Strangers

mixture of amazement, excitement, pleasure, and apprehension. Then with an impulsiveness that obviously surprised her as much as it did him, they virtually threw themselves at each other, embracing as if they were old and dear friends too long apart. Dom held her close, and she held him tightly, and he felt her heart pounding as hard and as fast as his.
        What the hell is happening here? he wondered.
        But he was in too much turmoil to analyze the situation. For the moment, he could feel but not think.
        Neither of them wanted to let go, and when they finally separated, neither could speak. She tried to say something, but her voice cracked with emotion, and Dom was incoherent. So she picked up one of her bags, and he picked up the other, and they went out to the parking lot.
        In the car, with the engine running and the heater blowing warm air in their faces, Ginger said, "What was that all about?"
        Still shaken, but curiously not embarrassed by the bold greeting he had given her, Dom cleared his throat. "Don't really know. But I think maybe, together, you and I went through something so shattering that the experience created a special bond between us, a powerful bond we weren't entirely aware of until we saw each other in the flesh."
        "When I first came across your picture on the book jacket, it had a very odd effect on me, but nothing like this. Stepping off the plane, seeing you there… it was as if we'd known each other all our lives. No, not exactly that. More precisely… it was as if we'd known each other far better, more completely, than we'd ever known anyone else, as if we shared some tremendous secret that all the world might want to know but that only we possessed. Does that sound crazy?"
        He shook his head. "No. Not at all. You've put into words what I was feeling… as nearly as words can explain it."
        "You've met some of the others," Ginger said. "Was it like this when you first encountered them?"
        "No. I instantly felt… a certain warmth toward them, a strong sense of community, but nothing a fraction as powerful as what I felt when you got off that plane. All of us went through something unusual that linked our lives, our futures, but evidently you and I shared an experience even stranger and more affecting than anything we shared with them. Damn. It's as layered as an onion, one strangeness on another."
        For half an hour they sat in the car, in the airport parking lot, talking. Outside, cars and pickups came and went around them, and the January wind buffeted the Chevy and moaned at the windows; however, they were seldom aware of anything but each other.
        She told him about her fugues, the hypnotic regression sessions with Pablo Jackson, and the mind-control technique known as the Azrael Block. She told him about Pablo's murder and her own narrow escape.
        Although, clearly, Ginger sought neither sympathy for her suffering nor praise for the way she had handled herself in trying circumstances, Dom's respect and admiration for her grew by the minute. She was only five-two, a hundred pounds, but somehow she had a physical presence more imposing than many men twice her size.
        Dom recounted the events of the past twenty-four hours, and when Ginger heard about his dream of the previous night and about the new memories that surfaced in it, she appeared immensely relieved. In Dom's dream, there was proof of Pablo Jackson's theory: Her fugues were not caused by mental aberration; they were, instead, always triggered by objects associated with her imprisonment at the motel two summers ago. The black gloves and dark-visored helmet had terrified her because they made a direct connection with the repressed memories of the people in decontamination suits who tended her while she underwent brainwashing. The drain in the hospital scrub sink threw the panic switch because she probably had been one of those "detainees" poisoned by Colonel Falkirk (whoever the hell he was), then forced to vomit up the deadly substance, just as Dom had been. While strapped in the motel bed, she must have undergone many eye examinations to determine the depth of her drug-induced trance, which was why an ophthalmoscope had sent her reeling away in a dark terror that night in George Hannaby's office. Dom saw a relaxation of the tension at this irrefutable evidence that her blackouts were not a sign of madness and were, in fact, a desperate