Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Startled, Miles said, “How? Why?”

  “Well, like you, I knew some of the witnesses were slowly shedding their memory blocks and having psychological problems in the process. So before anyone could decide to wipe them again one by one, I figured to do something to focus their attention on the motel. I hoped to stir up enough trouble to make it impossible to continue the cover-up.”

  “Why?” Miles repeated.

  “Because I’d finally decided the cover-up was wrong.”

  “But why sabotage it by such a back-door approach?” Miles asked.

  “Because if I’d gone public, I’d have been disobeying orders. I’d have been throwing my career away, maybe my pension. And besides ... I thought Falkirk might kill me.”

  Miles had worried about the same thing.

  Alvarado said, “I started with Twist because I thought his Ranger background and his inclination to challenge authority would make him a good candidate for organizing the other witnesses. From the information turned up during his memory-wipe session that summer, I knew about his safe-deposit boxes. So I searched the file on him, got the names of the banks, the passwords. The file also contained copies of all the keys to his boxes; Falkirk had them made in case it was ever necessary to turn up criminal evidence against Twist to use as blackmail or to put him out of the way in prison. I made copies of the copies. Then, when I was on leave for ten days in late December, I went to New York with a bunch of postcards of the Tranquility Motel, and I put one in each of his boxes. He didn’t go to those banks often, just a few times a year, and they’ve all got thousands of safe-deposit customers, so nobody remembered what Twist looked like or suspected that I wasn’t him. It was easy.”

  “And ingenious,” Miles said, staring with admiration and fondness at the bulky, shadowy form of his friend. “Finding those cards would’ve electrified Twist. And if Falkirk had gotten wind of it, he’d have no way of knowing who’d done it.”

  “Especially since I always handled the postcards with gloves,” Alvarado said. “Didn’t even leave a fingerprint. I planned to come back here, give Twist time to find them. Then I was going to go into Elko and, from a pay phone, make a couple of anonymous calls to other witnesses, give them Twist’s unlisted number, tell them he had answers to their various mental problems. That would’ve set the ball rolling pretty well. But before it got that far, someone else had sent notes and Polaroids to Corvaisis, more Polaroids to the Blocks, and a new crisis was already underway. Like Falkirk, I know whoever sent those pictures has to be here in Thunder Hill. You going to fess up, or am I the only one in a confessional mood?”

  Miles hesitated. His glance fell upon the vague grayness of the report on his desk: Falkirk’s psychological profile. He shuddered and said, “Yeah, Bob, I sent the pictures. Great minds think alike, huh?”

  From his own pocket of darkness, Alvarado said, “I told you why I picked Twist. And I can figure why you’d want to stir up the Blocks, since they’re local and sort of at the center of everything. But why’d you pick Corvaisis instead of one of the others?”

  “He’s a writer, which means a vivid imagination. Anonymous notes and odd pictures in the mail would probably grab his interest a little faster and tighter than anyone else’s. And his first novel has had tremendous prepublication publicity, so if he dug up some of the truth, reporters might be more likely to listen to him than to the others.”

  “We’re a clever pair.”

  “Too clever for our own good,” Miles said. “Looks like sabotaging the cover-up was too slow. We should’ve just violated our secrecy oaths and gone public with the news, even if it meant risking Falkirk’s anger and government prosecution.”

  They were silent a moment, and then Alvarado said, “Why do you think I’ve come here and opened up to you like this, Miles?”

  “You need an ally against the colonel. Because you don’t think he meant a word of what he told you on the phone. You don’t think he’s suddenly gotten reasonable. You don’t think he’s bringing the witnesses back here to let us study them.”

  “He’s going to kill them, I think,” Alvarado said. “And us, too. All of us.”

  “Because he thinks we’ve all been taken over. The damn foot.”

  The public address system crackled, whistled. A speaker was set in the wall of Miles’s office, as in every room within the Depository. The announcement followed the whistle: All personnel, military and civilian, were to report first to the armory to be issued handguns, then to their quarters to await further instructions.

  Getting up from his chair, Alvarado said, “When they’re all in their quarters, I’ll tell them it was Falkirk’s idea to put them there but my idea to arm them. I’ll warn them that, for reasons that’ll be clear to some and a mystery to others, we’re all in danger from Falkirk and his DEROs. Later, if the colonel sends some of his men to round up the staff and shoot them all, my people will be able to shoot back. I hope we can stop him before it goes that far.”

