Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  take heart from Jack’s tone of authority and quiet excitement.

  Now, the wild wind was vibrating the sheets of plywood at the windows, filling the restaurant with a low and ominous thrumming.

  Ernie Block cocked his gray-bristled head, listening, and said, “With winds like this already, so soon after the snow hits, it’s going to be a roof-raiser later on.”

  Jack didn’t want the weather to deteriorate too rapidly, for if the enemy was going to strike within the next few hours, as he anticipated, they might accelerate their schedule to avoid the messy complications of conducting the round-up in a full-scale blizzard.

  “Okay, Brendan,” Jack said, “convince Cardinal O’Callahan and get him to arrange quick meetings with the mayor, city councilmen, social and financial leaders. You might have as much as twenty-four hours to spread your story before your life is in danger. The farther you spread it, the less danger you’re in. But in any case, you shouldn’t risk spending more than twelve hours putting together a network of powerful advocates before you ask them to arrange a press conference. Just picture it: the city’s most prominent citizens forming a backdrop for you, reporters wondering what the hell is about to happen—and then you display your telekinetic ability by levitating a chair and sending it on a nice slow trip around the room!”

  Brendan grinned broadly. “That’ll put an end to their cover-up for sure. No way they can continue it after that.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Jack said. “Because while the rest of you are off on your various missions, Dom and Ned and I will be inside Thunder Hill, perhaps under military arrest, and our only chance of getting out in the same condition we went in is if you blow this wide open.”

  Jorja said, “I don’t like that part of it—the three of you going into the mountain. Why’s it necessary? I asked you that same question fifteen minutes ago, and you still haven’t answered me, Jack. If we can slip out of here, back to Boston and Chicago, use Ginger’s and Brendan’s connections to blast this story wide open, then there’s no need to go poking around in the Depository. Once we’ve set the wheels of the press in motion, the Army and whatever government agencies are involved will eventually have to come clean. They’ll have to tell us what happened that summer and what they’ve been doing in Thunder Hill.”

  Jack took a deep breath, for this was the part at which they might balk—especially Ned and Dom. “Sorry, Jorja. But that’s naive. If we all split and tell our stories, there’ll be enormous pressure on the military and government to reveal the truth, yes, but they’ll delay. They’ll drag their feet and spread contradictory stories for weeks, months. That’ll give them time to devise a convincing lie to explain everything, yet reveal nothing. Our only hope of exposing the truth is to make them open up fast. And to speed things along, the rest of you have to be able to tell the world that three of your friends—Dom, Ned, and me—are being held against our will inside the mountain. Hostages. The element of a hostage drama, with agencies of our own government in the role of terrorists, will be the final ingredient that might make it impossible for the Army to stonewall more than a day or two.”

  He could see that this revelation startled everyone. Ernie and Faye regarded him with a mixture of shock and sadness, as if he were already dead—or mind-wiped.

  Fear had risen like a dark moon in Jorja’s face. She said, “But you can’t. No, no. You simply can’t sacrifice yourselves—”

  “If the rest of you do your jobs properly,” Jack said quickly, “we won’t be sacrificing ourselves. You’ll pry us out of Thunder Hill with the lever of public protest that you create. That’s why it’s so important we all do exactly what we’re supposed to.”

  “But,” Jorja said, “what if, by some chance, you get inside the mountain and manage to see something that explains what happened to us that July. And what if you could snap a few pictures of it and get back out alive. Surely, in that case, you’d try to escape. You’re not saying that the hostage drama has to be a part of it—are you?”

  Jack said, “No, of course not.”

  He was lying. Though there was at least a small chance of getting deep into the Depository, Jack knew there was little hope of getting all the way back out again undetected. As for finding something in there that would immediately explain what they had seen the summer before last—there was no hope whatsoever. For one thing, they had no idea what they were looking for. It was possible—even probable—that they would pass right by the thing they were after without knowing what they had seen. Furthermore, if dangerous experiments had been taking place in Thunder Hill, and if one of those experiments had gotten out of hand that July night, the answer to the mystery was likely to lie in paper or microfilm files or in lab reports; even if they could gain access to the labs, he and Dom and Ned would not have time to pore leisurely through tons of paperwork looking for the few pertinent ounces that would shed light upon their experience. He did not say any of this to Jorja or the others. He could not permit the meeting to degenerate into debate about potential risks and other options.

