Strangers (88 page)

His duty was clear. Grim, terrible—but clear.

He would order the closure of I-80 under the pretense of a toxic spill, in order to isolate the Tranquility Motel. He would then take the witnesses into custody and transport them directly to the Thunder Hill Depository. When they were all underground with Dr. Miles Bennell and the other suspect workers staffing the Depository, trapped behind massive blast doors, Leland would take them—and himself—out with a pair of the five-megaton backpack nukes that were stored among the munitions in the subterranean facility. A couple of five-megatoners would incinerate everyone and everything inside the mountain, reduce them all to ash and bone fragments. That would eliminate the primary source of this hideous contamination, the home nest of the enemy. Of course, other potential sources of contamination would remain: the Tolk family, the Halbourg family, all remaining witnesses whose brainwashing had
not developed holes and who had not returned to Nevada, others.…But Leland was confident that, once he had taken the courageous action required to eliminate the largest and primary source of contamination, Riddenhour would be shamed by his example of self-sacrifice and would find the backbone to do what was necessary to finish the work and scrub every trace of contagion from the face of the earth.

Leland Falkirk was trembling. Not with fear. It was pride that made him tremble. He was enormously proud to have been chosen to fight and win the greatest battle of all time, thus saving not just one nation but all the world from a menace with no equal in history. He knew he was capable of the sacrifice required. He had no fear. As he wondered what he would feel in the split-second it took him to die in a nuclear blast, a thrill coursed through him at the prospect of pitting himself against the most intense pain of which the human mind could conceive. Oh, it would be cruelly intense and yet so short in duration that there was no doubt he’d prove capable of enduring it as stoutheartedly as he had endured all other pain to which he had subjected himself.

He was calm now. Perfectly calm. Serene.

Leland savored the sweet anticipation of the blistering pain to come. That brief atomic agony would be of such exquisite purity that the endurance of it would ensure the reward of heaven, which his Pentecostal parents, seeing the devil in every aspect of him, had always sworn he would not attain.

•

Stepping out of the Tranquility Grille behind Ginger, Dom Corvaisis looked up into the maelstrom of driving-whirling-spinning snow, and for an instant he saw and heard and felt what was not there:

Behind him rang out the atonal musical clatter of demolished
glass still falling from the explosion of the windows, and ahead lay the glow of the parking-lot lights and the hot summer darkness beyond, and all around the thunder-roar and earthquake-shudder of mysterious source; his heart pounding; his breath like taffy that had stuck in his throat; and as he ran out of the Grille he looked around and then up….

“What’s wrong?” Ginger asked.

Dom realized that he had staggered across the snowy pavement, skidding not on that surface but on the slippery recollection that had escaped his memory block. He looked around at the others, all of whom had come out of the diner. “I saw…like I was there again…that July night….” Two nights ago, in the diner, when he’d come close to remembering, he had unconsciously re-created the thunder and shaking of July 6. This time, there was no such manifestation, maybe because the memory was
no longer repressed and was breaking through and needed no help. Now, unable to adequately convey the intensity of the memory, he turned away from the others and peered up into the falling snow, and—

The roar was so loud that it hurt his ears, and the vibrations so strong that he felt them in his bones and in his teeth the way thunder sometimes reverberated in window glass, and he stumbled out across the macadam, looking up into the night sky and
—
there!
—
an aircraft flying only a few hundred feet above the earth, red and white running lights flashing across darkness, so low that the glow from within the cockpit was visible, a jet judging by the speed with which it rocketed past, a fighter jet judging by the powerful scream of its engines, and
—
there!
—
another one, sweeping past and wheeling up across the field of stars that filled the clear black sky in a panoramic speckle-splash; but the roar and the shaking that had shattered the diner’s windows and had set small objects adance on the tables now grew worse instead of better, even though he would have expected it to subside once the jets were past, so he turned, sensing the source behind him, and he cried out in terror when a third jet shot over the Grille at an altitude of no more than forty feet, so low that he could see the markings
—
serial numbers and an American flag
—
on the bottom of one wing, illuminated by the parking-lot light bouncing up from the macadam; Jesus, it was so low that he fell flat on the ground in panic, certain that the jet was crashing, that debris would
be raining over him in a second, perhaps even a shower of burning jet fuel….

“Dom!”