  “Do I get a handgun, too?”

  Alvarado moved to the door but did not open it. Standing in the dark, he said, “You especially. Wear a lab coat with the gun under it, so Falkirk won’t see you’re armed. I intend to wear my uniform coat unbuttoned, with a small pistol tucked into the back of my waistband, so he won’t realize I’m armed, either. If it seems he’s about to order our destruction, I’ll pull the gun and kill him. But I’ll alert you first, with a code word, so you can turn on Horner and kill him, too. It’s no good unless we get both, because if Horner has a chance, he’ll kill me when I open fire on Falkirk. And it’s imperative I survive, not just because I’m inordinately fond of my own hide, which I am, but because I’m a general, and I ought to be able to make Falkirk’s men obey me once their CO’s dead. Can you do that? Can you kill a man, Miles?”

  “Yes. I’ll be able to pull the trigger if it means stopping Horner. I consider you a good friend, too, Bob. Not just because of the poker and chess, either. There’s also the fact that you’ve actually read all of T. S. Eliot.”

  “‘I think we are in rats’ alley, Where the dead men lost their bones,’ ” Bob Alvarado quoted. Laughing softly, he pulled the door open and stood revealed in the argentine glow of the cavern lights. “How ironic. Ages ago, my daddy used to worry that my interest in poetry was a sign I’d grow up to be a skirt-wearing sissy. Instead, I became a one-star general, and in the hour of my greatest need, it’s poetry that persuades you to kill for me and save my ass. Coming to the armory, Dr. Bennell?”

  Miles rose from his chair and joined the general in the spill of frosty light in the doorway. He said, “You realize that Falkirk is, in essence, acting in the name of the Army Chief of Staff himself and even higher authorities. So after you’ve killed him, you’ll have General Riddenhour and maybe even the President coming down hard on your neck.”

  “Fuck Riddenhour,” Bob Alvarado said, clapping a hand on Miles’s shoulder. “Fuck all the politicians and their toadying generals like Riddenhour. Even though Falkirk will take the security computer’s new codes with him when we kill him, we’ll get out of here in a few days, even if we have to dismantle the damn exit. And then ... do you realize, when we take the news to the world, we’re going to be two of the most famous men on this sorry planet? Maybe two of the most famous men in history. Fact is, I can’t think of anyone in history who had quite such important news to spread ... except Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning.”

  Father Stefan Wycazik drove the Cherokee because he had experience with four-wheel-drive vehicles from his service with Father Bill Nader in Vietnam: Of course, those adventures had been laid in swamp and jungle, not in a blizzard. But he discovered the Jeep handled about the same in either condition. And though his daredevil experiences were long ago in time, they seemed recent in his heart and mind, and he controlled the wheel with the same reckless disregard for danger and sure-handed expertise that he’d shown in his younger days, under fire. As he and Parker Faine headed away from the lights of El
ko into the snow-blasted night, Father Wycazik knew that God had called him to the priesthood precisely because, at times, the Church required a man who carried a thick splinter of an adventurer’s soul lodged in his own.

  Because 1-80 was closed, they went north on State Route 51. They switched to a series of westward-leading county roads—macadam, gravel, dirt, all under a mantle of snow. The roads were marked by cat’s-eye-yellow reflectors on widely spaced posts along the berm, and the luster of those periodic guideposts, casting back the headlight beams, was frequently the only thing that kept Stefan from going astray. Sometimes, he had to drive overland to get from one lane to another. Fortunately, they had bought a dash-mounted compass and a county map. Although their route was winding and rough, they made steady progress in the general direction of the Tranquility Motel.

  On the way, Stefan told Parker about the CISG, about which he had learned from Michael Gerrano, after Michael had gotten the news from Mr. X, Ginger Weiss’s friend. “Colonel Falkirk was the only military member. The CISG looks like a typical waste of tax dollars: a study group funded to do a think-tank-type assessment of a social problem that would most likely never arise. The committee consisted of biologists, physicists, cultural anthropologists, medical doctors, sociologists, psychologists. The acronym CISG stands for Contact Impact Study Group, which means they tried to determine the positive and negative impact on human society of first contact with an intelligent species not of this world.”

