Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Ginger said, “Then why the warning signs?”

  “Partly to spook away amateurs,” Jack said. He put the beam of the flash on the overhang again. “However, there are conducting wires strung carefully through the center of that barbed-wire roll, so you’d get fried if you went over the top. We’ll cut through the bottom.”

  Ginger held the flashlight while Dom dug into one of the canvas rucksacks, found the acetylene torch, and passed it to Jack.

  After he had slipped on a pair of tinted ski goggles, Jack lit the torch and began to cut an entrance through the chainlink barrier. The fierce hissing of the burning gas was audible even above the keening, moaning wind. The intense blue-white acetylene flame cast an eerie light that struck a thousand jewel-bright glints in the snow.

  They were not at a position where they risked being seen from the main entrance of the Depository, which lay over the brow of a hill that sloped up from the other side of the fence. However, Dom was sure the weird acetylene light reached high enough into the night to be spotted from the other side of that rise. If seen, it would draw guards this way. But if Jack was right, if the Depository’s security was largely electronic, there would not be guards prowling the grounds tonight; and in this weather, surveillance by video cameras was pretty much ruled out, too, for their lenses would be iced-over or packed with snow.

  Of course, though they wanted to get inside the Depository and have a quick look around, it would not be a tragedy if they were apprehended here. After all, being taken into custody was part of Jack’s plan for focusing attention on Thunder Hill.

  Dom, Ginger, and Jack were not armed. All the weapons had been for the others, in the Cherokee, because their escape was essential. If they were stopped, all was lost. Dom hoped they wouldn’t need their guns, and that they were already safely in Elko.

  As Jack cut a crawl-through opening in the fence, the eldritch light of the acetylene torch increasingly captivated Dom and, suddenly, made a connection with the past, hurtling him back once more in memory:

  The third jet roared over the roof of the diner, so low that he threw himself flat on the parking lot, certain the airplane was crashing on top of him, but it swooped past, leaving shattered air and a blast of engine heat in its wake; he started to get up, and a fourth jet boomed over the roof of the motel, a huge half-glimpsed shadowy shape, its running lights carving white and red wounds through the night as it thundered south and angled east, out across the barrens beyond I-80, where the third jet had gone, and now the first two craft, which had passed over at a greater altitude, were far out there, swinging back, one to the east and one to the west; yet still the earth shook and the night was filled with a great rumble like an ongoing and never-ending explosion, and he thought there must be more jets coming, even though the queer electronic oscillation that had throbbed under the roar was now getting louder and shriller and stranger and was unlike anything jets would produce; he shoved up onto his feet and turned, and there was Ginger Weiss and Jorja and Marcie, and there was Jack running over from the motel, and Ernie and Faye coming out from the office, and others, all the others, Ned and Sandy; the rumble was now like the crash of Niagara Falls combined with the base-throb pounding of a thousand timpani; the ululant electronic whistle made him feel as if the top of his head was going to be sliced off by a bandsaw; there was frost-silver light of a peculiar kind; he looked up, away from the jets that had gone past, over the roof of the diner, looked up toward the light; he pointed and said, “The moon! The moon!” Others looked where he pointed; he was filled with a sudden terror, and he cried, “The moon! The moon!” and staggered back several steps in surprise and fear; someone screamed....

  “The moon!” he gasped.

  He was down in the snow, driven to his knees by the shock of the memory-flash, and Ginger was kneeling in front of him, holding him by the shoulders. “Dom? Dom, are you okay?”

  “Remembered,” he said numbly as the wind rushed between their faces and tore their smoking breath out of their mouths. “Something ... the moon ... but I didn’t quite get enough.”

  Beyond them, having cut a crawl-through in the chainlink fence, Jack switched off the acetylene torch. The darkness folded around them again like the wings of a great bat.

  “Come on,” Jack said, turning to Dom and Ginger. “Let’s go in. Quickly now.”

  “Can you make it?” Ginger asked Dom.

  “Yeah,” he said, though there was an icy cramping in his guts and a tightness in his chest. “But all of a sudden ... I’m scared.”

  “We’re all scared,” she said.

  “I don’t mean scared of getting caught. No. It’s something else. Something I almost remembered just then. And I’m ... shaking like a leaf, for God’s sake.”

