Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  like a submarine in dry dock for repairs. The only thing different from its appearance on the night of July 6 was the absence of the eerie glow that had changed from moon-white to scarlet to amber. It possessed no visible propulsion system, no rockets. The hull was nearly as featureless as she recalled: here, a ten-foot-long row of shallow depressions in the metal, each big enough for her to insert her fist, but without evident purpose; there, four protruding hemispheres like halves of cantaloupes, also without apparent function; here and there, half a dozen circular elevations, some as large as the lid of a trash can, some no bigger than the mouth of a mayonnaise jar, none higher than three inches, all quite mysterious. Otherwise, but for the marks of wear and age, the long curving hull was smooth over ninety-eight percent of its surface. Yet its unspectacular design did not prevent it from being by far the most spectacular thing Ginger had ever seen. She was-simultaneously terrified and joyous, overcome with a dread of the unknown yet exultant.

  Two men were sitting at a table at the foot of portable stairs that led up to an open hatch in the flank of the elevated spacecraft. The most imposing was a lanky man in his forties, with curly black hair and beard, wearing dark trousers, dark shirt, and white lab coat. The other was in an Army uniform with the jacket unbuttoned, a somewhat portly man ten years older than his bearded companion. Now, seeing their three visitors, they fell silent, rose from their chairs, but did not shout for guards or rush to trip an alarm switch. The two merely watched Dom, Jack, and Ginger with interest, gauging their first reactions to the trestled craft that loomed over them.

  They were expecting us, Ginger thought.

  That realization should have concerned her, but it did not. She had no interest in anything but the ship.

  With Dom close by her right side and Jack on her left, she moved with them in silence to the nearest end of the cylindrical vessel. Although her heart had begun beating hard and fast the moment she had entered the chamber and seen the ship, its previous pounding was mild compared to its current furious hammering. They stopped within an arm’s length of the hull and studied it with an attitude of wonder bordering on veneration.

  Random swirling patterns of fine-grain abrasion swept across the entire curving bulk of it, as if it had persevered through clouds of cosmic dust or particles of a type and origin as yet. unknown to man. Random nicks and small dents were scattered across the surface, clearly not part of the design but inflicted by elements far more hostile than the winds and storms that battered the ships of earth’s seas and skies. The hull was mottled gray-black-amber-brown as if bathed in a hundred different acids and scorched in a thousand fires.

  Aside from its intrinsic and powerful alienness, the strongest impression Ginger got from the ship was a sense of great age. For all she knew, it could have been built only a few years ago and could have journeyed to Elko County at faster-than-light speeds, arriving on the night of July 6, just a few months or a year after being launched. But she did not think that was the case. She could not ascertain the source of her conviction—call it intuition—but she was certain that she was standing in the shadow of an ancient vessel. And when she reached out and touched the cool metal, letting her fingertips move lightly over its scarred and finely abraded surface, she felt even more strongly that she was in the presence of a venerable relic.

  They had come such a long way. Such a very long way.

  Following her lead, Dom and Jack had touched the hull, too. Dom took a deep quaverous breath. His, “Ahhhhhhh,” was more eloquent than any words could have been.

  “Oh, how I wish my father could have lived for this,” Ginger said, remembering dear Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the luftmentsch, who had always loved tales of other worlds and distant times.

  Jack said, “I wish Jenny’d lived longer ... just a little longer....”

  Ginger suddenly realized that Jack did not mean the same thing she meant, that he was not saying he wished his Jenny had lived to see this vessel. He was wishing she had lived through these events because, as a result of this extraterrestrial contact, Brendan and Dom had acquired the power to heal her. If she had not succumbed on Christmas Day, they might have been able to go back to her—assuming they got out of Thunder Hill alive—and might have knit up her damaged brain, bringing her out of her coma, returning her to the arms of her devoted husband. That jolting moment of comprehension made Ginger aware that she had hardly begun to grasp the implications of this incredible event.

