Strangers (61 page)

Sandy, the only one of them to be affected
only
positively by their mysterious ordeal, was so sweet-tempered, so delighted with the recent changes in herself, that she was especially good company. Together, she and Ginger prepared the dinner salad and vegetables, and as they worked, an almost sisterly affection developed between them.

Faye Block made the dessert, a refrigerator pie with a chocolate crust and banana-cream filling. Ginger liked Faye, who reminded her of Rita Hannaby. That cultured society woman was different from Faye in many ways, but in fundamental respects they were alike: efficient, take-charge types, tough of mind, tender of spirit.

Ernie Block and Dom Corvaisis put the extra leaf in the table and arranged six place settings. Ernie had seemed gruff and intimidating at first, but now she saw he was a sweetheart. He inspired much affection because of his fear of darkness, which made him seem boyish in spite of his size and age.

Of the five people among whom Ginger found herself, only Dominick Corvaisis stirred emotions that she could not understand. For him, she felt the same friendship that she felt for the others, and she was aware of a special bond between them related to an unremembered experience just the two of them had shared. But she was also sexually attracted to him. That surprised her because she never felt desire for a man until she knew him for several weeks, at least, and knew him well. Wary of her romantic yearnings, Ginger kept a tight rein on her emotions, and she tried hard to convince herself that Dom did not feel a similar attraction for her, which he so patently did.

Through dinner, the six of them continued to discuss their strange predicament and search for clues that might have been overlooked.

Like Dom, Ginger had no recollection of the toxic spill two years ago, though the Blocks and Sarvers recalled it clearly. I-80 had really been closed, and an environmental emergency had been declared; there was no doubt about that much. Last night, however, Dom convinced the Blocks that their memories of evacuating to Elroy and Nancy Jamison’s mountain ranch were phony and that both they
and
the Jamisons had almost surely been kept at the motel. (According to Faye and Ernie, the Jamisons had not mentioned having any nightmares or odd problems lately, so their brainwashing must have been effective, though it would be necessary to talk to them soon.) Likewise, Ned and Sandy had reluctantly concluded that their own recollections of sitting out the crisis at their trailer were too shallow to be real and that they had been strapped into motel beds, drugged, and brainwashed like everyone else in those Polaroids.

“But,” Faye wondered, “why wouldn’t they give us all approximately the same false memories?”

Ginger said, “Maybe all you locals have had the toxic spill and the highway closure woven into your false memories. That’d be necessary because, later, people would be asking you where you went during the emergency, and you’d have to know what they were talking about. But Dom and I are from distant places, unlikely ever to return, unlikely to run into anyone who would know that we’d been within the quarantine zone, so they didn’t bother including that bit of reality in the set of fake memories they gave us.”

Sandy paused with a morsel of chicken on her fork. “But wouldn’t it be safer and easier to make your memories fit the toxic spill, too?”

“Ever since Pablo Jackson helped me discover that my mind had been tampered with,” Ginger said, “I’ve been reading about brainwashing, and I think maybe it’s a lot less difficult to implant recollections that are
entirely
false than it is to weave in threads of reality such as the environmental emergency and the road closure. It probably takes a lot longer to construct fake memories that have some reality to them, and maybe they simply didn’t have time to do that with all of us. So they gave the super-deluxe brainwashing job only to you locals.”

“That feels like the truth,” Ernie said, and everyone agreed.

Faye said, “But did the toxic spill really happen, or was it just a cover story that gave them an excuse to close I-80 and bottle us up, a way of preventing us from talking about what we’d seen Friday night?”

“I suspect there
was
contamination of some sort,” Ginger said. “In Dom’s nightmare, which we know is really more memory than dream,
those men were wearing decontamination suits. Now, when they came into the quarantine zone, maybe they’d wear costumes like that for the benefit of newsmen or other onlookers. But once here, where only we could see them, they wouldn’t keep the suits on unless they absolutely had to.”

Glancing uneasily at the blind-covered window nearest the table, as if he thought he had seen a trickle of darkness dribbling in from the night beyond, Ernie cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, uh…well, which was it, do you think? You’re the doctor. Does it sound like chemical or biological contamination? The story they gave the media was that it involved chemicals being delivered to Shenkfield’s testing facilities.”

