"Without hesitation," Leland said bluntly. "But if I and my people
could've been changed, if that much was possible-and it isn't
possible-then don't you realize that the entire staff in Thunder Hill
could've been changed, too? Not just the people who know what's in that
cavern, but everyone, military as well as civilians, all the way up to
and including General Alvarado."
"Well, sure," Leland said. "I realize that."
"And you'd be willing to kill everyone in the facility?"
"Yes."
"Jesus!"
"If you've decided to split," Leland said, "you can forget about leaving
for the duration. Eighteen months ago, looking ahead to this
possibility, I secretly had a special program entered into VIGILANT, the
security system. At my direction, VIGILANT can institute a new policy
that makes it impossible for anyone to leave Thunder Hill without a
special code. I'm the only one with the code, of course."
Bennell's posture was the essence of indignation and righteous outrage.
"You mean, you'd imprison us out of some misguided . . ." He fell
silent as the truth hit him. Then: "My God, you wouldn't have told me
this if you hadn't already activated VIGILANT'S new program."
"That's right," Leland said. "When I came in, I identified myself with
my left hand on the ID plate, instead of my right. That was the signal
to VIGILAMT to institute the new order. No one but Lieutenant Horner and
I can get out of Thunder Hill until I decide it's safe."
Leland Falkirk left the office, walked out into The Hub, as pleased
with himself as was possible under these disturbing conditions. It had
taken eighteen months, but he had at last shattered Miles Bennell's
infuriating composure.
If he had chosen to make one more revelation, he could have brought the
scientist all the way to his knees. But there was one secret the
colonel had to keep to himself. He had already devised a plan to kill
everyone and everything in Thunder Hill in the event that he decided
they were infected and only masquerading as human. He had the means to
reduce the installation to molten slag and stop the plague right here.
The hitch was that he would have to kill himself along with everyone
else. But he was prepared for that sacrifice.
After sleeping only five and a half hours, Jorja showered, dressed, and
went to the Blocks' apartment, where she found Marcie sitting at the
kitchen table with Jack Twist. She stopped at the end of the living
room, just outside the kitchen doorway, and watched them for a moment,
while they remained unaware they were being observed.
Last night, at four-forty a m., after Jorja and Jack and Brendan had
rendezvoused at the Mini-Mart with the second team of outriders and had
returned from Elko, Jack had slept on the floor in the Blocks' living
room, so Marcie would not be alone in the morning after Faye and Ernie
had gone off on their respective tasks. Jorja had wanted to move the
girl to their own room, but Jack had insisted that he did not mind doing
a little babysitting after Marcie woke. "Look," he said, "she's
sleeping with Faye and Ernie in their bed. If we try to move her now,
we'll wake all of them, and everyone needs whatever sleep he can get
tonight." Jorja said, "But Marcie's been sleeping for hours, so she'll
be up and around before you are in the morning. She'll wake you." And
he said, "Better me than you. Really, I don't need much sleep. Never
have." And she said, "You're a nice guy, Jack Twist." He said
self-mockingly, "Oh, I'm a saint!" And she said with great seriousness,
"You may be the nicest guy I've ever met."
She had firmly settled on that opinion during the hours they had cruised
through the night-clad streets of Elko in his Cherokee. He was smart,
witty, perceptive, gentle, and the best listener she'd ever encountered.
At one-thirty in the morning, Brendan pleaded exhaustion and curled up
in the back of the Cherokee, instantly falling asleep. Jorja, dismayed
that the priest had come with them, had not really understood her dismay
until Father Cronin went to sleep; then she realized that her feelings
had nothing to do with the priest, but resulted from her desire to have
Jack Twist to herself. With Brendan out of the way, she got what she
unconsciously wanted, and she fell entirely under Jack's spell, telling
him more about herself than she had told anyone since her all-time
closest friend had moved away when they were both sixteen. In almost
seven years of marriage, she had never had a conversation with Alan that
was half as profound as that she had with Jack Twist, a man she'd known
less than twelve hours.
Now, as she stood just outside the kitchen doorway in the Blocks'
apartment and watched Jack with Marcie, Jorja saw another good side of
him. He could talk comfortably with a child, without the slightest note
of condescension or boredom, something few adults could manage. He
joked with Marcie, questioned her about her favorite songs, foods, and
movies, helped her color one of the last untinted moons in her album.
But Marcie was in a deeper and even more frightening trance than she had
been yesterday. She did not answer Jack; she rewarded his attention with
nothing more than an occasional blank or puzzled look, but he was not
discouraged. Jorja realized that he had spent eight years talking to a
comatose wife who had never responded, so he would not lose patience
with Marcie anytime soon. Jorja stood in the shadows just beyond the
doorway for several minutes, unannounced, torn between the pleasure of
watching Jack be Jack and the agony of watching her daughter descend
even farther into a state increasingly similar to some of the behavior
of an autistic child.
