Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  since Ernie, Ned, and Dom had begun boarding up the diner's broken

  windows. Hours later, when Dom drove his rental car to the Elko airport

  to pick up Ginger Weiss, the world turned under a gloomy light, girdled

  in battlefield gray. He was too restless to wait inside the small

  terminal. He stood on the windswept tarmac, huddled in his heavy winter

  jacket,, so he heard the twin engines of the ten-seat commuter craft

  even before he saw it descend through the low clouds. The roar of the

  engines contributed to the mood of impending warfare, and Dom realized

  uneasily that, in a sense, they were assembling their army; war against

  their unknown enemy loomed nearer day by day.

  The plane taxied within eighty feet of the terminal, and Dr. Weiss was

  the fourth passenger to disembark. Even in a bulky, thoroughly

  unattractive carcoat, she looked petite and beautiful. The wind made a

  streaming banner of her silky silver-blond hair.

  Dom hurried toward her; she stopped and put down her bags. They

  hesitated, staring at each other in silence, with a peculiar mixture of

  amazement, excitement, pleasure, and apprehension. Then with an

  impulsiveness that obviously surprised her as much as it did him, they

  virtually threw themselves at each other, embracing as if they were old

  and dear friends too long apart. Dom held her close, and she held him

  tightly, and he felt her heart pounding as hard and as fast as his.

  What the hell is happening here? he wondered.

  But he was in too much turmoil to analyze the situation. For the moment,

  he could feel but not think.

  Neither of them wanted to let go, and when they finally separated,

  neither could speak. She tried to say something, but her voice cracked

  with emotion, and Dom was incoherent. So she picked up one of her bags,

  and he picked up the other, and they went out to the parking lot.

  In the car, with the engine running and the heater blowing warm air in

  their faces, Ginger said, "What was that all about?"

  Still shaken, but curiously not embarrassed by the bold greeting he had

  given her, Dom cleared his throat. "Don't really know. But I think

  maybe, together, you and I went through something so shattering that the

  experience created a special bond between us, a powerful bond we weren't

  entirely aware of until we saw each other in the flesh."

  "When I first came across your picture on the book jacket, it had a very

  odd effect on me, but nothing like this. Stepping off the plane, seeing

  you there . . . it was as if we'd known each other all our lives. No,

  not exactly that. More precisely . . . it was as if we'd known each

  other far better, more completely, than we'd ever known anyone else, as

  if we shared some tremendous secret that all the world might want to

  know but that only we possessed. Does that sound crazy?"

  He shook his head. "No. Not at all. You've put into words what I was

  feeling . . . as nearly as words can explain it."

  "You've met some of the others," Ginger said. "Was it like this when

  you first encountered them?"

  "No. I instantly felt . . . a certain warmth toward them, a strong

  sense of community, but nothing a fraction as powerful as what I felt

  when you got off that plane. All of us went through something unusual

  that linked our lives, our futures, but evidently you and I shared an

  experience even stranger and more affecting than anything we shared with

  them. Damn. It's as layered as an onion, one strangeness on another."

  For half an hour they sat in the car, in the airport parking lot,

  talking. Outside, cars and pickups came and went around them, and the

  January wind buffeted the Chevy and moaned at the windows; however, they

  were seldom aware of anything but each other.

  She told him about her fugues, the hypnotic regression sessions with

  Pablo Jackson, and the mind-control technique known as the Azrael Block.

  She told him about Pablo's murder and her own narrow escape.

  Although, clearly, Ginger sought neither sympathy for her suffering nor

  praise for the way she hadhandled herself in trying circumstances, Dom's

  respect and admiration for her grew by the minute. She was only

  five-two, a hundred pounds, but somehow she had a physical presence more

  imposing than many men twice her size.

  Dom recounted the events of the past twenty-four hours, and when Ginger

  heard about his dream of the previous night and about the new memories

  that surfaced in it, she appeared immensely relieved. In Dom's dream,

  there was proof of Pablo Jackson's theory: Her fugues were not caused by

  mental aberration; they were, instead, always triggered by objects

  associated with her imprisonment at the motel two summers ago. The

  black gloves and dark-visored helmet had terrified her because they made

  a direct connection with the repressed memories of the people in

  decontamination suits who tended her while she underwent brainwashing.

  The drain in the hospital scrub sink threw the panic switch because she

  probably had been one of those "detainees" poisoned by Colonel Falkirk

  (whoever the hell he was), then forced to vomit up the deadly substance,

  just as Dom had been. While strapped in the motel bed, she must have

  undergone many eye examinations to determine the depth of her

  drug-induced trance, which was why an ophthalmoscope had sent her

  reeling away in a dark terror that night in George Hannaby's office. Dom

  saw a relaxation of the tension at this irrefutable evidence that her

  blackouts were not a sign of madness and were, in fact, a desperate but

  entirely rational method of avoiding the repressed memories that the

  mind-control experts had forbidden her to recall.

