Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  “So, see, the cops close the block, evacuate the people out their houses, then they try to talk with this Sharkle the Shark. But he don’t have a phone, see, and when they use a bullhorn, he won’t answer them. The cops figure his sister and brother-in-law are in there alive, hostages, so nobody wants to do nothin’ rash.”

  “Wise,” Father Wycazik said bleakly, feeling even colder than the winter day in which he stood.

  “Wise, wise, wise,” Roger Hasterwick said impatiently, making it clear he preferred not to be interrupted. “So finally, with a half-hour daylight left, they decide they’ll send in the SWAT guys to dig him out, maybe save the sister and brother-in-law. So they lob tear gas in there, see, and the SWAT guys rush the place, but when they get in they hit trouble. Sharkle must’ve been workin’ on the house for weeks, settin’ traps. The cops start fallin’ over these thin wires he’s strung everywhere, and one gets brained by a deadfall, which don’t kill him but sure does some damage. Then, Christ, Sharkle opens fire on ‘em because he’s wearin’ a gas mask same as they are and just waitin’ like a cat. The dude was prepared. So he blows one cop away, utterly, and wounds one, then he heads down into the cellar and pulls the door shut, and nobody can get in after him ’cause it’s not any regular cellar door but a steel door he’s put in special. Not only that, but the outside cellar door, around back, is steel, too, and what he’s done is he’s put heavy sheet-metal shutters over the insides of the cellar windows, so it’s your typical stalemate, see.”

  By Stefan’s calculations, two people were dead, three wounded.

  Hasterwick said, “So the cops they pulled in their horns real fast and figured to wait him out through the night. This mornin‘, Sharkle the Shark slides open one of them sheet-metal shutters on a basement window, see, and he shouts a bunch of stuff, really crazy stuff, and they figure somethin’ more is gonna go down, but then he closes the shutter again, and since then—nothin’. I sure hope he does somethin’ soon, ’cause it’s cold and I’m beginnin’ to get bored.”

  “What did he shout?” Stefan asked.

  “Huh?”

  “This morning, what crazy stuff did he yell from the basement?”

  “Oh, well, see, what he says...” Roger Hasterwick stopped when he realized that a piece of news, passing in from the edge of the crowd, had electrified everyone. People hurried away from the barricade, some walking fast and some running south on Scott Avenue. Appalled by the prospect of missing new bloodshed, Hasterwick grabbed frantically at a blotchy-faced man in a deerstalker cap, the flaps of which were down but flopping loose. “What is it? What’s happenin’?”

  Trying to pull away from Hasterwick, the man in the deerstalker cap said, “Guy down here has a van with his own police-band radio. He’s tuned in on the cops, the SWAT team, they’re getting ready to wipe that fuckin’ Sharkle off the map!” He wrenched loose of Hasterwick and rushed away, and Hasterwick hurried after him.

  Father Wycazik stared after the departing throng for a moment. Then he glanced around at the ten or twelve onlookers who had remained, at the officers manning the barricade, past the barricade. More death, murder. He could sense it coming. He should do something to stop it. But he could not think. He was numb with dread. Until now, he had seen—and been able to see—only a positive side to the unfolding mystery. The miraculous cures and other phenomena had engendered only joy and an expectation of divine revelations to come. But now he was seeing the dark side of the mystery, and he was badly shaken by it.

  Finally, hoping he would not be mistaken for just another ghoul in the bloodthirsty crowd, Stefan hurried after Roger Hasterwick and the others. They had gathered almost a block. south of O’Bannon Lane, around a recreational van, a metallic-blue Chevrolet with a California-beach mural on the side. The owner, a huge and hugely bearded man sitting behind the wheel, had opened both doors and turned up the volume on the police-band radio, so everyone could hear the cops in action.

  In a minute or two, the essentials of their attack plan were clear. The SWAT team was already moving into place, back into the first floor of Sharkle’s house. They would use a small, precisely shaped charge of plastic explosives to blow the steel cellar door off its pins, not enough to send shrapnel cutting through the basement. Simultaneously, another group of officers would blow off the exterior cellar door with a similar carefully gauged charge. Even as the smoke was clearing, the two groups would storm into the basement and catch Cal Sharkle in a pincer attack. That strategy was terribly dangerous for the officers and the hostages, though the authorities had decided that they would be in far greater danger if action was delayed any further.

