Justin Cronin - The Twelve

Sanders escorted him into the hall. Only then did it occur to Peter that he’d forgotten to ask Greer about his other visitor. And something else: the major had never asked about Amy.

“Listen,” Sanders said as they were passing through the second door, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but could you sign this?”

He was holding out a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil.

“It’s for my wife,” he explained. “To prove I met you.”

Peter accepted the paper, scrawled his name, and handed it back. For a moment Sanders just looked at it.

“Wow,” he said.

“Uncle Peter!”

Breaking away from the other children, Caleb flew toward him across the playground. At the last instant he took three bounding steps and catapulted into Peter’s arms, nearly knocking him over.

“Whoa now, easy.”

The boy’s face was lit with joy. “Amy said you were coming! You’re here! You’re here!”

Peter wondered how she had known. But he quickly corrected himself; Amy simply seemed to know things, as if her mind were linked to the world’s hidden rhythms. Holding Caleb in his arms, Peter was washed with his distinctive physical presence: his boyish weight and heat; the warmth of his breath; the milky smell of his hair and skin, moist with exertion, mixed with the lingering scent of the harsh lye soap the sisters used. Across the playground, the other children were watching. Peter caught a glimpse of Sister Peg eyeing him coolly from the monkey bars, his unannounced presence a disruption to her beloved routine.

“Let me have a look at you.”

He lowered Caleb to the ground. As always, Peter was struck by the boy’s uncanny resemblance to Theo. He felt a stab of regret at the time he’d carelessly allowed to pass.

“You’re getting so big. I can hardly believe it.”

The little boy’s chest puffed with pride. “Where have you been, what did you see?”

“Lots of stuff. I was in New Mexico.”

“New Mexico!” The look of wonder on his face was total; Peter might just as well have told him he’d visited the moon. Although the prevailing custom in Kerrville was not to shelter the children from knowledge of the virals, as had been done in the Colony, his child’s mind had yet to absorb the ramifications. To Caleb, the Expeditionary was a grand adventure, like pirates crossing the seas or tales of the knights of old that the sisters read to them from storybooks. “How long can you stay?” the boy pleaded.

“Not long, I’m afraid. But we have the rest of the afternoon. And I’ll be back soon, probably just a week or so. What would you like to do?”

Caleb’s answer was instantaneous: “Go to the dam.”

“Why there?”

“You can see everything!”

Peter smiled. At such moments he felt something of himself in his nephew, the same undeniable force of curiosity that had governed his life. “The dam it is.”

Sister Peg came up behind the boy. Possessing a birdlike slightness, Sister Peg was nonetheless an intimidating figure, her dark eyes capable of shrinking your insides with a single censorious glance. Peter’s comrades who had been raised in the orphanage—men who weathered horrible conditions and constant peril—spoke of her with an awe verging on terror. My God , they all said, that woman scared the living shit out of us .

“Hello, Sister.”

Her face, a weathered topography of deep crevices and arid planes, possessed the immobility of judgment withheld. She had taken a position just beyond a normal conversational distance, a small but significant alteration that magnified her commanding presence. Her teeth were stained a yellowish brown from puffing on corn silk—an incomprehensible habit, widespread in Kerrville, that Peter regarded with a combination of wonder and revulsion.

“Lieutenant Jaxon, I didn’t expect you.”

“Sorry, it was all pretty sudden. Do you mind if I take him for the rest of the day?”

“It would have been better if you could have sent word. Things here run a certain way.”

Caleb’s body was jangling with energy. “Please, Sister!”

Her imperious gaze flicked down toward the boy, taking accounts. Delta-like fans of wrinkles deepened at the corners of her mouth as she sucked in her cheeks. “I suppose under the circumstances it would be all right. An exception, you understand, and keep an ear to the horn, Lieutenant. I know you Expeditionary feel yourselves to be above the rules, but I can’t allow it.”

Peter let the barb pass; it did, after all, possess an element of truth. “I’ll have him back by six.” Under her withering gaze, he found himself, with the next question, attempting to sound curiously offhanded. “Is Amy around? I’d like to visit with her before we go.”

“She’s gone to the market. You’ve just missed her.” This declaration was followed by a tart sigh. “I suppose you’ll want to stay for dinner.”

“Thank you, Sister. That’s kind of you.”

Caleb, bored by these formalities, was tugging at his hand. “Please, Uncle Peter, I want to go .”

For a breadth of time no longer than half a second, the woman’s stern countenance appeared to crack. A look of almost maternal tenderness flickered in her eyes. But it just as quickly vanished, leaving Peter to wonder if he’d imagined it.

“Mind the clock, Lieutenant. I’ll be watching.”

The dam was, in many ways, the heart of the city and its mechanisms. Along with the oil that powered the generators, Kerrville’s mastery of the Guadalupe River, which provided both water for irrigation and a barrier to the north and west—nobody had ever seen a viral even attempt to swim; it was widely believed that they either had a phobia of water or simply could not stay afloat—accounted for its longevity. The river itself had been a feature of scant dimension in the early days, thin and inconsequential, falling to barely a trickle in summer. But a devastating flood in the spring of 22, a harbinger of a meteorological shift that would raise the river permanently by as much as ten feet, had necessitated its taming. It had been, by all accounts, a massive project, requiring the temporary diversion of the river’s currents and the movement of huge quantities of earth and limestone to dig the bowl-like depression that would form the impoundment, followed by the erection of the dam itself, a feat of engineering on a scale Peter had always associated with the Time Before, not the world he knew. The day of the water’s first release was regarded as a foundational occurrence in the history of the Republic; more than anything else in Kerrville, the dam’s corralling of natural forces had impressed upon him how flimsy the Colony had been in comparison. They were lucky to have made it as long as they had.

Grated steel stairs ascended to the top. Caleb took them at a dash over Peter’s shouted protests to slow down. By the time Peter made the final turn, Caleb was already gazing over the water, toward the undulating ridge of hills at the horizon. Thirty feet below, the face of the impoundment possessed a stunning transparency. Peter could even see fish down there, white shapes piloting lazily in the glassy waters.

“What’s out there?” the boy asked.

“Well, more Texas mostly. That ridge you’re looking at is only a few miles away.”

“Where’s New Mexico?”

Peter pointed due west. “But it’s really, really far. Three days on a transport, and that’s without stopping.”

The boy chewed on his lower lip. “I want to see it.”

“Maybe someday you will.”

They walked along the dam’s curving top to the spillway. A series of vents released water at regular intervals into a wide pool, from which gravity pumps piped it down to the agricultural complex. Looming in the distance, regularly spaced towers marked the Orange Zone. They paused again, absorbing the view. Peter was once again struck by the elaborateness of it all. It was as if in this one place, human history still flowed in an uninterrupted continuum, undisturbed by the stark separation of eras that the virals had brought down upon the world.