  The portly man in the military uniform and the bearded man in the lab coat had walked over from the table near the ship’s portal. The civilian put his hand to the hull, which Ginger and Dom and Jack were still exploring. He said, “An alloy of some kind. Harder than any steel produced on this world. Harder than diamond, yet extremely light and with surprising flexibility. You’re Dom Corvaisis.”

  “Yes,” Dom said, offering his hand to the stranger, a courtesy that would have surprised Ginger if she had not also sensed that this mild-spoken scientist and the military man with him were not their enemies.

  “I’m Miles Bennell, director of the team studying this ... wonderful event. And this is General Alvarado, commanding officer of Thunder Hill. I can’t tell you how deeply I regret what’s been done to you. This shouldn’t be a secret possessed by a few. It belongs to the world. And if I had my way, the world would hear about it tomorrow.”

  Bennell shook Jack’s and Ginger’s hands, too.

  Ginger said, “We have questions....”

  “And you deserve answers,” Bennell said. “I’ll tell you everything we’ve been able to learn. But we might as well wait until everyone’s assembled. Where are the others?”

  “What others?” Dom asked.

  And Ginger said, “You mean from the motel? They’re not with us.”

  Bennell blinked in surprise. “You mean most of them managed to slip through Colonel Falkirk’s hands?”

  “Falkirk?” Jack said. “Do you think he brought us here?”

  Bennell said, “If not Falkirk—who?”

  “We came in ourselves,” Dom said.

  Ginger saw the shock of that news register with both Bennell and General Alvarado. They looked at each other in surprise, and then a light of hope lit both their faces.

  Alvarado said, “You’re not telling us you found a way through the Depository’s security? But that’s not possible!”

  “Have you read the file on Jack?” Bennell asked his friend. “Yes? Well, just remember his Ranger training and what he’s been doing for a living these past eight years or so.”

  Jack shook his head. “I can’t take all the credit. Yeah, I got us through the perimeter, across the grounds, and past the first door, but it was Dom who actually got us inside.”

  “Dom?” Bennell said, turning in surprise to the writer. “But what do you know about security systems? Unless ... of course! This strange damn power of yours! Since that experience in Lomack’s house and since the light you generated when Cronin first arrived at the Tranquility, you must’ve discovered the power wasn’t external. You must know now that it’s actually in you.”

  Ginger realized that Bennell’s statement had revealed that their conversations at the Tranquility had, indeed, been monitored. But it also revealed that their discussions and strategy sessions in the diner, after Jack’s arrival, had not been penetrated. Otherwise Bennell would have known about the experiment last night in which both Dom and Brendan had learned that their apparently mystical experiences were, in fact, events of their own creation.

  “Yes,” Dom said. “We know the power’s in us—me and Brendan. But where does it come from Doctor Bennell?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I think it has something to do with what happened to us when we went in the ship, but I can’t remember. Can’t you tell me?”

  “No,” Miles Bennell said. “Not really. It was known that three of you went into the vessel, but we didn’t know that anything ... peculiar had happened to you in there. You’d come out
just as the helicopters with DERO troops and scientific observers began to arrive on the site, and no one figured you’d been in there more than a couple minutes. When you were taken into custody, you didn’t tell anyone that something important had happened while you’d been aboard. I believe you said you’d just looked around. And for ease of handling, you were all sedated immediately after being arrested and conveyed back to the Tranquility. So even if you’d changed your mind and decided to tell us what happened, you didn’t have a chance.” Excited, the lanky scientist absentmindedly began to comb his long fingers through his curly black beard as he talked. “When the decision was made to put a lid on the event, to brainwash every civilian who’d seen it, there wasn’t time for a thorough debriefing of all the witnesses. In fact, you were never brought out of sedation; you were moved directly onto the drug program that was part of your memory-wipe. That’s one reason I was opposed to the cover-up. I felt that by brainwashing you without giving us plenty of time to debrief ... well, it was not only unfair and cruel to you but a really stupid waste of potential sources of data.”