  Listening to the radio-relayed voices crackle in the cold January air, Father Wycazik suddenly knew he must stop the attack. If it was carried out, the slaughter would be worse than anyone imagined. He had to be allowed to go past the barricade, to the house, and talk to Cal Sharkle. Now. Right away. Now. He turned from the Chevy van and raced back toward the entrance to O’Bannon Lane, a block away. He was not sure what he would say to Sharkle to get through his paranoia. Perhaps, “You are not alone, Calvin.” He’d think of something.

  His abrupt departure from the van apparently gave the crowd the idea that he had heard or seen something happening up at the barricade. He was less than halfway back to the entrance to O’Bannon Lane when younger and fleeter onlookers began to pass him, shouting excitedly, plunging off the sidewalk and out into the street, bringing a complete halt to the already crawling traffic on Scott Avenue. Brakes barked. Horns blew. There was the thud of one bumper hitting another. Stefan was jostled by runners and struck so hard that he fell to his hands and knees on the pavement. No one stopped to help him. Stefan got up and ran on. The air seemed to have thickened with animal madness and bloodlust. Stefan was horrified at the behavior of his fellow men, and his heart was pounding, and he thought, This is what it might be like in Hell, running forever in the midst of a frantic and gibbering mob.

  By the time Stefan reached the police blockade, more than half the frenzied crowd had returned ahead of him. They were jammed against the sawhorses and police cars, craning to see into the forbidden block of O’Bannon Lane. He pushed in among them, desperate to get to the head of the mob, so he could speak to the police. He was pushed, shoved, but he shoved back, telling them he was a priest, but no one was listening, and he felt his fedora knocked off his head, but he persisted, and then at last he was through to the front of the surging multitudes.

  The policemen angrily ordered the mob to move back, threatened arrest, drew batons, lowered the visors on their riot helmets. Father Wycazik was prepared to lie, to tell the police anything that might get them to postpone the imminent attack on the house, tell them that he was not just a priest but Sharkle’s own priest, that he knew what was wrong, knew how to get Sharkle to surrender. Of course, he didn’t really know how to obtain Sharkle’s surrender, but if he could buy time and talk to Sharkle, he might think of something. He caught the attention of an officer who ordered him to step back. He identified himself as a priest. The cop wasn’t listening, so Stefan tore open his topcoat and pulled off his white scarf to reveal his Roman collar. “I’m a priest!” But the crowd surged forward, pushing Stefan against a sawhorse, and the barrier fell over, and the cop shoved back angrily, in no mood to listen.

  An instant later, two small explosions shook the air, one a split-second after the other, low and flat but hard. The hundred voices of the crowd gasped as one, and everybody froze, for they knew what they had heard: the SWAT team blowing the steel doors off the cellar. A third explosion followed the first two, an immense and devastating blast that shook the pavement, that hurt the ears, that vibrated in bones and teeth, that shot slabs and splinters of Sharkle’s house into the wintry sky, that seemed to shatter the day itself and cast it down in a billion broken pieces. Again with a single voice, the crowd cried out. Instead of pressing toward the blockade this time, they scrambled back in fear, suddenly realizing that death could be not just
an interesting spectator sport but a participatory activity.

  “He had a bomb!” one of the barricade cops said. “My God, my God, Sharkle had a bomb in there!” He turned to the emergency medical van in which two paramedics were waiting, and he shouted, “Go! Go!”

  The red beacons flashed atop the paramedic’s wagon. It pulled out of the barricade, speeding toward the middle of the block.

  Shaking with horror, Father Wycazik tried to follow on foot. But one of the cops grabbed him and said, “Hey, get the hell back there.”

  “I’m a priest. Someone may need comforting, last rites.”

  “Father, I wouldn’t care if you were the pope himself. We don’t know for sure that Sharkle’s dead.”

  Numbly, Father Wycazik obeyed, though the tremendous power of the explosion left no doubt in his mind that Cal Sharkle was dead. Sharkle and his sister. And his brother-in-law. And most members of the SWAT team. How many altogether? Maybe five? Six? Ten?

  Moving aimlessly back through the crowd, absentmindedly tucking his scarf in place and buttoning his coat, partially in a state of shock, murmuring a Pater Noster, he saw Roger Hasterwick, the unemployed bartender with the queerly gleaming eyes. He put a hand on Hasterwick’s shoulder, and said, “What did he shout to the police this morning?”

  Hasterwick blinked. “Huh? What?”