  Brendan gasped in disbelief when Colonel Falkirk ordered one of his men to open fire on the Jeep that was approaching Vista Valley Road from the hillside above. The madman didn’t know who was in the vehicle. The soldier given the order also thought it was out of line, for he did not immediately raise his weapon. But Falkirk took a menacing step toward him and shouted: “I told you to open fire, Corporal! This is an urgent national security matter. Whoever’s in that vehicle is no friend of yours, mine, or our country. You think any innocent civilians would be driving overland, sneaking around the roadblock, in a goddamn blizzard like this? Fire! Waste them!”

  This time, the corporal obeyed. The clatter of automatic gunfire hammered the night, briefly overpowering the voice of the raging wind. Up on the hillside, the headlights of the oncoming Jeep blew out. The two hundred hard cracks of two hundred bullets erupting in a murderous stream from the muzzle of the machine gun were augmented by the sound of slugs tearing through sheet metal and smacking onto more solid barriers. The windshield imploded under raining lead, and the Jeep, which had braked immediately after topping the crest of the hill and had been descending slowly, abruptly gained speed and rushed down at them, then angled left when its wheels jolted over a lateral hump that extended across most of the slope. Obviously no longer under anyone’s control, it started to slow again, hit another bump, slid sideways, almost tipped over, almost rolled, but finally came to rest just forty feet away in the already drifting snow.

  Five minutes ago, when Ned had driven over the hill on the other side of Vista Valley Road and had turned south, only to encounter the colonel and his men waiting less than a half-mile south, it had been instantly clear that all the shotguns and handguns—and even the Uzi that Jack had provided—would be of no help. Considering that their lives depended on their escape from Elko County, they would have made a stand against a smaller force. But Falkirk was accompanied by too many men, all heavily armed. Resistance would have been purest folly.

  And Brendan had been filled with frustration because he had not dared use his special power to ensure their freedom. He felt he ought to be able to apply his telekinetic talent to the situation. If he concentrated hard enough, perhaps he could cause the guns to fly out of the soldiers’ hands. He sensed he had that much—and more—power in him, but he did not know how to bring it to bear effectively. He could not forget how the experiment in the diner had gotten entirely out of hand last night; they had been fortunate that none of them had been hurt by the careening salt and pepper shakers, and the violently levitating chairs. If he used his power to wrench the weapons from the soldiers, he might not be able to disarm all of them simultaneously, in which case the ones still in possession of their weapons might open fire in self-defense. Or at his instigation, the guns might tear free of the soldiers’ hands and go whirling through the air, out of control—firing until their magazines had emptied, pumping bullets into everything and everyone in sight. Sure, he might be able to heal the wounded. But what if he was shot? Could he heal himself? Probably. But if he was shot dead? He would not be able to bring himself back to life. And if anyone else was shot dead, he was not sure he would be able to bring them back, either. It was no good being gifted with the power of a god if no clear instr
uctions came with the blessing.

  Now, watching scores of bullets slam into the Jeep, watching it rush like a crazed and blinded beast down the hillside, seeing it come to a shuddering stop in the headlight beams of one of the vehicles on Vista Valley Road, Brendan felt his frustration ballooning beyond containment. The occupants of the Jeep had been hit. He could help them. He knew he could help them, and it was his duty to do so, not merely the duty of a priest but the minimal duty of a human being. He did not understand his healing power, either, but there was no greater danger in trying to use it than there was in attempting to employ telekinesis. So he thrust away from the Cherokee against which he had been standing, dashed through the group of soldiers whose attention had been distracted by the drama on the hillside, and ran toward the blasted Jeep even as it came to a stop.

  There were shouts behind him. He distinctly heard Falkirk warning him that he would be shot.

  Brendan ran anyway, slipping on the snowy pavement. He stepped into a ditch, fell, scrambled up, ran on to the bullet-riddled Jeep.

  No one fired, but he sensed people sprinting after him.

  The passenger’s side of the Jeep was nearest, bathed in a beam of light from one of the military vehicles, so he pulled open that door first. A stocky man of about fifty, wearing a navy peacoat, was slumped against the door and fell out into Brendan’s arms. Brendan saw blood, but not a lot. The stranger was conscious, though on the precarious edge of a faint; his eyes were unfocused. Brendan pulled him all the way out of the Jeep and lowered him gently onto his back on the snow-covered ground.

  A pursuing soldier put a hand on Brendan’s shoulder, and Brendan whirled on him, screamed in his face: “Get away from me, you rotten-crazy son of a bitch! I’ll heal him! I’ll heal him!” Then he vented an oath of such a vicious, ferocious, and filthy nature that he was astounded to hear it pass his lips. He hadn’t known he could use such obscene language. The soldier, thrown into an instantaneous fury, swung his machine gun high, intending to slam the butt into Brendan’s face.

