Justin Cronin - The Twelve

God bless you, Danny Chayes, Kittridge thought. This is going to be the ride of your life.

“Please, everyone, keep calm!” Porcheki, moving up and down the line of buses behind the barrier of soldiers, was yelling through a megaphone. “Form an orderly line and load from the rear! If you don’t get a seat, wait for the second load!”

The soldiers had erected barriers to serve as a kind of gate. The mob was pressing behind them, funneling toward the gap. Where were they going? people were asking. Was the destination still Chicago, or somewhere else? Just ahead of Kittridge’s group was a family with two children, a boy and girl, wearing filthy pajamas. Dirty feet, matted hair—they couldn’t have been older than five. The girl was clutching a naked Barbie. More thunder rolled in from the west, accompanied by flashes of light at the horizon. Kittridge and April were both keeping a hand on Tim, afraid the mob would swallow him.

Once through the gap, the group moved quickly to Danny’s bus. The Robinsons and Boy Jr. were the first to board; at the bottom of the steps were Wood and Delores, Jamal and Mrs. Bellamy. Pastor Don brought up the rear, behind Kittridge, Tim, and April.

A burst of lightning, ghostly white, ignited the air, freezing the scene in Kittridge’s mind. Half a second later, a long peal of thunder rolled. Kittridge felt the impact through the soles of his feet.

Not thunder. Ordnance.

A trio of jets shot overhead, then two more. Suddenly everyone was screaming—a high, shrill sound of undammed panic that built from the rear, engulfing the crowd like a wave. Kittridge turned his face toward the west.

He had never seen the virals in a large group before. Sometimes, from his perch on the tower, he had seen three of them together—never less or more—and of course there’d been the ones in the underground garage, which might have numbered as many as twenty. That was nothing compared to this. The sight suggested a flock of earthbound birds: a coordinated mass of hundreds, thousands even, rushing toward the wire. A pod , Kittridge remembered. That’s what they’re calling them, pods . For a second he felt a kind of awe, a pure breathtaken wonder at its organic majesty.

They’d sweep over the camp like a tsunami.

Humvees were racing toward the western wire, rooster-tails of dust boiling from their wheels. Suddenly the buses were unguarded; the crowd surged toward them. A great human weight crashed into Kittridge from behind. As the crowd enveloped him, he heard April scream.

“Tim!”

He dove toward her voice, fighting his way through the mob like a swimmer against the current, tossing bodies aside. A clot of people were trying to jam themselves into Danny’s bus, pushing, shoving. Kittridge saw the man who had been ahead of them in line holding his daughter over his head. He was yelling, “Please, somebody take her! Somebody take my daughter!”

Then Kittridge saw April, caught in the crush. He waved his hands in the air. “Get on the bus!”

“I can’t find him! I can’t find Tim!”

A roar of engines; at the back of the line, one of the buses drew clear, then another and another. In a burst of fury, Kittridge rammed his way toward April, grabbed her by the waist and plunged toward the door. But the girl would have none of it; she was fighting him, trying to break his grip.

“I can’t leave without him! Let me go!”

Ahead he saw Pastor Don at the base of the steps. Kittridge shoved April forward. “Don, help me! Get her on the bus!”

“I can’t leave, I can’t leave!”

“I’ll find him, April! Don, take her!”

A final thrust through the melee, Don reaching forward, finding April’s hand, pulling her toward the door; then she was gone. The bus was only half full, but there was no time to wait. Kittridge’s last glimpse of April was her face pressed to the window, calling his name.

“Danny, get them out of here!”

The doors closed. The bus pulled away.

In her basement chamber of the NBC facility, Lila Kyle, who had spent the last four days in a state of narcotic suspension—a semiconscious twilight in which she experienced the room around her as if it were but one of several movie screens she was viewing simultaneously—was asleep, and dreaming: a simple, happy dream in which she was in a car at night, being driven to the hospital to have her baby. Whoever was driving the car, Lila couldn’t see; the fringes of her vision were draped in blackness. Brad, she said, are you there? And then the blackness lifted, like the curtain over a stage, and Lila saw that it was Brad. A shimmering golden joy, weightless as June sunlight, thrummed through her entire being. We’ll be there soon, my darling, Brad said. We’ll be there any second. This isn’t all going to hell in a handbasket. You just hold on. The baby is coming. The baby is practically here.

And those were the words Lila was saying to herself—the baby is coming, the baby is coming—when the room was buffeted by a violent explosion—glass shattering, things falling, the floor beneath her lurching like a tiny boat at sea—and she began to scream.

The viral pod that swarmed the eastern Iowa refugee-processing center in the early morning hours of June 9 was part of a larger mass gathering out of Nebraska. Estimates made later by the joint task force, code-named JTF Scorch differed on its size; some believed it was fifty thousand, others many more. In the days that followed, it would convene with a second, larger pod, coming north out of Missouri, and a third, larger still, moving south from Minnesota. Always their numbers increased. By the time they reached Chicago, they were half a million strong, penetrating the defensive perimeter on July 17 and overwhelming the city within twenty-four hours.

The first virals to breach the wires of the refugee-processing center arrived at 4:58 CTD. By this time, extensive aerial operations in the central and eastern portions of the state had been under way for eight hours, and, in fact, all but one of the bridges over the Mississippi—Dubuque—had already been destroyed; the timing of the quarantine had been deliberately misreported by the task force. It was generally believed by the leaders of the task force—a conclusion supported by the combined wisdom of the American military and intelligence communities—that a concentrated human presence within the quarantine zone acted as a lure to the infected, causing them to coalesce in certain areas and thus make aerial bombardment more effective. The closest analogue, in the words of one task force member, was using a salt lick to hunt deer. Leaving behind a population of refugees was simply the price that needed to be paid in a war that lacked all precedent. And in any event, those people were surely dead anyway.

Major Frances Porcheki of the Iowa National Guard—in her civilian life, a district manager for a manufacturer of women’s sporting apparel—was unaware of the mission of JTF Scorch, but she was no fool, either. Though a highly trained military officer, Major Porcheki was also a devout Catholic who took comfort in, and guidance from, her faith. Her decision not to abandon the refugees under her protection, as she had been ordered to do, followed directly from this deeper conviction, as did her choice to devote the final energies of her life, and those of the soldiers still under her command—165 men and women, who, nearly to a one, took up positions at the western wire—to provide cover for the escaping buses. By this time, the civilians who had been left behind were racing after the vehicles, screaming for them to stop, but there was nothing to be done. Well, that’s it, Porcheki thought. I would have saved more if I could. A pale green light had gathered to the west, a wall of quivering radiance, like a glowing hedgerow. Jets were streaking overhead, unleashing the fury of their payloads into the heart of the pod: gleaming tracers, spouts of flame. The air was split with thunder. Through a gauntlet of destruction the pod emerged, still coming. Porcheki leapt from her Humvee before it had stopped moving, yelling, “Hold your fire, everyone! Wait till they’re at the wire!,” then dropped to a firing position—having no more orders to give, she would face the enemy on the same terms as her men—and began to pray.