Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  weather,” Ernie explained. “But up beyond the Depository, the road crews don’t do as thorough a job.”

  In no time they had gone ten miles, always following the crest of the valley that fell away on the east, and always with rising mountains on the west. They passed several dirt and gravel lanes leading to isolated homes and ranches in the eastward-sloping lands to their right, and at the ten-mile point they reached the guarded entrance road to Thunder Hill Depository, also on the right.

  Ernie slowed the Cherokee but did not turn into the entranceway. “Haven’t been this far up here in a long time. They’ve made changes since I saw the place last. Didn’t used to look this formidable.”

  A sign announced the Depository. Beside the sign another paved road branched off the county lane, leading away between towering pines of such a dark-green hue they seemed nearly black in the somber prestorm light. Fifteen feet in from the turnoff, the lane was blocked by long metal spikes that speared up from the pavement, precisely angled to puncture the tires of any vehicle that tried to proceed farther, but also large enough to catch on the axle of a hurtling truck or car and instantly arrest its progress. Twenty feet beyond the spikes, there was a massive steel gate, crowned with spears, painted red. A concrete-block guardhouse—twenty feet by ten—stood inside the gate, and its black metal door looked capable of withstanding a bazooka barrage.

  Ernie pulled to the edge of the main road and slowed almost to a full stop as they eased past the entrance to Thunder Hill. He pointed to a yard-square post at the verge of the entrance lane, just this side of the wicked spikes. “Looks like an intercom to the guardhouse. Not just a voice link, either. One of those systems like they have in drive-in banks, with a video monitor so they can see you in your car. The man in the guardhouse approves a visitor before the road spikes lower and the gate opens. Even then, I’ll bet there’re permanently emplaced machine guns to take you out if the guard decides he’s been duped after he’s already opened the gates.”

  From each end of the gate, an eight-foot-high chainlink fence with a barbed-wire overhang disappeared into the trees, and Dom noted a white sign with red lettering that warned DANGER—ELECTRIFIED. Although the perimeter fence led into the forest, no trees overhung it; from the small sections that he could see flanking the main gate, there appeared to be a twenty-foot-wide no-man’s-land on each side.

  Dom’s good mood faded. He’d thought that the security along the perimeter of the facility would be minimal. After all, once you got onto the grounds, the actual entrance to Thunder Hill was through eight- or ten-foot-thick blast doors set in the hillside. That barrier was so impregnable that it seemed wasteful to install maximum security around the entire outer edge of the property. Yet that was what they had done. Which meant the secret they were guarding was so important that they did not even trust nuclearproof doors and subterranean limestone vaults to keep it safe.

  “The spikes in the road are new,” Ernie said. “And the gate they had a couple of years ago was pretty flimsy by comparison. The fence was always here, but it wasn’t electrified before.”

  “We’ve no hope at all of getting a look inside.”

  Although no one had said as much (for fear of sounding foolish), they all hoped they might get as far as the blast doors of the facility, have a look around the newly expanded grounds that had been taken from ranchers Brust and Dirkson, and be fortunate enough to stumble across another piece of the puzzle they were committed to solve. Dom had never imagined they would actually get inside the underground rooms of Thunder Hill. That was an improbable scenario. But from the comfort of the Tranquility Motel, getting onto the grounds and snooping around had not seemed like an impossible dream. Until now.

  Dom wondered if his newly discovered telekinetic powers might be used to circumvent the Depository’s fortifications, but he dismissed that thought as quickly as it occurred to him. Until he could control the gift, it was of little use. It scared him. He sensed that the power was sufficient to cause tremendous destruction and death if he lost control of it, and he would not take the chance again—except under very tightly controlled conditions.

  “Well,” Ernie said, “it was never our intention to try waltzing through the front gate. Let’s have a look along some of the perimeter fence.” He touched his foot lightly on the accelerator. Looking in the rearview mirror, he said, “Oh, and by the way, we’re being followed.”

  Startled, Dom turned and looked through the rear window of the Cherokee. Less than a hundred yards behind was a pickup truck, an all-terrain job, loftily perched on tires twice as wide and more than twice as high as ordinary tires. Spotlights, currently unlit, were mounted on the roof, and a snow-plow, currently raised off the road, was fitted to the front. Although Dom was certain that private citizens living in the mountains might own similar trucks, this one had the look of a military vehicle. The windshield was tinted, the driver unrevealed.

