Strangers

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