Jack said, “This isn’t the place to discuss these things. You can be heard here, for God’s sake. I’ve been eavesdropping for nearly an hour. And if I can listen in on everything you say, then so can the people you’re pitted against.”

  They stared dumbly at him, startled by his assertion that their privacy was an illusion. Then a big, blocky man with gray brush-cut hair said, “Are you telling us these rooms are bugged? ’Cause I find that hard to believe. I mean, I’ve searched, you know; I’ve checked, found nothing. And I’ve had some experience in these matters.”

  “You must be Ernie,” Jack said, speaking in a sharp cold tone of voice meant to keep them on edge and get his message through to them. They had to understand, right away, that their conversations must be far better guarded, and the lesson had to be driven into them so hard and deep that they would not forget it. “I heard you mention your years in Marine Intelligence, Ernie. Christ, how long ago was that? Better part of a decade, I’ll bet. Things have changed since then, man. Haven’t you heard about the high-tech revolution? Shit, they don’t need to come in here and physically plant listening devices. Rifle mikes are a hell of a lot better than they used to be. Or they can just hook up an infinity transmitter to their phone and dial your number.” Jack pushed rudely past Ernie and stepped to the living room extension, which stood on a table by the sofa. He put his hand on the phone. “You know what an infinity transmitter is, Ernie? When they dial your number here, an electric tone oscillator deactivates the bell while it simultaneously opens the microphone in your telephone handset. There’s no ringing for you to hear; you’ve no way of knowing you’ve been called, that your line’s wide open. But they can monitor you in any room where you’ve got an extension.” He plucked up the handset and held it toward them with a calculated look of scorn. “Here’s your bug. You had it installed yourself.” He slammed the handset back into the cradle.“You can bet your ass they’ve been tuning in on you a lot lately. Probably listened all through dinner. You people keep this up, you might as well just cut your own throats and save everybody a lot of trouble.”

  Jack’s caustic performance had been effective. They were stunned. He said, “Now, is there a room without windows, big enough to hold a war council? Doesn’t matter if there’s a phone; we’ll just unplug it.”

  An attractive middle-aged woman, apparently Ernie’s wife, whom Jack vaguely remembered from checking into the motel two summers ago, thought for a moment and said, “There’s the restaurant, the diner, next door.”

  “Your restaurant doesn’t have any windows?” Jack asked.

  “They were ... broken,” Ernie said. “Right now they’re boarded up.”

  “Then let’s go,” Jack said. “Let’s work out our strategy in privacy, then come back here for some of that pumpkin pie I heard you talking about. I had a lousy dinner while you people were in here eating yourselves into a stupor.”

  Jack went quickly down the stairs, confident they would follow.

  Ernie loathed the crooked-eyed bastard for five minutes. But slowly, the hatred turned to grudging respect.

  For one thing, Ernie admired the caution and stealth with which the guy had answered his own call to the Tranquility Motel. He had not just walked in like the others. He’d even brought a submachine gun.

  But as he watched “Thornton Wainwright” slip the carrying-strap of the Uzi over one shoulder and head out the front door of the motel office, Ernie was still stung by the criticism he had endured. In fact, his rage was so great he did not pause to grab a coat, as most of the others did, but plunged after the stranger, through the door and across the macadam toward the diner, keeping pace with him in order to chew him out. “Listen, what the hell’s the point of being a wise-ass? You could’ve made your point without being so goddamn snide.”

  The stranger said, “Yeah, but I couldn’t have made it as fast.”

  Ernie was about to reply when he abruptly realized he was outside, vulnerable, at night, in the dark. Halfway between the office and the diner. His lungs seemed to collapse; he could not draw the slightest wisp of breath. He made a disgustingly pitiful mewling sound.

  To Ernie’s surprise, the newcomer immediately grasped his arm, providing support, with no trace of the scorn he’d shown before. “Come on, Ernie. You’re halfway there. Lean on me, and you’ll make it.”

  Furious with himself for letting this bastard see him disabled and weak with childish fear, furious with the guy, too, for playing the Samaritan, humiliated, Ernie jerked his arm away from the helping hand.

  “Listen,” the newcomer said, “while I was eavesdropping, I heard about your problem, Ernie. I don’t pity you, and I don’t find your condition amusing. Okay? If your fear of the dark has something to do with this situation we all find ourselves in, it’s not your fault. It’s those bastards who messed with us. We need one another if we’re going to get through this thing. Lean on me. Let me help you over to the diner, where we can turn on some lights. Lean on me.”

  When the newcomer began to talk, Ernie was unable to breathe, but by the time the guy finished his spiel, Ernie had the opposite problem; he was hyperventilating. As though pulled by a magnetic force, he turned from the diner and looked southeast, out into the terrifyingly immense darkness of the barrens. And suddenly he knew the darkness itself was not what he feared, but something that had been out there on the night of July 6, that bad summer. He was looking toward that special place along the highway, where they had gone yesterday to commune with the land in search of clues. That strange place.

  Faye had arrived, and Ernie had not shaken loose of her when she had taken hold of him. But now the crooked-eyed man tried to take his arm again, and he was still angry enough to reject that assistance.

  “Okay, okay,” the guy said. “You’re a bull-headed old Leatherneck bastard, and it’s going to take your hurt pride a while to heal. If you want to be a thick-skulled mule, go ahead, stay pissed at me. It was only your blind anger that got you this far into the dark, wasn’t it? Sure as hell wasn’t Marine backbone. Just dumb blind anger. So if you stay pissed at me, maybe you’ll be able to get to the diner.”

  Ernie knew the crooked-eyed man was cleverly taunting him into completing the trip to the Tranquility Grille, that he was not really being cruel. Hate me enough, the guy was saying, and you’ll fear the darkness less. Focus on me, Ernie, and take one step at a time. This was not much different than taking the guy’s arm and leaning on it, and if Ernie had not been scared half to death by the surging night on all sides of him, he would have been amused at being conned this way. But he held fast to his anger, fanned the flames of it, and used it to light his way to the diner. He stepped through the door after the newcomer, and sighed with relief when the lights came on.

  “It’s freezing in here,” Faye said. She went directly to the thermostat to switch on the oil furnace.

  Sitting in a chair in the center of the room, his back to the door, Ernie recuperated from his ordeal as the others entered behind him. He watched the crooked-eyed newcomer moving from window to window, checking the plyboard slabs that had been nailed up to replace the shattered glass. And that was when, to Ernie’s surprise, he realized he no longer loathed the guy, merely harbored an extreme dislike for him.

  The newcomer examined the payphone near the door. Being a coin-operated unit, it did not unplug, so he lifted the receiver, tore the cord free of the wall-mounted box, and threw the useless handset aside.

  “There’s a private phone back of the counter,” Ned said.

  The newcomer told h
im to unplug it, and Ned obliged.