  “Wait!” Falkirk shouted, stepping in and grabbing his man’s arm to halt the blow. The colonel turned to Brendan and regarded him with eyes like polished flint. “Go ahead. I want to see this. I want to see you incriminate yourself right in front of me.”

  “Incriminate?” Brendan said. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Go ahead,” the colonel said.

  Brendan waited for no more encouragement but knelt at once beside the wounded man and threw the flaps of his peacoat wide open. Blood was soaking through the sweater in two places: just below the left shoulder; and low on the right side, a couple of inches above the beltline. He rolled up the victim’s sweater, tore open the shirt beneath. Brendan put his hands on the abdominal wound first, for that appeared the worse of the two. He didn’t know what to do next. He could not recall what he’d thought or felt when he had healed Emmy and Winton. What triggered the healing power? He knelt in the snow, feeling the stranger’s blood oozing between his fingers, acutely sensitive to the life throbbing out of the man, yet unable to concentrate the miraculous power he knew was in him. Frustration filled him again, turned to anger, and the anger turned to rage at his own impotence and stupidity, at the injustice of death, this death specifically and all death in general—

  A tingle. In each palm.

  He knew the red circles had appeared again, but he did not lift his hands from the victim to look at those stigmata.

  Please, he thought desperately, please let it happen, let the healing happen, please.

  Amazingly, for the first time Brendan actually felt the mysterious energy flowing from him into the wounded man. It took shape in him and raveled out of him as if he were a spinning wheel and as if the wondrous power were the thread that he created. He whirled it into existence in the same manner by which the formless mass on the distaff was drawn into a strong filament of thread by the action of a spinning wheel, and the wounded man was the spindle onto which this power wound itself. But Brendan was not merely a single machine producing one meager thread; he felt, within himself, a thousand-million wheels flashing round and round so fast they whistled and hissed as they spewed out a thousand-million insubstantial and invisible—yet binding, strongly binding—filaments.

  He was a loom, as well, for somehow he used the countless threads of godlike power to weave a cloth of health. Unlike his experiences with Emmy Halbourg and Winton Tolk, during which he had been unaware of the cures he was performing, Brendan was acutely aware of knitting up the rent tissues of this gunshot stranger. He could almost hear the clatter of the pumping treadles, the thumping of the batten beating the threads into place, the reeds forcing the weft to the web, the heddles guiding the warp, the shuttle working, working, working.

  Not only had he begun to acquire a conscious appreciation of his power, but he sensed that the magical force he harbored was increasing, that he was ten times the healer he had been when he saved Winton—and would be twice as good tomorrow. Indeed, beneath him, the stranger’s eyes swam into focus within seconds, blinked. And when Brendan lifted his hands from the wound, he was rewarded with a sight that took his breath away and gladdened his heart: The bleeding had already stopped. He was even more amazed to see the bullet rise out of the man’s body as if being expelled by some inner pressure; it squeezed backwards from the entrance wound and popped free of the flesh with a sucking sound. Even as the spent slug, wet and dully gleaming, rolled out onto the victim’s belly, the ragged hole began to close as if Brendan were not watching the healing of a real wound but a time-lapse film of the healing.

  He quickly touched the lesser wound in the man’s shoulder. At once he felt the second bullet, not as deeply buried as the first, nudging out of the torn flesh. It pushed and squirmed against his palm.

  A thrill of triumph raced through Brendan. He had an urge to throw his head back and laugh into the chaotic fury of the storm, into the night, for the ultimate chaos and darkness of death had been defeated.

  The victim’s eyes cleared entirely, and he looked up at Brendan with bewilderment at first, then with recognition, then with horror. “Stefan,” he said. “Father Wycazik.”

  That familiar and beloved name, coming from the lips of this complete stranger, startled Brendan and filled him with inexplicable fear for his rector and mentor. “What? What about Father Wycazik?”

  “He must need your help more than I do. Quickly!”

  For an instant, Brendan did not understand what the man was telling him. Then with sudden dread he realized that the driver of the machine-gunned Jeep must be his rector. But that wasn’t possible. How had he gotten here? When? Why? For what possible purpose would he have come?

  “Quickly,” the stranger repeated.

