Strangers

quiet about it."
        Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded him. He swallowed some baked corn and said, "This explains why there weren't hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the thing happened, as there should've been at that hour. If the Army sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out of the danger zone before anything actually happened."
        Dom said, "Some didn't get out, saw too much, and were held and brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel."
        For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.
        Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the Sentinel published during the weeks following the toxic spill. When they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis, Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in fact, related to it. They pulled more issues from the files, and by studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what they hoped for. One place in particular figured in the news in such a way that it seemed linked to the closure of I-80.
        "Thunder Hill," Dom said. "We believe that's where our trouble came from. Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus attention away from the real source of the crisis. Thunder Hill."
        Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said, "Thunder Hill's ten or twelve miles north-northeast of here, in the mountains. The Army has an installation up there, too - the Thunder Hill Depository. There're natural limestone caves in those hills, where they store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so they won't lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the country are wiped out in a disaster… nuclear war, like that."
        Ernie said, "The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or more. Rumors have it that files and records aren't the only things in storage there. Some believe there's also huge supplies of food, medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense. In case a big war breaks out, the Army wouldn't want all its weapons and supplies on ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They've surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those."
        "Then anything might be up there," Jorja Monatella said uneasily.
        "Anything," Ned Sarver said.
        "Is it possible the place isn't just a storage dump?" Sandy asked. "Could they also maybe be doing some kind of experiments up there?"
        "What kind of experiments?" Brendan asked, leaning over to look past Ned, beside whom he was seated.
        Sandy shrugged. "Any kind."
        "It's possible," Dom said. The same thought had occurred to him.
        "But if there wasn't a toxic spill on I-80, if it was something at Thunder Hill that went wrong," Ginger said, "how could it have affected us, more than ten miles to the south?"
        No one could think of an answer.
        Marcie, who had been preoccupied with her moon collection for most of the evening and who had said nothing during dinner, put down her fork and piped up with a question of her own: "Why's it called Thunder Hill?"
        "Sweetie," Faye said, "that's one I can answer. Thunder Hill's really one of four huge, connecting mountain meadows, a long sloping piece of high pastureland. It's surrounded by a great many high peaks, and during a storm, the place acts like a sort of… well, a sort of funnel for sound. The Indians named it Thunder Hill hundreds of years ago because thunder echoes between those peaks and rolls down the mountainsides, and it all pours in on that one particular meadow in a most peculiar way, so that it seems as if the roar isn't coming out of the sky, but as if it's coming right up out of the ground around you."
        "Wow," Marcie said softly. "I'd probably pee my pants."
        "Marcie!" Jorja said as everyone broke into