Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

  debrief . . . well, it was not only unfair and cruel to you but a

  really stupid waste of potential sources of data."

  Ginger looked toward the open portal farther along the flank of the

  vessel, at the top of the portable stairs. "If we go back inside now,

  maybe the last of the memory block will crumble."

  "That might help," Bennell agreed.

  Looking up at the starship again, Jack said, "How'd you know it was

  coming down out there along I-80?"

  "Yeah," Dom said. "And why'd they think it should be covered up?"

  "And the creatures who came in it," Jack said.

  "God, yes," Ginger said, "where are they? What's happened to them?"

  Interrupting, General Alvarado said, "Like Niles said, you'll get the

  answers because you deserve them. But first, there's more urgent

  business." He turned to Dom. "I suppose if you can levitate things and

  create light out of thin air, there's no problem getting through an

  electronic security system. And if you can get in, you ought to be able

  to use your power to keep other people out. You think you could? Keep

  both the blast doors and the smaller entrance from opening until we're

  ready to open them?"

  Dom was clearly as baffled by these questions as Ginger was. He said,

  "Well, maybe. I don't know."

  Bennell looked at the general. "Bob, if you keep the colonel out,

  that'll be like lighting the fuse. He knows no one can control VIGILANT

  but him. If he can't get in . . . it'll look like voodoo to him.

  He'll be sure we're all infected."

  "Infected?" Ginger said uneasily.

  Alvarado said, "The colonel is convinced that we-you, me, Miles, all of

  us-have been somehow possessed by alien beings, taken over like a bunch

  of puppets, and that we're not human any more."

  "That's insane," Jack said.

  But with greater uneasiness, Ginger said, "Of course, we know we haven't

  been. But is there reason to believe it could've happened?"

  "Initially, yes, some small reason," Miles Bennell said, "but it didn't

  happen. It's not true. And we understand now that it was never a

  possibility. Just typical black-minded human nature . . . putting

  the worst interpretation on everything. I'll explain later."

  Ginger was about to demand an immediate explanation, but General

  Alvarado said, "Please, hold the questions. We don't have much time.

  Right now, we believe Falkirk is returning here, having taken your

  friends into custody-"

  "No," Dom said, "they got away before we did. They're gone."

  "Never underestimate the colonel," Alvarado said. "But see, the thing

  is-if Dom could use his power to shut down the entrances and keep

  Falkirk out, maybe we'd have the time to find a way to blow this whole

  story wide open. Because

  if he gets in here . . . I'm afraid there's going to be bloodshed one

  way or another."

  Movement at the front of the chamber caught Ginger's attention, and she

  gasped in dismay when she saw Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, and then all the

  others coming in through the small door in the big door.

  "Too late," Miles Bennell said. "Too late."

  At the entrance to Thunder Hill Depository, the seven witnesses and

  Parker Faine were taken out of the transport and grouped in the snow in

  front of the smaller steel door. Lieutenant Horner's machine gun

  discouraged flight and resistance.

  Leland ordered the other DERO men back to Shenkfield, where they were to

  bury Stefan Wycazik in an unmarked grave and await further orders. But

  no orders would be forthcoming from Leland, for he would not be alive to

  give them. It was not necessary to sacrifice the entire company, for

  just he and one other man could control the prisoners and destroy the

  entire Depository, and it was Lieutenant Horner's bad luck to be

  second-in-command and have that responsibility fall upon his shoulders.

  In the entrance tunnel, Leland was alarmed to see that the video cameras

  were not working. But then he realized that the new emergency program

  under which VIGILANT was operating did not require visual ID for

  admittance, for it would respond only to one key: the prints of the palm

  and all the fingers on Leland's left hand. When he put his palm to the

  glass panel beside the inner door, VIGILANT admitted him at once.

  He and Horner took the eight prisoners down to the second level and

  across The Hub to the cavern where Alvarado and Bennell waited. As

  Leland stood back and watched them file through the man-sized door in

  the huge wooden wall, he looked beyond them and saw the other

  witnesses-Corvaisis, Weiss, and Twist-and although he did not know how

  they had gotten here, he was exhilarated by the realization that,

  contrary to expectations, he had the whole group exactly where he wanted

  them.

  He left Horner to follow the prisoners, while he hurried back to the

  elevators. He could never trust poor Tom again,

  not now that the lieutenant had been alone with people who might be

  contaminated.

