Strangers

  “You need me to drill?” Pollard asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Jack returned the optical probe to its slot and withdrew a third slender instrument with a spongy mesh tip of some material he could not identify, which the designer of SLICKS had labeled the “tap-wand.” He inserted it through the tiny gap in the lock mechanism at the base of the 4 button, slowly moved it up and down, left and right, until the computer beeped and flashed INTERVENTION on the miniature video display.

  While Jack held the tap-wand in place and Chad Zepp held the SLICKS upright, Pollard used the computer’s small programming board to quickly type instructions. INTERVENTION disappeared, and onto the screen came other words: SYSTEM CONTROL ESTABLISHED. The computer could now feed commands directly to the microchip that processed the lock codes and that directed the sliding steel bolts to either close or open.

  Pollard hit two more keys, and the SLICKS began to send sequences of three numbers to the microchip, one combination every six-hundredths of a second, all of which used the already known 4 as the middle digit of the code. SLICKS hit the right code—545—in only nine seconds.

  With four simultaneous thumps, the lock bolts retracted as one.

  Jack returned the tap-wand to its niche, switched off the computer. Only four minutes had passed since the rifle-shot that had blown out the truck’s right front tire.

  Clockwork.

  As Zepp slung the SLICKS over his shoulder again, Pollard opened the rear doors of the armored car. The money was theirs for the taking.

  Zepp laughed with delight. With a gleeful whoop, Pollard clambered into the truck and began to push out bulging canvas bags.

  But Jack still felt empty and cold inside.

  A few snow flurries suddenly appeared in the wind.

  The unexplained change in Jack, which had begun weeks ago, had now reached completion. He no longer cared about getting even with society. He felt purposeless, as adrift as the wind-borne flakes of snow.

  Elko County, Nevada.

  Faye Block had turned on the NO VACANCY notice to ensure that they would not be disturbed.

  Sitting around the table in the cheery kitchen of their apartment above the motel office, with the blinds shut against the night, the Blocks sipped coffee and listened spellbound as Dom told his story.

  The only point at which they registered disbelief was when he told them of the impossible dance of paper moons in Zebediah Lomack’s house in Reno. But he was able to describe that startling event in such sharp detail that he felt gooseflesh pimpling his arms, and he saw that his own awe and fear were being transmitted to Faye and Ernie.

  They appeared most impressed by the two Polaroid photographs that had arrived in the mail from the unknown correspondent two days before Dom had flown to Portland. They studied the picture in which the zombie-faced priest was sitting at a writing desk, and they were certain it had been taken in one of their motel rooms. The photo of the blond in bed with an IV line in her arm was a closeup that showed nothing of the room, but they recognized the floral-patterned bedspread visible in one comer of the shot; it was the kind that had been in use in some units until ten months ago.

  To Dom’s surprise, they had been sent a similar photograph. Ernie remembered receiving it in a plain envelope on December 10, five days before they had flown to Milwaukee. Faye got it from the center drawer of the desk in the downstairs office, and they hunched conspiratorially over the kitchen table, studying the print. It was a shot of three people—man, woman, child—standing in sunshine by the door to Room 9. All three were dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals.

  “Do you recognize them?” Dom asked.

  “No,” Faye said.

  “But I feel like I ought to remember them,” Ernie said.

  Dom said, “Sunshine ... summer clothes ... so we can almost certainly conclude it was taken the summer before last, that weekend, between Friday the sixth of July and the following Tuesday. These three people were part of whatever happened. Maybe innocent victims like us. And our unknown correspondent wants us to think about them, remember them.”

  Ernie said, “Whoever sent the pictures would’ve been one of the people who erased our memories. So why would he want to stir us up like this after so much trouble was taken to make us forget?”

  Dom shrugged. “Maybe he never believed it was right—what was done to us. Maybe he only went along with it because he had to, and maybe it’s been on his conscience ever since. Whoever he is, he’s afraid to come right out with what he knows. He’s got to do it indirectly.”

