Justin Cronin - The Twelve

Now, the width of one and a half human lifetimes later, his grand design coming to fruition and the last of humanity having been gathered at his feet (the Kerrville thing, like the Sergio thing, being a small but significant irritant, a pea under the mattress of the Plan), here was Wilkes with his omnipresent clipboard and a facial expression, evidently, of not-good news.

“I just thought you should know the gathering party’s back. What’s, ah, left of it.”

With this disconcerting introduction, Wilkes withdrew the top sheet of paper from his clipboard and placed it on Guilder’s desk and backed away, as if he were happy to be rid of the thing.

Guilder scanned it quickly. “What the hell, Fred.”

“I guess you could say things didn’t go exactly as planned.”

“ Nobody ? Not one of them? What is wrong with these people?”

Wilkes gestured toward the paper. “The flow of oil has been at least temporarily disrupted. That’s a plus. It opens a lot of doors.”

But Guilder was beyond consolation. First Kearney, now this. There had been a time when scooping up survivors had proved a relatively clear-cut undertaking. The woman appeared; the gates swung open, the wheel of the vault began to turn, the drawbridge descended over the moat; the woman did her stuff, like a lion tamer at the circus; and the next thing you knew, the trucks were galloping back to Iowa, packed with human cargo. The Kentucky caves. That island in Lake Michigan. The abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. More recently, the California raid had been a bona-fide bonanza, fifty-six survivors taken, most of whom had marched like lambs into the truck once the power was cut and the terms were set. (Get in or you’re meat.) The usual attrition rate—some died en route, others failed to adapt to their new circumstances—but a solid haul nonetheless.

Since then, it had been one out-of-control bloodbath after another, starting with Roswell.

“Apparently there wasn’t much of a negotiation phase. The convoy was pretty heavily armed.”

“I don’t care if they had a nuclear missile. We knew that going in. These are Texans .”

“In a manner of speaking, that’s true.”

“We’re about to go on-line here, and this is what you tell me? We need bodies, Fred. Living, breathing bodies. Can’t she control these things anymore?”

“We could go in the old-fashioned way. I said so from the start. We’d take some casualties, but if we keep hitting their oil supply, sooner or later their defenses will weaken.”

“We collect people, Fred. We don’t lose them. Have I failed to make myself clear? Can you not do basic math? People are the point .”

Wilkes shrugged defensively. “You want to talk to her?”

Guilder rubbed his eyes. He supposed he’d have to make the gesture, but talking to Lila was like playing handball by yourself: the ball came right back no matter how hard you slapped it. One of the most significant aggravations of the job was dealing with the woman’s peculiar fantasies, a wall of delusion that Guilder could penetrate only by the roughest sort of insistence. Of all the experts he’d harvested through the years, why hadn’t he thought to get a shrink? Keeping her in babies made her calm; the woman’s special talent was an indispensable commodity that needed to be managed with care. But in the throes of motherhood she was virtually unreachable, and Guilder worried about further damaging her fragile psyche.

Because that was the thing about Lila. Of everyone who had tasted the blood, only she was endowed with the ability to control the virals.

More than control: in Lila’s presence, they became like pets, docile and even affectionate. The feeling was a two-way street; put the woman within two hundred yards of the feedlot, and she turned into a purring cat with a litter of kittens. The effect was nothing Guilder had been able to replicate on his own, though Lord knows he’d tried. Back in the early days, he’d been downright obsessed. Time after time he’d donned the pads and gone into the feedlot, thinking that if he could only find the right mental trick or ingratiating body language or soothing tone of voice they’d fall at his knees the way they did with her, like dogs waiting for their ears to be scratched. But this never happened. They’d tolerate his presence for a whopping three seconds before one of them tossed him in the air—he didn’t register as food, more like a man-sized toy—and the next thing Guilder knew he’d be flying around the place until somebody hit the lights to get him out.

He’d long since stopped trying, of course. The sight of Horace Guilder, Director of the Homeland, being batted around like a beach ball wasn’t exactly the kind of confidence-inspiring image he wanted to broadcast. Nor could anybody on the medical staff explain to his satisfaction just what it was that made Lila different. Her thymus cycled faster, needing the blood every seven days, and her eyes looked different, displaying none of the retinal stain that marked the senior staffers’. But her sensitivity to light was just as pronounced, and as far as Suresh could tell, the virus in her blood was the same as theirs. In the end, the man had thrown up his hands and attributed her abilities to the less than subtle fact that Lila was a woman—the only woman in the fold, which was how Guilder wanted it.

Maybe that’s all there is to it , Suresh had said. Maybe they just think she’s their mother .

Guilder became aware that Wilkes was looking at him. What had they been talking about? Lila? No, Texas. But Wilkes had told him there was something else.

“Which brings me to, um, the second thing.” And that was when Wilkes told Guilder about the bombing in the market.

Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!

“I know, I know,” Wilkes said, shaking his head in his Wilkesian way. “Not the best turn of events.”

“He’s one man. One!”

Guilder’s face, his whole body, tingled with righteous anger. Another volleying burp arose. He wanted vengeance. He wanted things to settle the hell down. He wanted this Sergio, whoever he was, with his head on a goddamn pike .

“We’ve got people working on it. HR is asking around, and we’ve offered double rations to anybody who comes forward with a solid lead. Not everyone down the hill is so enamored.”

“And somebody please tell me how he’s moving through the flatland like it’s a goddamn expressway? Do we not have patrols? Do we not have checkpoints? Can somebody please shed some light on this little detail?”

“We have a theory about that. The evidence points to an organization that’s classically cellular. Clusters of just a few individuals operating within a loose operational framework.”

“I am perfectly aware what a terrorist cell is, Fred.”

His chief of staff made a flustered gesture with his hands. “I’m simply saying that looking for one man may not be the answer. That it’s the idea of Sergio, not Sergio per se, that we’re up against. If you follow me.”

Guilder did, and it wasn’t a cheering thought. He’d been down this road before, first in Iraq and Afghanistan and then Saudi, after the coup. You lopped off the head but the body didn’t die; it simply grew another head. The only useful strategy in these situations was psychological. Killing the body was never enough. You had to kill the spirit.

“How many do we have in custody?”

Thus more paper. Guilder read the full report. According to eyewitnesses, the market bomber had been a female agricultural worker in her thirties. There’d never been any problems with her; by all accounts she was as meek as a lamb, a quality that to a disconcerting extent matched the profiles of other suicide bombers. She had no living family except for a sister; her husband and son had died six years ago, in an outbreak of salmonella. She’d apparently gotten past the checkpoints disguised in a col’s uniform (the original wearer’s body had been found stuffed into a dumpster, her throat slashed, one arm mysteriously severed at the elbow), though where she’d procured the explosives was unknown. None had been reported missing from the armory or the construction depot, but a full inventory had yet to be completed. Nine of her lodgemates plus her sister’s family, including two young children, had been detained for questioning.