  Outside, the wind howled.

  Jorja said, “And if you absolutely insist on going in there, why couldn’t the rest of us stay as near to you as possible? I mean, the seven of us could just go into Elko, to the offices of the Sentinel, and Brendan could demonstrate his power to the local press. We could start exposing the conspiracy here instead of in Chicago and Boston.”

  “No.” Jack was moved but also frustrated by her concern for him. (The hands on his wristwatch seemed to be spinning, for God’s sake.) “The national media wouldn’t pay quick enough attention to a small-town newspaper’s report that it had turned up a man with psychic powers and a major government conspiracy. It would be viewed as just another jerk-water story in the same league as reports of abominable snowmen and UFOs. Our enemies would find you and squash you—squash any local reporters you spoke with—long before the national media would bother sending anyone to check it out. You’ve got to go, Jorja. The way I’ve outlined it—that’s our best hope.”

  She slumped in her chair with a defeated look.

  “Dom,” Jack said, “are you with me?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am,” the writer said, as Jack had known he would. Corvaisis was one of those stand-up types you could rely on, though he probably didn’t see himself that way. He smiled ironically and said, “But, Jack, mind telling me why the honor fell on my shoulders?”

  “Sure. Ernie’s still not entirely over his nyctophobia, so it’s hard enough on him just to ride all night to Pocatello. He isn’t up to making a night-assault on the Depository. Which leaves you and Ned. And frankly, Dom, it won’t hurt our case if one of the hostages in Thunder Hill is a novelist, a celebrity of sorts. That adds one more bit of the kind of sensationalism the press thrives on.”

  Ginger Weiss had been frowning as Jack outlined his plan. Now she spoke: “You’re a great strategist, Jack, but you’re also chauvinistic. You’re only considering men for the expedition into Thunder Hill. I think the three who go should be you, Dom, and me.”

  “But—”

  “Hear me out,” she said, getting up, moving around to the far end of the table, drawing everyone’s attention from Jack to her. Jack was aware of how she focused her intellect, will, and beauty upon him, for her techniques were similar to his own methods of compelling everyone to accept his plans without argument. “Ned and Sandy could go to Chicago, which would still give Brendan two adults to back up his story. Jorja and Marcie could go with Faye and Ernie to the Hannabys in Boston, with a note from me. George and Rita will take them seriously, get them an audience. My note alone will assure they’re welcome and listened to. But their reception is doubly assured because in ten minutes Rita will recognize herself in Faye, and they’ll be like sisters, and Rita will go to the mat for her. My presence is not essential there. I’m needed more here. For one thing, the infiltration of the Depository will be a dangerous undertaking. Either of you—Dom, Jack—might be hurt and need emergency m
edical attention. We don’t know for sure that Dom has the same healing power as Brendan, and even if he has it, he might not be able to control it. So a doctor might come in handy, huh? Second, if it’ll help having a famous author—all right, Dom, moderately famous—as a hostage, then we’ll get even more press attention if a woman’s held in Thunder Hill. God damn it, you really need me, Jack!”

  “You’re right,” he said, startling her by his quick agreement. But what she said made sense, and there was no point wasting time debating it. “Ned, you’ll go with Sandy and Brendan to Chicago.”

  “I don’t mind going to the Depository with you, if that’s what you think’s best,” Ned told him.

  “I know,” Jack said. “I did think it was best, but now I don’t. Jorja, you and Marcie will go to Boston with Ernie and Faye. Now, if we don’t get the hell out of here soon, the whole question of who goes where won’t matter anyway, because we’ll be back in the hands of the people who had us drugged senseless the summer before last.”

