Justin Cronin - The Twelve

One of the cols lifted his baton over her head. “This man is going to bash your brains out,” Guilder said.

She shook her bowed head.

“Very well,” Guilder said.

Down went the baton; the woman toppled forward into the mud. From the left came a sharp cry.

“Get her.”

A young teenager, with her mother’s face. Onto her knees she went. She was crying, trembling; snot was running from her nose. Guilder raised the megaphone.

“Does anybody have anything to say?”

Silence. Guilder drew a pistol from beneath his coat and racked the slide. “Minister Wilkes,” he said, holding out the gun, “will you please do the honors?”

“Jesus, Horace.” His face was aghast. “What are you trying to prove?”

“Is this going to be a problem?”

“We have people for this kind of thing. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“What deal? There is no deal. The deal is what I say it is.” Wilkes stiffened. “I won’t do it.”

“You won’t or you can’t?”

“What difference does it make?”

Guilder frowned. “Not very much, now that I think about it.” And with these words, he stepped behind the girl, pushed the muzzle of the gun to the back of her head, and fired.

“Good Christ!”

“You know what the biggest problem with never growing old is?” Guilder asked his chief of staff. He was wiping down the blood-tinged barrel with a handkerchief. “I’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“Fuck you, Horace.”

Guilder pointed the pistol at Wilkes’s colorless face, leveling its sights at the spot between his eyes. “You forget that you can die.”

And Guilder shot him, too.

A change came over the crowd, their fear turning to something else. Murmurs moved up and down the lines, whispered calculations, the building energy of people who knew they had nothing to lose. Things had moved rather more briskly than Guilder would have liked—he’d hoped to get something useful before the hammer came down—but now the die was cast.

“Open the trucks.”

The canvas was pulled away. An eruption of volcanic screaming: no mystery now. Guilder walked briskly to his car, got in, and told the driver to go. They pulled away in a plume of mud and dirty snow as, behind them, the orchestra unleashed its mortal symphony: a melody of shouts and screams, high and wild and full of fear, punctuated by the syncopated rhythm of automatic weapon fire, fading to the final pops as the cols moved through the fallen bodies, silencing the last.

Iowa. The ashy bones.

They’d exhausted their fuel near the town of Millersburg, sheltered the night in a roofless church, and set out the next morning on foot. Another seventy miles, said Tifty, perhaps a little more. They’d encountered two more bone fields like the first, the number of dead virals unimaginable. Thousands, millions even. What did it mean? What impulse had led them to lie down on the open earth, waiting for the sun to take them away? Or had they perished first, their corpses reclaimed by the morning light? Even Michael, the man of theories, had no answer.

They walked. Trudged, through snow that now rose in places to their knees. Their rations were scarce; they saw no game. They had been reduced to eating their final stores—strips of dried meat and suet that left a coating of grease on the roofs of their mouths. The earth felt crystallized, the air held in suspension, like bated breath. For hours, no wind at all, and then it came howling. Daylight came and left in the blink of an eye. Heavy parkas with fur-lined hoods, woolen hats pulled down to their brows, gloves with the tips of the fingers cut away in case they needed to use their weapons, though Peter wondered if they could actually manage this. He’d never felt so cold. He hadn’t known cold like this existed. How Tifty maintained his bearings in this desolate place, he had no idea.

They passed their eighteenth night in an auto-repair shop that contained, miraculously, a potbellied woodstove of cast iron with a soap-stone top. Now, what to burn? As darkness came on, Michael and Hollis returned from the house next door, carrying a pair of wooden chairs and armfuls of books. The Encyclopaedia Britannica , 1998. A shame to burn it, it went against the grain, but they needed the heat. Two more trips and they were supplied for the night.

They awoke to brilliant sunlight, the first in days, although the temperature had, if anything, dropped. A hard north wind rattled the branches of the trees. They allowed themselves the luxury of setting one last fire and huddled around it, savoring every bit of heat.

“Like… molting.”

It was Michael who had spoken. Peter turned toward his friend. “What did you say?”

Michael’s eyes were focused on the door of the stove. “How many do you think we’ve seen?”

“I don’t know.” Peter shrugged. “A lot.”

“And they all died at the same time. So let’s suppose what’s happening is supposed to happen, that it’s part of the viral life cycle. Birds do this, insects, reptiles. When part of the body is worn out, they cast it off and grow a new one.”

“But we’re talking about whole virals,” Lore said.

“That’s how it looks . But everything we know about them says they function as a group. Each one connected to its pod, each pod connected to its member of the Twelve. Never mind the mumbo jumbo about souls and all the rest. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but that’s Amy’s turf. From my point of view, the virals are a species like any other. When Lacey killed Babcock, all of his virals died. Like bees, remember?”

“I do,” said Hollis, nodding along. “Kill the queen and you kill the hive. That’s what you said.”

“And what we saw on that mountain bore it out. But suppose each one of the viral families is actually a single organism. Each of the Twelve is like a major organ—the heart, the brain. The rest are like the feathers on a bird, or the carapace of an insect. When it wears out, the organism sheds it, in order to grow a new one.”

“They don’t feel like feathers,” Lore said acidly.

“Okay, not feathers, but you get the idea. Something peripheral, expendable. I’ve always wondered what was keeping so many alive. What’s left to eat? We know they can go a long time without feeding—Tifty, you proved that—but nothing can survive indefinitely without food. From the standpoint of species longevity, it makes no sense to devour your entire food supply. As predators, they’re actually too successful. The idea has always bothered me, because everything else about them is so organized.”

“I’m not sure I’m following,” Tifty said. “Are you saying they’re dying out?”

“Obviously something’s happening. The fact that it’s occurring all at once implies that it’s a natural process, built into the system. Here’s another analogy. When the human body goes into shock, it draws blood away from the periphery and redirects it to the major organs. It’s a defense mechanism. Protect what’s important, forget the rest. Now imagine that each of the viral tribes is one animal, and that it’s going into shock from starvation. The logical thing would be to radically reduce the numbers and let the food supply come back.”

“And then what?” Peter asked.

“Then you start the cycle over.”

For a moment, nobody spoke.

“Anyway,” Michael continued, “it’s just an idea I had. I could be full of shit.”

Peter knew different. “So why is it happening here?”

“That,” said Michael, “is what worries me.”