Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  security and a pair of blast-doors built to take a nuclear hit."

  Dom said, "Well, it's like Ernie told us ... we'll have to just stay

  loose and search for their weaknesses until we find a way."

  "But it looks like they don't have any weaknesses," Sandy said.

  "Their cover-up has been falling apart ever since they brainwashed us

  and let us go," Ginger said. "Each time one of us remembers another

  detail, that's another gaping hole in their cover-up."

  "Yeah," Ned said, "but seems to me they're in a better position to keep

  patching the holes than we are to keep poking new ones."

  "Let's can the goddamn negative thinking," Ernie said gruffly.

  Smiling beatifically, Brendan Cronin said, "He's right. We must not be

  negative. We need not be negative because we're meant to win." His

  voice was again infused with the eerie serenity and certitude which

  arose from his belief that the revelation of their special fate was

  inevitable. At moments like this, however, the priest's tone and manner

  did not comfort Dom, as they were meant to but, for some odd reason,

  stirred up a sediment of fear and muddied his emotions with anxiety.

  "How many men are stationed at Thunder Hill?" Jorjia asked.

  Before Dom or Ginger could respond with information they'd gleaned from

  the Sentinel, a stranger appeared in the doorway at the head of the

  stairs that led up from the motel office. He was in his late thirties,

  lean and tough-looking, dark-haired, dark-complexioned, with a crooked

  left eye that was not coordinated with his right. Though the downstairs

  door was locked, and although the linoleum on the stairs did nothing to

  quiet ascending footsteps, the intruder appeared with magical silence,

  as if he were not a real man but an ectoplasmic visitation.

  "For God's sake, shut up," he said, sounding every bit as real as anyone

  else in the room. "If you think you can plot in privacy here, you're

  badly mistaken."

  Eighteen miles southwest of the Tranquility Motel, at Shenkfield Army

  Testing Grounds, all the buildings-laboratories, administration offices,

  security command center, cafeteria, recreation lounge, and living

  quarters-were underground. In the blazing summers on the edge of the

  high desert and in the occasionally bitter winters, it was easier and

  more economical to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity level

  in underground rooms than in structures erected on the

  less-than-hospitable Nevada barrens. But a more important consideration

  was the frequent open-air testing of chemicaland occasionally even

  biological-weapons. The tests were conducted to study the effects of

  sunlight, wind, and other natural forces on the distribution patterns

  and potency of those deadly gases, powders, and superdiffusible mists.

  If the buildings were aboveground, any unexpected shift in the wind

  would contaminate them, making unwilling guinea pigs of base personnel.

  No matter how involved they became in work or leisure, the staff of

  Shenkfield never forgot they were beneath the earth, for they had two

  constant reminders of their condition: the lack of windows; plus the

  susurration of the piped-in air coming through the wall vents, and the

  echoing hum of the motors that fanned the air along the pipes.

  Sitting alone at a metal desk in the office to which he had been

  temporarily assigned, waiting impatiently and worriedly for the phone to

  ring, Colonel Leland Falkirk thought: God, I hate this place!

  The never-ending whine and hiss of the air-supply system gave him a

  headache. Since his arrival on Saturday, Falkirk had been eating

  aspirin as though they were candy. Now he tipped two more out of a

  small bottle. He poured a glass of ice-water from the metal carafe that

  stood on the desk, but he did not use it to wash down the pills.

  Instead, he popped the dry aspirin into his mouth and chewed them.

  The taste was bitter, disgusting, and he almost gagged. But he did not

  reach for the water.

  He did not spit out the aspirin, either. He persevered.

  A lonely, miserable childhood filled with uncertainty and pain, followed

  by an even worse adolescence, had taught Leland Falkirk that life was

  hard, cruel, and utterly unjust, that only fools believed in hope or

  salvation, and that only the tough survived. From an early age, he had

  forced himself to do things that were emotionally, mentally, and

  physically painful, for he had decided that self-inflicted pain would

  toughen him and make him less vulnerable. He tempered the steel of his

  will with challenges that ranged from chewing dry aspirin to major tests

  like the outings that he called "desperation survival treks." Those

  expeditions lasted two weeks or longer, and they put him face-to-face

  with death. He parachuted into a forest or jungle wilderness, far from

  the nearest outpost, without supplies, with only the clothes on his

  back. He carried no compass or matches. His only weapons were his bare

  hands and what he could fashion with them. The goal: reach civilization

  alive. He spent many vacations in that self-imposed suffering, which he

  judged worthwhile because he came back a harder and more self-reliant

  man than he'd been at the start of each adventure.

  Now he crunched dry aspirin. The tablets were reduced to powder, and

  the powder turned his saliva to an acidic paste.

