Justin Cronin - The Twelve

“We don’t have one.”

Michael glanced into the side-view. His eyes widened. “Now we do.”

He jammed the gearshift into first, swung the wheel all the way to the left, and hit the gas, clipping the second tanker. Instead of reversing, Michael pressed the accelerator again. A screech of metal and suddenly they were free, a fifteen-ton wheeled missile bounding into the undergrowth.

Behind them, the world exploded.

The truck shot forward like a rocket; Peter was thrust back in his seat. The rear of the truck lifted, swerved, then somehow found traction again. The cab was bouncing so fiercely it seemed certain they would shake apart. Michael worked through the gearbox, still accelerating. Brush swept over the windshield; they were flying blind as bats. He turned the wheel left again, guiding them in a long arc across the tangled field, and then with a second toss they were on the highway again, racing east.

Their flight had not escaped attention. In the side-view, Peter saw a bank of pale green light gathering behind them.

“We can’t outrun them in this thing,” Michael said. “The only chance is the hardbox.”

Peter jammed a magazine into his rifle. “What have you got?” he asked Lore, and she showed him a pistol.

“That’s not the only problem,” Michael said. “We’ve lost our brake coupler.”

“Meaning what?”

“I can’t slow down or she’ll jackknife. We’ll have to jump.”

The virals were closing. Peter guessed two hundred yards, maybe less.

“Can you get us up the exit ramp?”

“At this speed, there’s no way I’ll make the turn at the overpass. It’s ninety degrees.”

“How far’s the box from the top of the ramp?”

“A hundred yards straight south.”

There was no way they would make it if they jumped at the base of the ramp. A hundred yards would be cutting it close as it was, and that was assuming they escaped the fall uninjured.

The hardbox marker appeared in Michael’s headlights. Lore climbed over the bench and took a place by the door as Michael downshifted, cutting their speed to thirty, and veered to the right, guiding them up the ramp. They flung the doors wide, filling the cab with swirling wind.

“Here we go.”

As they hit the top of the ramp, Michael and Lore leapt from the cab, Peter just behind them. He hit the ground on his feet, knees flexed to absorb the impact, then rolled end over end on the pavement. The air poured from his chest. He came to a stop just in time to see the taillights of the tanker barreling through the guardrail. For the thinnest instant, the vehicle, all thirty thousand pounds of it, seemed on the verge of taking flight. But then it sank from sight, its disappearance followed by one more titanic explosion on a night of them, a roiling cloud with a white-hot center that blazed like an enormous flare.

From his left, the sound of Lore’s voice: “Peter, help me!”

Michael was unconscious. His hair was slick with blood, his arm twisted in a way that seemed broken. The first virals were at the foot of the ramp now. The light of the burning truck had bought them a moment, but that was all. Peter hoisted Michael over his shoulder. Christ, he thought, his knees buckling under the weight, this would have been easier a few years ago. The hardbox flag stood in dark silhouette against the stars.

They ran.

She appeared in the doorway as Lucius was concluding his evening devotions. From her hand dangled a chiming ring of keys. Her plain gray tunic and tranquil demeanor did nothing to communicate the impression of someone in the midst of a jailbreak, though Lucius noted a glaze of perspiration on her face, despite the evening chill.

“Major. It’s good to see you.”

His heart was full of a feeling of events set in motion, circles closing, a destiny unveiled. All his life, it seemed, he had been anticipating this moment.

“Something’s happening, isn’t it?”

Amy nodded evenly. “I believe it is.”

“I’ve prayed on it. I’ve prayed on you .”

Amy nodded. “We will have to move quickly.”

They stepped from the cell and continued down the dark hallway. Sanders was asleep at his desk in the outer room, his face turned sideways over neatly folded arms. The second guard, Coolidge, was snoring on the floor.

“They won’t awaken for a while,” Amy explained, “and when they do, they’ll have no memory of this. You will simply be gone.”

Lucius reached down to withdraw Sanders’s pistol from its holster, then glanced up to see Amy regarding him with a look of caution.

“Just remember,” she warned. “Carter’s one of us.”

Lucius chambered a round and set the safety and tucked the gun into his waistband. “Understood.”

Outside, they walked with measured briskness toward the pedestrian tunnel, keeping to the shadows. At the portal, three domestics were idly standing around a fire burning in an ash can, warming their hands.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Amy.

They melted to their knees, looks of mild surprise stamped on their faces. Lucius and Amy eased their bodies to the ground.

“That’s some trick,” said Lucius. “You’ll have to teach me sometime.”

On the far side of the tunnel, a pair of saddled horses waited. Lucius gave Amy a leg up, then climbed aboard the second horse, taking the reins loosely in his hand.

“One thing I need to ask,” he said. “Why me?”

Amy thought a moment. “Each of us has one, Lucius.”

“And Carter? Who does he have?”

An inscrutable look came into her eyes, as if her thoughts were carrying her far away. “He is different from the rest. He carries his familiar inside him.”

“The woman in the water.”

Amy smiled. “You’ve done your homework, Lucius.”

“Things have a way of coming.”

“Yes, they do. He loved her more than life but could not save her. She is the heart of him.”

“And the dopeys?”

“They are his Many, his viral line. They kill only because they must. It goes hard with them. As he thinks, they think. As he dreams, they dream. They dream of her.”

The horses were tamping the dust. It was just past midnight, a moonless sky the only witness to their departure.

“As I of you,” said Lucius Greer. “As I of you.”

They rode into the darkness.

Brothers, brothers .

And away, into the night. Julio Martínez, Tenth of Twelve, his legions discarded, cast to the wind. Julio Martínez, answering the call of Zero.

It is time. The moment of rebuilding has come. You will remake the world again; you will become the true masters of the earth, commanders not only of death but of life. You are the seasons. You are the turning earth. You are the circle within the circle within the circle. You are time itself, my brothers in blood .

In life Martínez had been an attorney, a man of law. He had stood before judges, defended the accused before juries of their peers. Death row cases were his specialty, his professional forté. He had acquired a particular brand of fame. The calls had come from everywhere: Would the great Julio Martínez, Esq., come to the aid of such-and-such? Could he be persuaded to swoop into action? The rock star who had bashed his girlfriend’s brains out with a lamp. The state senator with the dead whore’s blood on his hands. The suburban mother who had drowned her newborn triplets in the tub. Martínez took them all. They were insane or they were not; they pled or they didn’t; they went to the needle, or the tiny cell, or scot-free. The outcome was irrelevant to Julio Martínez, Esq.; it was the drama he loved. To know one was going to die and yet struggle against its inevitability—that was the fascination. Once, as a boy, in the field behind his house, he had come upon a rabbit in a trap, the kind with a spring and teeth. Its iron jaws had clamped onto the animal’s hind legs, flaying flesh to bone. The creature’s small, dark eyes, like beads of oil, were full of death’s wisdom. Life ebbed from it in a series of spasmodic scuffles. The boy Martínez could have watched for hours, and did just that; and when the rabbit failed to perish by nightfall, he carried it to the barn and returned to the house and ate his supper and went to bed in his room of toys and trophies, waiting for morning, when he could watch the rabbit die some more.