Dean R. Koontz - Strangers

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STRANGERS [065-5.0]
BY DEAN KOONTZ
Synopsis:
A group of seemingly diverse people are experiencing fugue states and
debilitating nightmares. Have they all shared a common experience? And,
does that experience portend the end of humanity as we know it?
Praise for Dean Koontz's
STRANGERS
"Koontz] is a great storyteller, and STRANGERS features a plot so
original you'll be reading, with chills, well into morning."
-New York Daily News
"The plot twists ingeniously ... an engaging, often chilling, book. I
found the novel tough to put down, except when making sure that the
doors and windows were securely locked."
-New York Times Book Review
"Koontz is a master at constructing vivid, eerily realistic worlds that
hold readers spellbound. A memorable thriller."
-Booklist
"Dean Koontz is a master storyteller, building suspense page by page,
episode by episode. He has absolutely amazing knowledge of his subject
matter, whether it be religion, military weapons, medicine, or an
understanding of human nature. STRANGERS is absolutely enthralling."
-Witchita Falls Times
"An almost unbearably suspenseful page-turner. His ability to maintain
the mystery through several plot twists is impressive, as is his array
of believable and sympathetic characters. STRANGERS may be the suspense
novel of the year."
-Library Journal
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. it was reported as "unsold and destroyed"
to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any
payment for this "stripped book."
To Bob Tanner
whose enthusiasm at a crucial stage
was more important than he can know.
Definition for "fugue"
taken from Taber's EnCyclopedia Medical Dictionary, Clayton L. Thomas,
M.D., M.P.H., (Ed.), 12th Edition, p. F-44. Published in 1973 by F.A.
Davis Company, Philadelphia.
This Berkley book contains the complete text of the original hardcover
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edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for ea,,;y
reading and was printed from new film.
STRANGERS
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Printing HISTORY
G. P. Putnam's Sons edition published / April 1986
Berkley edition / December 1986
All rights reserved.
Copyright 0 1986 by Nkui, Inc.
Cover photo credit (D Jeny Bauer.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or
any other means, without permission.
For information address: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New
York, New York 10016.
The Putnam Berkley World Wide Web site address is
littp:Hw.berkley.com
ISBN: 0-425-11992-0
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison
Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks belonging to Berkley
Publishing Corporation.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
30 29 28 27 26 25
A faithful friend is a strong defense.
A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
-APOCRYPHA
A terrible darkness has fallen upon us, but we must not surrender to it.
We shall lift lamps of courage and find our way through to the morning.
-ANONYMOUS MEMBER OF THE
FRENCH RESISTANCE (1943)
November 7-December 2
1.
Laguna Beach, California
Dominick Corvaisis went to sleep under a light wool blanket and a crisp
white sheet, sprawled alone in his bed, but he woke elsewhere-in the
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darkness at the back of the large foyer closet, behind concealing coats
and jackets. He was curled in the fetal position. His hands were
squeezed into tight fists. The muscles in his neck and arms ached from
the tension of a bad though unremembered dream.
He could not recall leaving the comfort of his mattress during the
night, but he was not surprised to find that he had traveled in the dark
hours. It had happened on two other occasions, and recently.
Somnambulism, a potentially dangerous practice commonly referred to as
sleepwalking, has fascinated people throughout history. It fascinated
Dom, too, from the moment he became a baffled victim of it. He had
found references to sleepwalkers in writings that dated as far back as
1000 B.C.
The ancient Persians believed that the wandering body of a sleepwalker
was seeking his spirit, which had detached itself and drifted away
during the night. Europeans of the grim medieval period favored demonic
possession or lycanthropy as an explanation.
Dom Corvaisis did not worry about his affliction, though he was
discomfited and somewhat embarrassed by it. As a novelist, he was
intrigued by these new nocturnal ramblings, for he viewed all new
experiences as material for his fiction.
Nevertheless, though he might eventually profit from creative use of his
own somambulism, it was an affliction. He crawled out of the closet,
wincing as the pain in his neck spread up across his scalp and down into
his shoulders. He had difficulty getting to his feet because his legs
were cramped.
As always, he felt sheepish. He now knew that somnambulism was a
condition to which adults were vulnerable, but he still considered it a
childish problem. Like bed-wetting.