"Good morning!" Jack said, looking up from the book of red moons,
spotting Jorja. "Sleep well? How long have you been standing there?"
"Not long," she said, entering the kitchen.
"Marcie, say good morning to your mother," Jack told the girl.
But Marcie did not look up from the moon that she was coloring.
Jorja met Jack's eyes and saw sympathy and concern in them. She said,
"Well, it's not really morning any more. Almost noon."
She went to Marcie, put a hand under her chin, lifted her head. The
child's gaze focused on her mother's eyes, but only for a moment, then
turned inward. It was a terrible and empty look. When Jorja let go,
Marcie turned immediately to the image of the moon before her and began
to scrub hard at the paper with her last red crayon.
Jack pushed his chair back, got up, and went to the refrigerator.
"Hungry, Jorja? I'm starved. Marcie ate earlier, but I've been waiting
breakfast on you." He pulled open the refrigerator door. "Eggs and
bacon and toast? Or I could whip up an omelet with some cheese, herbs,
just a touch of onion, a few slivers of green peppers."
:'You cook, too," Jorja said.
'I'll never win any prizes," he said. "But it's usually edible, and at
least half the time you can even tell what it is when I put it on your
plate." He pulled open the freezer door. "They have froze
n waffles. I
could toast a few of those to go along with the omelet."
"Whatever you're having." She was unable to look away from Marcie, and
as she watched her stricken daughter, her appetite faded.
Jack loaded his arms with a carton of milk, another of eggs, a package
of cheese, a green pepper, and a small onion, and carried the fixings to
the cutting board beside the sink.
When Jack began cracking eggs into a bowl, Jorja joined him at the
counter. Although she did not think Marcie would hear her even if she
shouted, she spoke sotto voce to Jack: "Did she really eat breakfast?"
He whispered too: "Sure. Some cereal. A piece of toast with jelly and
peanut butter. I had to help her a little, that's all."
Jorja tried not to think about what Dom had told her of Zebediah Lomack,
or about how Lomack tied in with what had happened to Alan. But if two
grown men had been unable to cope with the sick obsessions that had
evolved from what they'd seen on July 6 and from the subsequent
brainwashing, what chance did Marcie have of coping, living?
"Hey, hey," Jack said softly, "don't cry, Jorja. Crying won't help
anything." He took her in his arms. "She'll be all right. I promise
you. Listen, just this morning, the others were saying they had a
terrific night last night, no dreams for a change, and Dom didn't
sleepwalk, and Ernie wasn't half as afraid of the dark as usual. Know
why? Because just being here, pulling together like a family-it's
already making the memory blocks crumble, relieving the pressure. All
right, yes, Marcie's a bit worse this morning, but that doesn't mean
it's all downhill for her. She'll improve. I know she will."
Jorja was not expecting the embrace, but she welcomed it. God, how she
welcomed it! She leaned against him and allowed herself to be held, and
instead of feeling weak and foolish, she felt a new strength flowing
into her. She was tall for a woman, and he was not tall for a man, so
they were almost the same height, yet she had the atavistic feeling of
being protected, guarded. She was reminded of what she'd been thinking
yesterday, on the flight north from Las Vegas: Human beings were not
meant for solitude, lonely struggles; the very essence of the species
was its need to give and receive friendship, affection, love. Right
now, she needed to receive, and Jack needed to give, and the confluence
of their needs gave new purpose and determination to both of them.
"An omelet with cheese, herbs, a little bit of chopped onion, and
slivers of green pepper," he said softly, his lips against her ear, as
if sensing that she had regained her footing and was ready to go on.
"Does that sound all right?"
"Sounds delicious," she said, reluctantly letting go of him.
"And one other ingredient," he said. "I warned you I wouldn't win any
cooking prizes. I always get one little chip of eggshell in every
omelet, no matter how careful I am."
"Oh, that's the secret of a good omelet," she said. "One bit of
eggshell for texture. The finest restaurants make omelets that way."
"Yeah? Do they also leave one bone in every fish?"
"And a bit of hoof in every order of beef Bourguignon," she said.
"one antler in every chocolate mousse?"
"And one shoemaker's nail in every apple cobbler."
"One old maid in every apple pandowdy?"
"Oh, God, I hate puns."
"Me too," he said. "Truce?"
"Truce. I'll grate the cheddar for the omelet."
Together they made breakfast.