  Keeping his eyes on the snowy road, Stefan paused to let his meaning sink in, smiled slightly when he heard the artist take a sudden sharp breath. Parker said, “You don’t mean ... you couldn’t mean ...”

  “Yes,” Stefan said.

  “Something came ... you mean that ... something ...” For the first time in Stefan Wycazik’s acquaintance, Parker Faine was speechless.

  “Yes,” Stefan said. Although this amazing development was no longer news to him, he still shivered at the thought of it, and he appreciated what Parker was feeling. “Something came down that night. Something came down from the sky on July sixth.”

  “Jesus!” Parker exclaimed. “Uh, sorry, Father. Didn’t mean to be blasphemous. Came down. Holy shit. Sorry. Really. But ... Jesus!”

  Following cat’s-eye reflectors along an especially twisty gravel road that hugged the lower contours of folded and refolded hills, Father Wycazik said, “Under the circumstances, I don’t think God’s grading you on verbal restraint. The CISG’s primary purpose was to arrive at a consensus of how human cultures—and human beings themselves—would be affected by face-to-face contact with extraterrestrials.”

  “But that’s an easy question to answer. What a joyous, wondrous thing to discover we’re not alone!” Parker said. “You and I know how people would react. Look how they’ve been fascinated by movies about other worlds and aliens for decades now!”

  “Yes,” Stefan said, “but there’s a difference how they react to fictional contact and how they might react to the reality. At least that’s the opinion of many scientists, especially in the soft sciences like sociology and psychology. And anthropologists tell us that when an advanced culture interacts with one less advanced, the less advanced culture suffers a loss of confidence in—and often a complete collapse of—its traditions, institutions. The primitive culture loses respect for its religions and systems of government. Its sexual practices, social values, and family structures deteriorate. Look what happened to the Eskimos following their encounter with Western civilization: soaring alcoholism, family-destroying generational conflict, a high rate of suicide.... It’s not that Western culture is dangerous or evil. It isn’t. But our culture was far more sophisticated and richly textured than the Eskimo culture, and contact led to a serious loss of self-esteem among the Eskimos that they’ve never regained and never will.”

  Stefan had to pause in his elaboration of the issue, for they came to the end of the gravel track on which they had been traveling.

  Parker studied the map in the dim glow of the glove-compartment light. Then he checked the dash-mounted compass. “That way,” he said, pointing left. “We go three miles due west, all of it overland. Then we’ll come to a north-south county route called ... Vista Valley Road. We cross Vista Valley, and from there it looks about eight or nine miles, overland again, until we might come up behind the Tranquility.”

  “You keep checking the compass, make sure I stay pointed west.” Stefan drove the Cherokee into the snow-shrouded nightscape ahead.

  Parker said, “This stuff about the Eskimos, all this detail about what the CISG’s point of view is like—Mr. X didn’t pass all these fine points along to Father Gerrano in one telephone call.”

  “Some of it; not all of it.”

  “So I gather you’ve thought about the subject before.”

  “Not about extraterrestrial contact, no,” Father Wycazik said. “But part of Jesuit education involves a hard look at both the good and bad results of the Church’s efforts to spread the faith to backward cultures throughout history. The general feeling is we did a disturbing amount of damage even as we brought enlightenment. Anyway, we study a lot of anthropology, so I can understand the concern of the CISG.”

  “You’re drifting north. Angle left as soon as the land will let you,” Parker said, checking the compass. “Listen, I’m still not sure I understand the CISG’s concern.”

  “Consider the American Indian. Ultimately, the white man’s guns didn’t destroy them; the clash of cultures did them in; the influx of new ideas forced the Indians to view their comparatively primitive societies from a different perspective, resulting in a loss of esteem, a loss of cultural validity and direction. According to what Mr. X told Father Gerrano, the CISG believed contact between mankind and very advanced extraterrestrials could have those same effects on us: the destruction of religious faith, a loss of faith in all governments and other secular belief-systems, a rising feeling of inferiority, suicide.”

  Parker Faine made a harsh scoffing sound in the back of his throat. “Father, would your faith collapse because of this?”