Wearing blue pajama bottoms, bare-chested, slipperless, he shuffled
across the living room, down the short hall, into the master bedroom,
and into the bath. In the mirror, he looked dissipated, a libertine
surfacing from a week of shameless indulgence in a wide variety of sins.
In fact, he was a man of remarkably few vices. He did not smoke,
overeat, or take drugs. He drank little. He liked women, but he was
not promiscuous; he believed in commitment in a relationship. Indeed,
he had not slept with anyone inwhat was it now?-almost four months.
He only looked this bad-dissipated, wrung-out-when he woke and
discovered that he had taken one of his unscheduled nocturnal trips to a
makeshift bed. Each time he had been exhausted. Though asleep, he got
no rest on the nights he walked.
He sat down on the edge of the bathtub, bent his leg up to look at the
bottom of his left foot, then checked the bottom of his right foot.
Neither was cut, scratched, or particularly dirty, so he had not left
the house while sleepwalking. He had awakened in closets twice before,
once last week and once twelve days prior to that, and he had not had
dirty feet on those occasions, either. As before, he felt as if he had
traveled miles while unconscious, but if he actually had gone that far,
he had done it by making countless circuits of his own small house.
A long, hot shower soaked away a lot of his muscle discomfort. He was
lean and fit, thirty-five years old, with recuperative powers
commensurate with his age. By the time he finished breakfast, he felt
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almost human.
After lingering with a cup of coffee on the patio, studying the pleasant
geography of Laguna Beach, which shelved down the hills toward the sea,
he went to his study, sure that his work was the cause of his
sleepwalking. Not the work itself so much as the amazing success of his
first novel, Twilight in Babylon, which he had finished last February.
His agent put Twilight up for auction, and to Dom's astonishment a deal
was made with Random House, which paid a remarkably large advance for a
first novel. Within a month, movie rights were sold (providing the
down-payment on his house), and the Literary Guild took Twilight as a
main selection. He had spent seven laborious months of sixty-,
seventy-, and eighty-hour weeks in the writing of that story, not to
mention a decade getting himself ready to write it, but he still felt
like an overnight success, up from genteel poverty in one great leap.
The once-poor Dominick Corvaisis occasionally caught a glimpse of the
now-rich Dominick Corvaisis in a mirror or a sun-silvered window, saw
himself unguarded, and wondered if he really deserved what had come his
way. Sometimes he worried that he was heading for a great fall. With
such triumph and acclaim came considerable tension.
When Twilight was published next February, would it be well received and
justify Random House's investment, or would it fail and humiliate him?
Could he do it again-or was Twilight a fluke?
Every hour of his waking day, these and other questions circled his mind
with vulturine persistence, and he supposed the same damn questions
still swooped through his mind while he slept. That was why he walked
in his sleep: he was trying to escape those relentless concerns, seeking
a secret place to rest, where his worries could not find him.
Now, at his desk, he switched on the IBM Displaywriter and called up
chapter eighteen on the first disk of his new book, as yet untitled. He
had stopped yesterday in the middle of the sixth page of the chapter,
but when he summoned the document, intending to begin where he had left
off, he saw a full page where there had been half. Unfamiliar green
lines of text glowed on the word processor's video display.
For a moment he blinked stupidly at the neat letters of light, then
shook his head in pointless denial of what lay before him.
The back of his neck was suddenly cool and damp.
The existence of those unremembered lines on page six was not what gave
him the creeps; it was what the lines said. Furthermore, there should
not have been a page seven in the chapter, for he had not yet created
one, but it was there. He also found an eighth page.
As he scrolled through the material on the disk, his hands became
clammy. The startling addition to his work-in-progress was only, a
two-word sentence, repeated hundreds of times:
I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared.
Double-spacing, quadruple indentation, four sentences to a line,
thirteen lines on page six, twenty-seven lines on page seven, another
twenty-seven on page eight-that made 268 repetitions of the sentence.
The machine had not created them by itself, for it was merely an
obedient slave that did precisely what it was told. And it made no
sense to speculate that someone had broken into the house during the
night to tamper with his electronically stored manuscript. There were
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no signs of a break-in, and he could not think of anyone who would play
such a prank. Clearly, he had come to the word processor while
sleepwalking and had obsessively typed in this sentence 268 times,
though he had absolutely no recollection of having done it.
