Justin Cronin - The Twelve

“All eyes, hombre,” came the man’s reply.

Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.

They moved through without incident. Vegetation began to crowd the roadway as the gaps between the buildings widened.

“How much longer?” he asked Hollis.

“Don’t worry. It’s not far.”

Ten minutes later they were skirting a fence line. Hollis pulled the vehicle to the gate, removed a key from the glove box of the pickup, and stepped out. Peter was struck by a sense of the past: Hollis might have been Peter’s brother, Theo, opening the gate to the power station, all those years ago.

“Where are we?” he asked when Hollis returned to the truck.

“Fort Sam Houston.”

“A military base?”

“More like an Army hospital,” Hollis explained. “At least it used to be. Not a lot of doctoring goes on here anymore.”

They drove on. Peter had the sense of driving through a small village. A tall clock tower stood to one side of a quadrangle that might have once been the center of town. Apart from a few ceremonial cannons, he saw nothing that seemed military—no trucks or tanks, no weapon emplacements, no fortifications of any kind. Hollis brought the pickup to a halt before a long, low building with a flat roof. A sign above the door read, AQUATICS CENTER.

“Aquatics,” Lore said, after they’d all disembarked. She squinted doubtfully at the sign, a rifle balanced across her chest in a posture of readiness. “Like… swimming?”

Hollis gestured at the rifle. “You should leave that here. Wouldn’t want to make a bad impression.” He shifted his attention to Peter. “Last chance. There’s no way to undo this.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

They entered the foyer. All things considered, the building’s interior was in good shape: ceilings tight, windows solid, none of the usual trash.

“Feel that?” Michael said.

A basal throbbing, like a gigantic plucked string, was radiating from the floor. Somewhere in the building a generator was operating.

“I kind of expected there to be guards,” Peter said to Hollis.

“Sometimes there are, when Tifty wants to put on a show. But basically we don’t need them.”

Hollis led them to a pair of doors, which he pushed open to reveal a great, tiled space, the ceiling high above and, at the center of the room, a vast, empty swimming pool. He guided them to a second pair of swinging doors and a flight of descending stairs, illuminated by buzzing fluorescents. Peter thought to ask Hollis where Tifty got the gas for his generator, but then answered the question for himself. Tifty got it where he got everything; he stole it. The stairs led to a room crowded with pipes and metal tanks. They were under the pool now. They made their way through the cramped space to yet another door, though different from the others, fashioned of heavy steel. It bore no markings of any kind, nor was there an obvious way to open it; its smooth surface possessed no visible mechanisms. On the wall beside it was a keypad. Hollis quickly punched in a series of digits, and with a deep click the door unlatched, revealing a dark corridor.

“It’s okay,” Hollis said, angling his head toward the opening, “the lights go on automatically.”

As the big man stepped through, a bank of fluorescents flickered to life, their vibrancy intensified by the hospital-white walls of the corridor. Peter’s sense of Tifty was radically evolving. What had he imagined? A filthy encampment, populated by huge, apelike men armed to the teeth? Nothing he had seen even remotely conformed to these expectations. To the contrary: the display so far indicated a level of technical sophistication that seemed well beyond Kerrville’s. Nor was he alone in this shifting of opinion; Michael, too, was frankly gawking. Some place , his face seemed to say.

The corridor ended at an elevator. A camera was poised above it. Whoever was on the other side knew they were coming; they’d been observed since they’d entered the hall.

Hollis tilted his face upward to the lens, then pressed a button on the wall adjacent to a tiny speaker. “It’s all right,” he said. “They’re with me.”

A crackle of static, then: “Hollis, what the fuck.”

“Everyone’s unarmed. They’re friends of mine. I’ll vouch for them.”

“What do they want?”

“We need to see Tifty.”

A pause, as if the voice on the other end of the intercom was conferring with somebody else; then: “You can’t just bring them here like this. Are you out of your mind?”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Just open the door, Dunk.”

An empty moment followed. Then the doors slid open.

“It’s your ass,” the voice said.

They entered; the elevator commenced its downward creep. “Okay, I’ll bite,” Michael ventured. “What is this place?”

“You’re in an old USAMRIID station. It’s an annex to the main facility in Maryland, activated during the epidemic.”

“What’s USAMRIID?” asked Lore.

It was Michael who answered. “It stands for ‘United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.’ ” He frowned at Hollis. “I don’t get it. What’s Tifty doing here?”

And then the doors of the elevator opened to the sound of weapons being cocked, and each of them was staring down the barrel of a gun.

“All of you, on your knees.”

There were six. The youngest appeared to be no more than twenty, the oldest in his forties. Scruffy beards and greasy hair and teeth clotted with grime: this was more like it. One of them, a giant of a man with a great bald head and ridges of soft fat folded at the base of his neck, had bluish tattoos all over his face and the exposed flesh of his arms. This, apparently, was Dunk.

“I told you,” Hollis said, kneeling on the floor like the rest of them, hands on top of his head, “they’re friends of mine.”

“Quiet.” His clothing was a hodgepodge of different uniforms, both military and DS. He holstered his revolver and crouched in front of Peter, sizing him up with his intense gray eyes. Viewed up close, the images on his face and arms became clear. Virals. Viral hands, viral faces, viral teeth. Peter had no doubt that beneath his clothes, the man’s body was covered with them.

“Expeditionary,” Dunk drawled, nodding gravely. “Tifty’s going to like this. What’s your name, Lieutenant?”

“Jaxon.”

“Peter Jaxon?”

“That’s right.”

Maintaining his crouch, Dunk swiveled on the heels of his boots toward the others. “How about that, gentlemen. It’s not every day we get such distinguished visitors.” He focused on Peter again. “We don’t get visitors at all, actually. Which is a bit of a problem. This isn’t what you’d call a tourist destination.”

“I need to see Tifty.”

“So I hear. Tifty, I’m afraid, is indisposed at the moment. A very private fellow, our Tifty.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Hollis said. “I told you, I’ll vouch for them. Tifty needs to hear what they have to say.”

“This is your mess, my friend. I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to be making demands. And what about you two?” he asked, addressing Lore and Michael. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“We’re oilers,” Michael replied.

“Interesting. Did you bring us any oil?” His gaze narrowed on Lore; a smile, bright with menace, flickered over his face. “Now, you I think I know. Poker, wasn’t it? Or dice. Probably you don’t remember.”