  Ned pulled the table away from the door. Ernie removed the panel of plywood standing there, and beyond the glass the world was a whirling white wall of wind and snow.

  “Terrific,” Jack said. “Good cover.”

  As they stepped out into the driving snow, they could see only as far as the place where the green-brown, government Plymouth had been parked out by the county road. It was gone. That made Jack uneasy. He preferred the watchers out in the open—where he could also watch them.

  The conference call did not progress as Colonel Leland Falkirk had foreseen. He intended to seek agreement that the witnesses at the motel must be rounded up at once and conveyed to the Thunder Hill Depository. He expected that he and General Riddenhour would be able to convince the others that the threat of a spreading infection was both real and acute, and that he should be permitted to destroy everyone in the Tranquility group as well as the entire staff of Thunder Hill the moment he put his hands on proof that those individuals were no longer human, proof he fully expected to obtain. But from the moment he picked up the phone, nothing went his way. The situation deteriorated.

  Emil Foxworth, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had news of yet another disastrous development. The team making new memory modifications in the Salcoe family in Monterey, California, had been visited by a persistent intruder. They had thought they’d cornered him—a burly, bearded man—but he had made a spectacular escape. The four Salcoes were quickly transferred to a medical van and moved to a safe-house for continuation of memory modifications. A registration check on the bearded intruder’s abandoned car identified it as a rental from the local airport agency, and the lessee was not merely a burglar but Parker Faine, Corvaisis’ friend. “Subsequently,” the Director said, “we traced Faine on a flight out of Monterey to San Francisco, but there we’ve lost him. We have no idea where he’s been or what he’s been up to since his West Air flight landed at SFX.”

  Foster Polnichev, in the FBI’s Chicago office, was already of the view that maintaining the cover-up was impossible, and news of Faine’s escape confirmed that opinion. The two political appointees—Foxworth of the FBI, and James Herton, National Security Adviser to the President—were in agreement with him.

  Furthermore, with oily skill, Foster Polnichev argued that every development—the miraculous cures effected by Cronin and Tolk; the wondrous telekinetic powers of Corvaisis and Emmy Halbourg—indicated that the ultimate effects of the events of July 6 were going to be beneficial to mankind, not detrimental. “And we know that Doctor Bennell and most of the people working with him are of the opinion that there is no threat whatsoever and never was. They’ve been convinced of it for many months now. Their arguments are quite persuasive.”

  Leland tried to make them see that Bennell and his people might be infected and unreliable. No one inside Thunder Hill could be trusted any more. But he was a military leader, not a debater, and in a contest with Foster Polnichev, Leland knew he sounded like a raving paranoid.

  Leland did not even get much support from the one source on which he had counted most: General Maxwell Riddenhour. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was noncommittal at first, listening carefully to every point of view, playing the role of mediator, for his position put him somewhere between a political appointee and a career soldier. But it soon became clear that he agreed more with Polnichev, Foxworth, and Herton than he did with Leland Falkirk.

  “I understand your instincts in this situation, Colonel, and I admire them,” General Riddenhour said. “But I believe the matter has gone beyond the scope of our authority. It requires the input not just of soldiers but of neuropathologists, biologists, philosophers, and others before precipitous action can be taken. Upon disclosure of any evidence of an imminent threat, I will of course change my mind; I’ll favor the roundup of the witnesses at the motel, order the quarantine on Thunder Hill continued indefinitely, and take most of the other strong measures you now favor. But for the moment, in the absence of a grave and obvious threat, I believe we should move a bit more cautiously and leave open the possibility that the cover-up will have to be undone.”

  “With all due respect,” Leland said, barely able to control his fury, “the threat seems both grave and obvious to me. I don’t believe there’s time for neuropathologists or philosophers. And certainly not for the spineless equivocating of a bunch of gutless politicians.”

