Justin Cronin - The Passage

This place. The Haven. It made her so tired. All she could do was sleep. And eat. It was the baby, of course; it was the baby that made her think about eating all the time. After all the hardtack and bean paste, and that awful strange food they’d found in the bunker-hundred-year-old goop vacuumed in plastic; it was a miracle they hadn’t all poisoned themselves-how amazing to have real food. Beef and milk. Bread and cheese. Actual butter so creamy it made the top of her throat tickle. She shoveled it in, then licked her fingers clean. She could have stayed in this place forever, just for the food.

They’d all felt it right away: something wasn’t right. Last night, all those women crowding around her, holding babies or pregnant themselves-some actually both-their faces beaming with a sisterly glow at the discovery that she was pregnant too. A baby! How wonderful! When was she due? Was it her first? Were any of the other women in their group also with child? It hadn’t occurred to her at the time to wonder how they’d known-she was barely showing, after all-nor why none had asked who the father was or mentioned the fathers of their own children.

The sun was down. The last thing Mausami remembered was lying down for a nap. Peter and the others were probably in the other hut, deciding what to do. The baby was moving again, flipping around inside her. She lay with her eyes closed and let the sensation fill her. Standing the Watch: it seemed like years ago. A different life. That was what happened, she knew, when a person had a baby. This strange new being grew inside you and by the time it was all over, you were someone different, too.

Suddenly she realized: she wasn’t alone.

Amy was sitting on the bunk next to hers. Spooky, the way she could make herself invisible like that. Mausami rolled to face her, tucking her knees to her chest as the baby went thump-thump inside her.

“Hey,” Maus said, and yawned. “I guess I took a little nap there.”

Everybody was always talking that way around Amy, stating the obvious, filling the silence of the girl’s half of the conversation. It was a little unnerving, the way she looked at you with that intense gaze, as if she were reading your thoughts. Which was when Mausami realized what the girl was really looking at.

“Oh. I get it,” she said. “You want to feel it?”

Amy cocked her head, uncertain.

“You can if you want. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Amy rose, taking a place on the edge of Mausami’s cot. Mausami held her hand and guided it to the curve of her belly. The girl’s hand was warm and a little damp; the tips of her fingers were surprisingly soft, not like Mausami’s, which were callused from years of the bow.

“Just wait a minute. He was flipping around in there a second ago.”

A bright flicker of movement. Amy drew her hand away quickly, startled.

“You feel that?” Amy’s eyes were wide with pleasant shock. “It’s okay, that’s what they do. Here-” She took Amy’s hand and pressed it to her belly once more. At once the baby flipped and kicked. “Whoa, that was a strong one.”

Amy was smiling too now. How strange and wonderful, Mausami thought, in the midst of everything, all that had happened, to feel a baby moving inside her. A new life, a new person, coming into the world.

Mausami heard it then. Two words.

He’s here .

She yanked her hand away, scurrying up the cot so she was sitting with her back pushed to the wall. The girl was looking at her with a penetrating stare, her eyes filling Maus’s vision like two shining beams.

“How did you do that?” She was shaking; she thought she might be ill.

He’s in the dream. With Babcock. With the Many .

“Who’s here, Amy?”

Theo. Theo is here .

He was Babcock and he was forever. He was one of Twelve and also the Other, the one above and behind, the Zero. He was the night of nights and he had been Babcock before he became what he was. Before the great hunger that was like time itself inside him, a current in the blood, endless and needful, infinite and without border, a dark wing spreading over the world.

He was made of Many. A thousand-thousand-thousand scattered over the night sky, like the stars. He was one of Twelve and also the Other, the Zero, but his children were within him also, the ones that carried the seed of his blood, one seed of Twelve; they moved as he moved, they thought as he thought, in their minds was an empty space of forgetting in which he lay, each to a one, saying, You will not die. You are a part of me, as I am a part of you. You will drink the blood of the world and fill me up .

They were his to command. When they ate, he ate. When they slept, he slept. They were the We, the Babcock, and they were forever as he was forever, all part of the Twelve and the Other, the Zero. They dreamed his dark dream with him.

He remembered a time, before he Became. The time of the little house, in the place called Desert Wells. The time of pain and silence and the woman, his mother, the mother of Babcock. He remembered small things-textures, sensations, visions. A box of golden sunlight falling on a square of carpet. A worn place on the stoop that fit his sneakered foot just so, and the ridges of rust on the rail that cut the skin of his fingers. He remembered his fingers. He remembered the smell of his mother’s cigarettes in the kitchen where she talked and watched her stories, and the people on the television, their faces huge and close, their eyes wide and wet, the women with their lips painted and shimmering, like glossy pieces of fruit. And her voice, always her voice:

Be quiet now, goddamnit. Cain’t you see I’m trying to watch this? You make such a goddamn racket, it’s a wonder I don’t lose my goddamn mind .

He remembered being quiet, so quiet.

He remembered her hands, Babcock’s mother’s hands, and the starry bursts of pain when she struck him, struck him again. He remembered flying, his body lifted on a cloud of pain, and the hitting and the slapping and the burning. Always the burning. Don’t you cry now. You be a man. You cry and I’ll give you something to cry about, so much the worse for you , Giles Babcock . Her smoky breath, close to his face. The look of the red-hot tip of her cigarette where she rolled it against the skin of his hand, and the crisp wet sound of its burning, like cereal when he poured milk into it, the same crackle and pop. The smell of it mingling with the jets of smoke that puffed from her nostrils. And the way the words all stopped up inside him, so that the pain could end-so he could be a man, as she said.

It was her voice he remembered most of all. Babcock’s mother’s voice. His love for her was like a room without doors, filled with the scraping sound of her words, her talk-talk-talk. Taunting him, tearing into him, like the knife he took from the drawer that day as she sat at the table in the kitchen of the little house in the place called Desert Wells, talking and laughing and laughing and talking and eating her mouthfuls of smoke.

The boy isn’t just dumb. I tell you, he’s been struck dumb .

He was happy, so happy, he’d never felt such happiness in his life as the knife passed into her, the white skin of her throat, the smooth outer layer and the hard gristle below. And as he dug and pushed with his blade, the love he felt for her lifted from his mind so that he could see what she was at last-that she was a being of flesh and blood and bone. All her words and talk-talk-talk moving inside him, filling him up to bursting. They tasted like blood in his mouth, sweet living things.

They sent him away. He wasn’t a boy after all, he was a man; he was a man with a mind and a knife, and they told him to die-die, Babcock, for what you have done. He didn’t want to die, not then, not ever. And after-after the man, Wolgast, had come to where he was, like a thing foretold; and after the doctors and the sickness and the Becoming, that he should be one of Twelve, the Babcock-Morrison-Chávez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Lambright-Martínez-Reinhardt-Carter-one of Twelve and also the Other, the Zero-he had taken the rest the same way, drinking their words from them, their dying cries like soft morsels in his mouth. And the ones he did not kill but merely sipped, the one of ten, as the tide of his own blood dictated, became his own, joining to him in mind. His children. His great and fearful company. The Many. The We of Babcock.