  Abruptly, Faye pushed her chair back from the table. “Five weeks of mail piled up while we were away. Might be something more in it.”

  As the sound of Faye’s descending footsteps echoed up from the stairs, Ernie said, “Sandy—that’s our waitress at the Grille—sorted through the mail and paid the bills as they arrived. But the rest of the mail she just dropped in a paper sack. Since we came back this morning, we’ve been so busy getting the place open, we didn’t bother looking to see what the postman brought.”

  Faye returned with two plain white envelopes. In a state of high excitement, they opened the first. It contained a Polaroid of a man lying on his back in bed, an intravenous needle in his arm. He was in his fifties. Dark hair, balding. In ordinary circumstances, he probably had a jovial look, for he resembled W. C. Fields. But he was staring blankly toward the camera, face bleak. Zombie eyes....

  “My God, it’s Calvin!” Faye said.

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “Cal Sharkle. He’s a long-haul trucker movin’ freight between Chicago and San Francisco.”

  “He stops at the Grille most every trip,” Faye said. “Sometimes, when he’s beat, he stays overnight. Calvin’s such a nice man.”

  “What company’s he drive for?” Dom asked.

  “He’s independent,” Ernie said. “Owns his own rig.”

  “Would you know how to get in touch with him?”

  “Well,” Ernie said, “he signs the registry every time he checks in, so we’ll have his address ... around Chicago somewhere, I think.”

  “We’ll check later. First, let’s look in that other envelope.”

  Faye opened it and produced another Polaroid. Again, it was a shot of a man lying in one of the Tranquility Motel’s beds, an IV line in one arm. Like all the others, he had no expression whatsoever, and soulless eyes that reminded Dom of horror movies about the living dead.

  But this time, they all recognized the man in the bed. It was Dom.

  Las Vegas, Nevada.

  When Marcie’s bedtime came, she was sitting at the little desk in the corner of her room, occupied with her collection of moons.

  Jorja stood in the doorway, watching. The girl was so thoroughly engaged by the task that she remained unaware she was being observed.

  A box of crayons lay beside the album full of moons. Marcie was hunched over the work surface, carefully coloring one of the lunar faces. This was a new development, and Jorja wondered what it meant.

  In the week since Marcie had begun her collection with magazine clippings, she had filled the album. She had few sources for photos, so she drew hundreds of pictures to add to the monotonous gallery. Using templets as varied as coins, jar lids, vases, drinking glasses, cans, and thimbles, she traced lunar forms of all sizes on tablet paper, construction paper, paper bags, envelopes, and wrapping paper. She did not spend most of her time with the album, but each day she devoted a bit more time to it than she had the day before.

  Dr. Ted Coverly, the psychologist treating Marcie, believed the anxiety that had generated the girl’s irrational fear of doctors had not been relieved. Now, the child was expressing that anxiety through her lunar preoccupation. When Jorja noted that Marcie did not seem to be particularly frightened of the moon, Coverly said, “Well, her anxiety doesn’t have to seek expression in another phobia. It can show itself in other ways ... such as an obsession.” Jorja could not understand where her daughter’s extraordinary anx
iety came from. Coverly said, “That’s why the therapy—to seek understanding. Don’t worry, Miss Monatella.”

  But Jorja was worried.

  She was worried because Alan had killed himself only yesterday. Jorja had not yet told Marcie of her father’s death. On leaving Pepper Carrafield’s apartment, she had called Coverly to ask his advice. He was astonished to learn that Alan, too, had been dreaming of the moon and had independently developed an intense lunar fascination of his own. That one would take time to ponder. Meanwhile, Coverly thought it wise to withhold the bad news from Marcie until Monday. “Come with her to the appointment. We’ll tell her together.” Jorja was afraid that, in spite of Alan’s inattention, Marcie would be devastated by his death.

