Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  Earthquake? Ned wondered. A quake did not explain the electronic

  shriek that accompanied the thunder.

  The chairs jittered across the floor, bumping against one another. One

  of them slid into Corvaisis, and the writer jumped in surprise.

  Ned could feel the floor shaking.

  The thunderlike rumble and the accompanying oscillatory shriek rose to

  an ear-splitting peak, and with the hard flat crash of a bomb blast, the

  big front windows imploded. Faye screamed and threw her arms up in

  front of her face, and Ernie stumbled backward and nearly fell over a

  chair. Sandy buried her face against Ned's chest.

  They might have been badly cut by flying glass if the closed blinds had

  not imposed a barrier between them and the shattering panes. Even so,

  the force of the implosion flung the blinds up as a strong wind might

  blow curtains at an open window, and some glittering shards fell onto

  the booths, rained over Ned, and smashed on the floor around him.

  Silence. The implosion of the windows was followed by a profound

  silence disturbed only by a few last, loose, little pieces of glass

  falling out of window frames, one at a time.

  On that Friday night in July, the summer before last, much more than

  this had happened, though Ned could not remember what. Tonight,

  however, the mysterious drama apparently was not going to progress as

  far as it had gone then. For now, it was over.

  Dom Corvaisis was bleeding lightly from a nick in his cheek, hardly

  worse than a shaving cut. Ernie's forehead and the back of his right

  hand had been slightly scratched by splinters of glass.

  When he had determined that Sandy was unhurt, Ned reluctantly left her

  and rushed to the front door. He went out into the night in search of

  the cause of the weird noise and destruction, but he found only the

  deep, dark, solemn silence of the plains. No smoke or blackened rubble

  marked the source of an explosion. At the bottom of the hill on which

  the Tranquility Motel and Grille stood, widely separated cars and trucks

  moved on the interstate. Over at the motel, drawn by the commotion, a

  few guests had come outside in their nightclothes. The sky above was

  full of stars. The air was numbingly cold, but there was no wind, only

  a soft breeze, like the frigid sigh of Death. Nothing in sight could

  have caused the thunder, shaking, or implosion of the windows.

  Dom Corvaisis came out of the Grille, bewildered. "What the hell?"

  "I was hoping you'd know," Ned responded.

  "It's what happened the summer before last."

  "I know."

  ,'But just the start of it. Damn it, I can't remember what happened

  that night after the windows blew in."

  "Me neither," Ned replied.

  Corvaisis turned his hands palms-up, held them out for inspection. In

  the blue neon light from the sign on the diner's roof, Ned saw rings of

  swollen flesh in the writer's palms. Because the light was blue, he

  could not ascertain the true color of the marks. But from what

  Corvaisis had told them earlier, Ned knew the rings were an angry red.

  "What the hell?" Corvaisis said again.

  Sandy was standing in the open door of the diner, backlit by the

  fluorescent glow from inside, and Ned went to her, embraced her. He

  felt one shudder after another passing through her. But he did not

  realize how badly he was trembling until she said, "You're shaking like

  a leaf."

  Ned Sarver was scared sick. With an almost clairvoyant vividness, he

  sensed that they were involved in something of monumental importance,

  something unimaginably dangerous, and that it was likely to end in death

  for some or all of them. He was a natural-born fixer of both inanimate

  objects and people, a damned good repairman. But this time he was up

  against a force with which he did not know how to tinker. What if Sandy

  were killed? He took pride in his talents, but even the best fixer in

  the whole damned world could not undo the wreckage wrought by Death.

  For the first time since meeting her in Tucson, Ned felt powerless to

  protect his wife.

  At the horizon, the moon had begun to rise.

  January 12-January 14

  1.

  Sunday, January 12

  Air as dense as molten iron.

  In the nightmare, Dom could not draw breath. A tremendous pressure bore

  down on him. He was choking violently. He was dying.

  He could not see much; his vision was clouded. Then two men came close,

  both wearing white vinyl decontamination suits with dark-visored helmets

  similar to those of astronauts. One man was at Dom's right, frantically

  disconnecting the IV line, withdrawing the intravenous spike from his

  arm. The other man, on the left, was cursing the cardiological data on

  the video readout of the EKG machine. One of them unbuckled the straps

  and tore off the electrodes connecting Dom to the EKG, and the other

  lifted him into a sitting position. They pressed a glass to his lips,

  but he could not drink, so they tipped his head back and forced his

  mouth open and poured some noxious stuff down his throat.

  The men communicated with each other via radios built into their

  helmets, but they were leaning so close to Dom that he could hear their

  voices clearly even through the muffling Plexiglas of their dark visors.

