Justin Cronin - The Passage

“You’re bleeding.”

She pointed at his head. “So are you.”

Above them, a second series of explosions shook the air. A huge fireball ascended upward through the hotel, bathing the scene in a furious orange light, sending more flaming debris cascading to the street.

“You think the others got out?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Alicia coughed again, then took a mouthful of water from her canteen and spat onto the ground. “Stay put.”

She scooted around the base of the car, returning a moment later. “I count twelve smokes from here.” She made a vague gesture up and away. “More on the tower on the far side of the street. The fires pushed them back, but that won’t last.”

So there it was. Out in the dark, their rifles gone, trapped between a burning building and the virals. They were resting with their shoulders touching, their backs braced against the car.

Alicia rolled her head to look at him. “That was a good idea. Using the pan. How’d you know it’d work?”

“I didn’t.”

She shook her head. “It was still some cool trick, anyway.” She paused, a look of pain skittering across her face. She closed her eyes and breathed, then: “Ready?”

“The Humvees?”

“It’s our best shot, I think. Stay close to the fires, use them for cover.”

Fires or no, they probably wouldn’t make it ten meters once the virals saw them. From the look of Alicia’s leg, he doubted she’d be able to walk at all. All they had were their blades and the five grenades on Alicia’s belt. But Amy and the others were still out here, maybe; they had to at least try.

She clipped off two grenades and placed them in his hands. “Remember our deal,” she said.

She meant would he kill her, if it came to that. The answer came so easily it surprised him. “Me too. I won’t be one of them.”

Alicia nodded. She had removed a grenade and pulled the pin, ready to throw. “I just want to say, before we do this, I’m glad it’s you.”

“Same here.”

She wiped her eyes with her wrist. “Oh fuck, Peter, now you’ve seen me cry twice. You can’t tell anyone, you can’t.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

A blaze of light filled his eyes. For an instant he actually believed something had happened and she’d accidentally released the grenade-that death was, in the end, an affair of light and silence. But then he heard the roar of the engine and knew that it was a vehicle, coming toward them.

“Get in!” a voice boomed. “Get in the truck!”

They froze.

Alicia’s eyes widened at the unpinned grenade in her hand. “Flyers, what do I do with this?”

“Just throw it!”

She tossed it over the top of the car; Peter yanked her to the ground as the grenade went off with a bang. The lights were closing in. They took off at a hobbling run, Peter’s arm wrapped around Alicia’s waist. Lumbering out of the darkness was a boxy vehicle with a huge plow jutting from the front like a demented smile, the windshield wrapped in a cage of wire; some kind of gun was mounted to the roof, a figure positioned behind it. As Peter watched, the gun sprang to life, shooting a plume of liquid fire over their heads.

They hit the dirt. Peter felt stinging heat on the back of his neck.

“Keep down!” the voice boomed again, and only then did Peter realize the sound was amplified, coming from a horn on the roof of the truck’s cabin. “Move your asses!”

“Well, which is it?” Alicia yelled, her body pressed to the ground. “You can’t have both!”

The truck ground to a halt just a few meters from their heads. Peter pulled Alicia to her feet as the figure on the roof slid down a ladder. A heavy wire mask obscured his face; his body was covered in thick pads. A short-barreled shotgun clung to his leg in a leather holster. Written on the side of the truck were the words NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS.

“In the back! Move it!”

The voice was a woman’s.

“There are eight of us!” Peter cried. “Our friends are still out here!”

But the woman seemed not to hear him or, if she did, to care. She hustled them to the rear of the truck, her movements surprisingly nimble despite her heavy armor. She turned a handle and flung the door wide.

“Lish! Get in!”

The voice was Caleb’s. Everybody was there, splayed out on the floor of the dark compartment. Peter and Alicia clambered inside; the door clanged shut behind them, sealing them in darkness.

With a lurch, the truck began to move.

That awful woman. That awful fat woman in the kitchen, her loose round form spilling over her chair like something melted. The tight, close heat of the room and the taste of her smoke in his nose and mouth and the smell of the woman’s body, the sweat and crumb-filled creases in the rolls of billowing flesh. The smoke curling around her, puffing from her lips as she spoke, as if her words were taking solid form in the air, and his mind telling him, Wake up. You are asleep and dreaming. Wake up, Theo. But the pull of the dream was too strong; the more he struggled, the deeper he was drawn down into it. Like his mind was a well and he was falling, falling into the darkness of his own mind.

Watchoo looking at? Huh? You worthless little shit . The woman watching him and laughing. The boy isn’t just dumb. I tell you, he’s been struck dumb .

He awoke with a jolt, spilling from his dream into the cold reality of his cell. His skin was glazed with rank-smelling sweat. The sweat of his nightmare, which he could no longer recall; all that remained was the feeling of it, like a dark stain spattered over his consciousness.

He rose from his cot and shuffled to the hole. He did his best to aim, listening for the splash of his urine below. He’d begun to look forward to that sound, anticipating it the way he might have waited for a visit from a friend. He’d been waiting for the next thing to happen. He’d been waiting for someone to say something, to tell him why he was here and what they wanted. To tell him why he wasn’t dead. He had come to realize, through the empty days, that he was waiting for pain. The door would open, and men would enter, and then the pain would begin. But the boots came and went-he could make out their scuffed toes through the slot at the bottom of the door-delivering his meals and taking away the empty bowls and saying nothing. He pounded on the door, a slab of cold metal, again and again. What do you want from me, what do you want? But his pleas met only silence.

He didn’t know how many days he’d been here. High out of reach, a dirty window gave a view of nothing. A patch of white sky and at night, the stars. The last thing he remembered was the virals dropping from the roof, and everything turned upside down. He remembered Peter’s face receding, the sound of his name being called, and the whip and snap of his neck as he’d been tossed upward, toward the roof. A last taste of the wind and sun on his face and the gun dropping away. Its slow, pinwheeling passage to the floor below.

And then nothing. The rest was a black space in his memory, like the cratered edges of a missing tooth.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed when he heard footsteps approaching. The slot in the door opened and a bowl slid through, across the floor. The same watery soup he’d eaten meal after meal. Sometimes there was a little joint of meat in it, sometimes just a marrowed bone for him to suck. At the beginning he had decided not to eat, to see what they, whoever they were, would do. But this had lasted only a day before his hunger had gotten the better of him.

“How you feeling?”

Theo’s tongue was thick in his mouth. “Fuck off.”