  As she stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Marcie diligently applying a crayon to one of the moons, Jorja was stricken by an acute awareness of the girl’s fragility. Although she was seven years old and in second grade, the three-quarter-scale chair was still too big for her, and only the toes of her sneakers touched the floor. Even for a macho man armored with muscles, life was tenuous, and every additional day of existence was against the odds. But for a child as petite as Marcie, continued life seemed downright miraculous. Jorja realized how easily her precious daughter could be taken from her, and her heart swelled and ached with love.

  When at last Jorja said, “Honey, better put your pajamas on and brush your teeth,” she could not keep a tremor out of her voice.

  The girl looked bewildered, as if she were not quite sure where she was or who Jorja was. Then her eyes cleared, and she gave her mother a smile that could melt butter. “Hi, Mommy. I been coloring moons.”

  “Well, now it’s time to get ready for bed,” Jorja said. “In a little while, okay?” The girl appeared to be relaxed, yet she was gripping a crayon so tightly that her knuckles were white. “I want to color some more moons.”

  Jorja wanted to destroy the hateful album. But Dr. Coverly had warned that arguing with the child about the moons and forbidding her to collect them would only strengthen her obsession. Jorja was not sure he was right, but she stifled the urge to destroy the album.

  “‘Tomorrow, you’ll have lots of time to color, Peanut.”

  Reluctantly, Marcie closed the album, put away her crayons, and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  Alone beside the child’s desk, Jorja was overcome by weariness. In addition to working a full shift, she’d arranged a mortician for Alan’s body, ordered flowers, and settled details with the cemetery for Monday’s funeral. She had also called Alan’s estranged father in Miami to break the bad news. She was drained. Wearily, she opened the album.

  Red. The girl was coloring all the moons red, both those she had drawn and those clipped from newspapers and magazines. She had already painted more than fifty lunar images. The obsessive quality of the girl’s work was evident in the great care she had taken to keep the crayon from slipping past the outline of each moon. The crayon had been applied more heavily picture by picture, until some moons were coated with so much scarlet wax that they had a glisteningly wet look.

  The use of red—and red alone—profoundly disturbed Jorja. It almost seemed as if Marcie had glimpsed an augury of some onrushing terror, a premonition of blood.

  Elko County, Nevada.

  Faye Block had gone downstairs to the file cabinets, from which she had extracted the motel registry that had been in use the summer before last. Upon her return, she put the book on the kitchen table, in front of Dom, open to the guest lists of Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7.

  “There, just like Ernie and I remembered. That Friday was the night they closed the interstate because of a toxic spill. A truckload of dangerous chemicals headed out to Shenkfield. That’s a military installation about eighteen miles southwest of here. We had to close the motel until Tuesday, until they got the situation under control.”

  Ernie said, “Shenkfield’s an isolated testing ground for chemical and biological weapons, so the crap in that truck was damned nasty.”

  Faye continued, a new wooden note in her voice, as if reciting carefully memorized lines. “They erected roadblocks and ordered us to evacuate the danger zone. Our guests left in their own cars.” Her face remained expressionless. “Ned and Sandy Sarver were allowed to go up to their trailer near Beowawe because it was outside the quarantine area.”

  Astonished and confused, Dom said, “Impossible. I don’t remember any evacuation. I was here. I remember reading, researching the geography for a series of short stories ... but those memories are so thin I suspect they aren’t real. No substance to them. Still, I was here and nowhere else, and something weird was done to me.” He indicated the Polaroid snapshot of himself. “There’s the proof.”

  When Faye spoke, she sounded stiffer than before, and Dom saw a strangeness in her eyes, a slightly glazed look. “Until the all-clear was given, Ernie and I stayed with friends who have a small ranch in the mountains ten miles northeast of here—Elroy and Nancy Jamison. It was a difficult spill to clean up. The Army needed more than three days to do the job. They wouldn’t let us back here until Tuesday morning.”

  “What’s wrong with you, Faye?” Dom asked.

  She blinked. “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “You sound as if you’d been ... programmed with that little speech.”

