Strangers by Dean Koontz Page B

were stiff, and her feet were tired.
    “My God,” she said, “I’m pooped!”
    “You should be,” George said. “You started at seven-thirty, and it’s past the lunch hour. An aortal graft is damned debilitating.”
    “
You
feel this way when you’ve done one?”
    “Of course.”
    “But it hit me so suddenly. In there, I felt great. I felt I could go on for hours yet.”
    “In there,” George said with evident affection and amusement, “you were godlike, dueling with death and winning, and no god ever grows weary. Godwork is too much fun to ever get weary of it.”
    At the sinks, they turned on the water, took off the surgical gowns they’d worn over their hospital greens, and broke open packets of soap.
    As Ginger began to wash her hands, she leaned wearily against the sink and bent forward a bit, so she was looking straight down at the drain, at the water swirling around the stainless-steel basin, at the bubbles of soap whirling with the water, all of it funneling into the drain, around and around and down into the drain, around and down, down and down.…This time, the irrational fear struck and overwhelmed her with even less warning than at Bernstein’s Deli or in George’s office last Wednesday. In an instant her attention had become entirely focused upon the drain, which appeared to throb and grow wider as if it were suddenly possessed of malignant life.
    She dropped the soap and, with a bleat of terror, jumped back from the sink, collided with Agatha Tandy, cried out again. She vaguely heard George calling her name. But he was fading away in the manner of an image on a motion picture screen, retreating into a mist, as if he werepart of a scene that was dissolving to a full-lens shot of steam or clouds or fog, and he no longer seemed real. Agatha Tandy and the hallway and the doors to the surgery were fading, too.
Everything
was fading but the sink, which appeared to grow larger and more solid, super-real. A sense of mortal danger settled over her. But it was just an ordinary scrub sink, for God’s sake, and she had to hold on to that truth, clutch at the cliff of reality and resist the forces pulling her over the edge. Just a sink. Just an ordinary drain. Just—
    She ran. From every side, the mist closed around her, and she lost all conscious awareness of her actions.
    •
    The first thing she became aware of was the snow. Large white flakes sifted past her face, gently turning, lazily eddying toward the ground in the manner of fluffy airborne dandelion seeds, for there was no wind to drive them. She raised her head, looked up beyond the towering walls of the old high-rise buildings that shouldered in around her, and saw a rectangular patch of low gray sky, from which the snow descended. As she stared into the winter heavens, momentarily confused as to her whereabouts and condition, her hair and eyebrows grew white. Flakes melted on her face, but she slowly realized that her cheeks were already wet with tears and that she was still weeping quietly.
    Gradually, the cold impinged upon her. In spite of the absence of wind, the air was sharp-toothed; it bit her cheeks, nipped her chin, and her hands were numb from the cold venom of countless bites. The chill penetrated her hospital greens, and she was shivering uncontrollably.
    Next she became aware of the freezing concrete beneath her and the ice-cold brick wall against her back. She was squeezed into a corner, facing out, knees drawn up to her chin, arms locked around her legs—a posture of defense and terror. Her body heat was being leeched away through every contact point with pavement and masonry, but she did not have the strength or will to get to her feet and go inside.
    She remembered fixating upon the drain of the scrub sink. With unmitigated despair, she recalled the mindless panic, her collision with Agatha Tandy, the startled look on George Hannaby’s face as he had reacted to her screams. Although the rest was a blank, she supposed she had