  He said, “You sure they’re following us? When did they show up?”

  Piloting the Cherokee up the county road, Ernie said, “I noticed them about half a mile after we left the motel. When we slow down, they slow down, too. When we speed up, so do they.”

  “You think there’s going to be trouble?”

  “There will be if they ask for it. They’re probably only Army pussies,” Ernie said. He grinned.

  Dom laughed. “Don’t get me in a war just to prove Leath-ernecks are tougher than GIs. I’ll happily accept your word for it.”

  The road became steeper. The somber ashen sky grew lower. The dark trees drew closer on both sides. The pickup stayed behind them.

  Mrs. Halbourg, Emmy’s mother, answered the door, letting a puff of warm air out of the house into the frigid Chicago morning.

  Father Wycazik said, “Sorry to come unannounced like this, but the most extraordinary thing is happening, and I had to find out if Emmy—”

  He stopped in midsentence when he realized that Mrs. Halbourg was in terrible distress. Her eyes were wide with shock—with fear, too.

  Before he could ask what was wrong, she said, “My God, it’s you, Father. From the hospital, I remember. But how did you know to come? We haven’t called anyone yet. How’d you know to come?”

  “What’s happened?”

  Rather than answer, she took him by the arm, ushered him inside, slammed the door, and hurried him upstairs. “This way. Quickly.”

  Coming directly from the Mendozas’ apartment Uptown, he expected to find something odd at the Halbourg place, but not this state of crisis. When they reached the second-floor hallway, Mr. Halbourg was there with one of Emmy’s older sisters. They were standing halfway down the hall at an open door, staring into a room at something that seemed equally to attract and repel them. In the room, something thumped, rattled, then thumped twice again, followed by a musical burst of girlish laughter.

  Mr. Halbourg turned, a ghastly expression on his face, and blinked in surprise at Stefan. “Father, thank God you’re here, we didn’t know what to do, didn’t want to make complete fools of ourselves by calling for help and then maybe nothing’s happening when help gets here, you know. But now you’ve come, so it’s settled, and I’m relieved.”

  Stefan looked warily through the open doorway and saw the usual accouterments of a bedroom occupied by a girl of ten-going-on-eleven, the changeling age between childhood and adolescence: half a dozen teddy bears; big posters of the current teenage idols, boys utterly unknown to Stefan; a wooden hat rack hung with a collection of exotic chapeaux probably purchased from thrift shops; roller skates; a tape deck; a flute lying in an open case. Emmy’s other sister—in a white sweater, tartan-plaid skirt, and kneesocks—was standing a few feet inside the room, pale and half-paralyzed. Emmy was standing up in bed, pajama-clad, looking even healthier than on Christmas Day. She was hugging a pillow, grinning at the same astonishing performance—a poltergeist at play—that riveted her sister and frightened the rest of her family.

  As Father Wycazik stepped into the
room, Emmy laughed delightedly at the antics of two small teddy bears waltzing in midair. Their movements were nearly as precise and formal as those of real dancers.

  But the bears were not the only inanimate objects infused with magical life. The roller skates were not standing still in a corner but were moving about on separate courses, this one past the foot of the bed and then to the closet door, that one to the desk, this one to the window, moving fast, then slow. The hats jiggled on the rack. A Care Bear on a bookshelf bounced up and down.

  Stefan went to the foot of the bed, careful to avoid the roller skates, and looked up at Emmy, who still stood on the mattress. “Emmy?”

  The girl glanced down at him. “Pudge’s friend! Hello, Father. Isn’t it terrific? Isn’t it wild?”

  “Emmy, is this you?” he asked, gesturing at the capering objects.

  “Me?” she said, genuinely surprised. “No. Not me.”

  But he noticed that the flying-waltzing bears faltered when she turned her attention away from them. They did not drop to the floor, but bobbled and turned and bumped against one another in a clumsy and aimless manner quite different from their previous measured grace.