  “Before we got separated, you told me Calvin Sharkle slid open the metal shutter on one of the cellar windows and shouted a lot of weird stuff this morning, and you thought something was going to happen, but then nothing did. What exactly did he say?”

  Hasterwick’s face brightened with the memory. “Oh, yeah, yeah. It was real weird, see, straight-out crazy stuff.” He scrunched up his face, striving to recall the madman’s exact words. When he had them, he grinned, rolled his mouth as if savoring the revelation, then repeated Sharkle’s ravings for Stefan’s enjoyment.

  Stefan not only failed to enjoy the performance, but second by dreadful second, he became increasingly convinced that Calvin Sharkle had not been insane. Confused, yes, baffled and afraid because of the tremendous stress generated by his brainwashing and by the collapse of his memory blocks, badly confused but not insane. Roger Hasterwick and everyone else thought Sharkle’s shouted accusations and declarations and imprecations, flung at the world through the shielded window of a jerry-built fortress, were obviously the lunatic fantasies of a demented mind. But Father Wycazik had an advantage over everyone else: He saw Sharkle’s statements in the context of events at the Tranquility Motel, in the context of miracle cures and telekinetic phenomena, and he wondered if there might be some truth in the claims and accusations that the poor frightened man had shouted through the basement window. And wondering, he felt the fine hairs rise on the back of his neck. He shivered.

  Seeing that reaction, Hasterwick said, “Hey, ain’t no point takin’ it serious, for Christ’s sake. You don’t think what he said was true? Hell, the guy was a nut. He blowed himself up, didn’t he?”

  Father Wycazik ran north along Scott Avenue to the parish car.

  Even before he had arrived in Evanston and discovered the unfolding tragedy at Calvin Sharkle’s house, Stefan Wycazik had half-expected to be on a flight to Nevada before the day was through. The events at the Mendozas’ apartment and at the Halbourgs’ place had set a fire of wonder and curiosity burning in him, and the blaze would not be quenched unless he plunged into the activities of the troubled group in Elko County.

  Now, because of what he had just learned from Hasterwick, the urge to go to Nevada had become a burning need. If only half of what Sharkle had shouted through the basement window was true, Stefan had to go to Nevada, not only to witness a miracle but to do what he could to protect those who had gathered at the Tranquility. All his life, he had been a rescuer of troubled priests, a shepherd bringing lost souls back into the fold. This time, however, he might be called upon to save minds and lives as well. The threat of which Calvin Sharkle had spoken was one that might put body and brain in as much jeopardy as the spirit.

  He slipped the car in gear again. He drove out of Evanston.

  He decided not to return to the rectory to pack. There was no time. He would head straight to O’Hare International Airport and take the first available seat on the first available flight west.

  Dear God, he thought, what have You sent us? Is it the greatest gift for which we could have asked? Or a plague to make all Biblical plagues pale by comparison?

  Father Stefan Wycazik put the pedal to the metal and drove south and then west toward O’Hare like... well, like a bat out of Hell.

  Ginger and Faye spent the larger part of the morning with Elroy and Nancy Jamison under the pretense that Ginger, supposedly the daughter of an old friend of Faye’s, was moving west for unspecified health reasons and was interested in learning about Elko County. The Jamisons were local-history buffs, eager to talk about the county, especially about the beauty of the Lemoille Valley.

  Actually, indirectly and directly, Ginger and Faye were seeking indications that Elroy and Nancy were suffering from the effects of collapsing memory blocks. They found none. The Jamisons were happy, untroubled. Their brainwashing had been as successful as Faye’s; their false memories were firmly rooted. Bringing them into the Tranquility family would put them in jeopardy while serving no great purpose.

  In the motel van, as they pulled away from the Jamison house (with Elroy and Nancy waving from the front porch), Ginger said, “Good people. Really nice people.”

  “Yes,” Faye said. “Reliable. Wish they were standing beside us in this thing. On the other hand, I’m happy they’re well out of it.”

  Both women were quiet then, and Ginger figured Faye’s thoughts were the same as her own: They were wondering if the government car was still parked along the county road, near the entrance to the Jamisons’ place, and if the men in it would still be content merely to follow them. Ernie and Dom had armed themselves for their expedition into the mountains around Thunder Hill Depository. However, considering the unprovocative nature of Faye’s and Ginger’s errands, no one had thought that they might be in special danger, too. Ginger, like many attractive women living alone in a city, knew how to use a handgun, and Faye, a good Marine wife, was something of an expert, but their knowledge and expertise was of no use when they were not armed.

