Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  Response Organization.........

  As he stared at one glimmering and bejeweled moment of the storm framed

  in the terminal window, Father Wycazik listened to Michael rattle off a

  service biography of the colonel. Just as Stefan was beginning to sweat

  with the strain of remembering all the details, his curate told him none

  of that was important. Michael said, "Mr. X seemed to feel that only

  one part of Colonel Falkirk's background might have a bearing on what's

  happened to the people at the Tranquility Motel."

  "Mr. X?" Father Wycazik said.

  "Since he wouldn't give me his name, X will have to do."

  "Go on," Father Wycazik said.

  "Well, Mr. X believes the key fact here is that Colonel Falkirk was the

  military's representative to a government committee, the CISG, that

  undertook some important thinktank-type research starting about nine

  years ago. The reason Mr. X thinks the key is CISG is because, while

  poking around, he discovered two odd things. First, many of the same

  scientists who served on that committee are now-or have recently been-on

  long and unusual vacations, leaves of absence, or unexplained furloughs.

  Second, a new level of security restrictions was put on the CISG files

  on July eighth, two

  summers ago, exactly two days after Brendan and the others had trouble

  out there in Nevada."

  "What does CISG stand for? What was that committee studying?"

  Michael Gerrano told him.

  Father Wycazik said, "My God, I thought that might be it!"

  "You did? Father, you're hard to surprise. But this! Surely you can't

  have foreseen this was what lay behind Brendan's problems. And ... you

  mean ... that's really ... really what might've happened out there?"

  "Coxild still be happening, but I must admit I can't claim to have

  deduced it sheerly by the application of my gigantic intellect. This is

  part of what Calvin Sharkle was shouting at the police just this

  morning, before he blew himself to smithereens."

  Michael said, "Dear God."

  Father Wycazik said, "We may be teetering on the brink of a whole new

  world, Michael. Are you ready for it?"

  "I . I don't know," Michael said. "Are you ready, Father?"

  "Oh, yes!" Stefan said. "Oh, yes, very ready. But the way to it might

  be filled with danger."

  Ginger was aware of Jack Twist's growing agitation as the minutes

  passed. He was operating on a hunch that told him the last few grains

  of sand were dribbling through the neck of the hourglass. As Jack

  assisted with the tasks required for their departure, he kept glancing

  at windows and doors, as if he expected to see hostile faces.

  They needed almost half an hour to suit up for the bitter winter night

  ahead, load all the guns and spare ammunition clips, and transfer the

  gear to the Servers' pickup and to Jack's Cherokee behind the motel.

  They did not work in silence, for that might have given warning of their

  imminent departure to the eavesdroppers. Instead, they chatted about

  inconsequential things as they hurried through their preparations.

  Finally, at four-ten, turning on a radio very loud, hoping to cover

  their absence for a while, they left by the rear door of the maintenance

  room. They milled around in the wind and snow, hugging one another and

  saying, "goodbye," and

  "take care of yourself," and "I'll pray for you," and ,it's going to be

  all right," and "we'll beat the bastards." Ginger noticed that Jack and

  Jorja spent an especially long time together, embracing, and when he

  kissed Marcie and hugged her goodbye, it was as if she were his own

  child. It was worse than the end of a family reunion, for in spite of

  protestations to the contrary, the members of this family were more than

  half-convinced that some of them would not survive to attend another

  gathering.

  Squeezing back her tears, Ginger said, "All right, enough already, let's

  get the hell out of here."

  With Ned driving, the seven who would go to Chicago and Boston left

  first, crammed in the Cherokee. The fine snow was falling so fast and

  heavy that the Cherokee was half-lost to sight within a hundred feet and

  became only a ghostly form within a hundred and fifty. Nevertheless, it

  did not head straight up the hills, for fear of being spotted by the

  observers Jack had located with his heat-reading device. Instead, the

  Cherokee entered the sloping folds of land by way of a narrow glen. Ned

  would stay in glens, vails, and gulleys as long as he could. The sound

  of the engine was swallowed up in the greater howl of the wind even

  before the Jeep began to vanish in the snow.

  Ginger, Dom, and Jack climbed into the cab of the Servers' pickup and

  followed in the tracks of the Cherokee. But with its headstart, the

  Jeep soon disappeared into the white turmoil that claimed the land. As

  they thumped, jolted, tilted, and rocked upward through the glen, Ginger

  sat between Jack and Dom, looking through the windshield and past the

  beating wipers, wondering if she would ever see those in the Jeep again.

  In a few days, Ginger had come to love them all. She was afraid for

  them.

  We care. That is what differentiates us from the beasts of the field.