  He also saw indications that the previous phenomena had not all been this harmless. A ceramic lamp had been knocked to the floor and broken. One of the posters was torn. The dresser mirror was cracked.

  Seeing the direction of his gaze, Emmy said, “It was scary at first. But it calmed down, and now it’s just... fun. Isn’t it fun?”

  As she was speaking, the flute rose out of the open carrying case, up and up, until it was about seven feet off the floor, only a few feet to the left of the floating teddy bears. Out of the corner of her eye, the girl caught a glimpse of the rising instrument. When she turned to look directly at the flute, sweet music began to issue from it, not just random notes but a well-executed tune. Emmy jumped up and down on the bed excitedly. “That’s ‘Annie’s Song’! I used to play that.”

  “You’re playing it now,” Stefan said.

  “Oh, no,” she said, still staring at the flute. “My hands got so bad, my knuckle joints, that I had to give up the flute a year ago. I’m cured now, but my hands still aren’t good enough to play.”

  Stefan said, “But you aren’t using your hands to play it, Emmy.”

  His meaning finally penetrated. She looked down at him. “Me?”

  Deprived of her focused attention, the flute produced only a few more poorly executed notes and fell silent. It still hung in the air, but now it bobbled and dipped erratically. Emmy returned her attention to the instrument. It steadied in the air and began to play again.

  “Me,” she said wonderingly. She turned to her sister, who was still paralyzed by fear and amazement. “Me,” Emmy said, then looked at her parents, who were standing in the doorway. “Me!”

  Stefan appreciated what the child must be feeling, and his throat was pinched so tightly with emotion that he had difficulty swallowing. A month ago, she’d been a cripple, unable to dress herself, with nothing to look forward to except further deterioration, pain, and death. Now she was not only cured and her damaged bones reknit, but she was also in possession of this spectacular gift.

  Father Wycazik wanted to tell her that somehow this gift had been given to her unwittingly by Brendan Cronin, her Pudge, but then he would have to explain where Brendan had gotten his gift, and he could not do that. Besides, he hadn’t time even to tell them what he did know. It was nine-fifteen. He should have been in Evanston by now. Time was of the essence, for Stefan was beginning to suspect that he would be catching a flight for Nevada before the day ended. Whatever was happening in Elko County was bound to be even more incredible than what was happening here, and he was determined to be a part of it.

  Emmy looked at the floating bears, and they resumed their formal dance once more. She giggled.

  Stefan thought about what Winton Tolk had said only a short while ago in the Mendozas’ Uptown apartment: The power’s still here, still in me. I know... I feel it. And not just... not just the power to heal. There’s more. Winton had not known what powers he might possess in addition to the healing touch, but Stefan suspected that the policeman was in for some surprises similar to those that had thrown the Halbourg household into turmoil.

  “Father, will you do it yourself?” Mr. Halbourg asked from the doorway, where he stood with his wife, his voice sharp with anxiety.

  Mrs. Halbourg said, “Please, we want it to be done as soon as possible. Immediately. Can’t you begin at once?”

  Baffled, Stefan said, “I’m sorry... but what is it you want done?”

  Mr. Halbourg said, “An exorcism, of course!”

  Stefan stared at them incredulously, only now fully realizing why they had been in such distress when he had arrived and why they had greeted him with such relief. He laughed. “There won’t be any need for an exorcism. This isn’t Satan at work. Oh, no. My heavens, no!”

  From the corner of his eye, Stefan saw movement on the floor. He looked down at a two-foot-high teddy bear that was tottering past him on stiff little stuffed legs.

  Winton Tolk had said that he sensed he would need a long time to learn what his powers were and to be able to control them. Either he was wrong or the task was far easier for Emmy than for him. That might be the case. Children were much more adaptable than adults.

  Emmy’s parents and her other sister edged into the room, fascinated but wary.

  Stefan understood their wariness. All seemed well, the power benign. But the situation was so awesome, so profoundly affecting on a primitive level, that even an unfaltering optimist like Stefan Wycazik felt a tingle of fear.