  “No. Just the opposite,” Stefan said excitedly. “If this enormous universe didn’t contain any other life, if the trillions of stars and billions of planets were all barren of life—that might make me think there was no God, that our species’ evolution was just happenstance. Because if there’s a God, He loves life, cherishes life and all the creatures He created, and He’d never leave the universe so empty.”

  “A lot of people—most people—would feel the same,” Parker said.

  “And even if the species we encounter is frighteningly different from us in physical appearance, that wouldn’t shake me. When God told us He created us in His image, He didn’t mean our physical appearance was like His. He meant our souls, minds, our capacity for reason and compassion, love, friendship: Those are the aspects of humanity that are in His image. Which is the message I’m taking to Brendan. I believe Brendan’s crisis of faith was related to a memory of an encounter with a race vastly different from us—and so shatteringly superior to us—that he subconsciously believed it put the lie to what the Church teaches us about mankind being in God’s image. I want to tell him that it’s not what they look like that matters or whether they’re far more advanced than us. What indicates the divine hand in them is their capacity to love, to care—and to use their God-given intelligence to triumph over the challenges of the universe that He gave them.”

  “Which they’ve had to do in order to come so far,” Parker said.

  “Exactly!” Father Wycazik said. “I’m sure when the brainwashing loses its hold on Brendan, when he remembers what happened and has time to think about it, he’ll come to the same conclusion. But just in case, I want to be there beside him, to help him, guide him.”

  “You love him very much,” Parker said.

  For several seconds, Father Wycazik squinted into the tumultuous white world ahead, progressing more slowly and cautiously than when he’d been following th
e reflectors along a known road. At last he said, in a soft voice: “Sometimes I’ve regretted entering the priesthood. God help me, it’s true. Because sometimes I think about the family I might have had: a wife whose life I could share, who’d share mine, and children to watch grow.... The family that might have been—that’s what I miss. Nothing else. The thing about Brendan is ... well, he’s the son I never had and never will. I love him more than I can say.”

  After a while, Parker sighed and said, “Personally, I think the CISG was full of crap. First contact wouldn’t destroy us.”

  “I agree,” Stefan said. “Their fallacy lies in comparing this situation to our contact with primitive cultures. The difference is that we aren’t primitive. This will be the contact between one very advanced culture and another super-advanced culture. The CISG believed if there ever was contact it’d have to be concealed, if at all possible, and that news of it would have to be broken to the public over ten or even twenty years. But that’s wrong, dead wrong, Parker. We can handle the shock. Because we’re ready for them to come. Oh, dear God, but we are so desperately and longingly ready for them!”

  “So ready,” Parker agreed in a whisper.

  For perhaps another minute they bumped and rocked along in silence, unable to speak, unable to put in words exactly what it felt like to know that mankind did not stand alone in creation.

  Finally, Parker cleared his throat, checked the compass, and said, “You’re right on course, Stefan. Ought to be less than a mile to Vista Valley Road. This man in Chicago that you mentioned a while ago ... Cal Sharkle. What was it he yelled to the cops this morning?”

  “He insisted he’d seen aliens land and that they were hostile. He was afraid they were taking us over, that most of his neighbors had been possessed. He said the aliens tried to take control of him by strapping him in a bed and dripping themselves into his veins. Initially, I was afraid maybe he was right, that what had come down here in Nevada was a threat. But on the trip from Chicago, I had time to think about it. He was confusing his incarceration and brainwashing with the landing of the starship he’d seen. He thought it was aliens in pressurized space suits who’d kept him captive and stuck him full of needles. He witnessed the descent of a starship, and then these government men in decontamination suits came, and by the time they’d rammed all that stuff into his subconscious and weighted it down with a memory block, he was completely mixed up. No aliens apprehended him. It was his fellow men who mistreated him.”

  “You’re saying government agents would’ve worn decontamination suits until it was clear whether or not the alien contact carried a risk of bacteriological contamination.”

  “Exactly,” Stefan said. “Some guests at the Tranquility must’ve approached the ship openly, so they had to be considered contaminated until evidence to the contrary was turned up. And we know some at the motel have distinctly remembered men inside decontamination suits: a few soldiers, brainwashing specialists. So poor Calvin was driven insane by a misconception arising from his inability to remember clearly.”