  Brendan leaped up, whirled toward the onlooking soldier and Colonel Falkirk, pushed between them, slipped in the snow, stumbled against the front bumper of the Jeep. Holding on to the vehicle with one hand, he clambered as fast as he could around the front to the driver’s door on the other side. It wouldn’t open. Seemed to be locked. Or damaged by gunfire. He wrenched in panic, but it would not budge. He pulled harder. Still nothing. Then he willed it open, and it came with a grinding and squealing of broken bits of metal, fell wide on twisted hinges. A body, slumped against the steering wheel, began to tip slowly out through the open door.

  Brendan grabbed Father Wycazik, dragged him out of the driver’s seat, and laid him on the cold blanket of snow. This side of the Jeep was touched by less light than the other. In spite of the darkness, he saw his rector’s eyes, and as if his tortured voice were coming from a great distance, Brendan heard himself say, “Dear God, no. Oh, no.” The shepherd of St. Bette’s had flat, sightless, unmoving eyes that gazed at nothing in this world but at something far beyond the veil. “Please, no.” Brendan saw, too, the furrow of a bullet that had dug its way along the skull, from the corner of the right eye to a spot just past the ear. That was not a mortal wound, but the other was: a devastating hole in
the base of the throat, gaping horribly, filled with shattered flesh and stilled blood.

  Brendan placed his trembling hands upon Stefan Wycazik’s ravaged throat. From within himself he felt the threads of power spinning out again, a thousand-million filaments in a multitude of colors and tensile strengths, all invisible yet sufficient to provide the weft and warp of a strong and flexible fabric, the very fabric of life. Then, reaching psychically within the cooling body of this man he so deeply loved and respected, Brendan tried with all his mysterious skill to weave those threads upon the loom, to repair the torn cloth of life.

  However, he soon became aware that the miraculous healing process required an empathy between the healer and the healed. He realized that he had previously misunderstood the process, that he was not both the spinning wheel, providing the threads of power, and the loom which wove them into the cloth of life. Instead, the patient had to provide the loom to use the threads of life-giving power that Brendan provided. In some strange way, the healing was a bilateral process. And no loom of life remained in Stefan Wycazik; he had died within seconds, had been dead before Brendan reached the Jeep. Therefore, the multiple threads of healing power only tangled and knotted uselessly, unable to sew the damaged flesh together. Brendan could heal the wounded and cure the sick, but he could not do what had been done for Lazarus.

  A great, thick sob of grief shuddered from him, and another. But he refused to surrender to despair. He shook his head violently in stubborn denial of his loss, choked back another sob, and redoubled his efforts, determined to raise the dead even though he knew he could not.

  He was dimly aware that he was talking, but it was a minute or two before he realized that he was praying as he had prayed so many times in the past, though not recently: “Mary, Mother of God, pray for us; Mother most pure, pray for us; Mother most chaste, pray for us....”

  He was praying not by reflex, not unconsciously, but ardently, with the deep, sweet conviction that the Mother of God heard his desperate cries and that, by the combination of his new power and the Virgin’s intercession, Father Wycazik would be raised up again. If he had ever lost his faith, he regained it in that dark moment. With all his heart and mind, he believed. If Father Wycazik had been taken wrongly, before his appointed time, and if the Virgin handed these pleas, wet with her own tears, to Him who can never refuse His Mother anything she asks in the name of love, then the ruined flesh would be made whole and the rector would be restored to this world to complete his mission.

  Keeping his hands upon the wet and awful wound, kneeling, wearing no priestly raiments other than those the pure falling snow painted on his humbled shoulders, Brendan chanted the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. He beseeched Mary—Queen of Angels, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs. But still his cherished rector lay motionless on the bosom of the earth. He pleaded for the Virgin’s mercy, she who was the Mystical Rose, the Morning Star, the Tower of Ivory, Health of the Sick, Comforter of the Afflicted. But the dead eyes, once so full of warmth and intelligence and affection, stared unblinking as flakes of snow spiraled into them. “Mirror of Justice, pray for us; Cause of our joy, pray for us....”

  At last, Brendan admitted that it was the will of God that Father Wycazik move on from this place.

  He softly concluded the litany in a voice that grew shakier by the word. He removed his hands from the monstrous wound. Instead, he took one of Stefan Wycazik’s limp dead hands in both his own and held fast to it like a lost child. His heart was a deep vessel of grief.

  Colonel Leland Falkirk loomed over him. “So you’ve got limits to your power, do you? Good. That’s good to know. All right, then, come on. Get back there with the others.”

