Justin Cronin - The Twelve

“Somebody give me a rag.”

A rag was produced. Peter wet it with spit and rubbed the inside of the lid. His reflection began to emerge—not with any distinctiveness, barely more than a blurry shape; but it would have to suffice.

“This is what I want.”

Tifty’s men burst into laughter. A trash can lid! Some pathetic little shield against a full-blown drac! Did he intend to commit suicide?

“Your foolishness is one thing, Lieutenant,” said Tifty. “But this. I can’t allow it.”

Michael looked at him with a quizzical frown. “Like… Las Vegas?”

Peter gave him the barest nod, turned to Tifty again. “You said anything in the room.”

“That I did.”

“Then I’m ready.”

He was led into the arena. The crowd erupted in roars and stamping, but the sound was different than it had been with Dunk. Their allegiances had reversed. Peter wasn’t one of them; they were excited to watch him die, this arrogant soldier of the Expeditionary who dared to think he could take on a drac. The box was already in position at the center of the ring. As Peter approached, he thought he could see it shaking. He heard, from the bleachers, “All bets now closing!”

“Not too late to back out,” Hollis said. “We could make a run for it.”

“What kind of odds are they giving me?”

“Ten to one you survive thirty seconds. A hundred to one you make it a minute.”

“You get one down?”

“Took you to win in forty-five. I’ll be set for life.”

“The usual arrangement, okay?” Peter didn’t need to elaborate: If I’m bitten but survive, don’t let me. Make it fast .

“You don’t have to worry.”

“Michael? Hold him to that.”

The man’s face was bereft. “Jesus, Peter. You did it once . Maybe it was something else that slowed them down. Did you think about that?”

Peter looked at the box in the middle of the ring. It was shuddering like an engine. “Thanks—I’m thinking about it now.”

They shook hands. A grave moment, but they had been through similar ones before. Peter stepped inside the cage; one of Tifty’s men sealed the door behind him. Hollis and Michael took their places on the bleachers with Lore. Tifty rose with his megaphone.

“Lieutenant Jaxon of the Expeditionary, do you stand ready?”

A chorus of boos. Peter did his best to tune them out. He had been running on pure conviction, but now that the moment was here, his body had begun to doubt his mind. His heart was racing, his palms damp. The pike felt absurdly heavy in his hand. He filled his chest with air. “Ready!”

“Then… start the clock!”

In the aftermath, Peter was to learn that the contest had lasted a grand total of twenty-eight seconds. This seemed both long and short; it had happened slowly and all at once, a blur of events that didn’t correspond to the ordinary course of time.

What he would remember was this:

The drac’s explosion from the box, like water shot from a hose; her majestic airborne leap, a force of undiluted nature, straight to the top of the cage, and then three quick ricochets as she bounded side to side, too fast for Peter’s eyes to follow; the picture in his mind’s eye of her anticipated release and the arc her body would employ as she fell upon him, and then the moment of its occurrence, exactly as he’d foreseen; the blast of force as their bodies collided, one stationary, one in headlong flight; the drac sending him careening across the cage, and his body—breathless, broken, his own for a moment or two more but no longer—rolling and rolling and rolling.

He was on his stomach. The trash can lid and pike were gone. He rolled onto his back and scrabbled backward on his hands and feet, and then he found what was left of the pike. The pole had snapped two feet from its pointed steel end. He wrapped it with his fist and rose. He would go down swinging; he would die on his feet at least. On a distant planet, crowds were cheering. The viral was moving toward him in a manner he would have described as leisurely, almost sauntering. She cocked her head and opened her jaws to give him a good, long look at her teeth.

Their eyes met.

Really met . A bona fide, soul-searching gaze. The moment locked, and in that moment Peter felt his mind plunging into hers: its sensations and memories, thoughts and desires, the person she’d been and the pain of the terrible thing she’d become. Her expression had softened, her posture relaxed a discernible notch. The ferocity of her expression contained something else now: a profound melancholy. A human being was still inside her, like a tiny flame in the dark. Don’t look away , Peter told himself. Whatever you do, don’t break her gaze . The pike was in his hand.

He took one step, then another. Still she did not move. He felt a kind of quiet shuddering within himself, not of fear but of longing; this was what she wanted. The crowd had silenced. It was as if the two of them were alone in some immense, still space. An empty church. An abandoned theater. A cave. He drew back the pike, placing his free hand on her shoulder for balance. Please , her eyes said.

Then it was over.

The crowd was absolutely still. Peter realized he was shaking. Something irrevocable had happened, beyond knowing. He looked down at the body. He had felt her soul leaving her. It had brushed him like a breeze, only the breeze was inside him, made of words. Thank you, thank you. I am free .

Tifty was waiting for him when he exited the cage.

“Her name wasn’t Sheila,” Peter said. “It was Emily.”

Tifty said nothing, wearing an expression of pure bewilderment.

“She was seventeen when she was taken up. Her last memory was of kissing a boy.”

“I don’t understand.”

Hollis, Michael, and Lore were coming down the bleachers. Peter moved toward them, stopped, then turned back to Tifty.

“You want to know how to kill them?”

The man nodded, slack-jawed.

“Look them in the eye.”

Amy’s mind was full of him. Full of Carter and the woman, whose name was Rachel. Rachel Wood.

Amy felt it, felt it all. She felt and saw and knew. The woman’s arms around him, pulling him down and down. The taste of pool water, like demon’s breath. The soft thunk as they reached the bottom, their bodies entwined like lovers’.

How Carter had loved her. That was what Amy felt most keenly: his love. The man’s life had stopped right there, at the bottom of the pool, his mind forever trapped in a loop of sorrow. Oh please, let me , thought Anthony Carter. I’ll die if you want me to, I would die for you if you asked, let me be the one to die instead . And then the bubbles rising as the woman took the first breath, her lungs filling with the awful water, the deep spasm of death moving through her; and then the letting go.

His was the sadness at the center of the world. The Chevron Mariner: that’s what this place was. It was the very beating heart of grief.

Blood was dripping from her as she made her way aft across the tilted deck. Amy could feel the change coming, a rumbling in the hills above. It would sweep down upon her like an avalanche. It would obliterate her, fashion her anew. She descended into the bowels of the ship, its maze of halls, its listing passages of pipe. Her feet sloshed through standing water the color of rust. Rainbow shimmers danced upon its surface. She moved by instinct. She homed in. She was the receiver to Carter’s beacon, which inexorably drew her down and down and down.