Strangers (93 page)

“So ready,” Parker agreed in a whisper.

For perhaps another minute they bumped and rocked along in silence, unable to speak, unable to put in words exactly what it felt like to know that mankind did not stand alone in creation.

Finally, Parker cleared his throat, checked the compass, and said, “You’re right on course, Stefan. Ought to be less than a mile to Vista Valley Road. This man in Chicago that you mentioned a while ago…Cal Sharkle. What was it he yelled to the cops this morning?”

“He insisted he’d seen aliens land and that they were hostile. He was afraid they were taking us over, that most of his neighbors had been possessed. He said the aliens tried to take control of him by strapping him in a bed and dripping themselves into his veins. Initially, I was afraid maybe he was right, that what had come down here in Nevada was a threat. But on the trip from Chicago, I had time to think about it. He was confusing his incarceration and brainwashing with the landing of the starship he’d seen. He thought it was aliens in pressurized space suits who’d kept him captive and stuck him full of needles. He witnessed the descent of a starship, and then these government men in decontamination suits came, and by the time they’d rammed all that stuff into his subconscious and weighted it down with a memory block, he was completely mixed up. No aliens apprehended him. It was his fellow men who mistreated him.”

“You’re saying government agents would’ve worn decontamination suits until it was clear whether or not the alien contact carried a risk of bacteriological contamination.”

“Exactly,” Stefan said. “Some guests at the Tranquility must’ve approached the ship openly, so they had to be considered contaminated until evidence to the contrary was turned up. And we know some at the motel have distinctly remembered
men
inside decontamination suits: a few soldiers, brainwashing specialists. So poor Calvin was driven insane by a misconception arising from his inability to remember clearly.”

“Must be less than half a mile to Vista Valley Road,” Parker said, studying the map in the light from the open glove-compartment door.

Snow drove relentlessly through the yellow cones of the headlights. Now and then, when the wind faltered or briefly changed the angle of its assault, short-lived forms of snow capered in arabesque dances, this way and that, but always dispersing and vanishing like ghostly performers the moment that the wind recovered its momentum and purpose.

As they started up a steep slope, Parker said softly, “Something came down.…And if the government knew enough to close I-80 ahead of the event, they must’ve been tracking the craft a long time. But I still don’t
see how they could know where it would come down. I mean, the crew of the ship might’ve changed its course at any time.”

“Unless it was crashing,” Father Wycazik said. “Maybe it was picked up by satellite observation far out in space, monitored for days or weeks. If it approached on an undeviating course that would indicate it wasn’t traveling under control, there’d have been time to calculate its point of impact.”

“Oh, no. No. I don’t want to think it crashed,” Parker said.

“Nor do I.”

“I want to think they got here alive…all that way.”

When the Jeep Cherokee was halfway up the slope, the tires spun on an especially icy patch of ground, then caught hold and propelled them forward again with a jolt.

Parker said, “I want to believe Dom and the others didn’t just see a ship…but encountered whoever came in it. Imagine. Just imagine…”

Father Wycazik said, “Whatever happened to them that night in July was very strange indeed, a whole lot stranger than just seeing a ship from another world.”

“You mean…because of Brendan’s and Dom’s powers?”

“Yes. Something more happened, more than just contact.”

They topped the crest of the hill and started down the other side. Even through shifting curtains of the storm, Stefan saw the headlights of four vehicles on Vista Valley Road below. All four were stopped and angled every which way, and their blazing beams crisscrossed like gleaming sabers in the snow-bleeding darkness.

As he drove down toward the gathering, he quickly realized that he was heading into trouble.

“Machine guns!” Parker said.

Stefan saw that two of the men below were holding submachine guns on a group of seven people—six adults and one child—who were lined up against the side of a Cherokee that was different only in color from the one Parker had just bought. Eight or ten other men were standing around, a substantial force, obviously military because they were all dressed in the same Arctic-issue uniforms. Stefan had no doubt that these were some of the same forces involved in the closure of I-80 both tonight and eighteen months ago.

They had turned toward him and were staring uphill, surprised at being interrupted.

He wanted to swing the Jeep around, gun the engine, and flee, but although he slowed down, he knew there was no point in running. They would come after him.

Abruptly, he recognized a familiar Irish face among those lined up
against the Cherokee. “That’s him, Parker! That’s Brendan on the end of the lineup.”