  That's what Jacob had always said. Intellect, courage, love,

  friendship, compassion, and empathy-each of those qualities was as

  important to the human species as all the others, Jacob had said. Some

  people thought only intellect counted: knowing how to solve problems,

  knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize

  it. All were important factors that had contributed to the ascendancy

  and supremacy of humankind, yes, but the many functions of intellect

  were insufficient without courage, love,

  friendship, compassion, and empathy. We care. It is our curse. It is

  our blessing.

  At first Parker Faine was afraid that the pilot of the ten-seat feeder

  flight would not descend through the storm front and attempt a landing

  but would instead divert to another airfield farther south in Nevada.

  When, after all, the plane descended through the leading edge of the

  storm, Parker almost wished they had diverted. The buffeting wind and

  blinding snow seemed too hazardous even for a veteran pilot accustomed

  to instrument landings. Then they were safely on the ground, one of the

  last planes in before the Elko County Airport shut down.

  The small airport provided no covered ramp for debarkation. Parker

  hurried across the snow-patched macadam toward the door of the small

  terminal, wincing as his bare face was stung by wind-driven snow like

  thousands of tiny cold needles.

  After his Air West flight from Monterey had landed in San Francisco

  earlier today, he bought scissors and an electric razor at an airport

  gift shop and hastily shaved off his beard in the men's room. He had

  not seen his own unadorned visage in a decade. It was much prettier

  than he had expected. He trimmed his hair, too. When he was in the

  midst of this transformation, another guy in the men's room, washing his

  hands at the next sink, said jokingly, "O
n the run from the cops, huh?"

  And Parker said, "No, from my wife." And the guy said, "Yeah, me, too,"

  as if he meant it.

  To avoid leaving a credit-card trail, he paid cash for a ticket on an

  Air Cal jet to Reno. After a forty-five-minute trip over the Sierra

  Nevada to the Biggest Little City in the World, he had the good fortune

  to find a feeder line with a single empty seat on a flight departing for

  Elko in twelve minutes. He paid cash again, leaving only twenty-one

  dollars in his wallet. For two hours and fifteen minutes, he endured a

  frequently turbulent journey east across the Great Basin, toward the

  higher country of northeastern Nevada, where he sensed his friend was in

  desperate trouble.

  By the time he pushed through the doors into the humble but clean little

  building that served as the Elko County Airport's offices and public

  terminal, Parker should have felt wrung-out both because of the horrible

  experience in Monterey and because of his hectic travels. Strangely,

  however, he felt vital, energetic, brimming with purpose and overflowing

  with determination. He saw himself as a bull, storming into a field to

  deal with a fox that had been frightening the herd.

  He found the two public telephones, only one of which was in use. He

  looked up the number of the Tranquility, tried to call Dom, but the

  motel's phones were out of service. He supposed the storm might have

  something to do with it, but he was suspicious and worried. He had to

  get out there where he was needed, and fast.

  In two minutes flat, he discovered there were no rental cars and that

  the town's taxi company, equipped with only three vehicles, was so busy

  because of the storm that he would have to wait ninety minutes to get a

  cab. So he looked around the terminal at a couple of stragglers from

  his own flight and at a few others who evidently had landed in private

  craft just as the airport was closing down, and he accosted them one by

  one, seeking a ride without success. Turning from one of them, Parker

  literally collided with a distinguished gray-haired man. The guy looked

  as frantic as Parker felt. He had pulled his coat open to reveal a

  Roman collar. To Parker, he said, "Excuse me, please, I'm a priest with

  urgent business, a matter of life or death, and I'm desperately in need

  of a ride to the Tranquility Motel. Do you have a car?"

  Dom Corvaisis sat tensely in the Servers' pickup truck, with the

  passenger-side door on his right and Ginger Weiss on his left, squinting

  ahead into a snowfall so heavy that it seemed as if they were driving

  through countless barriers of gauzy white curtains. He peered forward

  as though an incredible revelation lay just beyond the next curtain. But

  when each parted without resistance, it revealed only an infinite array

  of additional curtains blowing-rippling-fluttering beyond.

  After a while he realized what he was so tensely anticipating: a

  recurrence of the memory-flash that had stricken him when he had walked

  out of the Tranquility Grille. Jets ...

  What had happened after the third jet swooped over, driving him to the

  pavement in terror?

