Justin Cronin - The Twelve

He took the stairs from the basement to his office, donned his glasses, and opened the drapes. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, jetting the clouds with ribbons of bright color. The sight was pretty, sort of. Guilder supposed it was the kind of thing he might have enjoyed, a century ago. But a person could only look at so many sunsets in a lifetime and muster an opinion. The problem of living forever, etc., etc., etc.

He missed Wilkes. The man hadn’t always been the best company—he’d been far too eager to please—but at least he’d been somebody to talk to. Guilder had trusted him, confided in him. Across the years there wasn’t much they hadn’t gotten around to saying. Guilder had even told him about Shawna, though he’d masked the story in irony. A whore, can you believe it? What a jackass I was! My, but they’d had a good, long laugh at that. The thing was, this was just the sort of unconstructed, vaguely anxious hour when Guilder would have stuck his head from the door, summoning his friend into his office on some pretense—“Fred, get in here!”—but really just to talk.

His friend. He supposed they were. Had been.

Darkness came on. Guilder’s gaze traveled down the hill to the Project. It would need a new name now. Hoppel would have been the guy for that; no doubt about it, he’d had a way with words. In his former life he’d been an ad guy with a big Chicago agency, experience he’d put to plentiful use concocting the catchphrases and jingles that kept the troops in rhetorical line, right down to the words of the anthem. Homeland, our Homeland, we pledge our lives to thee. Our labors do we offer, without recompense or fee. Homeland, our Homeland, a nation rises here. Safety, hope, security, from sea to shining sea . Corny as hell, and Guilder hadn’t been so keen on the word “recompense”—it seemed a little bookish—but the thing scanned nicely and was, by the standards of its genre, not too hard on the ears.

So, what should they call it there? “Bunker” was too martial. “Palace” had the right general ring, but there was nothing palatial about the place. It looked like a big concrete box. Something religious? A shrine? Who would not go willingly into a shrine?

Just how many of the flatlanders would have to go, and at what frequency, remained to be seen; Guilder had yet to receive specific instructions from Zero on this point, the general sense being that things would come out in the wash. The Twelve—or rather, Eleven—might be different from your garden-variety viral, but they were what they were—eating machines, basically. No matter what directives came down from on high, a century of gobbling up everything with a pulse would be a hard habit to shake. But in the main, their diet would consist of a combination of donated human blood and domestic livestock. The right ratios needed to be scrupulously maintained; the human population had to grow. Generation by generation, human and viral, working together—which was, come to think of it, not a bad way to sell the thing. It was positively Hoppelesque. What was the term? Rebranding? That’s what Guilder needed. A fresh point of view, a new lexicon, a new vision. A rebranding of the viral experience.

He might have really hit on something with this shrine business. The establishment of something rather like an official religion, with all the mumbo jumbo and ritualistic trappings, might be just the lubricant the gears of human psychology required. State worship was all stick and no carrot; it produced only an arid obedience to authority. But hope was the greatest social organizer of all. Give people hope, and you could make them do just about anything. And not just your average, everyday kind of hope—for food or clothes or the absence of pain or good suburban schools or low down payments with easy financing. What people needed was a hope beyond the visible world, the world of the body and its trials, of life’s endless dull parade of things . A hope that all was not as it appeared.

And there it was, the name. How simple it was, how elegant. Not a shrine; a temple. The Temple of Life Everlasting. And he, Horace Guilder, would be its priest.

So, not such a worthless day after all. Funny how things could just come like that, he thought with a smile—his first in weeks. Screw Hoppel and his ditties. And while he was at it, screw Wilkes, that ingrate. Guilder had everything in hand.

First the injection, and the wooziness, and Sara, lying on a wheeled gurney, observed the ceiling flowing past.

“Alley… oop .”

Now she was somewhere else. The room was dim. Hands were lifting her onto a table, tightening straps around her arms and legs and forehead. The metal was chilly beneath her. At some point her robe had been removed and replaced by a cotton gown. Her mind moved with animal heaviness through these facts, noting them without emotion. It was hard to care about anything. Here was Dr. Verlyn, peering down at her through his tiny glasses in his grandfatherly way. His eyebrows struck her as extraordinary. He was holding a silver forceps; a wad of cotton soaked in brown fluid was clinched between the tines. She supposed that since he was a doctor, he was doing something medical to her.

“This may feel a little cold.”

It did. Dr. Verlyn was swabbing down her arms and legs; at the same time, somebody else was positioning a plastic tube beneath her nose.

“Catheter.”

Now, that was not so nice. That wasn’t nice at all. A moan rose from her throat. Other things began to happen, various pokings and intrusions, the alien sensation of foreign objects sliding under her skin—her forearms, the insides of her thighs. There was a beeping sound, and a hiss of gas, and a peculiar odor under her nose, strikingly sweet. Diethyl ether. It was manufactured at the biodiesel plant, though Sara had never seen how this was done. All she remembered were tanks with the word FLAMMABLE stenciled in red on the sides, and their clattering bulk as they were rolled on dollies to a waiting truck.

“Just breathe, please.”

What a strange request! How could she not breathe?

“That’s it.”

She was borne aloft on the softest cloud.

Two days had passed since they’d made contact with the insurgency. At first, Nina had failed to believe them, as anyone would. The story was too fantastic, the history too complex. It was Alicia who had finally come up with a way to prove their case. She retrieved the RDF from her pack and led the woman up the ridge and pointed it toward the Dome. Greer was watching the valley below. At this distance, Alicia worried that she wouldn’t get a signal. What would they do then to convince the woman? But there it was, fat and clear, a continuous pulsation. Alicia was relieved but also perplexed: if anything, the signal was stronger. Amy was silent a moment, then said, We’ll have to hurry now. That sound you’re hearing: it means the remaining Twelve are already here. She drew the knife from her belt and passed it to Nina and told Alicia and Greer to disarm as well. We’re surrendering to you, said Amy. The rest is up to you.

The truck arrived, carrying two armed men. Alicia and the others met them with arms raised. Their wrists were bound, black hoods drawn over their heads. An interval of time passed, the three of them freezing in the bouncing cargo bed; then they heard the sound of a garage door opening. They were escorted from the truck and told to wait. A few minutes passed; footsteps approached.

“Take them off,” a man’s voice said.

The hoods were removed, revealing half a dozen men and women standing before them with raised weapons—all but one.