Justin Cronin - The Twelve

“He knows.”

Wolgast was gazing past her. “That’s something I can never forgive myself for. I knew it just to look at him. He loved that woman with his whole heart.” He dropped his eyes to the Monopoly board. “Looks like we’re done here. I don’t know how you do it. I’ll get you next time.”

“Would you like to read?”

They took their place on the couch beneath the woolen blanket. Mugs of hot cocoa sat on the table, having arrived, like everything else, of their own accord. Wolgast lifted the book and riffled the pages until he found the right one.

“ The Time Machine , chapter seven.” He cleared his throat and turned his face toward her. “My brave girl. My brave Amy. I really do, you know.”

“I love you, too,” said Amy, nestling against him.

And in this manner they passed an infinity of hours, the barest blink of an eye, until the darkness, a blanket in its own right, settled down upon them.

They followed the eastern supply line north to Texarkana, taking food and fuel and sleeping in the hardboxes. Their vehicle was one of Tifty’s, a small cargo truck retrofitted as a portable, which they would soon need: north of Little Rock they’d be sheltering in the open. Fuel was a problem they didn’t have, Tifty explained. The truck could carry an extra two hundred gallons in reserve, and on his trip north with Greer and Crukshank, fifteen years ago, they’d scouted sources all the way to the Iowa line—airfields, diesel power plants, large commercial depots with their fields of mushrooming tanks. The truck was equipped with a filtering system they could use to strip out the contaminants, and an oxidizing compound. A slow process, but with luck and good weather, they could reach Iowa by the middle of December.

Their first night in the portable occurred a hundred miles south of the Missouri border. As twilight fell, Tifty retrieved a large plastic jug from the cargo bed, pulled a rag over his face, and poured the contents, a clear liquid, in a line around the vehicle.

“What’s in that stuff?” Lore asked. The stink was eye-watering.

“Old family recipe. The dracs hate it—plus, it covers our smell. They won’t even know we’re in there.”

They ate their dinner of beans and hardtack and bedded down on the racks. Soon Hollis was snoring away. Hollis? Peter thought. No, Lore. She slept the way she did everything: however she liked. Peter could understand why Michael was drawn to her—her attraction was powerful—but also why his friend wouldn’t come out and say so. Who could withstand being wanted so badly? Even if the quarry wanted to be caught, it put up a struggle. During their days of waiting at the refinery, Peter had wondered, more than once, if Lore was flirting with him. She was, he decided; but it was only a tactic. She was trying to draw herself deeper into Michael’s world. Once she got to the heart of it, he’d have no defenses left; Michael would be hers.

Peter shifted on his rack, trying to make himself comfortable; he always had difficulty getting to sleep in a portable. Just when he would begin drifting off, a noise from outside would jar him into wakefulness. One time near Amarillo, the virals had pounded on the walls all night. They’d actually lifted the frame and attempted to turn it over. To keep their spirits up, the men of Peter’s squad had passed the hours playing poker and telling jokes, as if nothing of importance were happening. Hell of a racket out there was the most anyone would say. How am I supposed to concentrate on the cards? Peter would miss that life; he was AWOL nine days, as much of an outlaw as Hollis or Tifty. No matter what Gunnar might offer in Peter’s defense, the man’s message had been clear: you do this on your own; no one’s going to say they knew you.

The next thing he was aware of, Hollis was shaking him awake. They disembarked into the cold. This far north, there could be no doubt of the change of seasons. The sky set low with heavy gray clouds like formations of airborne stone.

“See?” Tifty said, gesturing at the ground around the truck. “No tracks at all.”

They drove on. The absence of virals nagged at Peter’s mind. Even outside the hardboxes they’d seen no tracks, no scat. A welcome turn of events, but so unlikely as to be disturbing, as if the virals were saving something special for them.

Their progress slowed, the roads becoming vague; frequently Tifty had to stop the truck to recalculate their course, using a compass and maps and sometimes a sextant, a device Peter had never seen before. Michael showed him how it worked. By measuring the sun’s angle to the horizon, and taking into account the time and date, it was possible to compute their location without any other points of reference. The instrument was typically used on ships at sea, Michael explained, where the horizon was unobstructed, but it could work on land, too. How do you know this stuff? Peter asked, but realized as he posed the question what the answer was. Michael had taught himself to use a sextant for that day when he would sail out to find, or not find, the barrier.

The days of travel passed, and still no virals. By now they were openly puzzling over this, though the discussion never advanced beyond noting its oddness. Strange , they said. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky . Which they were, but luck had a way of betraying you in the end. Eleven days in, Tifty announced that they were approaching the Missouri-Iowa line. They were dirty and exhausted; tempers were short. For two full days they’d been stymied by a nameless river, backtracking mile after mile, trying to find a bridge still standing. Their fuel supply was getting low. The landscape had changed again, not quite as flat as Texas but close, with gently undulating hills subsumed under waist-high grass. The hour was approaching noon when Hollis, at the wheel, brought the truck to a halt.

Peter, who had been dozing in the back, roused to the sound of the truck’s doors opening. He drew upright to find himself alone in the cab. Why were they stopping?

He retrieved his rifle and climbed down. Everything was coated with a fine, pale powder—the grass, the trees. Snow? The air had a tart smell, like something burnt. Not snow. Ashes. Little clouds of whiteness puffed underfoot as Peter advanced to where the others were standing, at the crest of a hill. There he stopped, as his companions had stopped, pinned in place by what they saw.

“For the love of God,” Michael said. “What the hell are we looking at?”

This woman: who was she?

A spy. An insurgent. That much was obvious; her attempt to free the hostages had all the trademarks, and she had killed six men before making her fatal mistake. But the absence of a tag on her arm didn’t add up. That curious odor Guilder had detected; what did it mean? They’d recovered her weapon, a Browning semiautomatic with two bullets remaining in the magazine. Guilder had never seen one like it; it wasn’t one of theirs. Either the insurgency had stockpiled a cache of weapons from a source he didn’t know about, or the woman came from someplace else entirely.

Guilder didn’t like mysteries. He liked them even less than he liked the idea of Sergio.

The woman seemed unbreakable. She hadn’t told them so much as her name. Even Sod, that psychopath, a man of notoriously revolting appetites, had failed to extract a scrap of information. The decision to employ the man’s services had come about with curious ease. Sending people to the feedlot was one thing; the virals made mercifully short work of it, and the creatures needed to be fed. It wasn’t anything nice, but it was over fast. And as for a few blows in detention, or the cautious application of the waterboard, well, sometimes such measures were simply unavoidable. What had the term been, back in the day? Enhanced interrogation.