  She said, "But what about the brass buttons on the coat of the man who

  killed Pablo? And on the policeman's uniform? Why did they terrify me

  and throw me into a fugue?"

  "We know the military is involved in this cover-up," Dom said, turning

  up the heater to counteract the cold air pouring off the car's

  wind-buffeted windows, "and officers' uniforms have brass buttons like

  that, though not a lion passant. Most likely . . . raised images of

  eagles. The buttons on the killer's and cop's coats were probably

  similar to the buttons on the uniforms of those who imprisoned us in the

  motel."

  "Okay, but you said they wore decontamination suits, not uniforms."

  "Maybe they didn't wear the decon suits for the entire three and a half

  days. At some point they decided it was safe to take them off."

  She nodded. "I'm sure that's right. Which leaves only one thing. Those

  carriage lamps behind the house on Newbury Street, the day Pablo was

  murdered. I told you about them: black iron with pebbled amber panes of

  glass. They had those bulbs that flickered like a gas flame. Perfectly

  innocent lamps. But they kicked me into another blackout."

  "The bases of the lamps in the rooms at the Tranquility Motel are

  designed like hurricane lamps, with little windows of amber glass."

  "I'll be damned. So every blackout was triggered by an object that

  reminded me of something from those days when I was being brainwashed." />
  Dom hesitated, then reached inside his sweater and withdrew the Polaroid

  photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  She paled and shuddered when she saw herself staring up with vacant eyes

  at the camera. "Gevalt!" She looked away from the picture.

  Dom gave her time to recover from the shock of the snapshot.

  Outside, in the fading dirty-gray light, a score of vehicles waited

  silently like dark, dumb, brooding beasts. The wind harried collections

  of litter, dead leaves, and miscellaneous debris across the macadam.

  "It's meshugge," she said, lowering her troubled gaze to the photo

  again. "It's crazy. What could possibly have happened to us that would

  justify this elaborate, risky conspiracy?

  What could we have seen that was so dreadfully goddamned important?"

  "We'll find out," he promised.

  "Will we? Will they let us? They killed Pablo. Won't they do

  whatever's necessary to keep us from uncovering the truth?"

  Adjusting the heater again, Dom said, "Well, I figure there're two

  factions among the conspirators. There are the hard-asses represented

  by Colonel Falkirk and his people, and the better guys-can't call them

  good guys exactly-represented by the fella who sent us these snapshots

  and by the two men in decontamination suits in my dream last night. The

  hard-asses wanted to kill all of us right at the start, so there'd never

  be any doubt that the cover-up would be permanent. But the better guys

  wanted to scrub our memories, use mind-control techniques instead of

  violence, so we could go on living, and the better guys must be the

  stronger of the two factions because they got their way."

  "The gunman who killed Pablo was most likely one of the hard-asses."

  "Yeah. Working for Falkirk. The colonel's evidently still willing to

  kill anyone who jeopardizes the cover-up, which means none of us is

  safe. But there's the other faction that doesn't believe in Falkirk's

  ultimate solution, and they're still trying to protect us, I think. So

  we have a chance. Anyway, we can't walk away. We can't go home and try

  to get on with our lives just because the enemy looks formidable."

  "No," Ginger agreed, "we can't. Because until we find out what

  happened, we don't really have lives to get on with."

  The wind blew withered leaves against the windshield, over the roof.

  Ginger swept the parking lot with her gaze. "They must know we're

  gathering at the motel, that things are falling apart. Do you think

  they're watching us now?"

  "Very likely they've got the motel under surveillance," Dom said. "But

  no one followed me to the airport. I watched for a tail."

  "They wouldn't need to tail you here," she said grimly. "They knew where

  you were going. They knew who you were picking up."

  "Are we laboring under a delusion of free will? Are we only bugs on a

  giant's palm, and can the giant crush us whenever he wants?"

  "Maybe," Ginger Weiss said. "But by God, we can at least give him a

  couple of nasty bites before he smashes us."

  She spoke with a fierce determination that was convincing but also

  amusing in the context of a metaphor as basically comic as a giant and a

  bunch of bugs. Though he was pleased by her fierce resolution in the

  face of such overwhelmingly poor odds, Dom could not help laughing.

  Blinking at him in surprise, she laughed too. "Hey, am I spunky, or

  what? Might be smashed by a giant, but I feel triumphant 'cause I'll be

  able to bite him just before he reduces me to a bloody smear."

