Justin Cronin - The Twelve

“Oh,” Sara cried. She let the basket drop, clutching her stomach. “Oh. Oh.”

She melted, moaning, to her knees. For a moment it seemed that amid the noise of the grinders her demonstration had gone unnoticed. She amplified her cries, curling her legs to her chest, hugging her midriff.

“Sara, what is it?” One of the other women—Constance Chou—was crouching over her.

“It hurts! It hurts!”

“Get up or they’ll see you!”

Another voice broke through: Vale’s. “What’s going on here?”

Constance backed away. “I don’t know, sir. She just… collapsed.”

“Fisher? What’s wrong with you?”

Sara didn’t answer, just kept up with the moaning, rocking at the waist and throwing in a few spastic kicks for good measure. A circle of onlookers had formed around her. “Appendix,” she said.

“What did you say?”

She clenched her face with manufactured pain. “I think… it’s my… appendix.”

Whistler charged through the crowd, pushing onlookers aside with her baton. “What’s her problem?”

Vale was scratching his head. “She says something’s wrong with her pendix.”

“What are you people looking at?” Whistler barked. “Get back to work.” Then, to Vale: “What do you want to do with her?”

“Fisher, can you walk?”

“Please,” she gasped. “I need a doctor.”

“She says she needs a doctor,” Vale reported.

“Yeah, I heard that, Vale.” The woman huffed a sigh. “All right, let’s get her out of here.”

They helped her to a pickup parked behind the plant and laid her in the back. Sara kept up the rocking and moaning. A brief negotiation ensued: should one of them take her or should they call for a driver?

“Fuck it, I’ll take her,” Whistler said. “Knowing you, you’ll dither all day.”

The trip to the hospital took ten minutes; Sara used them to formulate a plan. All she’d been thinking about was getting to the hospital, to find Jackie before the van took her away; she hadn’t considered the next step. It seemed to her now that she held only two good cards. First, she wasn’t really sick; once she experienced a miraculous recovery, it didn’t seem likely that they’d ship a perfectly able-bodied woman off to the feedlot. Second, she was a nurse. Sara wasn’t sure how she’d put this fact to use—she’d have to improvise—but she might be able to use her medical knowledge to convince the person in charge that Jackie wasn’t as ill as she appeared.

Or maybe nothing she did would matter. Maybe once she passed through the hospital doors, she’d never come out. This prospect, as she weighed it, did not appear entirely bad, thus giving her a third card to play: the card of not caring anymore if she lived or died.

Whistler pulled up to the hospital entrance, strode back to the cargo bed, and drew down the tailgate.

“Out with you. Let’s go.”

“I don’t think I can walk.”

“Well, you’ll have to try, because I’m not carrying you.”

Sara sat up. The sun had peeked from behind the clouds, sharpening the scene with its cold brightness. The hospital was a three-story brick building, part of a cluster of low, workaday structures at the southern edge of the flatland. At a distance of twenty yards stood one of three major HR substations. A dozen cols guarded the entrance, which was flanked by concrete barricades.

“Am I talking to myself here?”

She was; Sara was barely listening. She was focused on the car, a small sedan of the type the cols used to move among the lodges. It was headed toward them at high speed, dragging a boiling plume of dust. Sara clambered down from the bed. Simultaneously, she sensed a figure rushing at her from behind. The car was bearing down, its speed unabated. There was something odd about it, and not just the wild velocity of its approach. The windows were blacked out, obscuring the driver; something was written on the hood, the letters scrawled in streaks of white paint.

As the vehicle sailed toward the barricades, somebody smashed her from behind. In the next instant she was flat on the ground, her body smothered, as the truck exploded with a blast of sound and a wave of superheated pressure she didn’t believe could actually exist in the world. The air was sucked from her lungs. Things were falling. Things were sailing through the air and impacting like meteors around her, flaming, heavy things. There was a screeching sound of metal, a rain of tinkling glass. The world was noise and heat and the weight of a body on top of her, and then a sudden silence and a wash of warm breath close to her ear and a voice saying:

“Come with me now. Do exactly as I say.”

Sara was on her feet. A woman, no one she knew, was pulling her by the hand against the inertia of her wonderment. Something had happened to her hearing, bathing the scene around her in a milky unreality. The substation was a smoking crater. The pickup was gone; it lay on its side where the entrance to the hospital was, or had been. Something wet was on Sara’s hands and face. Blood. She was covered in it. And sticky things, biological things, and a fine, jeweled dust she realized was composed of tiny bits of glass. How amazing, she thought, how very amazing everything was, especially what had happened to Whistler. It was striking, what a body looked like when it wasn’t one thing anymore but had been dispersed in recognizably human pieces over a wide area. Who would have guessed that when a body blew apart, as had evidently happened, it actually did that: it blew apart.

She broke away, first her vision and then the rest of her; the woman was running and so was she, running and also being dragged, the energy of her rescuer—for Sara understood that this woman had protected her from the blast—passing into her body through their gripping hands. Behind them the silence had given way to a chorus of screams and shouts, a weirdly musical sound, and the woman skidded to a halt behind a building that somehow still stood (hadn’t all the buildings in the world just blown up?) and dropped on the ground. In her hand was a kind of hook, and with this hook she drew aside the manhole cover.

“Get in.”

Sara did. She got in. She lowered herself into the hole where a ladder waited. Something smelled bad. Something smelled like shit because it was. As Sara’s feet touched the bottom, her sneakers filling with the horrible water, the woman reached over her head and resealed the manhole with a clank, plunging Sara into an absolute darkness. Only then did it occur to her in fullest measure that she had been in an explosion of many deaths and much destruction and that in its immediate aftermath, an interval of probably less than a minute, she had given herself completely to a woman she did not know, and that this woman had whisked her into a kind of nonexistence: that Sara had, in effect, disappeared.

“Wait.”

The glow of a small bluish flame igniting: the woman was holding a lighter, touching it to the head of a torch. A blaze leapt forth, illuminating her face. Somewhere in her twenties, with a long neck and small, dark eyes, full of intensity. There was something familiar about her, but Sara couldn’t fix her mind on it.

“No more talking. Can you run?”

Sara nodded yes.

“Come on.”

The woman began to move at a trot down the sewer pipe, Sara following. This went on for some time. At each of many intersections, the woman decisively chose a direction. Sara had begun to take stock of her injuries. The explosion had not occurred without effect. There was a variety to her pains, some of them quite sharp, others more like a generally dispersed thudding. Yet none was so severe as to prevent her from keeping up with the woman. After more time had passed, Sara realized that the distance they had traveled must have surely placed them beyond the wired boundaries of the Homeland. They were escaping! They were free! A ring of light appeared before them: an exit. Beyond it lay the world—a dangerous world, a lethal world where virals roamed unchecked, but even so it loomed before her like a golden promise, and she stepped into the light.