Strangers

asking you where you went during the emergency, and you'd have to know what they were talking about. But Dom and I are from distant places, unlikely ever to return, unlikely to run into anyone who would know that we'd been within the quarantine zone, so they didn't bother including that bit of reality in the set of fake memories they gave us."
        Sandy paused with a morsel of chicken on her fork. "But wouldn't it be safer and easier to make your memories fit the toxic spill, too?"
        "Ever since Pablo Jackson helped me discover that my mind had been tampered with," Ginger said, "I've been reading about brainwashing, and I think maybe it's a lot less difficult to implant recollections that are entirely false than it is to weave in threads of reality such as the environmental emergency and the road closure. It probably takes a lot longer to construct fake memories that have some reality to them, and maybe they simply didn't have time to do that with all of us. So they gave the super-deluxe brainwashing job only to you locals."
        "That feels like the truth," Ernie said, and everyone agreed.
        Faye said, "But did the toxic spill really happen, or was it just a cover story that gave them an excuse to close I-80 and bottle us up, a way of preventing us from talking about what we'd seen Friday night?"
        "I suspect there was contamination of some sort," Ginger said. "In Dom's nightmare, which we know is really more memory than dream, those men were wearing decontamination suits. Now, when they came into the quarantine zone, maybe they'd wear costumes like that for the benefit of newsmen or other onlookers. But once here, where only we could see them, they wouldn't keep the suits on unless they absolutely had to."
        Glancing uneasily at the blind-covered window nearest the table, as if he thought he had seen a trickle of darkness dribbling in from the night beyond, Ernie cleared his throat and said, "Yeah, uh… well, which was it, do you think? You're the doctor. Does it sound like chemical or biological contamination? The story they gave the media was that it involved chemicals being delivered to Shenkfield's testing facilities."
        Ginger had been thinking about this question for some time, long before Ernie asked it. Chemical or biological contamination? She had arrived at an answer that deeply disturbed her. "Generally speaking, the suits required for a chemical spill don't have to be air-tight. They just have to cover the worker from head to toe in order to prevent any caustic or toxic substance from coming into contact with his skin, and they have to include a respirator, rather like a scuba diver's tank and mask, so he won't breathe deadly fumes. They're usually made of lightweight nonporous cloth, and the headgear consists of a simple cloth hood with a plastic visor. But Dom described heavy-looking suits with an outer level of thick vinyl, with gloves that were of one piece with the sleeves, and a hard helmet that locked into an airtight seal at the collar. That is unquestionably gear that's been designed to prevent exposure to a dangerous biological agent, microbes."
        For a while no one said a word, pondering this disquieting news.
        Then Ned took a long swallow of his Heineken for fortification and said, "So we must've been infected with something."
        Faye said, "Some virus they developed for biological warfare."
        "If it was headed for Shenkfield, that's the only kind of bug it could've been," Ernie said. "Something mean."
        "Yet we lived," Sandy said.
        "Because they were immediately able to quarantine us and treat us," Ginger said. "Surely they wouldn't be intending to test a genetically engineered virus, some new and deadly organism that could be used as a weapon, unless they had simultaneously developed an effective cure for it. So they had a supply of a new antibiotic OT serum to guard against just such an accident. If they contaminated us, they also cured US."
        Ernie said, "It sounds right, doesn't it? Maybe it's all starting to fall together, piece by piece."
        Dom disagreed. "It still doesn't explain what happened on that Friday night, what we saw that they didn't want us to see. It doesn't explain what made the whole damned diner shake or what blew out the windows - either on that first night or again last night."
        "And it doesn't explain the other weird stuff," Faye said. "Like all those paper