  "Ring, damn you," he said to the telephone on the desk. He was hoping

  for news that would get him out of this hole in the ground.

  In DERO, the Domestic Emergency Response Organization, a colonel was

  less a desk-jockey and more a field officer than in any other branch of

  the Army. Falkirk's home base was in Grand Junction, Colorado, not

  Shenkfield, but even in Colorado, he spent little time in his office. He

  thrived on the physical demands of the job, so the low-ceilinged,

  windowless rooms of Shenkfield felt like a many-chambered coffin.

  If he had been engaged upon any mission but this one, he might have

  established temporary unit headquarters up at Thunder Hill Depository.

  That place was also underground but its caves were huge, high-ceilinged,

  not like these tombsized rooms.

  But there were two reasons he had to keep his men away from Thunder

  Hill. First, he dared not draw attention to the place because of the

  secret it harbored. Several ranchers lived in the highlands along the

  road leading to the gated Thunder Hill turnoff. If they spotted a fully

  equipped DERO company moving into the Depository, they'd speculate about

  it. Locals must not start wondering about Thunder Hill. Two summers

  ago, he'd used Shenkfield as a red herring to divert attention from the

  Depository. Now, with another crisis building, he would stay here at

  Shenkfield again, so he would be in position to spread the same kind of

  disinformation to the press and public that he'd spread before. The

  second reason he set up HQ at Shenkfield was because he had certain dark

  suspicions about everyone in the Depository: He trusted none of them,

  would not feel safe among them. They might be . . . changed.

  The residue of crushed aspirin had been in his mouth so lo
ng that he had

  adjusted to the bitter taste. He was no longer sickened, no longer had

  to struggle against the gag reflex, so it was all right to drink the

  water now. He drained the glass in four swallows.

  Leland Falkirk suddenly wondered if he had crossed the line that

  separated the constructive use of pain from the enjoyment of it. Even

  as he asked the question, he knew the answer: Yes, to some degree, he

  had become a masochist. Years ago. He was a very well-disciplined

  masochist, one who benefited from the pain he inflicted on himself, one

  who controlled the pain instead of letting it control him, but a

  masochist nonetheless. At first he subjected himself to pain strictly

  to make himself tough. But along the way, he began to enjoy it, too.

  That insight left him blinking in surprise at the empty water-glass.

  An outrageous image formed in his mind: himself more than a decade from

  now, a sixty-,year-old pervert sticking bamboo shoots under his

  fingernails every morning for the thrill and to get his heart running.

  That grotesque picture was grim. It was also funny, and he laughed.

  As recently as a year ago, Leland would not have been capable of

  self-critical insights of this nature. He had never been much of a

  laugher, either. Until recently. Lately, he was not merely

  noticing-and being amused by-traits in himself that he had never noticed

  before, but he was also becoming aware that he could and should change

  some of his attitudes and habits. He saw that he could become a better

  and more satisfied person, without losing the toughness he prized. This

  was a strange state of mind for him, but he knew the cause of it. After

  what had happened to him two summers ago, after all the things that he

  had seen, and considering what was happening right now up at Thunder

  Hill, he could not possibly go on with his life exactly as before.

  The telephone rang. He grabbed it, hoping it was news about the

  situation in Chicago. But it was Henderson from Monterey, California,

  reporting that the operation at the Salcoe house was going smoothly.

  The summer before last, Gerald Salcoe, with his wife and two daughters,

  rented a pair of rooms at the Tranquility Motel. On the wrong night.

  Recently, all of the Salcoes had experienced marked deterioration of

  their memory blocks.

  The CIA's experts in brainwashing, who were usually used only in covert

  foreign operations, had been borrowed for the Tranquility job that July

  and had promised to repress witnesses' memories without fail; now they

  were embarrassed by the number of subjects whose conditioning was

  breaking down. The experience these people had undergone was too

  profound and shattering to be easily repressed; the forbidden memories

  possessed mythopoeic power and exerted relentless pressure on the memory

  blocks. The mind-control experts now claimed that another three-day

  session with the subjects would guarantee their eternal silence.

  In fact, the FBI and CIA, working in conjunction, were illegally holding

  the Salcoe family incommunicado in Monterey at this very moment, putting

  them through another intricate program of memory repression and

  alteration. Although Cory Henderson, the FBI agent on the phone,

  claimed it was going well, Leland decided it was a lost cause. This was

  one secret that could not be kept.

  Besides, too many agencies were involved: FBI, CIA, one entire DERO

  company, others. Which made too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

  But Leland was a good soldier. In charge of the military side of the

  operation, he'd carry out his assignment even if it was hopeless.