  Although the streaming snowflakes made the winter day appear to be a

  tapestry of millions of randomly arranged white threads, they did not

  help illuminate the glen. The false twilight of the storm brought a

  deep-gray gloom to the land three-quarters of an hour ahead of the real

  twilight. Gnarled, toothy rock formations and an occasional cottonwood

  loomed suddenly out of the murkiness like prehistoric beasts out of a

  primeval mist, never failing to startle. However, Dom knew that Jack

  dared not risk turning on the headlights yet. Though the truck itself

  was hidden by the snow and by the steep walls of the hollow in which

  they were sheltered, the lights would reflect up through the falling

  mega-trillion bits of ice crystals, and the glow would certainly be

  visible to the observers below.

  They came to a place where the fading tire tracks of the Cherokee, like

  the trails of huge twin serpents, turned east into a branching glen that

  led off the main hollow. Jack did not follow Ned Sarver and the others,

  for the plan required them to head in a different direction. Instead,

  he pressed the pickup steadily north, relying on Dom's reading of a

  compass for guidance.

  In another hundred yards, they reached the head of the glen, where it

  narrowed to-and finally terminated in-a steep upward slope. Dom thought

  they would have to turn back and follow Ned, after all, but Jack shifted

  gears, accelerated, and the four-wheel-drive pickup started to climb.

  The slope was rocky and rutted. The pickup progressed with many a

  jounce and sway and lurch that repeatedly threw Ginger Weiss against Dom

  in a series of collisions that were not without a pleasant aspect.

  In the dreary gray storm light of the waning day, and in the dull and

  well-worn interior of the pickup, Ginger looked, by contrast, more

  beautiful than ever. Compared to her lustrous silver-blond hair, the

  white snow appeared soiled.

  With a leap and a crash that bumped Dom's head against the roof, the

  truck crested the long hill. They drove down a brief incline, then

  across a level strip of land. As they started up another slope, Jack

  suddenly slammed on the brakes and cried, "Jets!"

  Dom gasped, looked up into the seething snowstorm, expecting to see an

  aircraft plummeting at them, then realized that Jack was speaking of

  jets from the past. He had remembered the same thing that had come back

  to Dom less than an hour ago. Judging by Jack's sure-handed control of

  the pickup, however, he had not seen the memory as vividly as Dom had

  seen it, but had merely recalled it.

  "Jets," Jack said again, keeping one foot on the brake and one on the

  clutch, gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands, staring out at

  the snow but trying to look back into time. "One, two, roaring high up,

  the way you said, Dom. And then another, low over the diner, and right

  after that one . . . a fourth.........

  "didn't remember a fourth," Dom said excitedly.

  Hunching over the wheel, Jack said, "The fourth jet came just as I

  rushed out of the motel. I wasn't over there in the diner with you.

  There was this tremendous shaking and roaring, and I rushed out of my

  room in time to see the third fighter-an F-16, I think. It virtually

  exploded out of nowhere, out of the darkness, over the roof of the

  diner. You're right: Its altitude couldn't have been more than forty or

  fifty feet. And while I was still taking that in, a fourth came

  straight over the motel, from behind the place, and it was even lower.

  Maybe ten feet lower than the other one, and the window behind me burst

  when it passed. . . ."

  "And then?" Ginger asked in a whisper, as if a louder tone would shake

  the emerging memory back down into Jack's subconscious.

  Jack said, "The third and fourth fighters, the low ones, roared down

  toward the interstate, about twenty feet above the goddamn power lines,

  you could see right into the redhot intakes of t
heir engines, and they

  went screaming out over the plains beyond I-80, one of them peeling up

  and out to the east, the other to the west, both swinging around and

  coming back ... and I started running toward you ... toward the group

  of you who'd come out of the diner over there . . . "cause I thought

  maybe you'd know what was going on........ I

  Snow tapped on the windshield.

  The wind whispered susurrant secrets at the tightly shut windows. At

  last Jack Twist said, "That's all. I can't remember any more."

  "You will," Dom said. "We all will. The blocks are crumbling."

  Jack slipped the pickup into gear again and started up the next slope,

  continuing their roundabout trek to Thunder Hill.

  Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Horner, accompanied by two heavily

  armed DERO corporals, took one of Shenkfield's Jeep Wagoneers to the

  roadblock at the western end of the quarantine zone. Two large Army

  transports had been parked across the wide eastbound lanes of I-80,

  effectively blocking them. (The westbound lanes were blocked on the

  other side of the Tranquility, ten miles from this point.) Emergency

  beacons mounted on sawhorses flashed in profusion. Half a dozen DERO men

  were in sight, dressed in Artic issue. Three of them were leaning down

  to the open windows of halted automobiles, talking to motorists,

  courteously explaining the situation.

  Telling Horner and the two corporals to wait in the car, Leland got out

  and walked to the center of the blockade, to have a brief word with

  Sergeant Vince Bidakian, who was in charge of this aspect of the

  operation. "How's it going so far?" Leland asked.