Ginger had been thinking about this question for some time, long before Ernie asked it. Chemical or biological contamination? She had arrived at an answer that deeply disturbed her. “Generally speaking, the suits required for a chemical spill don’t have to be air-tight. They just have to cover the worker from head to toe in order to prevent any caustic or toxic substance from coming into contact with his skin, and they have to include a respirator, rather like a scuba diver’s tank and mask, so he won’t breathe deadly fumes. They’re usually made of lightweight nonporous cloth, and the headgear consists of a simple cloth hood with a plastic visor. But Dom described heavy-looking suits with an outer level of thick vinyl, with gloves that were of one piece with the sleeves, and a hard helmet that locked into an airtight seal at the collar. That is unquestionably gear that’s been designed to prevent exposure to a dangerous
biological
agent, microbes.”

For a while no one said a word, pondering this disquieting news.

Then Ned took a long swallow of his Heineken for fortification and said, “So we must’ve been infected with something.”

Faye said, “Some virus they developed for biological warfare.”

“If it was headed for Shenkfield, that’s the only kind of bug it could’ve been,” Ernie said. “Something mean.”

“Yet we lived,” Sandy said.

“Because they were immediately able to quarantine us and treat us,” Ginger said. “Surely they wouldn’t be intending to test a genetically engineered virus, some new and deadly organism that could be used as a weapon, unless they had simultaneously developed an effective cure for it. So they had a supply of a new antibiotic or serum to guard against just such an accident. If they contaminated us, they also cured us.”

Ernie said, “It sounds right, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s all starting to fall together, piece by piece.”

Dom disagreed. “It still doesn’t explain what happened on that Friday night, what we saw that they didn’t want us to see. It doesn’t explain
what made the whole damned diner shake or what blew out the windows—either on that first night or again last night.”

“And it doesn’t explain the other weird stuff,” Faye said. “Like all those paper moons whirling around Dom in Lomack’s house. Or Father Wycazik’s claim that this young priest’s been performing miracle cures.”

They looked at one another, waiting in silence for someone to put forth an explanation that would tie biological contamination with those paranormal events, but no one had an answer.

•

Less than three hundred miles west of the Tranquility Motel, in another motel in Reno, Brendan Cronin had gone to bed and turned out the lights. Although it was only a few minutes after nine o’clock, he was still functioning on Chicago time, so for him it was after eleven.

However, sleep eluded him. After checking into the motel and having dinner at a nearby Bob’s Big Boy, he had telephoned St. Bette’s rectory and had spoken with Father Wycazik, who had told him of the call from Dominick Corvaisis. Brendan was electrified by the news that he was not the only one caught up in this mystery. He considered calling the Tranquility, but they already knew he was on his way, and whatever they could say on the phone could be said better in person, tomorrow. Thoughts of tomorrow and speculations about what might happen were what kept sleep at bay.

He had lain awake less than an hour and his thoughts had drifted to the eerie luminescence that had filled his rectory bedroom two nights ago, when suddenly that phenomenon appeared once more. This time, there was no visible source of light, not even one so unlikely as the frost-moon upon the window from which the uncanny radiance had sprung last Friday night. Now, the glow appeared above him and on all sides, as if the very molecules of the air had acquired the ability to produce light. It was a lunar-pale, milky shimmer at first, growing brighter by the second, until it seemed as if he must be lying in an open field, under the looming countenance of a full moon.

This was different from the peaceful golden light that was featured in his recurring dream, and as it had done two nights ago, it filled him with conflicting emotions—horror and rapture, fear and wild excitement.

As in his rectory bedroom, the lactescent light changed color, darkening to scarlet. He seemed suspended in a radiant bubble of blood.

It’s inside me,
he thought, wondering what that meant.
Inside me.
The thought reverberated in his mind. Suddenly he was cold with fear.

His thundering heart seemed about to explode. He lay rigid. In his hands, the rings appeared. Throbbing.