I'm scared.
Scared of what-sleepwalking? It was a disorienting experience, at least
on the morning end, but it was not an ordeal that would cause such
terror as this.
He was frightened by the quickness of his literary ascent and by the
possibility of an equally swift descent into oblivion. Yet he could not
completely dismiss the nagging thought that this had nothing to do with
his career, that the threat hanging over him was something else
altogether, something strange, something his conscious mind did not yet
see but which his subconscious perceived and which it had tried to
convey to him by means of this message left while he was sleeping.
No. Nonsense. That was only the novelist's overactive imagination at
work. Work. That was the best medicine for him.
Besides, from his research into the subject, he knew that most adult
sleepwalkers made short careers of it. Few experienced more than half a
dozen episodes, usually contained within a time span of six months or
less. Chances were good that his sleep would never again be complicated
by midnight ramblings and that he would never again wake huddled and
tense in the back of a closet.
He deleted the unwanted words from the disk and went to work on chapter
eighteen.
When he next looked at the clock, he was surprised to see that it was
past one and that he had labored through the lunch hour.
Even for southern California, the day was warm for early November, so he
ate lunch on the patio. The palm trees rustled in a mild breeze, and
the air was scented with autumn flowers. With style and grace, Laguna
sloped down to the shores of the Pacific. The ocean was spangled with
sunlight.
Finishing his last sip of Coke, Dom suddenly tilted his head back,
looked straight up into the brilliantly blue sky, and laughed. "You
see-no falling safe. No plummeting piano. No sword of Damocles."
It was November 7.
2.
Boston, Massachusetts
Dr. Ginger Marie Weiss never expected trouble in Bernstein's
Delicatessen, but that was where it started, with the incident of the
black gloves.
Usually, Ginger could deal with any problems that came her way. She
relished every challenge life presented, thrived on trouble. She would
have been bored if her path had been always easy, unobstructed. However,
it had never occurred to her that she might eventually be confronted
with trouble she could not handle.
As well as challenges, life provides lessons, and some are more welcome
than others. Some lessons are easy, some difficult.
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Some are devastating.
Ginger was intelligent, pretty, ambitious, hard-working, and an
excellent cook, but her primary advantage in life was that no one took
her seriously on first encounter. She was slender, a wisp, a graceful
sprite who seemed as insubstantial as she was lovely. Most people
underestimated her for weeks or months, only gradually realizing that
she was a formidable competitor, colleague-or adversary.
The story of Ginger's mugging was legend at Columbia Presbyterian, in
New York, where she had served her internship four years prior to the
trouble at Bernstein's Deli catessen. Like all interns, she had often
worked sixteen-hour shifts and longer, day after day, and had left the
hospital with barely enough energy to drag herself home. One hot, humid
Saturday night in July, after completing an especially grueling tour of
duty, she headed for home shortly after ten o'clockand was accosted by a
hulking Neanderthal with hands as big as shovel blades, huge arms, no
neck, and a sloping forehead.
"You scream," he said, launching himself at her with jackin-the-box
suddenness, "and I'll bust your goddamned teeth out." He seized her arm
and twisted it behind her back. "You understand me, bitch?"
No other pedestrians were close, and the nearest cars were two blocks
away, stopped at a traffic light. No help in sight.
He shoved her into a narrow night-mantled serviceway between two
buildings, into a trash-strewn passage with only one dim light. She
slammed into a garbage bin, hurting her knee and shoulder, stumbled but
did not fall. Many-armed shadows embraced her.
With ineffectual whimpers and breathless protests, she made her
assailant feel confident, because at first she thought he had a gun.
Humor a gunman, she thought. Don't resist. Resisters get shot.
"Move!" he said between clenched teeth, and he shoved her again.
When he pushed her into a recessed doorway three-quarters of the way
along the passage, not far from the single faint bulb at the end, he
started talking filthy, telling her what he was going to do with her
after he took her money, and even in the poor light she could see he
held no weapon. Suddenly she had hope. His vocabulary of obscenities
was blood-curdling, but his sexual threats were so stupidly repetitive
that they were almost funny. She realized he was just a big dumb loser
who relied on his size to get what he wanted. Men of his type seldom
carried guns. His muscles gave him a false sense of invulnerability, so
he probably had no fighting skill, either.
