Strangers

serious matter, sir."
        Burning a brighter red, Alvarado stalked out, the card pinched between thumb and forefinger and held away from his side as if it were an offensive object. He was back in fifteen minutes, no longer flushed but pale. "All right, Colonel, you have the authority you claim. So… I guess you're in command of Thunder Hill for the time being."
        "Not at all, sir," Leland said. "You're still the CO."
        "But if I'm a prisoner-"
        Leland interrupted. "Sir, your orders take precedence as long as they don't directly conflict with my authority to guarantee that no dangerous persons - no dangerous creatures - escape from Thunder Hill."
        Alvarado shook his head in amazement. "According to Miles Bennell, you have this crazy idea that we're all… some kind of monsters." The general had used the most melodramatic word he could think of, with the intent of belittling Leland's position.
        "Sir, as you know, one or more people in this facility attempted, by indirection, to bring some of the witnesses back to the Tranquility, evidently with the hope that the witnesses will remember what they've been made to forget and will create a media circus that'll force us to reveal what we've hidden. Now, these traitors are probably just well-intentioned men, most likely members of Bennell's staff, who simply believe the public should be informed. But the possibility also exists that they've got other and darker motives."
        "Monsters," Alvarado repeated sourly.
        When the polygraph was repaired, Leland charged Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms with interrogating everyone in Thunder Hill who had knowledge of the special secret harbored there for more than eighteen months. "If you screw up again," Leland warned them, "I'll have your heads." If they failed again to find the man who'd sent the Polaroids to the witnesses, he would view their failure as one more bit of evidence that rot had spread widely through the Thunder Hill staff, and that it was not ordinary human corruption but the result of an extraordinary and terrifying infection. Their failure would cost them their lives.
        At one-forty-five, Leland and Lieutenant Horner returned to Shenkfield, leaving the Depository's entire staff locked deep in the bosom of the earth. Upon his return to his windowless office in that other underground facility, the colonel received several doses of bad news, all courtesy of Foster Polnichev, the head of the Chicago office of the FBI.
        First, Sharkle was dead out in Evanston, Illinois, which should have been good news, but he had taken his sister, brother-in-law, and an entire SWAT team with him. The siege of Sharkle's house had become national news due to the extreme violence of its conclusion. The blood-hungry media would be focused on O'Bannon Lane until endless rehashing of the story drained it of thrills. Worse, among Sharkle's mad ravings, there had been enough truth to lead a perceptive and aggressive reporter to Nevada, to the Tranquility, and perhaps all the way to Thunder Hill.
        Worst of all, Foster Polnichev reported that "something almost… well… supernatural is happening here." A stabbing and shooting in an Uptown apartment, involving a family named Mendoza, had caused such a sensation within the city's police department that newspaper reporters and television crews had virtually set siege to the tenement house hours ago. Evidently, Winton Tolk, the officer whose life had been saved by Brendan Cronin, had brought a stabbed child back from near-death.
        Incredibly, Brendan Cronin had passed his own amazing talents to Tolk. But what else had he passed on to the black policeman? There might be only a wondrous new power in Winton Tolk… or something dark and dangerous, alive and inhuman, living within the cop.
        The worst possible scenario was, after all, unfolding. Leland was half-sick with apprehension as he listened to Polnichev.
        According to the FBI agent, Tolk was giving no interviews to the press and was, in fact, now in seclusion in his own house, where another mob of reporters had gathered. Sooner or later, however, Tolk would agree to speak with the press, and he would mention Brendan Cronin, and from there they would eventually find the link to the Halbourg girl.
        The Halbourg girl. That was another nightmare. Upon receiving this morning's news of Tolk's unexpected healing powers, Polnichev had gone to the