  That honest appraisal brought a stormy reaction from Foxworth and Herton, the mealy spawn of politicians. When they shouted at Leland, he lost his usual reserve and shouted back at them. In an instant the conference call degenerated into a noisy verbal brawl that ended only when Riddenhour exerted control. He forced a quick agreement that no moves would be made against the witnesses or any steps taken to further cement the cover-up, while at the same time no steps would be taken to weaken the cover-up, either. “I’ll seek an emergency meeting with the President the instant I end this call,” Riddenhour said. “In twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the latest, we’ll try to have a plan that satisfies everyone from the Commander-in-Chief to Bennell and his boys out there in Thunder Hill.”

  That, Leland thought sourly, is impossible.

  When Leland hung up, the ill-fated conference call having concluded in unanticipated humiliation, he stood for at least a minute at his desk in the windowless room at Shenkfield, seething with such pure anger that he did not trust himself to summon Lieutenant Homer. He did not want Horner to know that the tide had gone against him, did not want Horner to have any reason to suspect that the operation he was about to launch was in absolute contradiction of General Riddenhour’s orders.

  His duty was clear. Grim, terrible—but clear.

  He would order the closure of 1-80 under the pretense of a toxic spill, in order to isolate the Tranquility Motel. He would then take the witnesses into custody and transport them directly to the Thunder Hill Depository. When they were all underground with Dr. Miles Bennell and the other suspect workers staffing the Depository, trapped behind massive blast doors, Leland would take them—and himself—out with a pair of the five-megaton backpack nukes that were stored among the munitions in the subterranean facility. A couple of five-megatoners would incinerate everyone and everything inside the mountain, reduce them all to ash and bone fragments. That would eliminate the primary source of this hideous contamination, the home nest of the enemy. Of course, other potential sources of contamination would remain: the Tolk family, the Halbourg family, all remaining witnesses whose brainwashing had not developed holes and who had not returned to Nevada, others.... But Leland was confident that, once he had taken the courageous action required to eliminate the largest and primary source of contamination, Riddenhour would be shamed by his example of self-sacrifice and would find the backbone to do what was necessary to finish the work and scrub every trace of contagion from the face of the earth.

  Leland Falkirk was trembling. Not with fear. It was pride that made him tremble. He was enormously proud to have
been chosen to fight and win the greatest battle of all time, thus saving not just one nation but all the world from a menace with no equal in history. He knew he was capable of the sacrifice required. He had no fear. As he wondered what he would feel in the split-second it took him to die in a nuclear blast, a thrill coursed through him at the prospect of pitting himself against the most intense pain of which the human mind could conceive. Oh, it would be cruelly intense and yet so short in duration that there was no doubt he’d prove capable of enduring it as stout-heartedly as he had endured all other pain to which he had subjected himself.

  He was calm now. Perfectly calm. Serene.

  Leland savored the sweet anticipation of the blistering pain to come. That brief atomic agony would be of such exquisite purity that the endurance of it would ensure the reward of heaven, which his Pentecostal parents, seeing the devil in every aspect of him, had always sworn he would not attain.

  Stepping out of the Tranquility Grille behind Ginger, Dom Corvaisis looked up into the maelstrom of driving-whirling-spinning snow, and for an instant he saw and heard and felt what was not there:

  Behind him rang out the atonal musical clatter of demolished glass still falling from the explosion of the windows, and ahead lay the glow of the parking-lot lights and the hot summer darkness beyond, and all around the thunder-roar and earthquake-shudder of mysterious source; his heart pounding; his breath like taffy that had stuck in his throat; and as he ran out of the Grille he looked around and then up....

  “What’s wrong?” Ginger asked.