He found himself lying facedown in the snow, clutching the ground in a reenactment of the terror he had felt on the night of July 6, when he’d thought the jet was crashing on top of him.

“Dom, what’s wrong?” Sandy Sarver asked. She was kneeling beside him, a hand on his shoulder.

Ginger was kneeling at his other side. “Dom, are you all right?”

With their support, he got up from the snow. “The memory block is going, crumbling.” He turned his face up toward the sky again, hoping that the white snowy day would flash away, as before, and be replaced by a dark summer night, hoping that the recollections would continue to pour forth. Nothing. Wind gusted. Snow lashed his face. The others were watching him. He said, “I remembered jets, military fighter craft…two at first, swooping by a couple of hundred feet above…and then a third one so low that it almost took the roof off the diner.”

“Jets!”
Marcie said.

Everyone looked at her in surprise, even Dom, for it was the first word—other than “moon”—that she had spoken since dinner the previous night. She was in her mother’s arms, bundled against the weather. She
had turned her small face to the sky. In response to what Dom had said, she seemed to be searching the stormy heavens for some sign of the long-departed jets of a summer lost.

“Jets,” Ernie said, looking up as well. “I don’t…recall.”

“Jets! Jets!” Marcie reached up with one hand toward the heavens.

Dom realized that he was doing the same thing, although with both hands, as if he could reach up beyond the blinding snow of time-present, into the hot clear night of time-past, and pull the memory down into view. But he could not bring it back, no matter how hard he strained.

The others were not able to recall what he described, and in a moment their tremulous expectation turned to frustration again.

Marcie lowered her face. She put a thumb in her mouth and sucked earnestly on it. Her gaze had turned inward again.

“Come on,” Jack said. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

They hurried toward the motel, to dress and arm themselves for the journeys and battles ahead of them. Reluctantly, with the smell of July heat still in his nose, with the roar of jet engines still echoing in his bones, Dom Corvaisis followed.

part three

NIGHT ON

THUNDER HILL

TUESDAY NIGHT, JANUARY 14

1
Strife

Father Stefan Wycazik flew Delta from Chicago to Salt Lake City, then caught a feeder flight into the Elko County Airport. He landed after snow had begun to fall but before the rapidly dropping visibility and the oncoming false dusk of the storm had curtailed air traffic.

In the small terminal, he went to a public phone, looked up the number of the Tranquility Motel, and dialed it. He got nothing, not even a ring. The line hissed emptily. He tried again with no success.

When he sought help from an operator, she was also unable to ring the number. “I’m sorry, sir, there seems to be trouble with the line.”

Taking that as very bad news, Father Wycazik said, “Trouble? What trouble? What’s wrong?”

“Well, sir, I suppose the storm. We’re getting really gusty wind.”

But Stefan was not as certain as she was. The storm had hardly begun. He could not believe telephone lines had already succumbed to the first tentative gusts, which he had experienced on his way into the terminal. The isolation of the Tranquility was an ominous development, more likely to be the handiwork of men than of the impending blizzard.

He placed a call to St. Bette’s rectory in Chicago, and Father Gerrano answered on the second ring. “Michael, I’ve arrived safely in Elko. But I haven’t gotten Brendan. Their phone isn’t working.”

“Yes,” Michael Gerrano said, “I know.”

“You know? How could you possibly know?”

“Just minutes ago,” Michael said, “I received a call from a man who refused to identify himself but who said he was a friend of this Ginger Weiss, one of those people out there with Brendan. He said she called him this morning and asked him to dig up some information for her. He found what she wanted, but he couldn’t get through to the Tranquility. She’d apparently foreseen that problem, so she’d given him our number and the number of friends of hers in Boston, told him to tell us what he’d found, and she’d call us at her convenience.”

“Refused to give his name?” Father Wycazik said, puzzled. “And you say she asked him to dig up information?”

“Yes,” Michael said. “About two things. First, this place called the Thunder Hill Depository. He says to tell her that, as far as he could determine, the Depository is what it’s always been: an elaborate blastproof storage depot, one of eight virtually identical underground facilities situated across the country, and not the largest one. She also asked him to get her some background on an army officer, Colonel Leland Falkirk, who’s with something called the Domestic Emergency 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 think-tank-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?”

“Could 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 Sarvers’ 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.