Justin Cronin - The Passage

“What the hell is this place?”

Peter approached the nearest table. Three seated figures occupied it; a fourth lay on the floor beside his overturned stool. Holding up his light stick, Peter bent to the closest body, a woman. She had toppled face-first; her head was turned to the side, her cheekbone resting on the table’s surface. Her hair, bleached of all color, formed a snarl of parched fibers around the knob of her skull. Where her teeth should have been were a pair of dentures, their plastic gums still retaining an incongruously lifelike pinkness. Ropes of golden metal wreathed her neck; the bones of her fingers, where they rested on the tabletop-she seemed to have reached out to stop her fall-were bedecked with rings, fat shining stones of every color. On the table before her was a pair of playing cards, face-up. A six and a jack. It was the same with the others, he saw: each player had two cards showing. There were more cards strewn over the table. Some kind of game, like go-to. In the center lay a heaping mound of more jewelry, rings and watches and bracelets, as well as a pistol and a handful of shells.

“We better keep moving,” Alicia said, coming up beside him.

Something was here, he thought, something he was meant to find.

“It’ll be dark soon, Peter. We have to find those stairs.”

He pulled his gaze away, nodding.

They emerged into an atrium, domed in glass. The sky above was cooling, night falling. Escalators led down to another dark recess; to the right they saw a bank of elevators, and yet another hallway, and more shops.

“Are we going in circles?” This was Michael. “I swear we came right though here.”

Alicia’s face was grave. “Peter-”

“I know, I know.” The moment of decision was upon them: keep looking for the stairs or seek shelter on the ground floor. He turned to face the group, which seemed, suddenly, too small.

“Damnit, not now .”

Mausami pointed toward the windows of the closest shop. “There she is.”

DESERT GIFT EMPORIUM, the sign read. Peter opened the door and moved inside. Amy was facing a wall of shelves by the counter, bearing a display of spherical glass objects. Amy had taken one in her hand. She gave it a hard shake, filling its interior with a flurry of movement.

“Amy, what is that?”

The girl turned, her face bright- I have found something , her eyes seemed to say, something wonderful -and held it out for him to take. An unexpected weight filled his hand: the sphere was full of liquid. Suspended in this fluid, bits of glittering white matter, like flakes of snow, were settling down upon a landscape of tiny buildings. Rising at the center of this miniaturized city was a white tower-the same tower, Peter realized, in which they now stood.

The others had crowded around. “What is it?” Michael asked.

Peter passed it to Sara, who showed it to the others.

“Some kind of model, I think.” Amy’s face was still wearing a look of glowing happiness. “Why did you want us to see this?”

But it was Alicia who provided the answer.

“Peter,” she said, “I think you better look at this.”

She had turned the globe upside down, revealing the words that were printed on its base.

Milagro Hotel and Casino

Las Vegas

The smell had nothing to do with the slims, Michael explained. It was sewer gas. Mostly methane, which was why the place smelled like an outhouse. Somewhere beneath the hotel was a sea of one-hundred-year-old effluent, the pooled waste of an entire city, trapped like a giant fermentation tank.

“We don’t want to be here when that lets go,” he warned. “It’ll be the biggest fart in history. The place will go up like a torch.”

They were on the fifteenth floor of the hotel, watching the night come on. For a few, panicked minutes it had begun to look as if they’d have to take refuge on the hotel’s lower levels. The only stairwell they’d found, on the far side of the casino, was clogged with debris-chairs, tables, mattresses, suitcases, all of it bent and smashed, as if hurled from a great height. It was Hollis who had suggested jimmying open one of the elevators. Assuming the cable was intact, he explained, they could climb a couple of floors, enough to get around the barricade, and take the stairs the rest of the way.

It worked. Then, at the sixteenth floor, they encountered a second barricade. The floor of the stairwell was littered with shell casings. They exited to find themselves in a darkened hallway. Alicia cracked another light stick. The hall was lined with doors; a sign on the wall said AMBASSADOR SUITE LEVEL.

Peter gestured with his rifle to the first door. “Caleb, do your thing.”

The room had two bodies in it, a man and a woman, lying on the bed. They were both wearing bathrobes and slippers; on the table by the bed was an open whiskey bottle, its contents long evaporated to a brown stain, and a plastic syringe. Caleb, voicing the words everyone was thinking, said he wasn’t going to spend the night with a couple of slims, especially slims that had killed themselves. It wasn’t until they had tried five doors that they found one without bodies behind it. Three rooms, two with a pair of beds in each and a third, larger room facing a wall of windows that gazed over the city. Peter stepped to the glass. The last daylight was going, bathing the scene in an orange glow. He wished they were higher, even on the roof, but this would have to do.

“What’s that down there?” Mausami asked. She was pointing across the street, where a massive structure of ribbed steel, four legs that tapered to a narrow tip, rose between the buildings.

“I think it’s the Eiffel Tower,” said Caleb. “I saw a picture of it in a book once.”

Mausami frowned. “Isn’t that in Europe?”

“It’s in Paris.” Michael was kneeling on the floor, unpacking their gear. “Paris, France.”

“So what’s it doing here?”

“How should I know?” Michael shrugged. “Maybe they moved it.”

They watched together as night fell-first the street, then the buildings, then the mountains beyond, all sinking into darkness as if into the waters of a filling tub. The stars were coming out. No one was in the mood to talk; the precariousness of their situation was obvious. Sitting on the sofa, Sara rebandaged Hollis’s wounded arm. Peter could discern, not from anything she said but from what she didn’t, going about her work with tight-lipped efficiency, that she was worried about him.

They divvied up the MREs and lay down to rest. Alicia and Sara volunteered to take first watch. Peter was too exhausted to object. Wake me up when you’re ready, he said. Probably I won’t even sleep.

He didn’t. In the bedroom he lay on the floor, his head propped on his pack, staring at the ceiling. Milagro, he thought. This was Milagro. Amy was sitting in a corner with her back to the wall, holding the glass globe. Every few minutes she would lift it from her lap and give it a shake, holding it close to her face as she watched the snow whirl and settle inside it. At such moments, Peter wondered what he was to her, what all of them were. He had explained to her where they were going and why. But if she knew what was in Colorado, and who had sent the signal, she had made no indication.

At last he gave up trying to sleep and returned to the main room. A wedge of moon had risen over the buildings. Alicia was standing at the window, scanning the street below; Sara was sitting at the small table, playing a hand of solo, her rifle resting across her lap.

“Any sign out there?”

Sara frowned. “Would I be playing cards?”

He took a chair. For a while he said nothing, watching her play.

“Where’d you get the cards?” On the backs was that name, Milagro.