  Dom realized that he had staggered across the snowy pavement, skidding not on that surface but on the slippery recollection that had escaped his memory block. He looked around at the others, all of whom had come out of the diner. “I saw ... like I was there again...that July night....” Two nights ago, in the diner, when he’d come close to remembering, he had unconsciously re-created the thunder and shaking of July 6. This time, there was no such manifestation, maybe because the memory was no longer repressed and was breaking through and needed no help. Now, unable to adequately convey the intensity of the memory, he turned away from the others and peered up into the falling snow, and—

  The roar was so loud that it hurt his ears, and the vibrations so strong that he felt them in his bones and in his teeth the way thunder sometimes reverberated in window glass, and he stumbled out across the macadam, looking up into the night sky and—there!—an aircraft flying only a few hundred feet above the earth, red and white running lights flashing across darkness, so low that the glow from within the cockpit was visible, a jet judging by the speed with which it rocketed past, a fighter jet judging by the powerful scream of its engines, and—there!—another one, sweeping past and wheeling up across the field of stars that filled the clear black sky in a panoramic speckle-splash; but the roar and the shaking that had shattered the diner’s windows and had set small objects adance on the tables now grew worse instead of better, even though he would have expected it to subside once the jets were past, so he turned, sensing the source behind him, and he cried out in terror when a third jet shot over the Grille at an altitude of no more than forty feet, so low that he could see the markings—serial numbers and an American flag-on the bottom of one wing, illuminated by the parking-lot light bouncing up from the macadam; Jesus, it was so low that he fell flat on the ground in panic, certain that the jet was crashing, that debris would be raining over him in a second, perhaps even a shower of burning jet fuel....

  “Dom!”

  He found himself lying face-down in the snow, clutching the ground in a reenactment of the terror he had felt on the night of July 6, when he’d thought the jet was crashing on top of him.

  “Dom, what’s wrong?” Sandy Sarver asked. She was kneeling beside him, a hand on his shoulder.

  Ginger was kneeling at his other side. “Dom, are you all right?”

  With their support, he got up from the snow. “The memory block is going, crumbling.” He turned his face up toward the sky again, hoping that the white snowy day would flash away, as before, and be replaced by a dark summer night, hoping that the recollections would continue to pour forth. Nothing. Wind gusted. Snow lashed his face. The others were watching him. He said, “I remembered jets, military fighter craft ... two at first, swooping by a couple of hundred feet above ... and then a third one so low that it almost took the roof off the diner.”

  “Jets!” Marcie said.

  Everyone looked at her in surprise, even Dom, for it was the first word—other than “moon”—that she had spoken since dinner the previous night. She was in her mother’s arms, bundled against the weather. She had turned her small face to the sky. In response to what Dom had said, she seemed to be searching the stormy heavens for some sign of the long-departed jets of a summer lost.

  “Jets,” Ernie said, looking up as well. “I don’t ... recall.”

  “Jets! Jets!” Marcie reached up with one hand toward the heavens.

  Dom realized that he was doing the same thing, although with both hands, as if he could reach up beyond the blinding snow of time-present, into the hot clear night of time-past, and pull the memory down into view. But he could not bring it back, no matter how hard he strained.

  The others were not able to recall what he described, and in a moment their tremulous expectation turned to frustration again.

  Marcie lowered her face. She put a thumb in her mouth and sucked earnestly on it. Her gaze had turned inward again.

  “Come on,” Jack said. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

  They hurried toward the motel, to dress and arm themselves for the journeys and battles ahead of them. Reluctantly, with the smell of July heat still in his nose, with the roar of jet engines still echoing in his bones, Dom Corvaisis followed.

  PART III

  Night on Thunder Hill

  Courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy lift us above the simple beasts and define humanity.

  —THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS

  By foreign hands thy humble grave

  adorned;

  By strangers honored, and by strangers

  mourned.

  —ALEXANDER POPE

  SIX

  Tuesday Night, January 14

  1. Strife

  Father Stefan Wycazik flew Delta from Chicago to Salt Lake City, then caught a feeder flight into the Elko County Airport. He landed after snow had begun to fall but before the rapidly dropping visibility and the oncoming false dusk of the storm had curtailed air traffic.

  In the small terminal, he went to a public phone, looked up the number of the Tranquility Motel, and dialed it. He got nothing, not even a ring. The line hissed emptily. He tried again with no success.

  When he sought help from an operator, she was also unable to ring the number. “I’m sorry, sir, there seems to be trouble with the line.”