Justin Cronin - The Twelve

36

Everywhere people were whispering: there had been another bombing in the market.

The November morning broke gray and cold, tasting of the winter to come. Sara awoke to the blare of the horn, followed by a chorus of coughing, throats clearing, bones cracking ambivalently to life. Her eyes and mouth were as dry as paper. The room smelled of unwashed skin and stale breath and delousing powder, a biological vapor of human decay, though Sara barely noticed. Some of the smell, she knew, was herself.

Another pitiless sunrise, she thought. Another morning as a citizen of the Homeland.

She had learned not to linger on her bunk. One minute late to the ration line and you could find yourself dragging through the day without a scrap in your stomach. A bowl of corn mush trumped a few slender minutes of tormented half sleep every time. With her stomach growling, she unwrapped her threadbare blanket and swung her weight around, ducking her head, to plant her sneakered feet on the floorboards. She always slept wearing her sneakers, such as they were—a ragged pair of Reeboks inherited from a bunkmate who had died—because footwear was always being stolen. Who took my shoes! a voice would cry out, and the victim would go charging through the lodge, begging and accusing and eventually crumpling to the floor in hopeless tears. I’ll die without them! Somebody help me, please! It was true: a person would die without shoes. Though she worked at the biodiesel plant, word had gotten out in the flatland that Sara was a nurse. She had seen the blackened nuts of frozen toes, the scabs of worms burrowed in; she’d pressed her ear to the sunken chests and listened to the pneumonic rattles of lungs slowly drowning; she’d felt beneath her fingertips the drum-taut bellies of septic appendicitis, or malignancy, or simple starvation; she’d palmed the foreheads blazing with fever and dressed the weeping wounds that would devour the body with rot. And to each person, Sara said, with the taste of a lie in her teeth: You’ll be fine. Not to worry. In another few days you’ll be right as rain, I promise. It wasn’t medical care she was giving; it was a sort of blessing. You will die, and it will hurt, but you will do it here, among your own kind, and the last touch you feel will be one of kindness, because it will be mine.

Because you didn’t want the cols to know you were sick, let alone the redeyes. Nothing was ever said aloud, but people in the flatland had few illusions what the hospital was actually for. Man or woman, old or young, it didn’t matter; you passed through those doors and nobody saw you again. Off to the feedlot you went.

The lodges varied in size; Sara’s was one of the largest. The bunks were stacked four high, twenty bunk lengths in each row, ten rows: eight hundred souls crammed into a room the approximate dimensions of a feed shed. People were rising, jamming their children’s heads into hats, murmuring to themselves, their limbs moving with the heavy docility of livestock as they shambled to the door. Quickly scanning the area to make sure she wouldn’t be observed, Sara knelt by her bunk, lifting the mattress with one hand while sliding the other beneath it. She removed the piece of carefully folded paper from its hiding place and secreted it in the pocket of her tunic. Then she drew herself upright.

“Jackie,” Sara said quietly, “wake up.”

The old woman was curled in a fetal position with the blanket drawn to her chin. Her rheumy eyes stared dully at the wash of gray descending from the high windows of the lodge. Sara had listened to her coughing all night.

“The light,” Jackie said. “It looks like winter.”

Sara felt her forehead. No trace of fever; if anything, the woman felt cold. It was hard to say how old Jackie was. She’d been born in the flats, but her parents had come from somewhere else. Jackie wasn’t one to speak of the past, but Sara knew she had outlived three children and a husband, the last sent to the feedlot for the crime of coming to the aid of a friend who was being sticked by a col.

The room was rapidly emptying out. “Jackie, please.” Sara shook her by the shoulder. “I know you’re tired, but we’ve really got to go.”

The woman’s eyes drew Sara into focus. She trembled with a dry cough.

“I’m sorry, hon,” she said, when the spasm had passed. “I don’t mean to be uncooperative.”

“I just don’t want to miss breakfast. You need to eat.”

“There you go, looking out for me like you always do. Help an old lady down, will you?”

Sara gave Jackie a shoulder for balance and eased her to the floor. Her body was practically weightless, a form of sticks and air. Another cough hacked through her chest, a sound like pebbles being shaken in a sack. She slowly drew herself erect.

“There now.” Jackie took a moment to swallow. Her face was flushed; beads of dampness had risen on her forehead. “All better.”

Sara pulled the blanket off her bunk and draped it over the woman’s shoulders. “It’s going to be a cold one. Stay by me, okay?”

Her lips stretched into a toothless smile. “Where else would I go, hon?”

Sara retained only fleeting images of her capture. A sense of certain death, everything over and done, and then a huge force, merciless in its energy, seizing her bodily. A glimpse of the ground dropping away as the viral hurled her into the air—why hadn’t it just killed her?—and then another massive jolt as she was snatched once more, plucked from the air by the second viral, and then the third, and so on, each aerial vault catapulting her farther away from the walls and lights of the garrison and into the enveloping blackness, her person passed from airborne hand to airborne hand like a ball in a children’s game, all of it beyond the boundaries of her comprehension, and then the final brain-battering impact as she was slammed into the truck. The awful coming to consciousness, like climbing a ladder from hell into hell. Days without water, without food. The endless bone-banging hours and whispered, unanswerable questions. Where were they going? What was happening to them? Nearly all the captives were women, part of the civilian corps stationed at Roswell, though a handful of soldiers were among them. The cries of the injured and frightened. The smothering darkness.

Sara’s mind had not returned to full awareness until their arrival. It was as if time had stretched for the duration of their journey only to snap back into shape when the door opened onto a disorienting splash of daylight. Revealing… what? Half of the truck’s human cargo had perished—a few dead at the outset and filling the compartment with a stink of gray decay, others from injuries sustained in their capture, the rest from some combination of hunger and thirst and suffocating hopelessness. Sara was lying on the floor, as they all were, both the living and the dead, inertly limbed and thick-tongued, her back propped against the wall, her eyes clenched against the unaccustomed brightness. An inversion of her physical proportions seemed to have occurred, such that most of her mass had lodged in her head. Over her lifetime, she had seen a lot of people die; lying among them was a first. The boundary separating her from them seemed a membrane as permeable as gauze. Through stinging slits, she watched as a half dozen expressionless men in ragged khaki and heavy, floor-banging boots boarded the compartment and commenced a perfunctory toting away of the deceased. She gathered that the unstructured weight of a dead body was something these men were accustomed to, its purposeless association of parts warranting no more consideration than any other awkward object a person might be forced to carry. Body after body, unceremoniously hauled away. When they came for her, Sara lifted a hand in protest; she might have said something like “Please” or “Wait” or “You can’t do this.” But these meager efforts were instantly silenced by a hot slap across her cheek, followed, for good measure, by the thrust of a boot that would have caught her midsection had Sara not protectively folded around herself.