  After using a pay phone at a Shell service station in Elko to get in touch with Alexander Christophson in Boston, Ginger accompanied Faye to Elroy and Nancy Jamison’s ranch in the Lemoille Valley, twenty miles from Elko. The Jamisons were the Blocks’ friends who had been visiting on the evening of July 6, the summer before last. They had surely been caught up in the unknown events of that night and had been detained at the motel for brainwashing, with everyone else, though they remembered differently, of course. According to their program of false memories, they had been allowed to evacuate the danger zone, taking Ernie and Faye with them. They believed they had returned to their small ranch, where they and the Blocks had passed the next few days. That was also what Faye and Ernie had believed—until recently.

  Ginger and Faye were paying a visit to the Jamisons not to inform them of what had actually happened but to determine, as indirectly as possible, if the Jamisons were having troubles of the kind afflicting Ginger, Ernie, Dom, and some of the others. If they were suffering, they would be brought into the mutually supportive community at the motel—the members of which had come to think of themselves as the “Tranquility family”—and would join the search for answers.

  But if the brainwashing had been effective, the Jamisons would not be told anything. To tell the Jamisons would be to endanger them.

  Besides, given the urgent strategy developed last night with Jack Twist, if the Jamisons were not already suffering, there was no point wasting a lot of time convincing them that they’d been brainwashed. Time was precious, and every passing hour carried the Tranquility family deeper into danger. Jack believed—and convinced Ginger—that their enemies would soon move against them.

  The drive from Elko in the motel’s van was quick and scenic. The picturesque Lemoille Valley—fifteen miles long, four miles wide—began at the foot of the Ruby Mountains. Wheat, barley, and potato farms occupied the lowlands, though the fields were unplanted now, slumbering under scattered patches of snow.

  Between the valley floor and the mountains, the higher lands and foothills offered lush pasturage, and that was where the Jamisons had their ranch. At one time, they owned hundreds of acres on which they raised cattle, but eventually they sold off much of their property, which had risen substantially in value, and got out of the livestock business. Now, in their early sixties and ret
ired, they owned about fifty acres in the foothills, employed no ranch hands, and kept only three horses and a few chickens.

  As Faye turned off the main valley road onto a lane leading into the highlands, she said, “I think someone’s following us.”

  The back doors of the van had no windows, so Ginger looked at the side-mounted mirror. A nondescript sedan was about a hundred feet behind them. “How do you know?”

  “Same car’s been back there since the Union 76 in town.”

  “Maybe it’s coincidence,” Ginger said.

  When they had followed the lane over halfway up the valley wall, they reached the long narrow driveway to the Jamisons’ ranch, which led half a mile back through deep shadows thrown by flanking rows of big pinons. Faye pulled into the driveway and slowed to see what the other car would do. Instead of going past, farther up into the hills, it pulled to a stop and parked along the outer lane, directly across from the entrance to the Jamisons’ property.

  In the sideview mirror, Ginger could see that the car was a late-model Plymouth, painted a flat ugly brown-green.

  “Obviously a government heap,” Faye said.

  “Pretty bold, aren’t they?”

  “Well, if they’ve been eavesdropping on us the way Jack says, through our own telephones, then they know we’re on to them, so maybe they figure there’s no point in playing coy with us.” Faye took her foot off the brake and headed up the driveway.

  Watching the unmarked Plymouth dwindle in the side mirror, Ginger said, “Or maybe they’re getting in position to take us into custody. Maybe they’ve put tails on all of us, and maybe they’re just waiting for the order to snatch us all at the same time.”

  On the narrow, gravel driveway, the interlacing shadows of the overarching piñons wove a darkness nearly as deep as night.

  As they drove up the two-lane road through the broad snow-covered meadow toward the massive blast doors, Colonel Falkirk sat in the front passenger’s seat of the Wagoneer, thinking about the catastrophe that would ensue from the revelation of Thunder Hill’s secret.

  From a political perspective, this would make the Water-gate mess look like a tea party. An unprecedented number of competing government institutions were involved in the cover-up, organizations that often operated in jealous opposition to one another—the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, the United States Army, the Air Force, and others. It was a testament to the degree of potential danger that these groups could work together with nary a hitch and without a single leak in more than eighteen months. But if the cover-up were uncovered, the scandal would extend throughout so much of the government that the faith of the American people in their leaders would be severely shaken. Of course, very few in any of those organizations knew what had happened, no more than six in the FBI, fewer in the CIA; most of their men involved in the cover-up didn’t know what they were covering up, which was why there had been no leaks. But the número uno of each organization—the Director of the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Chief of Staff of the Army—was completely in the know. Not to mention the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the Secretary of State. And the President, his closest advisers, the Vice-President. A lot of prominent men might fall from grace if this affair was not kept under lock and key.