  Carrying his submachine gun at the ready, Leland took a smaller elevator

  down to the third level. He intended to kill anyone who moved toward

  him. And if they rushed him in great numbers, he would turn the gun on

  himself. He wouldn't let- himself be changed. Through childhood and

  adolescence, his parents had striven to change him into one of them: a

  shouter-and-wailer-in-churches, a self-flagellator, a God-terrorized

  speaker of tongues. He had resisted the changes his parents would have

  wrought in him, and he would not be changed now. They had been after

  him all his life, in one guise or another, and they would not get him

  after he had come this far with his identity and dignity intact.

  The bottom level of Thunder Hill Depository was given over entirely to

  the storage of supplies, munitions, and explosives. Staff members all

  lived on the second level and most worked there as well. However, at

  any hour of the day, a few workers and a guard were usually on duty on

  the third and lowest floor. When Leland stepped out of the elevator,

  into the central cavern off which other chambers openedan arrangement

  much like that on the second floor-he was pleased to see the basement

  was deserted tonight. General Alvarado had obeyed Leland's orders and

  had sent all of his people to their quarters.

  Alvarado probably thought that, by cooperating, he could convince Leland

  that he and all his people were unquestionably human. But Leland was

  not naive enough to be taken in by such a ruse. His own parents had

  been capable of behaving like normal human beings, too-oh, yes, smiles

  and plenty of sweet-talk, oaths of love and affection-and )*ust when you

  started to think they actually cared about you and wanted the best for

  you, they'd suddenly reveal ' themselves for what they really were. They

  would get out the leather strap or the Ping-Pong paddle in which the old

  man had drilled holes, and the beatings would be administered in the

  name of God. Leland Falkirk couldn't be easily deceived by a masquerade

  of humanity, for at an early age he had learned to look for-in fact, to

  exp
ect-an inhuman presence below the skin of normality.

  Crossing the main cavern to the massive steel blast door that sealed off

  the munitions room, Leland looked nervously left and right and up into

  the darkness between the lights. One of his punishments, as a child, had

  been long imprisonments in a windowless coal cellar.

  Leland pressed his left hand to the glass panel beside the door, which

  rolled open. Banks of lights flickered on automatically down the length

  of a room piled twenty feet high with anchored crates and drums and

  racks that contained live ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, mines,

  and other instruments of destruction.

  At the end of the long chamber was a twenty-foot-square vault that also

  required a palm ID to be opened. The weapons within were of such deadly

  magnitude that only eight people out of the hundreds in Thunder Hill

  were authorized to enter, and no one of them alone could open the vault.

  The system required three of the eight to apply their palms to the glass

  panel, one after another, within one minute, before access would be

  granted. But this also was overseen by VIGILANT, and the computer's new

  program, designed by Leland, made him the sole keeper of the

  Depository's tactical nuclear arsenal. He put his palm to the cool

  glass, and fifteen seconds later the many-layered, steel MacGruder vault

  door swung slowly open with a hum of electric motors.

  To the right of the vault door, twenty backpack nukes hung on wall pegs,

  missing only their primary detonators and their binary packages of

  explosive material. The detonators were stored in drawers along the

  back wall. To the left of the door, in lead-lined cabinets, the binary

  packages lay waiting for Armageddon.

  DERO training included familiarization with a variety of nuclear devices

  that terrorists might conceivably plant in American cities, so Leland

  knew how to assemble, arm, and disarm The Bomb in virtually all of its

  design permutations. He got the components from the cabinets, took two

  backpackbomb frames down from the wall pegs, and put together both

  weapons in only eight minutes, glancing nervously at the door as he

  worked. He breathed easier only when he had set the timers on both

  detonators for fifteen minutes and had started the clocks.

  He slung his submachine gun over his shoulder, slipped each arm into the

  straps of a backpack nuke. Each device weighed sixty-nine pounds. He

  heaved both off the floor and lurched out of the vault, bent like a

  hunchback and grunting under that apocalyptic weight.

  Another man might have had to stop two or three times during the journey

  back through the immense munitions room. Any other man might have been

  forced to pause, put the bombs down, catch his breath, and stretch his

  muscles before going on. But not Leland Falkirk. That dead weight

  wrenched his back and pulled at his shoulders and made his arms ache,

  but he grew happier as the pain intensified.

  In the main cavern into which the elevators opened, he put one of the

  backpack nukes on the center of the floor. He looked around at the

  solid rock walls and up at the granite ceiling with a feeling of

  satisfaction. If there were any faults at all in the rock strata-and

  surely there were-the place would cave in, bringing everything above

  down with it. But even if the mighty stone chambers could contain and

  withstand the blast, no one who tried to take refuge on this level would

  survive. Not even an alien lifeform of great adaptability could

  reconstitute itself after being vapotized in a nuclear heat and reduced

  to random atoms.