  Ginger looked toward the open portal farther along the flank of the vessel, at the top of the portable stairs. “If we go back inside now, maybe the last of the memory block will crumble.”

  “That might help,” Bennell agreed.

  Looking up at the starship again, Jack said, “How’d you know it was coming down out there along 1-80?”

  “Yeah,” Dom said. “And why’d they think it should be covered up?”

  “And the creatures who came in it,” Jack said.

  “God, yes,” Ginger said, “where are they? What’s happened to them?”

  Interrupting, General Alvarado said, “Like Miles said, you’ll get the answers because you deserve them. But first, there’s more urgent business.” He turned to Dom. “I suppose if you can levitate things and create light out of thin air, there’s no problem getting through an electronic security system. And if you can get in, you ought to be able to use your power to keep other people out. You think you could? Keep both the blast doors and the smaller entrance from opening until we’re ready to open them?”

  Dom was clearly as baffled by these questions as Ginger was. He said, “Well, maybe. I don’t know.”

  Bennell looked at the general. “Bob, if you keep the colonel out, that’ll be like lighting the fuse. He knows no one can control VIGILANT but him. If he can’t get in ... it’ll look like voodoo to him. He’ll be sure we’re all infected.”

  “Infected?” Ginger said uneasily.

  Alvarado said, “The colonel is convinced that we—you, me, Miles, all of us—have been somehow possessed by alien beings, taken over like a bunch of puppets, and that we’re not human any more.”

  “That’s insane,” Jack said.

  But with greater uneasiness, Ginger said, “Of course, we know we haven’t been. But is there reason to believe it could’ve happened?”

  “Initially, yes, some small reason,” Miles Bennell said, “but it didn’t happen. It’s not true. And we understand now that it was never a possibility. Just typical black-minded human nature ... putting the worst interpretation on everything. I’ll explain later.”

  Ginger was about to demand an immediate explanation, but General Alvarado said, “Please, hold the questions. We don’t have much time. Right now, we believe Falkirk is returning here, having taken your friends into custody—”

  “No,” Dom said, “they got away before we did. They’re gone.”

  “Never underestimate the colonel,” Alvarado said. “But see, the thing is—if Dom could use his power to shut down the entrances and keep Falkirk out, maybe we’d have the time to find a way to blow this whole story wide open. Because if he gets in here ... I’m afraid there’s going to be bloodshed one way or another.”

  Movement at the front of the chamber caught Ginger’s attention, and she gasped in dismay when she saw Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, and then all the others coming in through the small door in the big door.

  “Too late,” Miles Bennell said. “Too late.”

  At the entrance to Thunder Hill Depository, the seven witnesses and Parker Faine were taken out of the transport and grouped in the snow in front of the smaller steel door. Lieutenant Homer’s machine gun discouraged flight and resistance.

  Leland ordered the other DERO men back to Shenkfield, where they were to bury Stefan Wycazik in an unmarked grave and await further orders. But no orders would be forthcoming from Leland, for he would not be alive to give them. It was not necessary to sacrifice the entire company, for just he and one other man could control the prisoners and destroy the entire Depository, and it was Lieutenant Horner’s bad luck to be second-in-command and have that responsibility fall upon his shoulders.

  In the entrance tunnel, Leland was alarmed to see that the video cameras were not working. But then he realized that the new emergency program under which VIGILANT was operating did not require visual ID for admittance, for it would respond only to one key: the prints of the palm and all the fingers on Leland’s left hand. When he put his palm to the glass panel beside the inner door, VIGILANT admitted him at once.

  He and Horner took the eight prisoners down to the second level and across The Hub to the cavern where Alvarado and Bennell waited. As Leland stood back and watched them file through the man-sized door in the huge wooden wall, he looked beyond them and saw the other witnesses—Corvaisis, Weiss, and Twist—and although he did not know how they had gotten here, he was exhilarated by the realization that, contrary to expectations, he had the whole group exactly where he wanted them.