  She seemed genuinely baffled. “What’re you talking about?”

  Frowning, Ernie said, “Faye, your voice went ... flat.”

  “Well, I was only explaining what happened.” She leaned over and put one finger on Friday’s page of the registry. “See, we’d rented out eleven rooms by the time they closed the interstate that night. But nobody paid for the rooms because nobody stayed. They were evacuated.”

  “There’s your name, seventh on the list,” Ernie said.

  Dom stared at his signature and at the Mountainview, Utah, address to which he had been moving at the time. He could remember checking in, but he sure as hell could not remember climbing back into his car and driving out the same night in response to an evacuation order. He said, “Did you actually see the accident, the tanker truck?”

  Ernie shook his head. “No, the truck overturned a couple miles from here.” He spoke in that by-rote tone that had marked Faye’s speech. “The Army experts from Shenkfield were concerned the chemicals would be dispersed by the wind, so the quarantine zone was very large.”

  Chilled by the unconscious artificiality in Ernie’s voice, Dom looked at Faye and saw that she too had noticed her husband’s unnatural tone. He said, “That’s what you sounded like a moment ago, Faye.” He looked at Ernie. “You two have been programmed with the same script.”

  Faye frowned. “Are you saying the spill never happened?”

  “It happened, all right,” Ernie told Dom. “For a while we saved a bunch of newspaper clippings about it from the Elko Sentinel. But I think we eventually threw them out. Anyway, people around these parts still wonder what might’ve happened if we’d gotten big winds and been contaminated with that top-secret stuff before the evacuation order was even given. No, it’s not just some delusion of Faye’s and mine.”

  “You can ask Elroy and Nancy Jamison,” Faye said. “They were here that night, visiting. When we had to evacuate, they offered to take us back to their place and put us up for the duration. ”

  Dom smiled sourly. “I wouldn’t put much credence in their recall of events. If they were here, then they saw what the rest of us saw, and it was scrubbed from their minds. They remember taking you back to their place because that’s what they were told to remember. In fact they were probably right here, being brainwashed with the rest of us.”

  “My head’s swimming,” Faye said. “This is positively Byzantine.”

  “But, damn it, the toxic spill and evacuation happened,” Ernie said. “It was in the newspapers.”

  Dom thought of a disturbing explanation that made his scalp crawl. “What if everyone here at the motel that night was contaminated
with some chemical or biological weapon headed for Shenkfield? And what if the Army and the government covered it up to avoid bad press, millions of dollars in lawsuits, and the disclosure of top-secret information? Maybe they closed the highway and announced that everyone was safely evacuated, when in fact we had not been gotten out in time. Then they used the motel as a clinic, decontaminated us as much as they could, scrubbed the memory of the incident out of our minds, and reprogrammed us with false memories, so we’d never know what had happened to us.”

  They stared at one another in shocked silence for a moment. Not because the scenario sounded entirely right, which it did not. But because it was the first scenario they’d come up with that made sense of the psychological problems they had been having and explained the drugged people in those Polaroid snapshots.

  Then Ernie and Faye began to think of objections. Ernie voiced the first: “In that case, the logical thing for them to’ve done was to make our false memories tie in closely with their cover story about the toxic spill and evacuation. That’s exactly what they did with Faye and me, with the Jamisons, Ned and Sandy Sarver. So why didn’t they do the same with you? Why’d they program you with different memories that didn’t have anything to do with the evacuation? That was irrational and risky. I mean, the radical differences between our memories is virtually proof that you or we—or all of us—were brainwashed.”

  “Don’t know,” Dom said. “That’s just one more mystery to unravel.”

  “And here’s another flaw in that theory,” Ernie said. “If we’d been contaminated by a biological weapon, they wouldn’t have let us go in just three days. They’d have been afraid of contagion, epidemic.”