2
Monday, January 13

When they gathered in Ernie and Faye’s kitchen for breakfast the next morning, Dom was excited to learn that the previous night had been an ordeal for most of them. “It’s unraveling the way I hoped it might,” he said. “By gathering together here, by re-creating the group that was gathered here
that
night, and by working together to get at the truth, we’re putting constant pressure on the memory blocks that’ve been implanted in us. And now, that barrier is crumbling a bit faster.”

Last night, Dom, Ginger, Ernie, and Ned experienced exceptionally vivid nightmares of such similarity that they were surely fragments of forbidden memories. In every case they had involved being strapped to motel beds and tended by men in decontamination suits. Sandy had a pleasant dream, although it lacked the clarity and detail of the others’ nightmares. Faye was the only one who did not dream at all.

Ned had been so disturbed by his nightmare that on Monday morning, when he and Sandy arrived from Beowawe for breakfast, he announced they were moving into a room at the motel for the duration. “During the night, after the dream woke me, I couldn’t get back to sleep. And while I was laying there, I got to thinking how lonely it is at our trailer, empty plains all around.…Maybe this Colonel Falkirk will decide to kill us like he wanted to do in the first place. And if he comes for us, I don’t want me and Sandy to be alone out there at the trailer.”

Dom sympathized with Ned because these dark and vivid dreams were new to the cook. Over recent weeks, Dom, Ginger, and Ernie had learned a little about coping with the frighteningly powerful nightmares, but Ned had developed no armor, so he was badly shaken.

And, of course, Ned was well advised to fear Falkirk. The closer they came to exposing the conspiracy and learning the truth, the more likely they were to become targets of a preemptive strike. Dom did not think Falkirk would make a move until Brendan Cronin, Jorja Monatella, and perhaps other victims had gathered at the Tranquility. But once they were in one place, they would need to be prepared for trouble.

Now, in the Blocks’ kitchen, Ned Sarver picked at his breakfast without appetite as he spoke of the images that had disturbed his sleep. At first he had dreamed of being held prisoner by men in decontamination suits, but later they had worn either lab coats or military uniforms, an indication that the biological danger had passed. One of the uniformed men had been Colonel Falkirk, and Ned described that officer in detail:
about fifty years old, black hair graying at the temples, gray eyes like circles of polished steel, a beakish nose, thin lips.

Ernie was able to confirm the word-portrait that Ned painted, for Falkirk had also been in his nightmare. The amazing coincidence of the same man appearing in both Ned’s and Ernie’s dreams made it clear that his face was not merely a figment of imagination but a memory of a real face that both Ernie and Ned had seen two summers ago.

“And in my nightmare,” Ernie said, “another Army officer referred to Falkirk by his first name. Leland. Colonel Leland Falkirk.”

“He’s probably stationed at Shenkfield,” Ginger said.

“We’ll try to find out later,” Dom said.

The barriers to memory were definitely crumbling. That prospect boosted Dom’s spirits higher than they had been in months.

In Ginger’s nightmare, which she recounted for them, she had not been the only person being brainwashed in Room 5, the room she had occupied that summer and which she now occupied again. “There was a rollaway bed in one corner, and the redhead in it was someone I’d never seen before. She was about forty years old. They had her connected to her own IV drip and EKG machine. She had that…vacant stare.”

Just as Ernie and Ned had shared a new development—the appearance of Colonel Falkirk—in their nightmares, Dom and Ginger had shared this other discovery. In Dom’s dream, there had been a rollaway bed, flanked by an IV stand and an EKG monitor, and in the bed had been a young man in his twenties with a pale face, bushy mustache, and zombie eyes.

“What does it mean?” Faye Block asked. “Did they have so many subjects for brainwashing that they more than filled all twenty rooms?”

“But,” Sandy said, “the registry showed only eleven rooms rented.”

Ginger said, “There must’ve been people on the interstate, in transit, who saw what we saw. The Army managed to stop them and bring them here. None of their names would appear on the registry.”

“How many?” Faye wondered.

“We’ll probably never know for sure,” Dom said. “We never actually met them; we only shared rooms with them while we were drugged. We might eventually remember the faces of those we saw, but we can’t possibly remember names and addresses we never knew in the first place.”