Strangers

VIGILANT but him. If he can't get in… it'll look like voodoo to him. He'll be sure we're all infected."
        "Infected?" Ginger said uneasily.
        Alvarado said, "The colonel is convinced that we - you, me, Miles, all of us - have been somehow possessed by alien beings, taken over like a bunch of puppets, and that we're not human any more."
        "That's insane," Jack said.
        But with greater uneasiness, Ginger said, "Of course, we know we haven't been. But is there reason to believe it could've happened?"
        "Initially, yes, some small reason," Miles Bennell said, "but it didn't happen. It's not true. And we understand now that it was never a possibility. Just typical black-minded human nature… putting the worst interpretation on everything. I'll explain later."
        Ginger was about to demand an immediate explanation, but General Alvarado said, "Please, hold the questions. We don't have much time. Right now, we believe Falkirk is returning here, having taken your friends into custody-"
        "No," Dom said, "they got away before we did. They're gone."
        "Never underestimate the colonel," Alvarado said. "But see, the thing is - if Dom could use his power to shut down the entrances and keep Falkirk out, maybe we'd have the time to find a way to blow this whole story wide open. Because if he gets in here… I'm afraid there's going to be bloodshed one way or another."
        Movement at the front of the chamber caught Ginger's attention, and she gasped in dismay when she saw Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, and then all the others coming in through the small door in the big door.
        "Too late," Miles Bennell said. "Too late."
        

        
        At the entrance to Thunder Hill Depository, the seven witnesses and Parker Faine were taken out of the transport and grouped in the snow in front of the smaller steel door. Lieutenant Horner's machine gun discouraged flight and resistance.
        Leland ordered the other DERO men back to Shenkfield, where they were to bury Stefan Wycazik in an unmarked grave and await further orders. But no orders would be forthcoming from Leland, for he would not be alive to give them. It was not necessary to sacrifice the entire company, for just he and one other man could control the prisoners and destroy the entire Depository, and it was Lieutenant Horner's bad luck to be second-in-command and have that responsibility fall upon his shoulders.
        In the entrance tunnel, Leland was alarmed to see that the video cameras were not working. But then he realized that the new emergency program under which VIGILANT was operating did not require visual ID for admittance, for it would respond only to one key: the prints of the palm and all the fingers on Leland's left hand. When he put his palm to the glass panel beside the inner door, VIGILANT admitted him at once.
        He and Horner took the eight prisoners down to the second level and across The Hub to the cavern where Alvarado and Bennell waited. As Leland stood back and watched them file through the man-sized door in the huge wooden wall, he looked beyond them and saw the other witnesses - Corvaisis, Weiss, and Twist - and although he did not know how they had gotten here, he was exhilarated by the realization that, contrary to expectations, he had the whole group exactly where he wanted them.
        He left Horner to follow the prisoners, while he hurried back to the elevators. He could never trust poor Tom again, not now that the lieutenant had been alone with people who might be contaminated.
        Carrying his submachine gun at the ready, Leland took a smaller elevator down to the third level. He intended to kill anyone who moved toward him. And if they rushed him in great numbers, he would turn the gun on himself. He wouldn't let himself be changed. Through childhood and adolescence, his parents had striven to change him into one of them: a shouter-and-wailer-in-churches, a self-flagellator, a God-terrorized speaker of tongues. He had resisted the changes his parents would have wrought in him, and he would not be changed now. They had been after him all his life, in one guise or another, and they would not get him after he had come this far with his identity and dignity intact.
        The bottom level of Thunder Hill Depository was given over entirely to the storage of supplies, munitions, and explosives. Staff members all lived on the second level and most worked there as