Justin Cronin - The Passage

But it was, Peter thought. It was.

The answer had come to Michael just after dawn: 1,432 megahertz-of course .

The bandwidth was officially unassigned, because it really had been assigned-to the military. A short-range digital signal, cycling every ninety minutes, looking for its mainframe.

And all night long, the signal had been growing stronger. It was practically on their doorstep.

The encryption would be the easy part. The trick would be finding the handshake, broadcasting the one reply that would cause the signal’s transmitter, wherever and whatever it was, to link up with the mainframe. Once he did this, the rest would be just a question of uploading the data.

So what was the signal looking for? What was the digital answer to the question it was posing, every ninety minutes?

Something Elton had said, just before he’d gone to bed: Someone’s calling us .

That was when he’d figured it out.

He knew just what he needed. The Lighthouse was full of all kinds of crap, stored in bins on the shelves; there was at least one Army handheld that he knew of. They had some old lithium cells that could still hold a charge-not more than a few minutes’ worth, but that was all he’d need. He worked quickly, keeping an eye on the clock, waiting for the next ninety-minute interval to pass so he could grab the signal. Dimly he sensed some kind of commotion going on outside, but who knew what that was. He could jack the handheld into the computer, snatch the signal as it came in, capture its embedded ID, and program the handheld from the panel.

Elton was asleep, snoring on his cratered cot in the back of the Lighthouse. Flyers, if the old man didn’t take a bath soon, Michael didn’t know what he’d do. The whole place stank like socks.

By the time he was through it was almost half-day. How long had he been working, barely rising from his chair? After that whole thing with Mausami, he’d been too restless to sleep and returned to the hut; that might have been ten hours ago. His ass felt like he’d been sitting that long at least. He really had to pee.

He stepped from the hut, too quickly, unprepared for the blast of daylight that filled his eyes.

“Michael!”

Jacob Curtis, Gabe’s boy. Michael saw him jogging up the path with a lumbering gate, waving his arms. Michael took a breath to prepare himself. It was hardly the boy’s fault, but talking to Jacob could be a trial. Before Gabe had gotten sick, he would sometimes bring Jacob around the Lighthouse, asking Michael if he could find something for the boy to do to make himself useful. Michael had done his best, but there really wasn’t much Jacob could understand. Whole days could be swallowed up by explaining the simplest tasks to him.

He came to a halt before Michael, dropping his hands to his knees and heaving for breath. Despite his size, his movements possessed a childlike disorderliness, the parts never quite seeming in sync. “Michael,” he gulped, “Michael-”

“Easy, Jacob. Slow down.”

The boy was flapping a hand before his face, as if to push more oxygen into his lungs. Michael couldn’t tell if he was upset or simply excited. “I want to see… Sara,” he gasped.

Michael told him she wasn’t there. “Did you try at the house?”

“She’s not there either!” Jacob lifted his face. His eyes were very wide. “I saw her, Michael.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t find her.”

“Not her . The other one . I was sleeping and I saw her!”

Jacob didn’t always make perfect sense, but Michael had never seen the boy like this. His face wore a look of complete panic.

“Did something happen to your dad, Jacob? Is he okay?”

A frown creased the boy’s damp face. “Oh. He died.”

“Gabe’s dead?”

Jacob’s tone was disturbingly matter-of-fact; he might have been telling Michael what the weather was. “He died and he won’t wake up anymore.”

“Flyers, Jacob. I’m sorry.”

That was when Michael saw Mar hurrying down the path. He felt a gush of relief.

“Jacob, where have you been?” The woman stopped before them. “How many times do I have to tell you? You can’t run off like that, you can’t .”

The boy backed away, his long arms flailing. “I have to find Sara!”

“Jacob!”

Her voice seemed to hit him like an arrow: he froze where he stood, though his face was still animated by a strange, unknowable dread. His mouth was open and he was breathing fast. Mar moved toward him cautiously, as if she were approaching some large, unpredictable animal.

“Jacob, look at me.”

“Mama-”

“Hush now. No more talk. Look at me.” She reached up to his face, placing a hand on each of his cheeks, focusing her eyes on his face.

“I saw her, Mama.”

“I know you did. But it was just a dream, Jacob, that’s all. Don’t you remember? We went back to the house and I put you to bed and you were sleeping.”

“I was?”

“Yes, honey, you were. It was nothing, just a dream.” Jacob was breathing more easily now, his body stilling beneath his mother’s touch. “I want you to go home now and wait for me there. No more looking for Sara. Can you do that for me?”

“But, Mama-”

“No buts, Jacob. Can you do as I ask?”

Reluctantly, Jacob nodded.

“That’s my good boy.” Mar stepped back, releasing him. “Straight home, now.”

The boy looked at Michael once, a quick, furtive glance, and jogged away.

Finally Mar turned to Michael. “It always works when he gets like this,” she said with a weary shrug. “It’s the only thing that does.”

“I heard about Gabe,” he managed. “I’m sorry.”

Mar’s eyes looked as if she had cried so much there were no tears left in her at all. “Thank you, Michael. I think Jacob wanted to see Sara because she was there, at the end. She was a good friend. To all of us.” Mar halted a moment, a look of pain skittering across her face. But she shook her head, as if to ward this thought away. “If you can get her a message, tell her we’re all thinking of her. I don’t think I had a chance to properly thank her. Will you do that?”

“I’m sure she’s around here someplace. Did you check the Infirmary?”

“Of course she’s in the Infirmary. That was the first place Jacob went.”

“I don’t understand. If Sara’s in the Infirmary, why didn’t he find her?”

Mar was looking at him strangely. “Because of the quarantine, of course.”

“Quarantine?”

Mar’s face fell. “Michael, where have you been?”

Alicia didn’t find him, after all; it was the other way around. Peter knew just where she’d be.

She was sitting in a wedge of shade outside the Colonel’s hut, her back braced against a stack of wood, knees pulled to her chest. At the sound of Peter’s approach, she looked up, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Oh, damn, damn,” she said.

He took a seat beside her on the ground. “It’s okay.”

Alicia sighed bitterly. “No it isn’t. You tell anyone you saw me like this I will blade you, Peter.”

They sat in silence for a while. The day was cloudy, cast with a pale and smoky light, carrying with it a strong, acrid odor-the body detail, burning the corpses outside the Wall.

“You know, I always wondered something,” Peter said. “Why did we call him the Colonel?”

“Because that was his name. He didn’t have another one.”

“Why do you think he went out there? He didn’t seem like the type. To, you know, let it go like that.”

But Alicia didn’t respond. Her relationship with the Colonel was something she rarely spoke of, and never in detail. It was a region of her life, perhaps the one region, that she withheld from Peter’s view. And yet its presence was something he was always aware of. He did not believe she thought of the Colonel as a father-Peter had never detected any trace of that kind of warmth between them. On those rare occasions when his name arose, or he appeared on the catwalk at night, Peter felt a rigidity come into her, a cold distance. It was nothing overt, and probably he was the only person who would have noticed. But whatever the Colonel had been to her, their bond was a fact; he understood that her tears were for him.