While he was emptying the purse that she willingly relinquished, Ginger
summoned all her courage and kicked him squarely in the crotch. He
doubled over from the blow. She moved fast, seized one of his hands,
and bent the index finger
backward, savagely, until the pain must have been as excruciating as the
throbbing in his bruised privates.
Radical, violent, backward extension of the index finger could quickly
incapacitate any man, regardless of his size and strength. By this
action she was straining the digital nerve on the front of his hand
while simultaneously pinching the highly sensitive median and radial
nerves on the back. The intense pain also traveled into the acromial
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nerves in his shoulder, into his neck.
He grabbed her hair with his free hand and pulled. That counterattack
hurt, made her cry out, blurred her vision, but she gritted her teeth,
endured the agony, and bent his captive finger even farther. Her
relentless pressure quickly banished all thought of resistance from his
mind. Involuntary tears burst from his eyes, and he dropped to his
knees, squealing and cursing and helpless.
"Let go of me! Let go of me, you bitch!"
Blinking sweat out of her eyes, tasting the same salty effluence at the
corners of her mouth, Ginger gripped his index finger with both hands.
She shuffled cautiously backward and led him out of the passage in an
awkward three-point crawl, as if dragging a dangerous dog on a tightened
choke-chain.
Scuttling, scraping, hitching, and humping himself along on one hand and
two knees, he glared up at her with eyes muddied by a murderous urge.
His mean, lumpish face became less visible as they moved away from the
light, but she could see that it was so contorted by pain and fury and
humiliation that it did not seem human: a goblin face. And in a shrill
goblin voice he squealed a chilling array of dire imprecations.
By the time they had clumsily negotiated fifteen yards of the
serviceway, he was overwhelmed by the agony in his hand and by the
sickening waves of pain rushing outward through his body from his
injured testicles. He gagged, choked, and vomited on himself.
She still did not dare let go of him. Now, given the opportunity, he
would not merely beat her senseless: he would kill her. Disgusted and
terrified, she urged him along even faster than before.
Reaching the sidewalk with the befouled and chastened mugger in tow, she
saw no pedestrians who could call the police for her, so she forced her
humbled assailant into the middle of the street, where passing traffic
came to a standstill at this unexpected spectacle.
When the cops finally arrived, Ginger's relief was exceeded by that of
the thug who had attacked her.
In part, people underestimated Ginger because she was small: five-two, a
hundred and two pounds, not physically imposing, certainly not
intimidating. Likewise, she was shapely but not a blond bombshell. She
was blond, however, and the particular silvery shade of her hair was
what caught a man's eye, whether he was seeing her for the first time or
the hundredth. Even in bright sunshine her hair recalled moonlight. That
ethereally pale and radiant hair, her delicate features, blue eyes that
were the very definition of gentleness, an Audrey Hepburn neck, slender
shoulders, thin wrists, long-fingered hands, and her tiny waist-all
contributed to a misleading impression of fragility. Furthermore, she
was quiet and watchful by nature, two qualities that might be mistaken
for timidity. Her voice was so soft and musical that anyone could
easily fail to apprehend the self-assurance and underlying authority in
those dulcet tones.
Ginger had inherited her silver-blond mane, cerealian eyes, beauty, and
ambition from her mother, Anna, a five-foot-ten Swede.
"You're my golden girl," Anna said when Ginger graduated from sixth
grade at the age of nine, two years ahead of schedule, after being
promoted twice in advance of her peers.
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Ginger had been the best student in her class and had received a
gilt-edged scroll in honor of her academic excellence. Also, as one of
three student performers who had provided entertainment before the
graduation ceremony, she had played two pieces on the piano-Mozart,
followed by a ragtime tune-and had brought the surprised audience to its
feet.
"Golden girl," Anna said, hugging her all the way home in the car.
Jacob drove, blinking back tears of pride. Jacob was an emotional man,
easily moved. Somewhat embarrassed by the frequency with which his eyes
moistened, he usually tried to conceal the depth of his feelings by
blaming his tears or reddened eyes on a never-specified allergy. "Must
be unusual
pollens in the air today," he said twice on the way home from
graduation. "Irritating pollens."
Anna said, "It's all come together in you, bubbeleh. My best features
and your father's best, and you're going places, by God, you just wait
and see if you aren't. High school, then college, then maybe law school
or medical school, anything you want to do. Anything."
