Justin Cronin - The Twelve

A titanic wave of love broke over him. It was all he could do not to throw his arms around her and press his mouth to hers. “I want to make love to you. Real love.”

She glanced at her watch. “Well, sure. If that’s what you want. I don’t have the full hour, though.”

Guilder had begun to undress, madly unbuckling his belt, yanking off his wingtips. But something was wrong. He sensed her hesitation.

“Isn’t there something you’re forgetting?” she asked.

The money. That’s what she was asking for. How could she think about money at a time like this? He wanted to tell her that what they shared couldn’t be counted in dollars and cents, words along those lines, but all he managed to say was “I don’t have it with me.”

She frowned. “Honey, that’s not how this works. You know that.”

But by this time Guilder was so frantic he was barely processing any of it. He was also standing in front of her wearing only his boxers and undershirt, his pants bunched around his ankles.

“Are you all right? You don’t look so good.”

“I love you,” he said.

She gave an airy smile. “That’s sweet.”

“I said, I love you.”

“Okay, I can do that. That’s no problem. Put the money on the dresser and I’ll say anything you want.”

“I don’t have any money. I gave you the bracelet.”

Suddenly there was no sign of warmth or even friendship in her eyes. “Horace, this is a cash business, you know that. I don’t like the way you’re talking.”

“Please, let me make love to you.” Guilder’s pulse was throbbing in his ears. “You can sell the bracelet if you want. It’s worth a lot of money.”

“Baby, I don’t think so.” She held it out to him with unconcealed contempt. “I hate to break it to you, but this is glass. I don’t know who sold it to you, but you should get your money back. Now go on, be sweet. You know the drill.”

He had to make her understand how he felt. In desperation he reached for her, but his feet were still tangled up in his trouser legs. Shawna released a yelp; the next thing Guilder knew, he was sprawled on the floor. He raised his face to discover a pistol aimed at his head.

“Get the fuck out.”

“Please,” he moaned. His voice was thick with tears. “You said you wanted to be my only one.”

“I say a lot of things. Now get out of here with your crappy goddamned bracelet.”

He rose heavily to his feet. Never had he experienced such humiliation. And yet what he mostly felt was love. A helpless, melancholy love that would devour him whole.

“I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying, baby.” She waved the pistol at the door. “Do like I say before I shoot your balls off.”

He knew he could never face her again. How could he have been so stupid? He drove to his townhouse, pulled into the garage, shut off the engine, and sealed the door with the remote. He sat in his car for a full thirty minutes, unable to muster the energy to move. He was dying. He had made a fool of himself. He would never see Shawna again, because he meant nothing to her.

Which was when he realized why he was still sitting in the Camry. All he had to do was turn the engine back on. It would be like falling asleep. He’d never have to think about Shawna again, or Project NOAH, or live in the prison of his own failing body, or visit his father at the convalescent center—none of it. All his cares lifted, just like that. Following an impulse he could not explain, he removed his watch and took his wallet from his back pocket, placing them on the dashboard—as if he were getting ready for bed. Probably it was customary to write a note, but what would he say? Who would the note be for?

Three times he tried to make himself turn the key. Three times his resolve failed him. By then he had begun to feel silly, sitting in his car—one more humiliation. There was nothing left to do but put his watch back on and return his wallet to his pocket and go into the house.

As Guilder was driving home from McLean, his handheld buzzed. Nelson.

“They’re on the move.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska. A large group massing in western Kansas.” He paused. “That’s not why I called.”

Guilder drove straight to the office. Nelson met him in the hallway. “We picked up the signal a little before sunset. Grabbed it off a tower west of Denver, a town called Silver Plume. It took some doing, but I was able to call in some favors at Homeland and reroute one of the drones to see if we could get a picture.”

At his terminal he showed Guilder the photograph, a grainy black and white. Not the girl; it was a man. He was standing beside a pickup truck parked on the side of the highway. It looked like he was taking a leak.

“Who the hell is this? One of the docs?”

“It’s one of Richards’s guys.”

Guilder was perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

For a moment, Nelson appeared faintly embarrassed. “Sorry, I thought you were in the loop on this. They’re paroled sex offenders. One of Richards’s little projects. For security reasons, all sixth-tier civilian personnel were harvested from the national registry.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not.” Nelson tapped the image on the screen. “This guy? Our lone survivor of Project NOAH? He’s a fucking pedophile.”

The pickup gave out late on the morning of Grey’s second day on the road.

The hour was just shy of noon, the sun high in the sky. After a restless night in a Motel 6 near Leadville, Grey had picked up I-70 near Vail, then made his descent toward Denver. As far east as the town of Golden, the interstate corridor had been mostly clear, but as he moved into the city’s outer suburban ring, with its huge shopping centers and sprawling subdivisions, things began to change. Portions of the highway were choked with abandoned cars, forcing him onto the access road; the vast parking lots lining the highway were scenes of frozen disorder, store windows smashed, merchandise strewn over the pavement. The stillness was different here, too—not a simple absence of sound but something deeper, more ominous. A lot of the bodies he saw were headless, like the suspendered man at the Red Roof. Grey guessed maybe Zero and the others liked to take the heads.

He did his best to keep his eyes on the road, forcing the carnage to the fringes of his vision. The weird, buzzing energy he’d felt at the Red Roof had not abated; his brain was humming like a plucked string. He hadn’t slept in a day and a half, but he wasn’t tired. Or hungry, which wasn’t like him at all. Grey used to slam it down, but for some reason the thought of food wasn’t remotely appealing. In Leadville he’d gotten a Baby Ruth from a vending machine in the lobby of the Motel 6, thinking he should try to put something in his stomach, but he couldn’t get the damn thing past his nose. Just the odor of it made his insides clench. He could practically smell the preservatives in the thing, a nasty chemical stink, like industrial floor cleaner.

By the time the city’s core rose into view, Grey knew he would have to abandon the interstate. There was simply no way around the cars, and the situation was only going to get worse the closer he got. He drew the truck into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and checked his map. The best route would be circling downtown to the south, he decided, though this was just a guess; he didn’t know Denver at all.

He veered south, then east again, picking his way through the suburbs. Everywhere was the same, not a living soul about. He wished he could at least have had the radio for company, but when he scanned up and down the dial, all he could get was the same empty wash of static he’d heard for a day and a half. For a while he honked the truck’s horn, thinking this might alert anyone left alive to his presence, but eventually he gave up. There was no one left to hear it. Denver was a crypt.