  The political destruction wrought by the release of the secret would be only a small part of the devastation. The CISG—a think-tank of physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologists, economists, educators, and other learned people—had pondered precisely this crisis at great length and depth, years before it had arisen here in Nevada. The CISG had issued a 1220-page top-secret report on its conclusions, a document that offered some disturbing reading. Leland knew that report by heart, for he was the military representative to the CISG and had helped write several position papers included in the final text. Within the CISG, the opinion was unanimous that the world would never be the same if such an event were to occur. All societies, all cultures would be radically changed forever. Projected deaths over the first two years ranged in the millions.

  Lieutenant Horner, who was driving the Wagoneer, braked twenty feet in front of the giant blast doors that were set in the sudden steep upper slope of the meadow. He didn’t wait for the huge barriers to open, for he was not driving directly into Thunder Hill. Homer turned right, into a small parking lot, where three minibuses, four Jeep wagons, a Land Rover, and several other vehicles stood side by side.

  The twin blast doors, each thirty feet high and twenty feet wide, were so thick they could be opened only at a ponderous pace, producing a rumble that could be heard a mile away and felt in the air and in the ground at least half as far. When a truck—loaded with ammunition, weapons, or supplies—pulled up in front of the drive-in entrance, the doors required five minutes to roll apart. Opening those hangar-sized portals every time a lone man needed to walk in or out was unthinkably inefficient, so a second, man-sized door—nearly as formidable—was set in the hillside thirty feet to the right of the main entrance.

  There was no better vault than Thunder Hill in which to keep the secret of July 6. It was an impregnable fortress.

  Leland and Lieutenant Horner hurried through the bitter air to the walk-in entrance. The small steel door, almost as blastproof as the massive versions to the left, had an electronic lock that could be disengaged only by tapping the proper four numbers on a keyboard. The code changed every two weeks, and those entrusted with it were required to commit it to memory. Leland punched in the code, and the fourteen-inch-thick, lead-core door slid aside with a sudden pneumatic whoosh.

  They stepped into a twelve-foot-long concrete tunnel about nine feet in diameter and brightly lit. It angled to the left. At the end was another door identical to the first, but it could not be opened until the outer door was closed. Leland touched a heat-sensitive switch just inside the tunnel entrance, and the outer door hissed shut behind him and Lieutenant Horner.

  Immediately, a pair of video cameras, mounted on the ceiling at opposite ends of the chamber, clicked on. The cameras tracked the two men as they walked to the inner door.

  No human eyes were watching the colonel and lieutenant on any video display, for the system was operated entirely by VIGILANT, the security computer, as a precaution against the possibility that a traitor within Thunder Hill’s own guard unit might open the facility to hostile forces. VIGILANT was not linked to the installation’s main computer or to the outside world; therefore, it was invulnerable to saboteurs seeking to take control of it by means of a modem or other electronic tap.

  The guard at the perimeter fence had notified VIGILANT that Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Thomas Horner would be arriving. Now, as they approached the inner door under the gazes of video cameras, the computer compared their appearance to stored holographic images of them, rapidly matching forty-two points of facial resemblance. It was impossible to deceive VIGILANT either with makeup or with a look-alike for an approved visitor. If Leland or Horner had been an imposter or unauthorized visitor, VIGILANT would have sounded an alarm, simultaneously filling the entrance tunnel with a sedative gas.

  The lock on the inner door had no keyboard; no code would open it. Instead, a one-foot-square panel of glass was set in the wall beside the door. Leland almost pressed his right hand palm-down against the panel, hesitated, then used his left, and the glass lit, and a faint humming arose. VIGILANT scanned his palmprint and fingerprints, comparing them to the prints in its files.

  Lieutenant Horner said, “Almost as hard to get in here as into heaven.”

  “Harder,” Leland said.