The only people who never underestimated Ginger were her parents.
They reached home, turned into the driveway. Jacob stopped short of the
garage and said, in surprise, "What are we doing?
Our only child graduates from sixth grade, our child who thinks she can
do absolutely anything-will probably marry the King of Siam and ride a
giraffe to the moon, our child wears her first cap and gown and we
aren't celebrating? Should we drive into Manhattan, have maybe
champagne at the Plaza?
Dinner at the Waldorf? No. Something better. Only the best for our
giraffe-riding astronaut. We'll go to the soda fountain at Walgreen's!"
"Yeah!" Ginger said.
At Walgreen's, they, must have been as odd a family as the soda jerk had
ever seen: the Jewish father, not much bigger than a jockey, with a
Germanic name but a Sephardic complexion; the Swedish mother, blond and
gloriously feminine, five inches taller than her husband; and the child,
a wraith, an elf, petite though her mother was not, fair though her
father was dark, with a beauty altogether different from her mother's-a
more subtle beauty with a fey quality. Even as a child, Ginger knew
that strangers, seeing her with her parents, must think she was adopted.
From her father, Ginger had inherited her slight stature, soft voice,
intellect, and gentleness.
She loved them both so completely and intensely that, as a child, her
vocabulary had been insufficient to convey her feelings. Even as an
adult, she could not find the words to express what they had meant to
her. They were both gone now, to early graves.
When Anna died in a traffic accident, shortly after Ginger's twelfth
birthday, the common wisdom among Jacob's relatives was that both Ginger
and her father would be adrift without the Swede, whom the Weiss clan
had long ago ceased to regard as an interloping gentile and for whom
they had developed both respect and love. Everyone knew how close the
three had been, but, more important, everyone knew that Anna had been
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the engine powering the family's success. It was Anna who had taken the
least ambitious of the Weiss brothers-Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the meek,
Jacob with his nose always in a detective novel or a science fiction
storyand made something of him. He had been an employee in a jewelry
store when she married him, but by the time she died he owned two shops
of his own.
After the funeral, the family gathered at Aunt Rachel's big house in
Brooklyn Heights. As soon as she could slip away, Ginger sought solace
in the dark solitude of the pantry. Sitting on a stool, with the aroma
of many spices heavy in the air of that narrow place, praying to God to
bring her mother back, she heard Aunt Francine talking to Rachel in the
kitchen. Fran was bemoaning the grim future awaiting Jacob and his
little girl in a world without Anna:
"He won't be able to keep the business going, you know he won't, not
even once the grief has passed and he goes back to work. The poor
lufunensch. Anna was his common sense and his motivation and his best
adviser, and without her in five years he'll be lost."
They were underestimating Ginger.
To be fair, Ginger was only twelve, and even though she was already in
tenth grade, she was still a child in most people's eyes. No one could
have foreseen that she would fill Anna's shoes so quickly. She shared
her mother's love of cooking, so in the weeks following the funeral she
pored through cookbooks, and, with the amazing diligence and
perseverance that were her trademarks, she acquired what culinary skills
she had not already learned. The first time relatives came for dinner
after Anna's death, they exclaimed over the food. Homemade potato rolls
and cheese kolacky. Vegetable soup with plump cheese and beef kreplach
floating in it. Schrafe fish as an appetizer. Braised veal paprika,
tzimmes with prunes and potatoes, creamy macaroni patties fried in hot
fat and served in tomato sauce. A choice of baked peach pudding or
apple schalet for dessert. Francine and Rachel thought Jacob was hiding
a marvelous new housekeeper in the kitchen. They were disbelieving when
he pointed to his daughter. Ginger did not think she had done anything
remarkable. A cook was needed, so she became a cook.
She had to take care of her father now, and she applied herself to that
responsibility with vigor and enthusiasm. She cleaned house swiftly,
efficiently, and with a thoroughness that defied her Aunt Francine's sub
rosa inspections for dust and grime. Although she was only twelve, she
learned to plan a budget, and before she was thirteen she was in charge
of all the household accounts.
At fourteen, three years younger than her classmates, Ginger was the
valedictorian of her high-school class. When it became known that she
had been accepted by several universities but had chosen Barnard,
everyone began to wonder whether, at the tender age of fourteen, she had
finally taken too big a bite and would choke trying to swallow it.