  "Spunky should be your middle name," Dom agreed, laughing harder.

  As he watched Ginger laughing at her own expense, Dom was again stricken

  by her beauty. His response to her, on seeing her disembark from the

  plane, had been instant and powerful because of unremembered experiences

  they shared. But even if they had been complete strangers whose lives

  had never crossed, he would have felt something more at the sight of her

  than he felt when he saw other beautiful women. Under any

  circumstances, she would have turned his head. She was special.

  He drew a deep breath. "Shall I take you to meet the others?"

  "Oh, yes," she said, dabbing her slender fingers at the corners of her

  eyes to wipe away tears that her graveyard laughter had occasioned.

  "Yes, I'm eager to meet them. The other bugs on the giant's hand."

  Less than half an hour before nightfall, the shadows on the high plains

  were long, and the muddy gray light of the overcast dusk lent an air of

  mystery even to such ordinary objects as clumps of sagebrush, rock

  formations, and twisted mounds of dead brown bunch-grass.

  Before taking her to the motel, Dom Corvaisis had brought Ginger to what

  he called "the special place," more than two hundred yards south of

  Interstate 80. The wind rustled halfseen vegetation. The ice on the

  grass and sagebrush, when glimpsed at all, looked black, shiny black.

  The writer stood away from her, hands jammed in his jacket pockets,

  silent. He had told her that he did not want to influence her reaction

  to the place or color her first feelings with a description of his own.

  Ginger wandered slowly back and forth, feeling slightly foolish, as if

  taking part in a half-baked experiment in psychic perception, seeking

  clairvoyant vibrations. But she quickly stopped feeling foolish when

  the vibrations actually began to shake her. A queer uneasiness arose,

  and she found herself staying away from the deeper pockets of shadows,

  as if something hostile lurked in them. Her heart pounded. Uneasiness

  became fear, and she heard the tempo of her breathing change.

  "It's inside me. It's inside me."

  She whirled toward that voice. It was Dom's voice, but it had not come

  from him. The words had been spoken behind her. But no one was there:

  only dry sagebrush and a thin patch of snow glowing softly, luminously

  within a nest of shadows.

  "What's the matter?" Dom asked, moving toward her.

  She was wrong. Dom's other voice, the ghostly-sounding voice, had not

  come from behind her. It had come from within her. She heard that

  other Dom again, and she realized she was hearing a fragment of memory,

  an echo from the past, something he had said to her that Friday night,

  July 6, perhaps when they had both stood in this same place. The scrap

  of memory came with no visual or olfactory element because it was part

  of the events locked behind the Azrael Block. There were just those

  three urgent words repeated twice: "It's inside me. It's inside me."

  Abruptly, her simmering fear flashed bright. The landscape around her

  seemed to embody a nameless but monstrous threat. She started back

  toward the highway, walking fast, and Dom asked what was wrong, and she

  walked even faster, unable to answer because fear was like a paste in

  her mouth and throat. He called her name, and she began to run. Every

  object in sight seemed to have been wounded on its eastern flank, for

  black blood-shadows spilled in that direction.

  She was not able to speak until they were back in the Chevy, with the

  doors locked, the engine running, and the heater blowing warm air on her


  chilled face. Shakily, she told him about the nameless threat she had

  felt on that ordinary-looking piece of ground, and about the memory of

  his urgent voice and the three-word sentence.

  " 'It's inside me,' " he said thoughtfully. "You're sure it's really

  something I said to you that night?"

  "Yes." She shivered.

  " 'It's inside me." What in the world did I mean by that?"

  "I don't know," Ginger said. "But it gives me the creeps."

  He was silent a moment. Then he said, "Yeah. Me, too."

  That evening, at the motel, Ginger Weiss felt almost as if she was with

  her family on a holiday gathering like Thanksgiving. In spite of the

  difficulties in which they found themselves, their spirits were high;

  for in the manner of a real family, they drew strength from one another.

  The six of them crowded into the kitchen and prepared dinner together,

  and through that domestic labor, Ginger got to know the others better

  and felt a strengthening of the ties that bound her to them.

  Ned Sarver, being a professional cook, prepared the main dish-chicken

  breasts baked in a spicy green tomatillo sauce with sour cream.

  Initially, Ginger mistakenly thought Ned was a brooding, unfriendly

  sort, but she soon changed her opinion. Taciturnity sometimes could be

  a sign of a healthy ego that did not require constant gratification,

  which was the case with Ned. Besides, Ginger could not help but like a

  man who loved his wife as deeply as Ned loved Sandy, a love apparent in

  every word he spoke to her, in every glance he cast her way.