  Having driven only a quarter-mile along the Jamisons’ half-mile driveway, Faye stopped the van in one of the deepest pools of shadows cast by the overhanging piñons. “I’m probably being melodramatic,” she said. She slipped open a few buttons on her coat and reached under her sweater. “And these won’t be much good if they point guns at our heads.” Grimacing, she withdrew two steak knives and put them on the seat between her and Ginger.

  Surprised, Ginger said, “Where’d you get these?”

  “This is why I insisted on drying the breakfast dishes while Nancy washed them. Putting away the silverware, I swiped these. Didn’t want to ask straight-out for a weapon; that would’ve meant bringing Nancy and Elroy into it, which it was clear we weren’t going to have to do. I can return them later, when this is over.” She picked up one of the knives. “The end’s nicely pointed. The blade’s sharp and serrated. Like I said, not much help if they’ve got a gun at your head. But if they were to run us off the road and try to force us into their car, you keep the knife a secret until you get your opening, then stab the bastard.”

  “Got it,” Ginger said. She grinned and shook her head. “Someday, I hope you’ll get a chance to meet Rita Hannaby.”

  “Your friend in Boston.”

  “Yes. You and Rita are a lot alike, I think.”

  “Me and a high-society lady?” Faye said doubtfully. “Can’t imagine what we’d have in common.”

  “Well, for one thing, you both have such equanimity, such serenity, regardless of what’s happening.”

  Putting the knife back on the seat, Faye said, “When you’re a service wife, you either learn to go with the flow, or you go
crazy.”

  “And both you and Rita look so feminine, soft and dependent on the outside—but inside, each of you is, in your own way, tough as nails.”

  Faye smiled. “Honey, you got a bit of that yourself.”

  They drove the last quarter-mile of the pinon-shaded driveway, out of the shadows and into the midday gloom of the pending storm.

  The brown-green, stripped-down government car was still parked along the county road. Two men were in it. They looked impassively at Ginger. Impulsively, she waved at them. They did not wave back.

  Faye drove down toward the floor of the Lemoille Valley.

  The car followed.

  Miles Bennell slumped in the big chair behind his gray metal desk and looked bored, and Miles Bennell ambled around his office while answering questions in a tone of voice that was sometimes indifferent and sometimes amusedly ironic, but Miles Bennell never fidgeted, groveled, looked frightened, or became angry, as almost any other man would have done in the same situation.

  Colonel Leland Falkirk hated him.

  Sitting at a scarred table in one corner of the room, Leland worked slowly through a stack of personnel files, one for each of the civilian scientists who were conducting studies and experiments in the cavern with the immense wooden doors, where the secret of July 6 was contained. He was hoping to narrow the field of possible traitors by determining which men and women could have been in New York City during the time the two notes and Polaroid snapshots had been mailed to Dominick Corvaisis in Laguna Beach. He had told Thunder Hill’s military security staff to do this work on Sunday, and they professed to have completed the inquiries and to have found nothing to pinpoint the leak. But in light of the screw-ups in their investigation thus far—including two sabotaged lie detectors—he no longer trusted them any more than he trusted Bennell or the other scientists. He had to do it himself.

  But right away Leland ran into problems. For one thing, during the past eighteen months, two damn many civilians had been brought into the conspiracy. Thirty-seven men and women, representing a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, had possessed both high-security clearances and specialized knowledge essential to the research program Bennell had devised. Thirty-eight civilians, counting Bennell. It was a miracle that thirty-eight eggheads, utterly lacking in military discipline, could have kept any secret so long, let alone this one.

  Worse, only Bennell and seven others were engaged in the research full-time, to the exclusion of all other professional pursuits and to the extent that they actually lived in Thunder Hill. The other thirty had families and university positions they could not leave for long periods of time, so they came and went as their schedules permitted, sometimes staying a few days, maybe a few weeks, rarely as long as a few months. Therefore, it would be a long and arduous job to investigate each and determine if and when he—or she—had been in New York.

  Worse still, of the eight members of the full-time investigatory team, three had been in New York in December, including Dr. Miles Bennell himself. In short, the list of suspects currently numbered at least thirty-three among the scientific research staff alone.