Barnard was more difficult than high school. She no longer learned
faster than the other kids, but she learned as well as the best of them,
and her grade average was frequently 4.0, never less than 3.8-and that
was the semester in her junior year when Jacob was sick with his first
bout of pancreatitis, when she spent every evening at the hospital.
Jacob lived to see her get her first degree, was sallow and weak when
she received her medical degree, even hung on tenaciously until she had
served six months of her internship. But after three bouts of recurring
pancreatitis, he developed pancreatic cancer, and he died before Ginger
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had finally made up her mind to go for a surgical residency at Boston
Memorial instead of pursuing a career in research.
Because she had been given more years with Jacob than she had been given
with her mother, her feelings for him were understandably more profound,
and the loss of him was even more devastating than the loss of Anna had
been. Yet she dealt with that time of trouble as she dealt with every
challenge that came her way, and she finished her internship with
excellent reports and superb recommendations.
She delayed her residency by going to California, to Stanford for a
unique and arduous two-year program of additional study in
cardiovascular pathology. Thereafter, following a one-month vacation
(by far the longest rest she had ever taken), she moved East again, to
Boston, acquired a mentor in Dr. George Hannaby (chief of surgery at
Memorial and renowned for his pioneering achievements in various
cardiovascular surgical procedures), and served the first three-quarters
of her two-year residency without a hitch.
Then, on a Tuesday morning in November, she went into Bernstein's Deli
to buy a few items, and terrible things began happening. The incident
of the black gloves. That was the start of it.
Tuesday was her day off, and unless one of her patients had a
life-threatening crisis, she was neither needed nor expected at the
hospital. During her first two months at Memorial, with her usual
enthusiasm and tireless drive, she had gone to work on most of her days
off, for there was nothing else that she would rather do. But George
Hannaby put an end to that habit as soon as he learned of it. George
said that the practice of medicine was high-pressure work, and that
every physician needed time off, even Ginger Weiss.
"If you drive yourself too hard, too fast, too relentlessly," he said,
"it's not only you that suffers, but the patient as well."
So every Tuesday she slept an extra hour, showered, and had two cups of
coffee while she read the morning paper at the kitchen table by the
window that looked out on Mount Vernon Street. At ten o'clock she
dressed, walked several blocks to Bernstein's on Charles Street, and
bought pastrami, corned beef, homemade rolls or sweet pumpernickel,
potato salad, blintzes, maybe some lox, maybe some smoked sturgeon,
sometimes cottage cheese vareniki to be reheated at home. Then she
walked home with her bag of goodies and ate shamelessly all day while
she read Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, John D. MacDonald, Elmore
Leonard, sometimes a Heinlein. While she had not yet begun to like
relaxation half as much as she liked work, she gradually began to enjoy
her time off, and Tuesday ceased to be the dreaded day it had been when
she first began her reluctant observance of the six-day week.
That bad Tuesday in November started out fine-cold with a gray winter
sky, brisk and invigorating rather than frigidand her routine brought
her to Bernstein's (crowded, as usual) at ten-twenty-one. Ginger
drifted from one end of the long counter to the other, peering into
cabinets full of baked goods, looking through the cold glass of the
refrigerated display cases, choosing from the array of delicacies with
gluttonous pleasure. The room was a stewpot of wonderful smells and
happy sounds: hot dough, cinnamon; laughter; garlic, cloves; rapid
conversations in which the English was spiced with everything from
Yiddish to Boston accents to current rock-and-roll slang; roasted
hazelnuts, sauerkraut; pickles, coffee; the clink-clank of silverware.
When Ginger had everything she wanted, she paid for it, pulled on her
blue knit gloves, and hefted the bag, going past the small tables at
file:///G|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Dean%20R.%20Koontz%20-%20Strangers.txt (10 of 465) [2/9/2004 10:15:09 PM]
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file:///G|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Dean%20R.%20Koontz%20-%20Strangers.txtSTRANGERS[065-5.0]BYDEANKOONTZSynopsis:Agroupofseeminglydiversepeopleareexperiencingfuguestatesanddebilitatingnightmares.Havetheyallsharedacommonexperience?And,doesthatexperienceportendtheendofhumanityasweknowit?PraiseforDeanK...

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