  Dom said, “All right. So it was a chemical agent, not a virus or bacterium. Something they could wash off or flush out of our systems.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, either,” Faye said. “Because the things they test at Shenkfield are meant to be deadly. Poison gas. Nerve gas. Hideous damn stuff. If we’d got caught in a cloud like that, we’d have been dead on the spot or brain-damaged or crippled.”

  “Maybe it was a slow-acting agent,” Dom said. “Something that generates tumors, leukemia, or other conditions that only begin to show up two or three or five years from the date of contamination.”

  That thought also shocked them into silence. They listened to the ticking of the kitchen clock, to the mournful fluting of the wind at the windows, wondering if malignancies were even now sprouting within them.

  Finally, Ernie said, “Maybe we were contaminated, and maybe we’re all slowly rotting inside, but I don’t think so. After all, they test potential weapons at Shenkfield. And what use would a weapon be that didn’t kill the enemy for years and years?”

  “Virtually no use at all,” Dom acknowledged.

  “And,” Ernie said, “how could chemical contamination explain that bizarre experience you had in Lomack’s house in Reno?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Dom said. “But now that we know they cordoned off this whole area using the excuse of a toxic spill—whether it was a real spill or not—my theory that we were brainwashed is a lot more credible. Because, see, before this I wasn’t able to explain how someone could’ve rounded us up at will and held us long enough to make us forget the thing we saw. But the quarantine gave them the time they needed, and it also kept away prying eyes. So ... at least now we have a good idea who we’re up against. The United States Army, maybe acting in collusion with the government, maybe acting alone, has been trying to hide something that happened here, something it did but shouldn’t have done. I don’t know about you, but the thought of being up against an enemy that big and that potentially ruthless scares the hell out of me.”

  “An old Leatherneck like me is bound to be scornful of the Army,” Ernie said. “But they’re not devils, you know. We can’t leap to the conclusion we’re victims of a wicked right-wing conspiracy. That crackpot stuff makes millions for paranoid novelists and for Hollywood, but in the real world, evil is more subtle, less identifiable. If Army and government officials are behind what happened to us, they don’t necessarily have immoral motives. They probably think they did the only wise thing they could’ve done in the circumstances.”

  “But whether or not it’s wise,” Faye said, “we’ve got to dig into this situation. If we don’t, Ernie’s nyctophobia will surely get worse. And your sleepwalking will also get worse, Dom. And what then?”

  They all knew “what then.” “What then” was a shotgun barrel jammed in the mouth, the route to peace that Zebediah Lomack had taken.

  Dom looked down at the motel registry on the table before him. Four spaces above his own name, he saw another entry that electrified him. Dr. Ginger Weiss. Her address was in Boston.

  “Ginger,” he said. “The fourth name on those moon posters.”

  Furthermore, Cal Sharkle, the Blocks’ trucker-friend from Chicago, the zombie-eyed subject of one of the Polaroid snapshots, had checked into the motel just before Dr. Weiss. The first guests to sign in that day were Mr. and Mrs. Alan Rykoff and daughter, of Las Vegas. Dom was willing to bet that they were the young family photographed in front of the door to Room 9. Zebediah Lomack’s name was not in the registry, so he had probably just been unlucky enough to stop at the Grille for dinner that night, on his way between Reno and Elko. One of the other names might have been that of the young priest in the other Polaroid, but if so, he had signed without appending his title.

  “We’ll have to talk to all these people,” Dom said excitedly. “We can start calling them first thing tomorrow and see what they remember about those days in July.”

  Chicago, Illinois.

  By allowing no slightest hairline crack to appear in his resolve, by showing no equivocation whatsoever, Brendan managed to obtain Father Wycazik’s permission to go to Nevada alone on Monday, without Monsignor Janney trailing him in expectation of miracles.

  By ten-ten, he was in bed with the lights out, lying on his side in blackness, staring at the window, where the palest light glistered softly in the frost that skinned the pane. The window looked out upon the courtyard, where no lights burned at this hour, so Brendan knew that he was seeing indirect moonglow refracted by the thin layer of ice that had welded itself to the glass. It had to