  One of them said, "How many detainees were poisoned?" And the other

  said, "Nobody's sure yet. Looks like at least a dozen." The first said,

  "But who'd want to poison them?" And the second said, "One guess." The

  first said, "Colonel Falkirk. Colonel fucking Falkirk." The second man

  said, "But we'll never prove it, never nail the bastard."

  Flash-cut. The motel bathroom. The men were holding Dom on his feet,

  forcing his face down into the sink. This

  time, he understood what they were saying to him. With growing urgency,

  they were insisting that he vomit. Colonel fucking Falkirk had somehow

  had him poisoned, and these guys had made him drink a foul-tasting

  emetic, and now he was supposed to purge himself of the poison that was

  killing him. But even as sick as he was, he still could not puke. He

  gagged, retched; his stomach roiled; sweat poured off him like melting

  fat off a broiling chicken; but he could not rid himself of the poison.

  The first man said, "We need a stomach pump." And the second said, "We

  don't have a stomach pump." They pressed Dom's face deeper into the

  porcelain bowl. The crushing pressure grew worse, and Dom could hardly

  breathe at all now, and hot greasy waves of nausea washed through him,

  and sweat gushed from him, but he could not puke, could not, could not.

  And then he did.

  Flash-cut. In bed again. Weak, kitten-weak. But able to breathe,

  thank God. The men in the decontamination suits had cleaned him up and

  strapped him to the mattress once more. The one on the right prepared a

  hypodermic and administered an injection of something apparently meant

  to counteract the remaining effects of the poison. The one on the left

  reconnected him to the intravenous drip from which he was receiving

  drugs, not nourishment. Dom was woozy, holding on to conscious
ness only

  with considerable effort. They hooked him to the EKG again, and as they

  worked, they talked. "Falkirk's an idiot. We can keep a lid'on this,

  given half a chance."

  "He's afraid the memory block will wear off. He's afraid that some of

  them will eventually remember what they saw."

  "Well, he may be right. But if the asshole kills them all, how's he

  going to explain the bodies?

  That's going to draw reporters like raw meat draws jackals, and then

  there'll be no way to keep the lid on. A nice memory wipe-that's the

  only sensible answer."

  "You don't have to convince me. Go burn Falkirk's ear about it."

  The dream-figures faded away, as did their voices, and Dom passed into a

  different nightmare country. He no longer felt weak, no longer sick,

  but his fear exploded into stark terror, and he began to run with that

  maddening slow-motion panic indigenous to nightmares. He did not know

  what he was running from, but he was certain that something was pursuing

  him, something threatening and inhuman, he could sense it right behind

  him, closer, reaching for him, closer, and finally he knew he could not

  outrun it, knew he must face it, so he stopped and turned and looked up

  and cried outin surprise: "The moon!"

  Dom was awakened by his own cry. He was in Room 20, on the floor beside

  the bed, kicking, flailing. He got up and sat on the bed.

  He looked at his travel clock. Three-oh-seven A. M.

  Shivering, he blotted his damp palms on the sheets.

  Room 20 was having precisely the effect on him that he had thought it

  would. The bad vibrations of the place stimulated his memory, made his

  nightmares more vivid and more detailed than ever.

  These dreams were radically different from all others he had ever known,

  for they were not fantasies but glimpses of a past reality seen through

  a distorting lens. They were not dreams as much as they were memories,

  forbidden recollections that had been weighted and dropped into the

  black sea of his subconscious, like dead bodies encumbered with cement

  shoes and thrown from a bridge into the deeps. Finally, the memories

  had slipped out of the cement and were surging to the surface.

  He really had been imprisoned here, drugged, brainwashed. And during

  that ordeal, someone named Colonel Falkirk had actually poisoned him to

  prevent him from talking about whatever he had seen.

  Falkirk was right, Dom thought. Eventually, we'll overcome the

  brainwashing and remember the truth. He should have killed us all.

  Sunday morning, Ernie purchased panels of plyboard from a friend in Elko

  who owned a building supply. With his portable tablesaw, he cut the

  panels to fit the busted-out diner windows. Ned and Dom helped nail the

  plyboard in place, and by noon they had completed the job.

  Ernie did not want to call a glazier and have the windows replaced

  because last night's phenomena might recur. Until they knew what had

  caused the thunderous noise and shaking, installing new glass seemed

  foolhardy. In the interim, the Tranquility Grille would not be open.