  Leland was also suspicious of the entire Depository security staff, though Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms, the head of security and his right-hand man, were supposedly the only security personnel who knew what was happening in the forbidden cavern. On Sunday, soon after Fugata began questioning the full-time research staff and those part-time researchers currently in residence, he discovered that the polygraph was damaged and could not produce reliable results. Yesterday, when a new machine was sent up from Shenkfield, it also proved defective. Fugata said that the second machine was already damaged when it arrived from Shenkfield, but that was bullshit.

  Someone involved in the project had seen reports that the witnesses’ memory blocks were breaking down. Deciding to exploit that opportunity, he egged some of them along with cryptic notes and Polaroids stolen from the files. The bastard had nearly gotten away with it, and now that the heat was coming down on him, he had sabotaged the lie detectors.

  Pausing in his perusal of the personnel files, Leland looked at Miles Bennell, who was standing in the small window. “Doctor, give me the benefit of your insight into the scientific mind.”

  Turning away from the window, Bennell said, “Certainly, Colonel.”

  “Everyone working with you knows about the classified CISG report that was done seven years ago. They know the terrible consequences that might result if we went public with our discoveries. So why would any of them be so irresponsible as to undermine project security?”

  Dr. Bennell assumed a tone of earnest helpfulness, but Leland heard the acid-sharp disdain beneath the surface: “Some disagree with CISG’s conclusions. Some think going public with these discoveries wouldn’t result in a catastrophe, that the CISG was fundamentally wrong, too elitist in its viewpoint.”

  “Well, I believe the CISG was correct. And you, Lieutenant Horner?”

  Homer was sitting near the door. “I agree with you, Colonel. If the news is broken to the public, they’ll have to be prepared slowly, over maybe ten years. And even then...”

  Leland nodded. To Bennell, he said, “I have a low but realistic opinion of my fellow men, Doctor, and I know how poorly most would cope with the new world that would follow the release of these discoveries. Chaos. Political and social upheaval. Just like the CISG report said.”

  Bennell shrugged. “You’re entitled to your view.” But his tone said: Even if your view is ignorant and arrogant and narrow-minded.

  Leaning forward in his chair, Leland said, “How about you, Doctor? Do you believe the CISG was right?”

  Evasively, Bennell said, “I’m not your man, Colonel. I didn’t send those notes and Polaroids to Corvaisis and the Blocks.”

  “Okay, Doctor, then will you support my effort to have everyone in the project interrogated with the assistance of drugs? Even if we get the polygraph fixed, the answers we obtain will be less reliable than those we’d get with sodium pentothal and certain other substances.”

  Bennell frowned. “Well, there are some who’d object strenuously. These are people of superior intellect, Colonel. Intellectual life is their primary life, and they won’t risk subjecting themselves to drugs that might, as a side-effect, have even the slightest permanent detrimental effect on their mental function.”

  “These drugs don’t have that effect. They’re safe.”

  “They’re safe most of the time, maybe. But some of my people will have moral objections to using drugs for any reason—even safe drugs, even for a worthwhile purpose.”

  “Doctor, I’m going to push for drug-assisted interrogation of everyone in Thunder Hill, those who know the secret and those who don’t. I’m going to demand General Alvarado approve.” Alvarado was commanding officer of the Thunder Hill Depository, a pencil-pushing desk-jockey who had spent his career on his backside. Leland liked Alvarado no more than he liked Bennell. “If the general approves drug-assisted interrogation, and if any of your people then refuse, I’ll come down hard on them, hard enough to break them. That includes you, if you refuse. You understand me?”

  “Oh, perfectly,” Bennell said, still unruffled.

  Disgusted, the colonel pushed the remaining personnel files aside. “This is too damn slow. I need the traitor quickly, not a month from now. We’d better repair the polygraph.” He started to get up, then sat down as if he’d just thought of what he was about to ask, though it had been on his mind since he entered the Depository. “Doctor, what do you think of this development with Cronin and Corvaisis? These miraculous cures, the other bizarre phenomena. What do you make of it?”

  Finally Bennell showed strong, genuine emotion. He unfolded his hands from behind his head and leaned forward in his chair. “I’m sure it scares the hell out of you, Colonel. But there could be another, less cataclysmic explanation than the one on which you’ve fixated. Fear is your only reaction, while I think it might be the greatest moment in t
he history of the human race. But whatever the case—we’ve absolutely got to talk with Cronin and Corvaisis. Tell them everything and seek their cooperation to discover exactly how they obtained these wonderful powers. We can’t simply eliminate them or put them through another memory-wipe