  Brendan looked up into the sharp face and polished-flint eyes, and he felt none of the fear that the colonel previously aroused in him. He said quietly, “He died without an opportunity to make a last confession. I am a priest, and I will stay here and do what a priest must do, and when I’m finished I will rejoin the others. The only way you’ll move me now is if you kill me and drag me away. If you can’t wait, then you’ll have to shoot me in the back.” He turned away from the colonel. Face wet with tears and melting snow, he took a deep breath and found that the Latin phrases came to his tongue without hesitation.

  The crawl-through that Jack had cut in the chainlink fence was small, but none of them—Jack, Dom, or Ginger—was a large person, so they all squeezed onto the grounds of Thunder Hill without difficulty, having pushed the rucksacks full of equipment ahead of them.

  At Jack’s direction, Dom and Ginger stayed close to the fence until he had a chance to study the immediate landscape through the Star Tron night-vision device. He was searching for posts on which surveillance cameras and photoelectric-cell alarm systems might be rigged. Though blowing snow made the inspection more difficult than it would have been in better weather, he located two poles on which were mounted cameras that covered this portion of the Thunder Hill perimeter from different angles. He believed the lenses of both cameras were filmed with snow, though due to the storm he could not be certain. He saw no evidence of photoelectric systems to detect movement across this part of the meadow.

  Next, from a zippered pocket, he withdrew a wallet-size device—an extremely sophisticated variation of a voltameter. It could detect the passage of electric current through a line without making contact with that line, although it could not measure the strength of the current.

  He turned toward the open meadow, putting his back to the fence. Crouching, he held the object out at arm’s length, about two feet above the ground, and moved slowly forward. The voltage detector would register a current from lines buried as deep as eighteen inches underground, unless they were sheathed in pipes. The kind of lines he was looking for were neither that deep nor sheathed. Even the foot of new and old snow would not measurably affect the device’s performance. He edged forward only about three yards before the detector began beeping softly and flashing its amber light.

  He halted immediately, stepped back a couple of feet, and called Dom and Ginger to his side. They huddled together, and Jack said, “There’s a pressure-sensitive alarm grid buried an inch or two under the ground. It starts about ten feet inside the fence, and I’m sure it runs parallel to the fence all around the facility. It’s a web of wires—sealed in thin plastic—that carry a low-voltage current. It’s designed so the connections of some of the wires will be broken and the current interrupted if anything above a certain weight—oh, say fifty pounds—steps on them. The weight of the snow doesn’t affect it because that’s evenly distributed. It reacts to localized pressure—like a footstep.”

  “Even I weigh more than fifty pounds,” Ginger said. “How wide’s this alarm grid?”

  “At least eight or ten feet,” Jack said. “They want to be sure that if someone immensely clever like me should come along and detect the system, it’ll be impossible just to jump across it.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Dom said, “but I can’t fly across.”

  “I’m not so sure you can’t,” Jack said. “I mean, if you had time to explore that power of yours.... If you can levitate chairs, why couldn’t you levitate yourself?” He saw this suggestion had startled Dom. “But you haven’t time to learn to control your power, so we’ll have to rely on what’s gotten us this far.”

  “What’s that?” Ginger asked.

  “My genius,” Jack said with a grin. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll walk along the perimeter, staying in the safe ground between the fence and the alarm grid, until we find a place where there’s a big sturdy tree standing twenty or thirty feet deeper in the meadow, well beyond the width of the grid.”

  “Then?” Dom asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “What if we don’t find a tree?” Ginger asked.

  “Doc,” Jack said, “I had you pegged as a go-getting optimist. If I say we need a tree, I’d expect you to tell me we’ll find a forest and have a thousand to choose from.”

 
They found the tree only three hundred yards down the slope toward the valley floor. It was a huge pine of such age and character that it offered the thick and widely separated limbs that Jack required. It towered eighty feet or higher, a snow-dusted monolith looming out of the storm, and it was thirty or thirty-five feet back from the fence, well beyond the farther edge of the alarm grid.

  Using the Star Tron again, Jack studied the massive pine until he found exactly the right branch. It had to be sturdy, yet not much higher than the fence, with which it would form the opposing stanchions of a rope bridge. He put the Star Tron away again.

  From one of the rucksacks, he removed the four-pronged grappling hook that had been one of the many items on Ginger’s and Faye’s shopping list when they had