  Nuclear pain.

  He would not be able to survive it, but he would prove that he had the

  nerve to contemplate and endure it. Only a fraction of a second of

  blinding agony. Not bad, actually. In fact, not as bad as vigorous and

  drawn-out beatings with a leather strap or with a Ping-Pong paddle that

  had been drilled full of holes to increase the sting.

  Still holding the second nuke by its straps, Leland smiled down at the

  changing numbers on the first bomb's digitaldisplay clock, which was

  already counting toward Ragnarok. The nicest thing about backpack nukes

  was that, once armed, they could not be disarmed. He did not have to

  worry that someone could undo his work.

  He entered the elevator and rode up to the second level.

  Carrying Marcie, Jorja crossed directly to Jack Twist and stood beside

  him, looking up at the ship cradled on trestles. Although the collapse

  of her memory block and the inrushing recollections had more or less

  prepared her for this sight, she was overcome with an awe as powerful as

  that which had seized her in the troop transport, when the astounding

  truth had first been revealed. She reached out to touch the mottled

  hull, and a shiver-part fear, part wonder, part delightcoursed through

  her when her fingertips made contact with the scorched and abraded

  metal.

  Whether following her mother's lead or acting on an impulse of her own,

  Marcie reached forward, too. When her small tentative hand pressed

  against the hull, she said, "The moon. The moon."

  "Yes," Jorja said immediately. "Yes, honey. This is what you saw come

  down. Remember? It wasn't the moon falling. It was this, glowing white

  like the moon, then red, then amber."

  "Moon," the child said softly, sliding her tiny hand back and forth

  across the flank of the vessel, as if she were trying to clean off the

  mottled film of age and tribulation and, thereby, also clean off the

  clouded surface of her own memory. "Moon fell down."

  "Not the moon, honey. A ship. A very special ship. A spaceship like

  in the movies, baby."

  Marcie turned and looked at Jorja, actually looked at her, with eyes

  that were no longer out of focus or turned inward. "Like Captain Kirk

  and Mr. Spock?"

  Jorja smiled and hugged her tighter. "Yes, honey, like Captain Kirk and

  Mr. Spock."

  "Like Luke Skywalker," Jack said, leaning forward and pushing a lock of

  hair out of the girl's eyes.

  "Luke," Marcie said.

  "And Han Solo," Jack said.

  The child's eyes blurred out of focus. She had returned to her private

  place to contemplate the news she had just received.

  Jack smiled at Jorja and said, "She's going to be all right. It may take

  time, but she'll be all right because her whole obsession was a struggle

  to remember. Now, she's begun to remember, and she doesn't need to

  struggle any more."

  As usual, Jorja was reassured merely by his presence, by his aura of

  calm competence. "She'll be all right-if we can get out of here alive

  and with our memories intact."

  "We will," Jack said. "Somehow."

  A rush of warm emotion filled Dom when he saw Parker. He embraced the

  stocky artist and said, "How in God's name did you wind up here, my

  friend?"

  "It's a long story," Parker said. A sorrow in his face and eyes said,

  better than words, that at least part of the story was bleak.

  "I didn't mean to get you so deep in this trouble," Dom said.

  Looking up at th
e starship, Parker said, "I wouldn't have missed it for

  the world."

  "What happened to your beard?"

  "When this kind of company's coming," Parker said, gesturing at the

  ship, "they're worth shaving for."

  Ernie moved along the side of the starship, staring, touching.

  Faye stayed with Brendan, for she was concerned about him. Months ago,

  he had lost his faith-or had thought he'd lost it, which was just as bad

  for him. And tonight he had lost Father Wycazik, a blow that had left

  him hollow-eyed and shaky.

  "Faye," he said, looking up at the ship, "it's truly wonderful, isn't

  it?"

  "Yes," she said. "I never was one for stories about other worlds, never

  gave much thought to what it would mean. . . .

  But it's the end of everything and the start of something new. Wonderful

  and new."

  "But it's not God," he said, "and in my heart, that's what I'd hoped it

  would be."

  She took his hand. "Remember the message that Parker brought you from

  Father Wycazik? What he told you in the truck? Father Wycazik knew

  what had happened, what had come down that night, and for him it was a

  reaffirmation of his faith."

  Brendan smiled forlornly. "For him, everything was a reaffirmation of

  his faith."

  "Then it'll also be a reaffirmation for you," she told him. "You just

  need time, a little time to think about it. Then you'll see it the same

  way Father Wycazik did because, though you aren't aware of it, you are a