Justin Cronin - The Passage

“David, it’s Brad.”

For a moment David didn’t say anything. “It’s late, Brad. What do you want?”

“Is Lila there?”

“She’s had a long day,” David said firmly. “She’s tired.”

I know she’s tired , Brad thought. I slept in the same bed with her for six years . “Just put her on, will you?”

David sighed and put the phone down with a thump. Wolgast heard the rustling of sheets and then David’s voice, saying to Lila, It’s Brad, for Pete’s sake, tell him to call at a decent hour next time .

“Brad?”

“I’m sorry to call so late. I didn’t realize what time it was.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m in Texas. A motel, actually. I can’t tell you where exactly.”

“Texas.” She paused. “You hate Texas. I don’t think you called to tell me you’re in Texas, did you?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you. I don’t think David’s too happy.”

Lila sighed into the phone. “Oh, it’s all right. We’re still friends, right? David’s a big boy. He can handle it.”

“I got your email.”

“Well.” He heard her breathe. “I kind of figured. I supposed that was why you called. I thought I’d hear from you at some point.”

“Did you do it? Get married.”

“Yes. Last weekend, here at the house. Just a few friends. My parents. They asked for you, actually, wanted to know how you were doing. They always really liked you. You should call them, if you want. I think my dad misses you more than anyone.”

He let the remark pass-more than anyone? More than you, Lila? He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, and the silence was taken up by a picture that formed in his mind, a picture that was actually a memory: Lila in bed, in an old T-shirt and the socks she always wore because her feet got cold no matter the time of year, a pillow wedged between her knees to straighten her spine because of the baby. Their baby. Eva.

“I just wanted to tell you I was.”

Lila’s voice was quiet. “Was what, Brad?”

“That I was… happy for you. Like you asked. I was thinking that you should, you know, quit your job this time. Take some time off, take better care of yourself. I always wondered, you know, if-”

“I will,” Lila cut in. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine, everything is normal.”

Normal. Normal, he thought, was what everything was not. “I just-”

“Please.” She took a deep breath. “You’re making me sad. I have to get up in the morning.”

“Lila-”

“I said I have to go.”

He knew she was crying. She didn’t make a sound to tell him so, but he knew. They were both thinking about Eva, and thinking about Eva would make her cry, which was why they weren’t together anymore, and couldn’t be. How many hours of his life had he held her as she cried? And that was the thing; he’d never known what to say when Lila cried. It was only later-too late-that he’d realized he wasn’t supposed to say anything at all.

“Damn it, Brad. I didn’t want to do this, not now.”

“I’m sorry, Lila. I was just… thinking about her.”

“I know you were. Goddamnit. God damnit . Don’t do this, don’t .”

He heard her sob, and then David’s voice came on the line. “Don’t call back, Brad. I mean it. Understand what I’m saying to you.”

“Fuck you,” Wolgast said.

“Whatever you say. Just don’t bother her anymore. Leave us alone.” And he hung up the phone.

Wolgast looked at his handheld once before hurling it across the room. It made a handsome arc, spinning like a Frisbee, before slapping the wall above the television with the crunch of breaking plastic. He instantly felt sorry. But when he knelt and picked it up, he found that all that had happened was the battery case had popped open, and the thing was perfectly fine.

Wolgast had been to the compound only once, the previous summer, to meet with Colonel Sykes. Not a job interview, exactly; it had been made clear to Wolgast that the NOAH assignment was his if he wanted it. A pair of soldiers drove him in a van with blacked-out windows, but Wolgast could tell they were taking him west from Denver, into the mountains. The drive took six hours, and by the time they pulled into the compound, he’d actually managed to fall asleep. He stepped from the van into the bright sunshine of a summer afternoon. He stretched and looked around. From the topography, he’d have guessed he was somewhere around Ouray. It could have been farther north. The air felt thin and clean in his lungs; he felt the dull throb of a high-altitude headache at the top of his skull.

He was met in the parking lot by a civilian, a compact man dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt rolled at the sleeves, a pair of old-fashioned aviators perched on his wide, faintly bulbous nose. This was Richards.

“Hope the ride wasn’t too bad,” Richards said as they shook hands. Up close Wolgast saw that Richards’s cheeks were pockmarked with old acne scars. “We’re pretty high up here. If you’re not used to it, you’ll want to take it easy.”

Richards escorted Wolgast across the parking area to a building he called the Chalet, which was exactly what it sounded like: a large Tudor structure, three stories tall, with the exposed timbers of an old-fashioned sportsmen’s lodge. The mountains had once been full of these places, Wolgast knew, hulking relics from an era before time-share condos and modern resorts. The building faced an open lawn and beyond, at a hundred yards or so, a cluster of more workaday structures: cinder-block barracks, a half dozen military inflatables, a low-slung building that resembled a roadside motel. Military vehicles, Humvees and smaller jeeps and five-ton trucks, were moving up and down the drive; in the center of the lawn, a group of men with broad chests and trim haircuts, naked to the waist, were sunning themselves on lawn chairs.

Stepping into the Chalet, Wolgast had the disorienting sensation of peeking behind a movie set; the place appeared to have been gutted to the studs, its original architecture replaced by the neutral textures of a modern office building: gray carpeting, institutional lighting, acoustic-tile drop ceilings. He might have been in a dentist’s office or the high-rise off the freeway where he met his accountant once a year to do his taxes. They stopped at the front desk, where Richards asked him to turn over his handheld and his weapon, which he passed to the guard, a kid in camos, who tagged them. There was an elevator, but Richards walked past it and led Wolgast down a narrow hallway to a heavy metal door that opened on a flight of stairs. They ascended to the second floor and made their way down another nondescript hallway to Sykes’s office.

Sykes rose from behind his desk as they entered: a tall, well-built man in uniform, his chest spangled with the various bars and little bits of color that Wolgast had never understood. His office was neat as a pin, its arrangement of objects, right down to the framed photos on his desk, giving the impression of having been placed for maximum efficiency. Resting in the center of the desk was a single manila folder, fat with paper. Wolgast knew it was almost certainly his personnel file, or some version of it.

They shook hands and Sykes offered him coffee, which Wolgast accepted. He wasn’t drowsy but the caffeine, he knew, would help the headache.

“Sorry about the bullshit with the van,” Sykes said, and waved him to a chair. “That’s just how we do things.”

A soldier brought in the coffee, a plastic carafe and two china cups on a tray. Richards remained standing behind Sykes’s desk, his back to the broad windows that looked out on the woodlands that ringed the compound. Sykes explained what he wanted Wolgast to do. It was all quite straightforward, he said, and by now Wolgast knew the basics. The Army needed between ten and twenty death row inmates to serve in the third-stage trials of an experimental drug therapy, code-named “Project NOAH.” In exchange for their consent, the inmates would have their sentences commuted to life without parole. It would be Wolgast’s job to obtain the signatures of these men, nothing more. Everything had been legally vetted, but because the project was a matter of national security, all of these men would be declared legally dead. Thereafter, they would spend the rest of their lives in the care of the federal penal system in a white-collar prison camp, under assumed identities. The men would be chosen based upon a number of factors, but all would be men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five with no living first-degree relatives. Wolgast would report directly to Sykes; he’d have no other contact, though he’d remain, technically, in the employment of the Bureau.