Strangers

to reserve all twenty. For the time being, the Tranquility was less a motel than a barracks, where the troops would be quartered until this war with an unknown enemy was finally brought to a conclusion.
        

    ***
        
        When the diner was boarded up, they all got into the motel's Dodge van, and Faye drove them down to the interstate and just over a quarter of a mile east, where she parked on the shoulder of the highway near the place that had a special attraction for Ernie and Sandy. The five of them stood along the guardrail, staring south, seeking a communion with the landscape that might illuminate the past. The winter solstice was three weeks behind them, so the sunlight was almost as hard and flat and cold as fluorescent light. In the grip of January, the scrub- and grass-covered plains, rugged hills, arroyos and gnarled rock formations were basically trichromatic, rendered in browns and grays and deep reds, with only an occasional patch of white sand, snow, or vein of borax. The scene was stark and dreary under a sky that grew more clouded and gray by the hour, but it also possessed an undeniable austere grandeur.
        Faye wanted very much to feel something special about this place, for if she felt nothing, that would mean the people who brainwashed her had totally controlled her, totally violated her. She allowed no room in her self-image for the concept of absolute submission. She was a proud, capable woman. But she felt nothing other than the winter wind.
        Ned and Dom appeared to be no more moved than Faye was, but she could see that Ernie and Sandy were receiving some cryptic message from the vista before them. Sandy was smiling beatifically. But Ernie had that look he got when night fell: pale, drawn, with haunted eyes.
        "Let's go closer," Sandy said. "Let's go right down there."
        All five climbed over the guardrail and plunged down the steep embankment of the elevated road. They moved across the plain - fifty yards, a hundred - carefully avoiding the cold-weather prickly pear which grew in profusion near the foot of the interstate but soon disappeared in favor of sagebrush and bunch-grass, which in turn gave way to another kind of grass which was also brown but thicker, silkier. Portions of the plain were rocky and sandy and in the grip of worthless bristly scrub, while other portions were almost like small lush meadows, for this was a land in transition from the semidesert of the south to the rich mountain pastures of the north. More than two hundred yards from the interstate, they stopped on a patch of ground not appreciably different from surrounding territory.
        "Here," Ernie said with a shudder, jamming his hands in his pockets and pulling his neck down into the rolled sheepskin collar of his coat.
        Sandy smiled and said, "Yes. Here."
        They spread out and moved back and forth across the ground. Here and there, in one shadowed niche or another, meager patches of snow lay hidden from the evaporating effect of the dry wind and from the cold winter sun. Those traces of winter, plus the lack of green grass and scattered late-blooming wildflowers, were the only things that made the landscape different from the way it had looked two summers ago. After a minute or two, Ned announced that he did, indeed, feel an inexplicable connection with the place, though it did not bring him peace as it did his wife. His fear became so acute that, expressing surprise and embarrassment at his reaction, he turned and walked away. As Sandy hurried after Ned, Dom Corvaisis admitted that he was strangely affected by the place, too. However, he was not merely frightened, like Ned; Dom's fear, like Ernie's, was spiced by an unexplained awe and a sense of impending epiphany. Only Faye remained unaffected, unmoved.
        Standing in the middle of the area in question, Dom turned slowly in a circle. "What was it? What the hell happened here?"
        The sky had turned to gray slate.
        The blunt wind became sharp. Faye shivered.
        She remained unable to feel what Ernie and the others felt, and that inability increased her sense of violation. She hoped she would one day meet the people who had messed with her mind. She wanted to look in their eyes and ask them how they could have so little respect for the personal integrity of another human being. Now that she knew she had been manipulated, she would never again feel entirely