Strangers

contamination, Riddenhour would be shamed by his example of self-sacrifice and would find the backbone to do what was necessary to finish the work and scrub every trace of contagion from the face of the earth.
        Leland Falkirk was trembling. Not with fear. It was pride that made him tremble. He was enormously proud to have been chosen to fight and win the greatest battle of all time, thus saving not just one nation but all the world from a menace with no equal in history. He knew he was capable of the sacrifice required. He had no fear. As he wondered what he would feel in the split-second it took him to die in a nuclear blast, a thrill coursed through him at the prospect of pitting himself against the most intense pain of which the human mind could conceive. Oh, it would be cruelly intense and yet so short in duration that there was no doubt he'd prove capable of enduring it as stout-heartedly as he had endured all other pain to which he had subjected himself.
        He was calm now. Perfectly calm. Serene.
        Leland savored the sweet anticipation of the blistering pain to come. That brief atomic agony would be of such exquisite purity that the endurance of it would ensure the reward of heaven, which his Pentecostal parents, seeing the devil in every aspect of him, had always sworn he would not attain.
        

        
        Stepping out of the Tranquility Grille behind Ginger, Dom Corvaisis looked up into the maelstrom of driving-whirling-spinning snow, and for an instant he saw and heard and felt what was not there:
        Behind him rang out the atonal musical clatter of demolished glass still falling from the explosion of the windows, and ahead lay the glow of the parking-lot lights and the hot summer darkness beyond, and all around the thunder-roar and earthquake-shudder of mysterious source; his heart pounding; his breath like taffy that had stuck in his throat; and as he ran out of the Grille he looked around and then up…
        "What's wrong?" Ginger asked.
        Dom realized that he had staggered across the snowy pavement, skidding not on that surface but on the slippery recollection that had escaped his memory block. He looked around at the others, all of whom had come out of the diner. "I saw… like I was there again… that July night… Two nights ago, in the diner, when he'd come close to remembering, he had unconsciously re-created the thunder and shaking of July 6. This time, there was no such manifestation, maybe because the memory was no longer repressed and was breaking through and needed no help. Now, unable to adequately convey the intensity of the memory, he turned away from the others and peered up into the falling snow, and-
        The roar was so loud that it hurt his ears, and the vibrations so strong that he felt them in his bones and in his teeth the way thunder sometimes reverberated in window glass, and he stumbled out across the macadam, looking up into the night sky and - there! - an aircraft flying only a few hundred feet above the earth, red and white running lights flashing across darkness, so low that the glow from within the cockpit was visible, a jet judging by the speed with which it rocketed past, a fighter jet judging by the powerful scream of its engines, and - there! - another one, sweeping past and wheeling up across the field of stars that filled the clear black sky in a panoramic speckle-splash; but the roar and the shaking that had shattered the diner's windows and had set small objects adance on the tables now grew worse instead of better, even though he would have expected it to subside once the jets were past, so he turned, sensing the source behind him' and he cried out in terror when a third jet shot over the Grille at an altitude of no more than forty feet, so low that he could see the markings - serial numbers and an American flag - on the bottom of one wing, illuminated by the parking-lot light bouncing up from the macadam; Jesus, it was so low that he fell flat on the ground in panic, certain that the jet was crashing, that debris would be raining over him in a second, perhaps even a shower of burning jet fuel…
        "Dom!"
        He found himself lying face-down in the snow, clutching the ground in a reenactment of the terror he had felt on the night of July 6, when he'd thought the jet was crashing on top of him.
        "Dom, what's wrong?" Sandy Sarver asked. She was kneeling beside him, a hand on his