“The others must be from the motel,” Parker said, leaning forward to peer anxiously through the windshield. “But I don’t see Dom.”

Now that he had spotted Brendan, Father Wycazik could not have turned back even if God had opened the mountains for him and provided a highway clear to Canada, as He had parted the Red Sea for Moses. On the other hand, Stefan was unarmed. And as a priest, he would have had little use for a gun even if he had possessed one. Having neither the means nor desire to attack, yet unable to run, he let the Cherokee roll slowly down the hill as he frantically wracked his mind for some course of action that would turn the tables on the soldiers below.

The same concern had gripped Parker, for he said, “What in the devil are we going to do?”

Their dilemma was resolved by the soldiers below. To Stefan’s astonishment, one of the men with a machine gun opened fire on them.

•

Dom watched as Jack Twist directed the flashlight beam over the chainlink fence, then up to the barbed-wire overhang that thrust out above their heads. They were at that long length of Thunder Hill’s perimeter that ran through an open meadow, down toward the floor of the valley. Windblown snow had stuck to large sections of the thick, interlocking steel loops of the fence, but other areas were bare, and those uncrusted links were what Jack studied most closely.

“The fence itself isn’t electrified,” Jack said above the shrieking wind. “There aren’t conducting wires woven through it, and the current can’t be carried by the links. No way. There’d be just too damn much resistance because they’re too thick and because the ends of some of them don’t make tight contact with each other.”

Ginger said, “Then why the warning signs?”

“Partly to spook away amateurs,” Jack said. He put the beam of the flash on the overhang again. “However, there
are
conducting wires strung carefully through the center of that barbed-wire roll, so you’d get fried if you went over the top. We’ll cut through the bottom.”

Ginger held the flashlight while Dom dug into one of the canvas rucksacks, found the acetylene torch, and passed it to Jack.

After he had slipped on a pair of tinted ski goggles, Jack lit the torch and began to cut an entrance through the chain-link barrier. The fierce hissing of the burning gas was audible even above the keening, moaning wind. The intense blue-white acetylene flame cast an eerie light that struck a thousand jewel-bright glints in the snow.

They were not at a position where they risked being seen from the main entrance of the Depository, which lay over the brow of a hill that sloped up from the other side of the fence. However, Dom was sure the weird acetylene light reached high enough into the night to be spotted from the other side of that rise. If seen, it would draw guards this way. But if Jack was right, if the Depository’s security was largely electronic, there would not be guards prowling the grounds tonight; and in this weather, surveillance by video cameras was pretty much ruled out, too, for their lenses would be iced-over or packed with snow.

Of course, though they wanted to get inside the Depository and have a quick look around, it would not be a tragedy if they were apprehended here. After all, being taken into custody was part of Jack’s plan for focusing attention on Thunder Hill.

Dom, Ginger, and Jack were not armed. All the weapons had been for the others, in the Cherokee, because their escape was essential. If they were stopped, all was lost. Dom hoped they wouldn’t need their guns, and that they were already safely in Elko.

As Jack cut a crawl-through opening in the fence, the eldritch light of the acetylene torch increasingly captivated Dom and, suddenly, made a connection with the past, hurtling him back once more in memory:

The third jet roared over the roof of the diner, so low that he threw himself flat on the parking lot, certain the airplane
was crashing on top of him, but it swooped past, leaving shattered air and a blast of engine heat in its wake; he started to get up, and a fourth jet boomed over the roof of the motel, a huge half-glimpsed shadowy shape, its running lights carving white and red wounds through the night as it thundered south and angled east, out across the barrens beyond I-80, where the third jet had gone, and now the first two craft, which had passed over at a greater altitude, were far out there, swinging back, one to the east and one to the west; yet still the earth shook and the night was filled with a great rumble like an ongoing and never-ending explosion, and he thought there must be more jets coming, even though the queer electronic oscillation that had throbbed under the roar was now getting louder and shriller and stranger and was unlike anything jets would produce; he shoved up onto his feet and turned, and there was Ginger Weiss and Jorja and Marcie, and there was Jack running over from the motel, and Ernie and Faye coming out from the office, and others, all the others, Ned and Sandy; the rumble was now like the crash of Niagara Falls combined with the base-throb pounding of a thousand timpani; the ululant electronic whistle made him feel as if the top of his head was going to be sliced off by a band saw; there was frost-silver light of a peculiar kind; he looked up, away from the jets that had gone past, over the roof of the diner, looked up toward
the light; he pointed and said, “The moon! The moon!” Others looked where he pointed; he was filled with a sudden terror, and he cried, “The moon! The moon!” and staggered back several steps in surprise and fear; someone screamed….