  He left Horner to follow the prisoners, while he hurried back to the elevators. He could never trust poor Tom again, not now that the lieutenant had been alone with people who might be contaminated.

  Carrying his submachine gun at the ready, Leland took a smaller elevator down to the third level. He intended to kill anyone who moved toward him. And if they rushed him in great numbers, he would turn the gun on himself. He wouldn’t let himself be changed. Through childhood and adolescence, his parents had striven to change him into one of them: a shouter-and-wailer-in-churches, a self-flagellator, a God-terrorized speaker of tongues. He had resisted the changes his parents would have wrought in him, and he would not be changed now. They had been after him all his life, in one guise or another, and they would not get him after he had come this far with his identity and dignity intact.

  The bottom level of Thunder Hill Depository was given over entirely to the storage of supplies, munitions, and explosives. Staff members all lived on the second level and most worked there as well. However, at any hour of the day, a few workers and a guard were usually on duty on the third and lowest floor. When Leland stepped out of the elevator, into the central cavern off which other chambers opened—an arrangement much like that on the second floor—he was pleased to see the basement was deserted tonight. General Alvarado had obeyed Leland’s orders and had sent all of his people to their quarters.

  Alvarado probably thought that, by cooperating, he could convince Leland that he and all his people were unquestionably human. But Leland was not naive enough to be taken in by such a ruse. His own parents had been capable of behaving like normal human beings, too—oh, yes, smiles and plenty of sweet-talk, oaths of love and affection—and just when you started to think they actually cared about you and wanted the best for you, they’d suddenly reveal themselves for what they really were. They would get out the leather strap or the Ping-Pong paddle in which the old man had drilled holes, and the beatings would be administered in the name of God. Leland Falkirk couldn’t be easily deceived by a masquerade of humanity, for at an early age he had learned to look for—in fact, to expect—an inhuman presence below the skin of normality.

  Crossing the main cavern to the massive steel blast door that sealed off the munitions room, Leland looked nervously left and right and up into the darkness between the lights. One of his punishments, as a child, had been long imprisonments in a wi
ndowless coal cellar.

  Leland pressed his left hand to the glass panel beside the door, which rolled open. Banks of lights flickered on automatically down the length of a room piled twenty feet high with anchored crates and drums and racks that contained live ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, mines, and other instruments of destruction.

  At the end of the long chamber was a twenty-foot-square vault that also required a palm ID to be opened. The weapons within were of such deadly magnitude that only eight people out of the hundreds in Thunder Hill were authorized to enter, and no one of them alone could open the vault. The system required three of the eight to apply their palms to the glass panel, one after another, within one minute, before access would be granted. But this also was overseen by VIGILANT, and the computer’s new program, designed by Leland, made him the sole keeper of the Depository’s tactical nuclear arsenal. He put his palm to the cool glass, and fifteen seconds later the many-layered, steel MacGruder vault door swung slowly open with a hum of electric motors.

  To the right of the vault door, twenty backpack nukes hung on wall pegs, missing only their primary detonators and their binary packages of explosive material. The detonators were stored in drawers along the back wall. To the left of the door, in lead-lined cabinets, the binary packages lay waiting for Armageddon.

  PERO training included familiarization with a variety of nuclear devices that terrorists might conceivably plant in American cities, so Leland knew how to assemble, arm, and disarm The Bomb in virtually all of its design permutations. He got the components from the cabinets, took two backpack-bomb frames down from the wall pegs, and put together both weapons in only eight minutes, glancing nervously at the door as he worked. He breathed easier only when he had set the timers on both detonators for fifteen minutes and had started the clocks.

  He slung his submachine gun over his shoulder, slipped each arm into the straps of a backpack nuke. Each device weighed sixty-nine pounds. He heaved both off the floor and lurched out of the vault, bent like a hunchback and grunting under that apocalyptic weight.