At the kitchen table, Marcie colored moons. And colored moons. And
murmured that one word in monotonous, mesmeric, rhythmic chains.
In Monterey, California, Parker Faine had almost fallen into the lair of
a trap-door spider. He counted himself fortunate to have gotten out
alive. A trap-door spider-that was how he thought of the Salcoes'
neighbor, a woman named Essie Craw. The trap-door spider constructed a
tubular nest in the ground and fixed a cleverly concealed hinged lid at
the top. When other hapless insects, innocent and unsuspecting, crossed
the perfectly camouflaged lid, it opened and dropped them down to the
rapacious arachnoid beast below. Essie Craw's tubular nest was a lovely
large Spanish home far more suited to the California coast than the
Salcoes' Southern Colonial manse, with graceful arches and leaded-glass
windows and flowers blooming in large terra cotta pots on the portico.
One look at the place, and Parker was prepared to encounter charming and
exquisitely gracious people, but when Essie Craw answered the door he
knew he was in deep trouble. When she discovered that he was seeking
information about the Salcoes, she virtually seized him by his sleeve
and dragged him inside and slammed the lid of her tubular nest behind
him, for those who sought information often had information to give in
return, and Essie Craw fed on gossip as surely as the trap-door spider
fed on careless beetles, centipedes, and pillbugs.
Essie did not look like a spider but rather like a bird. Not a scrawny,
thirmecked, meager-breasted sparrow. More like a well-fed sea gull. She
had a quick birdlike walk, and she held her head slightly to the side in
the manner of a bird, and she had beady little avian eyes.
After leading him to a seat in the living room, she offered coffee, but
he declined, and she insisted, but he protested that he did not want to
be a bother. She brought coffee anyway, plus butter cookies, which she
produced with such alacrity that he suspected she was as perpetually
prepared for drop-in guests as was the trap-door spider.
Essie was disappointed to hear that Parker knew nothing about the Salcoe
family and had no gossip. But since he was not their friend, either, he
offered a fresh pair of ears for her observations, tales, slanders, and
mean-spirited suppositions. He did not even have to ask questions in
order to learn more than he wanted to know. Donna Salcoe, Gerald's
wife, was (Essie said) a brassy sort, too blond, too flashy,
phony-sweet. Donna was so thin she was surely a problem drinker who
survived on a liquid diet-or maybe she was anorexic. Gerald was Donna's
second husband, and although they had been married eighteen years, Essie
did not think it would last. Essie made the sixteen-year-old twin girls
sound so wild, so unrestrained, so nubile and licentious, that Parker
pictured packs of young men sniffing around the Salcoe house like dogs
seeking bitches in heat. Gerald Salcoe owned three thriving shops-an
antiques store, two art galleries-in nearby Carmel, though Essie could
not understand how any of these enterprises showed a profit when Salcoe
was a hard-drinking libertine and a thick-headed boob with no business
sense.
Parker drank only two sips of his coffee and didn't even nibble at the
butter cookies, because Essie Craw's enthusiasm for malicious gossip
went beyond the limits of ordinary behavior into a realm of weirdness
that made him uncomfortable and unwilling to turn his back on her-or
consume much of what she provided.
But he learned a few useful thing
s, as well. The Salcoes had taken an
impromptu vacation-one week in the wine country, Napa and Sonoma-and had
been so desperate to escape the pressures of their various enterprises
that they had not wanted to reveal the name of the- hotel where they
could be reached, lest it get back to the very business associates from
whom they needed a rest.
"He called me Sunday to tell me they were off and wouldn't be back until
Monday, the twentieth," Essie said. "Asked me to keep a watch over the
place, as usual. They're terrible gadabouts, and it's such a bother to
be expected to look out for burglars and God knows what. I have my own
life to live, which of course concerns them not at all."
"You didn't speak with any of them face to face?"
"I guess they were in a hurry to be off."
"Did you see them leave?"
"No, though I . . . well . . . I looked out a couple of times, but
I must've missed them."
"The twins went with them?" Parker asked. "Isn't school in?"
"It's a progressive school-too progressive, I say-and travel is thought
to be as broadening as classroom work. Did you ever hear such-"
"How did Mr. Salcoe sound when you spoke with him on the phone?"
Impatiently, Essie said, "Well . . . he sounded . . . like he
always sounds. What do you mean?"
"Not at all strained? Nervous?"
She pursed her tight little mouth, cocked her head, and her bird-bright
eyes glittered at the prospect of potential scandal. "Well, now that
you mention it, he was a bit odd. Stumbled over his words a few times,
but until now I didn't realize he'd probably been drinking. Do you
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 77