  The Tranquility Motel also would be closed. Ernie did not want business

  to distract him from helping Dom and the others probe into the mystery

  of the "toxic spill." When the last of yesterday's check-ins departed

  later today, the motel would house only Ernie, Faye, Dom, and any other

  victims who, when contacted, might decide to journey to Elko County to

  participate in the investigation. He did not know how many rooms he

  might need for those fellow-sufferers, so he decided to reserve all

  twenty. For the time being, the Tranquility was less a motel than a

  barracks, where the troops would be quartered until this war with an

  unknown enemy was finally brought to a conclusion.

  When the diner was boarded up, they all got into the motel's Dodge van,

  and Faye drove them down to the interstate and just over a quarter of a

  mile east, where she parked on the shoulder of the highway near the

  place that had a special attraction for Ernie and Sandy. The five of

  them stood along the guardrail, staring south, seeking a communion with

  the landscape that might illuminate the past. The winter solstice was

  three weeks behind them, so the sunlight was almost as hard and flat and

  cold as fluorescent light. In the grip of January, the scrub- and

  grass-covered plains, rugged hills, arroyos and gnarled rock formations

  were basically trichromatic, rendered in browns and grays and deep reds,

  with only an occasional patch of white sand, snow, or vein of borax. The

  scene was stark and dreary under a sky that grew more clouded and gray

  by the hour, but it also possessed an undeniable austere grandeur.

  Faye wanted very much to feel something special about this place, for if

  she felt nothing, that would mean the people who brainwashed her had

  totally controlled her, totally violated her. She allowed no room in

  her self-image for the concept of absolute submission. She was a proud,

  capable woman. But she felt nothing other than the winter wind.

  Ned and Dom appeared to be no more moved than Faye was, but she could

  see that Ernie and Sandy were receiving some cryptic message from the

  vista before them. Sandy was smiling beatifically. But Ernie had that

  look he got when night fell: pale, drawn, with haunted eyes.

  "Let's go closer," Sandy said. "Let's go right down there."

  All five climbed over the guardrail and plunged down the steep

  embankment of the elevated road. They moved across the plain-fifty

  yards, a hundred-carefully avoiding the coldweather prickly pear which

  grew in profusion near the foot of the interstate but soon disappeared

  in favor of sagebrush and bunch-grass, which in turn gave way to another

  kind of grass which was also brown but thicker, silkier. Portions of

  the plain were rocky and sandy and in the grip of worthless bristly

  scrub, while other portions were almost like small lush meadows, for

  this was a land in transition from the semidesert of the south to the

  rich mountain pastures of the north. More than two hundred yards from

  the interstate, they stopped on a patch of ground not appreciably

  different from surrounding territory.

  "Here," Ernie said with a shudder, jamming his hands in his pockets and

  pulling his neck down into the rolled sheepskin collar of his coat.

  Sandy smiled and said, "Yes. Here."

  They spread out and moved back and forth across the ground. Here and

  there, in one shadowed niche or another, meager patches of snow lay

  hidden from the evaporating effect of the dry wind and from the cold

  winter sun. Those traces of winter, plus the lack of green grass and

  scattered late-blooming wildflowers, were the only things that made the

  landscape different from the way it had looked two summers ago. After a

  minute or two, Ned announced that he did, indeed, feel an inexplicable

  connection with the place, though it did not bring him peace as it did

  his wife. His fear became so acute that, expressing surprise and

  embarrassment at his reaction, he turned and walked away. As Sandy

  hurried after Ned, Dom Corvaisis admitted
that he was strangely affected

  by the place, too. However, he was not merely frightened, like Ned;

  Dom's fear, like Ernie's, was spiced by an unexplained awe and a sense

  of impending epiphany. Only Faye remained unaffected, unmoved.

  Standing in the middle of the area in question, Dom turned slowly in a

  circle. "What was it? What the hell happened here?"

  The sky had turned to gray slate.

  The blunt wind became sharp. Faye shivered.

  She remained unable to feel what Ernie and the others felt, and that

  inability increased her sense of violation. She hoped she would one day

  meet the people who had messed with her mind. She wanted to look in

  their eyes and ask them how they could have so little respect for the

  personal integrity of another human being. Now that she knew she had

  been manipulated, she would never again feel entirely secure.

  Stirred by the wind, the dry sagebrush made a scrapingrustling noise.

  Ice-crusted twigs clicked against one another with a sound that,

  fancifully, made Faye think of small, scurrying skeletons of little

  animals long-dead but somehow reanimated.

  Back at the motel, in the Blocks' apartment, Ernie and Sandy and Ned sat

  at the kitchen table, while Faye made coffee and hot chocolate.

  Dom perched on a stool by the wall phone. On the counter in front of

  him lay the Tranquility Motel's registration book that had been in use

  the year before last. Referring to the page for Friday, July 6, he

  began to call those who must have shared the unremembered but important

  experiences of that faraway summer night.