  “Must be less than half a mile to Vista Valley Road,” Parker said, studying the map in the light from the open glove-compartment door.

  Snow drove relentlessly through the yellow cones of the headlights. Now and then, when the wind faltered or briefly changed the angle of its assault, short-lived forms of snow capered in arabesque dances, this way and that, but always dispersing and vanishing like ghostly performers the moment that the wind recovered its momentum and purpose.

  As they started up a steep slope, Parker said softly, “Something came down.... And if the government knew enough to close I-80 ahead of the event, they must’ve been tracking the craft a long time. But I still don’t see how they could know where it would come down. I mean, the crew of the ship might’ve changed its course at any time.”

  “Unless it was crashing,” Father Wycazik said. “Maybe it was picked up by satellite observation far out in space, monitored for days or weeks. If it approached on an undeviating course that would indicate it wasn’t traveling under control, there’d have been time to calculate its point of impact.”

  “Oh, no. No. I don’t want to think it crashed,” Parker said.

  “Nor do I.”

  “I want to think they got here alive ... all that way.”

  When the Jeep Cherokee was halfway up the slope, the tires spun on an especially icy patch of ground, then caught hold and propelled them forward again with a jolt.

  Parker said, “I want to believe Dom and the others didn’t just see a ship ... but encountered whoever came in it. Imagine. Just imagine ...”

  Father Wycazik said, “Whatever happened to them that night in July was very strange indeed, a whole lot stranger than just seeing a ship from another world.”

  “You mean ... because of Brendan’s and Dom’s powers?”

  “Yes. Something more happened, more than just contact.”

  They topped the crest of the hill and started down the other side. Even through shifting curtains of the storm, Stefan saw the headlights of four vehicles on Vista Valley Road below. All four were stopped and angled every which way, and their blazing beams crisscrossed like gleaming sabers in the snow-bleeding darkness.

  As he drove down toward the gathering, he quickly realized that he was heading into trouble.

  “Machine guns!” Parker said.

  Stefan saw that two of the men below were holding submachine guns on a group of seven people—six adults and one child—who were lined up against the side of a Cherokee that was different only in color from the one Parker had just bought. Eight or ten other men were standing around, a substantial force, obviously military because they were all dressed in the same Arctic-issue uniforms. Stefan had no doubt that these were some of the same forces involved in the closure of 1-80 both tonight and eighteen months ago.

  They had turned toward him and were staring uphill, surprised at being interrupted.

  He wanted to swing the Jeep around, gun the engine, and flee, but although he slowed down, he knew there was no point in running. They would come after him.

  Abruptly, he recognized a familiar Irish face among those lined up against the Cherokee. “That’s him, Parker! That’s Brendan on the end of the lineup.”

  “The others must be from the motel,” Parker said, leaning forward to peer anxiously through the windshield. “But I don’t see Dom.”

  Now that he had spotted Brendan, Father Wycazik could not have turned back even if God had opened the mountains for him and provided a highway clear to Canada, as He had parted the Red Sea for Moses. On the other hand, Stefan was unarmed. And as a priest, he would have had little use for a gun even if he had possessed one. Having neither the means nor desire to attack, yet unable to run, he let the Cherokee roll slowly down the hill as he frantically wracked his mind for some course of action that would turn the tables on the soldiers below.

  The same concern had gripped Parker, for he said, “What in the devil are we going to do?”

  Their dilemma was resolved by the soldiers below. To Stefan’s astonishment, one of the men with a machine gun opened fire on them.

  Dom watched as Jack Twist directed the flashlight beam over the chainlink fence, then up to the barbed-wire overhang that thrust out above their heads. They were at that long length of Thunder Hill’s perimeter that ran through an open meadow, down toward the floor of the valley. Windblown snow had stuck to large sections of the thick, interlocking steel loops of the fence, but other areas were bare, and those uncrusted links were what Jack studied most closely.

  “The fence itself isn’t electrified,” Jack said above the shrieking wind. “There aren’t conducting wires woven through it, and the current can’t be carried by the links. No way. There’d be just too damn much resistance because they’re too thick and because the ends of some of them don’t make tight contact with each other.”