“The moon!” he gasped.

He was down in the snow, driven to his knees by the shock of the memory-flash, and Ginger was kneeling in front of him, holding him by the shoulders. “Dom? Dom, are you okay?”

“Remembered,” he said numbly as the wind rushed between their faces and tore their smoking breath out of their mouths. “Something…the moon…but I didn’t quite get enough.”

Beyond them, having cut a crawl-through in the chain-link fence, Jack switched off the acetylene torch. The darkness folded around them again like the wings of a great bat.

“Come on,” Jack said, turning to Dom and Ginger. “Let’s go in. Quickly now.”

“Can you make it?” Ginger asked Dom.

“Yeah,” he said, though there was an icy cramping in his guts and a tightness in his chest. “But all of a sudden…I’m scared.”

“We’re all scared,” she said.

“I don’t mean scared of getting caught. No. It’s something else. Something I almost remembered just then. And I’m…shaking like a leaf, for God’s sake.”

•

Brendan gasped in disbelief when Colonel Falkirk ordered one of his men to open fire on the Jeep that was approaching Vista Valley Road from the hillside above. The madman didn’t know who was in the vehicle. The soldier given the order also thought it was out of line, for he did not immediately raise his weapon. But Falkirk took a menacing step toward him and shouted: “I told you to open fire, Corporal! This is an urgent national security matter. Whoever’s in that vehicle is no friend of yours, mine, or our country. You think any innocent civilians would be driving overland, sneaking around the roadblock, in a goddamn blizzard like this? Fire! Waste them!”

This time, the corporal obeyed. The clatter of automatic gunfire hammered the night, briefly overpowering the voice of the raging wind. Up on the hillside, the headlights of the oncoming Jeep blew out. The two hundred hard cracks of two hundred bullets erupting in a murderous stream from the muzzle of the machine gun were augmented by the sound of slugs tearing through sheet metal and smacking onto more solid barriers. The windshield imploded under raining lead, and the Jeep, which had braked
immediately after topping the crest of the hill and had been descending slowly, abruptly gained speed and rushed down at them, then angled left when its wheels jolted over a lateral hump that extended across most of the slope. Obviously no longer under anyone’s control, it started to slow again, hit another bump, slid sideways, almost tipped over, almost rolled, but finally came to rest just forty feet away in the already drifting snow.

Five minutes ago, when Ned had driven over the hill on the
other
side of Vista Valley Road and had turned south, only to encounter the colonel and his men waiting less than a half-mile south, it had been instantly clear that all the shotguns and handguns—and even the Uzi that Jack had provided—would be of no help. Considering that their lives depended on their escape from Elko County, they would have made a stand against a smaller force. But Falkirk was accompanied by too many men, all heavily armed. Resistance would have been purest folly.

And Brendan had been filled with frustration because he had not dared use his special power to ensure their freedom. He felt he ought to be able to apply his telekinetic talent to the situation. If he concentrated hard enough, perhaps he could cause the guns to fly out of the soldiers’ hands. He sensed he had that much—and more—power in him, but he did not know how to bring it to bear effectively. He could not forget how the experiment in the diner had gotten entirely out of hand last night; they had been fortunate that none of them had been hurt by the careening salt and pepper shakers, and the violently levitating chairs. If he used his power to wrench the weapons from the soldiers, he might not be able to disarm all of them simultaneously, in which case the ones still in possession of their weapons might open fire in self-defense. Or at his instigation, the guns might tear free of the soldiers’ hands and go whirling through the air, out of control—firing until their magazines had emptied, pumping bullets into everything and everyone in sight. Sure, he might be able to heal the wounded. But what if he was shot? Could he heal himself? Probably. But if he was shot
dead
? He would not be able to bring himself back to life. And if anyone else was shot dead, he was not sure he would be able to bring them back, either. It was no good being gifted with the power of a god if no clear instructions came with the blessing.