Justin Cronin - The Passage

“I thought you might be hungry.”

As she advanced into the room, the smell of warm food hit Michael’s senses like an electric current. He was suddenly ravenous. The girl placed the tray on his lap: some kind of meat in a brown gravy, boiled greens, and, most wondrous of all, a fat slice of buttered bread. Metal utensils lay beside it, wrapped in a rough cloth.

“I’m Michael,” he offered.

The girl nodded faintly, smiling. Why was everybody always smiling?

“I’m Mira.” She was blushing, he saw. What little hair she possessed was so fair it was practically white, like a Little’s. “I was the one who took care of you.”

Michael wondered what this meant exactly. In the hours since he’d awakened, bits of memory had come floating back to him. The sound of voices, shapes and bodies moving around him, water on his body and moistening his mouth.

“I guess I should say thank you.”

“Oh, I was glad to do it.” She studied him for a moment. “You’re really from away, aren’t you?”

“Away?”

She gave a delicate shrug. “There’s here and there’s away.” She lifted her nose toward the tray. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

He started with the bread, soft and wonderful in his mouth, then moved on to the meat and finally the greens, stringy and bitter but still satisfying. While he ate, the girl, who had taken a chair beside his bed, kept her eyes on him, her face rapt, as if each bite he took brought her pleasure as well. What strange people these were.

“Thanks,” he said, when all that remained was a smear of grease on his plate. How old was she, anyway? Sixteen? “That was fantastic.”

“I can get you more. Whatever you want.”

“Really, I couldn’t eat another bite.”

She took the tray from his lap and put it aside. He thought she was preparing to leave but instead she moved toward him again, standing close to the cot, which was positioned high off the floor.

“I like… watching you, Michael.”

He felt his face grow warm. “Mira? It’s Mira, right?”

Nodding, she took his hand from where it lay on the sheet and wrapped it in her own. “I like how you say my name.”

“Yes, well, um-”

But he couldn’t continue; she was suddenly kissing him. A wave of sweet softness filled his mouth; he felt his senses collapsing. Kissing him! Of all things, she was kissing him! And he was kissing her!

“Poppa says I can have a baby,” she was saying, her breath warm on his face. “If I have a baby, I won’t have to go to the ring. Poppa says I can have anyone I want. Can I have you, Michael? Can I have you?”

He was trying to think, to process what she was saying and what was happening, the taste of her, and also the fact that she had now, it seemed, climbed on top of him, straddling him near the waist, her face still pushed into his own-a collision of impulses and sensations that rendered him into a state of mute compliance. A baby? She wanted to have a baby? If she had a baby she didn’t have to wear a ring?

“Mira!”

A moment of complete disorientation; the girl was gone, vaulted away. The room was suddenly full of men, large men in orange jumpsuits, crowding the space with their bulk. One of them caught Mira by the arm. Not a man: Billie.

“I’ll pretend,” she said to the girl, “that I didn’t see this.”

“Listen,” Michael said, finding his voice, “it was my fault, whatever you think you saw-”

Billie nailed him with a cold glare. Behind her, one of the men snickered.

“Don’t even pretend this was your idea.” Billie pointed her eyes at Mira again. “Go home,” she commanded. “Go home now.”

“He’s mine! He’s for me!”

“Mira, enough. I want you to go straight home and wait there. Don’t talk to anyone. Do I make myself understood?”

“He’s not for the ring!” Mira cried. “Poppa said!”

That word again, Michael thought. The ring. What was the ring?

“He will be unless you get out of here. Now go.”

These last words appeared to work; Mira fell silent and, without looking at Michael again, darted behind the screen. The feelings of the last few minutes-desire, confusion, embarrassment-were still whirling inside him while another part of him was also thinking: just my luck. Now she’ll never come back.

“Danny, go bring the truck around back. Tip, you stay with me.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

Billie had withdrawn a small metal tin from somewhere on her person. With thumb and forefinger she pinched a bit of dust from the tin and sprinkled it into a cup of water. She held it out to him.

“Bottoms up.”

“I’m not drinking that.”

She sighed impatiently. “Tip, a little help here?”

The man stepped forward, towering over Michael’s bed.

“Trust me,” Billie said. “You won’t like the taste, but you’ll feel better fast. And no more fat lady.”

The fat lady, thought Michael. The fat lady in the kitchen in the Time Before.

“How did you-?”

“Just drink. We’ll explain on the way.”

There seemed no way to avoid it. Michael tipped the cup to his lips and poured it down. Flyers, it was awful.

“What the hell is that?”

“You don’t want to know.” Billie took the cup from him. “Feeling anything yet?”

He was. It was as if someone had plucked a long, tight string inside him. Waves of bright energy seemed to radiate from his very core. He’d opened his mouth to declare this discovery when a strong spasm shook him, a gigantic, whole-body hiccup.

“That happens the first time or two,” said Billie. “Just breathe.”

Michael hiccuped again. The colors in the room seemed unusually vivid, as if all the surfaces around him were part of this new nexus of energy.

“He better shut up,” warned Tip.

“It’s fantastic,” Michael managed to say. He swallowed hard, pushing the urge to hiccup down inside him.

The second man had returned from the hallway. “We’re losing the light,” he said briskly. “We better get a move on.”

“Get him his clothes.” Billie steadied her gaze on Michael again. “Peter says you’re an engineer. That you can fix anything. Is that true?”

He thought of the words on the paper Sara had slipped him. Tell them nothing .

“Well?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t want you to guess, Michael. It’s important. You can or you can’t.”

He glanced toward the two men, who were looking at him expectantly, as if everything depended on his answer.

“Okay, yes.”

Billie nodded. “Then put your clothes on and do everything we tell you.”

Mausami in darkness, dreaming of birds. She awoke to a quick bright fluttering beneath her heart, like a pair of wings beating inside her.

The baby, she thought. This baby is moving.

The feeling came again-a distinct aquatic pressure, rhythmic, like rings widening on the surface of a pool. As if someone were tapping at a pane of glass inside her. Hello? Hello out there!

She let her hands trace the curve of her belly under her shirt, damp with sweat. A warm contentment flooded her. Hello, she thought. Hello back, you.

The baby was a boy. She’d thought it was a boy since the start, since the first morning at the compost pile when she’d lost her breakfast. She didn’t want to name him yet. It would be harder to lose a baby with a name, that’s what everyone always said; but that wasn’t the real reason, because the baby would be born. The idea was more than hope, more than belief. Mausami knew it for a fact. And when the baby was born, when he’d made his loud and painful entry into the world, Theo would be there, and they would name their son together.