Justin Cronin - The Twelve

The big man shrugged. “I don’t know, you’re pretty good with the cards. Tell me what the odds are.”

Lore shifted her gaze to Michael, then back at Hollis. “This isn’t a question of odds. Of all the men in the world, that woman chose you. If she’s still out there, she’s waiting for you. Staying alive any way she can until you find her. That’s all that matters.”

Everybody waited for what Hollis would next say.

“You’re a real ballbuster, you know that?”

Lore grinned. “Famous for it.”

Another silence fell. Then:

“Let me pack a few things.”

The first snow fell on Alicia’s third night scouting the fringes of the city, fat flakes spiraling from an inky sky. A clean, wintry cold had settled onto the earth. The air felt hard and pure. It moved through her body like a series of small exclamations, bursts of icy clarity in her lungs. She would have liked to set a fire, but it might be seen. She warmed her hands with her breath, stamped her feet on the frozen earth when she felt sensation receding. There was something suitable about it, this shock of cold; it had the taste of battle.

Soldier was beside her no more. Where Alicia was going, he could not follow. There had always been something celestial about him, she thought, as if he’d been sent to her from a world of spirits. In his deep awareness, he had seen what was happening to her, the dark evolution. The fierce taste uncoiling inside her since the day she had sunk her blade into the buck on the ridge, prying forth the living heart of him. There was an exhilarating power in it, a flowing energy, but it came at a cost. She wondered how much time remained before it overwhelmed her. Before her human surface stripped away and she became one thing only. Alicia Donadio, scout sniper of the Expeditionary, no more.

Go now , she had told him. You’re not safe with me . Tears floated on the surface of her eyes; she longed to look away from him but couldn’t. You great lovely boy, I will never forget you .

She had traveled the final miles on foot, tracing the river. Its waters still flowed easily but this wouldn’t last; ice had begun to crust at the edges. The landscape was treeless and bare. The image of the city bristled from the horizon as dusk was falling. She had been smelling it for hours. Its vastness startled her. She withdrew the yellowed, hand-drawn map from her pack and took the lay of the land. The dome rising from the hilltop, the bowl-like stadium, the bisecting river with its hydro dam, the massive concrete building with its cranes, the rows of barracks hemmed by wire—all just as Greer had recorded, fifteen years ago. She took out the RDF and adjusted the gain with fingers numb with cold. She swept it back and forth. A wash of static; then the needle nudged a fraction of an inch. The receiver was pointing at the dome.

Somebody was home.

She no longer needed her glasses except in the brightest hours of the day. How had this come to pass? What had happened to her eyes? She examined her face in the surface of the river; the orange light had continued to fade. What did it mean? She looked almost… normal. An ordinary human woman. Would that were true, she thought.

She passed the first two days circling the perimeter to gauge its defenses. She took inventories: vehicles, manpower, weaponry. The regular patrols that left from the main gate were easy to avoid; their efforts felt perfunctory, as if they perceived no real threat. At first light trucks would disperse from the barracks to thread through the city, carting workers to the factories and barns and fields, returning as darkness fell. As the days of observation passed, it came to Alicia that she was seeing a kind of prison, a citizenry of slaves and slave masters, yet the structures of containment seemed meager. The fences were thinly manned; many of the guards didn’t even appear to be armed. Whatever force held the populace in check, it came from within.

Her focus narrowed to two structures. The first was the large building with the cranes. It possessed the blocky appearance of a fortress. Through her binoculars Alicia could discern a single entrance, a broad portal sealed by heavy metal doors. The cranes sat idle; the building’s construction seemed complete, and yet to all appearances it went unused. What purpose did it serve? Was it a refuge from the virals, a shelter of last retreat? That seemed possible, though nothing else about the city communicated a similar sense of threat.

The other was the stadium, situated just beyond the southern perimeter of the city in an adjacent fenced compound. Unlike the bunker, the stadium was the site of daily activity. Vehicles came and went, step vans and some larger trucks, always at dusk or shortly after, disappearing down a deep ramp that led, presumably, to the basement. Their contents were a mystery until the fourth day, when a livestock carrier, full of cattle, descended the ramp.

Something was being fed down there.

And then shortly after noon on the fifth day, Alicia was resting in the culvert where she’d made her camp when she heard the distant wallop of an explosion. She pointed her binoculars to the heart of the city. A plume of black smoke was uncoiling from the base of the hill. At least one building was on fire. She watched while men and vehicles raced to the scene. A pumper truck was brought in to douse the flames. By now she had learned to distinguish the prisoners from their keepers, but on this occasion a third class of individuals appeared. There were three of them. They descended upon the site of the catastrophe in a sleek black vehicle utterly unlike the salvaged junkers Alicia had seen, straightening their neckties and fussing with the creases of their suits as they emerged into the winter sunshine. What strange costumes were these? Their eyes were concealed by heavy dark glasses. Was it just the brightness of the day or something else? Their presence had an instantaneous effect, the way a stone cast ripples across the surface of a pond. Waves of anxious energy radiated from the others on the scene. One of the suited men appeared to be taking notes on a clipboard while the other two shouted orders, gesturing wildly. What was she seeing? A leadership caste, that was apparent; everything about the city implied one’s existence. But what was the explosion? Was it an accident or something deliberate? A chink in the armor, perhaps?

Her orders were clear. Scout the city, assess the threat, report back to Kerrville in sixty days. Under no circumstances was she to engage the inhabitants. But nothing said she had to stay outside the wires.

The time had come to take a closer look.

She chose the stadium.

For two more days, she observed the comings and goings of the trucks. The fences were no problem; getting into the basement would be the tricky part. The door, like the portal on the bunker, looked impenetrable. Only when a truck hit the top of the ramp would the door ascend, sealing quickly as the vehicle passed through, all of it perfectly timed.

Dusk of the third day: behind a stand of scrub, Alicia stripped herself of weapons—all but the Browning, snug in its holster, and a single blade sheathed against her spine. She had scouted a spot in the wires where her ascent would be concealed by one of several buildings that appeared unused. A hundred yards of open ground separated these buildings from the ramp. Once the driver of the van rounded the corner, Alicia would have six seconds to cross the distance. Easy, she told herself. Nothing to it.

She took the fence with a single toehold, scuttled against the building’s rear wall, and peered around the corner. There it was, right on time, churning toward the stadium: the van. The driver downshifted as he approached the turn.