  Another man might have had to stop two or three times during the journey back through the immense munitions room. Any other man might have been forced to pause, put the bombs down, catch his breath, and stretch his muscles before going on. But not Leland Falkirk. That dead weight wrenched his back and pulled at his shoulders and made his arms ache, but he grew happier as the pain intensified.

  In the main cavern into which the elevators opened, he put one of the backpack nukes on the center of the floor. He looked around at the solid rock walls and up at the granite ceiling with a feeling of satisfaction. If there were any faults at all in the rock strata—and surely there were—the place would cave in, bringing everything above down with it. But even if the mighty stone chambers could contain and withstand the blast, no one who tried to take refuge on this level would survive. Not even an alien lifeform of great adaptability could reconstitute itself after being vaporized in a nuclear heat and reduced to random atoms.

  Nuclear pain.

  He would not be able to survive it, but he would prove that he had the nerve to contemplate and endure it. Only a fraction of a second of blinding agony. Not bad, actually. In fact, not as bad as vigorous and drawn-out beatings with a leather strap or with a Ping-Pong paddle that had been drilled full of holes to increase the sting.

  Still holding the second nuke by its straps, Leland smiled down at the changing numbers on the first bomb’s digital-display clock, which was already counting toward Ragnarok. The nicest thing about backpack nukes was that, once armed, they could not be disarmed. He did not have to worry that someone could undo his work.

  He entered the elevator and rode up to the second level.

  Carrying Marcie, Jorja crossed directly to Jack Twist and stood beside him, looking up at the ship cradled on trestles. Although the collapse of her memory block and the inrushing recollections had more or less prepared her for this sight, she was overcome with an awe as powerful as that which had seized her in the troop transport, when the astounding truth had first been revealed. She reached out to touch the mottled hull, and a shiver—part fear, part wonder, part delight—coursed through her when her fingertips made contact with the scorched and abraded metal.

  Whether following her mother’s lead or acting on an impulse of her own, Marcie reached forward, too. When her small tentative hand pressed against the hull, she said, “The moon. The moon.”

  “Yes,” Jorja said immediately. “Yes, honey. This is what you saw come down. Remember? It wasn’t the moon falling. It was this, glowing white like the moon, then red, then amber.”

  “Moon,” the child said softly, sliding her tiny hand back and forth across the flank of the vessel, as if she were trying to clean off the mottled film of age and tribulation and, thereby, also clean off the clouded surface of her own memory. “Moon fell down.”

  “Not the moon, honey. A ship. A very special ship. A spaceship like in the movies, baby.”

  Marcie turned and looked at Jorja, actually looked at her, with eyes that were no longer out of focus or turned inward. “Like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock?”

  Jorja smiled and hugged her tighter. “Yes, honey, like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.”

  “Like Luke Skywalker,” Jack said, leaning forward and pushing a lock of hair out of the girl’s eyes.

  “Luke,” Marcie said.

  “And Han Solo,” Jack said.

  The child’s eyes blurred out of focus. She had returned to her private place to contemplate the news she had just received.

  Jack smiled at Jorja and said, “She’s going to be all right. It may take time, but she’ll be all right because her whole obsession was a struggle to remember. Now, she’s begun to remember, and she doesn’t need to struggle any more.”

  As usual, Jorja was reassured merely by his presence, by his aura of calm competence. “She’ll be all right—if we can get out of here alive and with our memories intact.”

  “We-will,” Jack said. “Somehow.”

  A rush of warm emotion filled Dom when he saw Parker. He embraced the stocky artist and said, “How in God’s name did you wind up here, my friend?”

  “It’s a long story,” Parker said. A sorrow in his face and eyes said, better than words, that at least part of the story was bleak.

  “I didn’t mean to get you so deep in this trouble,” Dom said.

  Looking up at the starship, Parker said, “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  “What happened to your beard?”

  “When this kind of company’s coming,” Parker said, gesturing at the ship, “they’re worth shaving for.”