  In Monterey, Henderson said, "When are you moving in on the other

  witnesses at the motel?"

  That was the word they used for everyone who had been brainwashed that

  July-witnesses. Leland thought it was apt, for in addition to its

  obvious meaning, it also embodied mystical and religious overtones. He

  remembered, as a child, being taken to tent revivals at which scores of

  Holy Rollers writhed upon the floor while the raving minister screamed

  at them to "be a witness to the miraculous, be a heartfelt witness for

  the Lord!" Well, what the witnesses at the Tranquility Motel had seen

  was every bit as paralyzing, amazing, humbling, and terrifying as the

  face of God that those spasming Pentecostals had longed to see.

  To Henderson, Leland said, "We're standing by, ready to seal off the

  motel with half an hour's notice. But I'm not giving the go-ahead until

  someone straightens out the mess in Chicago with Calvin Sharkle. Not

  until I know for sure what's going on out in Illinois."

  "What a screwup! Why was the situation with Sharkle allowed to

  deteriorate so far? He should've been grabbed, put into a new

  memory-repression program days ago, like we've done with the Salcoes

  here."

  "Wasn't my screwup," Leland said. "Your Bureau is in charge of

  monitoring the witnesses. I only come in and mop up after you."

  Henderson sighed. "I wasn't trying to shift the blame to your men,

  Colonel. And hell, you can't blame us, either. The trouble is, even

  though we're only doing visual surveillance of each witness four days a

  month and listening to only about half the tapes of their phone calls,

  we need twenty-five agents. But we only have twenty. Besides, the damn

  case is so highly classified that only three of the twenty know why the

  witnesses have to be watched. A good agent doesn't like being kept in

  the dark like that. Makes him feel he's not trusted. Makes him sloppy.

  So you get a situation like this Sharkle: The witness starts breaking

  through his memory block, and nobody notices until it's at crisis stage.

  Why'd we ever think we could maintain such an elaborate deception for an

  unlimited length of time? Nuts. I'll tell you what our problem was: We

  believed the CIA's brain-scrubbers. We believed those motherfuckers

  could do what they said they could do. That was our mistake, Colonel."

  "I always said there was a simpler solution," Leland reminded him.

  "Kill them all? Kill thirty-one of our own citizens just because they

  were in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

  "I wasn't proposing it seriously. My point was that, short of

  barbarism, we couldn't contain the secret and shouldn't have tried."

  Henderson's silence made it clear he did not believe Leland's

  disclaimer. Finally: "You will move on the motel tonight?"

  "If the Chicago situation clears up, if I can figure what's going on

  there, we'll move tonight. But there're questions need answers. These

  strange . . . psychic phenomena. What's it mean? We both have

  ideas, don't we? And we're scared pukesick. No, sir, I'm not moving

  against the motel and jeopardizing my men until I understand the

  situation."

  Leland hung up.

  Thunder Hill. He wanted to believe that what was happening up in the

  mountains would lead to a better future than mankind deserved. But in

  his heart he was afraid it was, instead, the end of the world.

  When Jack stepped into the living room-which they had converted to a

  dining room-and spoke to the group, som
e gasped in surprise and started

  to rise, bumping the table in their eagerness to turn around, sending up

  a clatter of dishes and flatware. Others flinched in their chairs as if

  they thought he had been sent to kill them. He'd left the Uzi

  downstairs to avoid causing just such a panic, but his unexpected

  arrival still scared them. Good. They needed a nasty shock to make

  them more cautious. Only the little girl, playing in her gravysmeared

  plate with a spoon, did not react to his arrival.

  "All right, okay, be calm. Sit down, sit," Jack said, gesturing

  impatiently. "I'm one of you. That night, I registered at the motel as

  Thornton Wainwright. Which is how you've probably been looking for me.

  But that's not my real name. We'll get into that later. For now-"

  Suddenly, everyone was excitedly pitching questions at him.

  "Where did you-"

  -scared the bejesus-"

  "How did you-"

  "-tell us if-"

  Raising his voice enough to silence them, Jack said, "This isn't the

  place to discuss these things. You can be heard here, for God's sake.

  I've been eavesdropping for nearly an hour. And if I can listen in on

  everything you say, then so can the people you're pitted against."

  They stared dumbly at him, startled by his assertion that their privacy

  was an illusion. Then a big, blocky man with gray brush-cut hair said,

  "Are you telling us these rooms are bugged? 'Cause I find that hard to

  believe. I mean, I've searched, you know; I've checked, found nothing.

  And I've had some experience in these matters."

  "You must be Ernie," Jack said, speaking in a sharp cold tone of voice