Justin Cronin - The Passage

The barrel had begun to waver, driven by the current of Alicia’s rage. “Caleb mattered! He was worth more than your whole fucking Haven! He never had anyone! I stood for him! I stood for him!”

Alicia howled, a deep animal sound of pain, and then she pulled the trigger-but no shot came. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. “Fuck!” She squeezed again and again; the gun was empty. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Then she turned to Peter, the useless pistol dropping from her hand, leaned into his chest, and sobbed.

In the morning, Olson was gone. Tracks led away into the culvert; Peter didn’t have to look to know which way he was headed.

“Should we go look for him?” Sara asked.

They were standing by the empty train, assembling the last of their gear.

Peter shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any point.”

They gathered around the place where they had buried Caleb, in the shade of a cottonwood. They’d marked the spot with a scrap of metal Michael had popped from the hull and etched with the tip of a screwdriver, then affixed to the trunk of the tree with sheet-metal screws.

CALEB JONES

HIGHTOP

ONE OF US

Everyone was there except Amy, who was standing apart, in the tall grass. Beside Peter were Maus and Theo. Mausami was leaning on a crutch Michael had fashioned from a length of pipe; Sara had examined her wound and said she could travel, as long as they didn’t push it. Theo had slept straight through the night, awakening at dawn, and now seemed if not better, then at least on the mend. Yet, standing beside him, Peter could feel something missing in his brother; something had changed, or broken, or been taken away. Something had been stolen from him, in that cell. In the dream. With Babcock.

But it was Alicia who worried him most of all. She was standing at the foot of the grave with Michael, a shotgun cradled across her chest, her face still swollen from crying. For a long time, the rest of the day and all that night, she had said almost nothing. Anyone else might have supposed she was simply grieving for Caleb, but Peter knew differently. She had loved the boy, and that was a part of it. They all had, and Caleb’s absence felt not just strange but wrong, as if a piece of them had been cut away. But what Peter saw now, as he looked into Alicia’s eyes, was a deeper kind of pain. It was not her fault that Caleb was dead, and Peter had told her so. Still, she believed she had failed him. Killing Olson would not have solved anything, though Peter couldn’t help but think it might have helped. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t tried harder-tried at all, really-to take Jude’s gun away from her.

Peter realized he was waiting out of habit for his brother to speak, to issue the command that would set the day in motion. When he didn’t, Peter hitched up his pack and spoke.

“Well,” he said, his throat thick, “we should probably get going. Use the daylight.”

“Forty million smokes out there,” Michael said glumly. “What chance do we have on foot?”

Amy stepped into the circle then.

“He’s wrong,” she said.

For a moment no one spoke. None of them seemed to know where to look-at Amy, at one another-a flurry of startled and amazed glances passing around the circle.

“She can talk?” Alicia said.

Peter stepped gingerly toward her. Amy’s face seemed different to him, now that he had heard her voice. It was as if she were suddenly present, fully among them.

“What did you say?”

“Michael is wrong,” the girl stated. Her voice was neither a woman’s nor a child’s but something in between. She spoke flatly, without intonation, as if she were reading the words from a book. “There aren’t forty million.”

Peter wanted to laugh or cry, he didn’t know which. After everything, for her to speak now!

“Amy, why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I am sorry. I think I had forgotten how.” She was frowning inwardly, as if puzzling over this thought. “But now I have remembered.”

Everyone fell silent again, gaping at her in astonishment.

“So, if there aren’t forty million,” Michael ventured, “how many are there?”

She lifted her eyes to them all.

“Twelve,” said Amy.

From the Journal of Sara Fisher (“The Book of Sara”)

Presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period

Center for the Study of Human Cultures and Conflicts

University of New South Wales, Indo-Australian Republic

April 16-21, 1003 A.V.

[Excerpt begins.]

… and that was when we found the orchard-a welcome sight, since none of us has had anything like enough to eat since three days ago, when Hollis shot the deer. Now we are loaded up with apples. They’re small and wormy and if you eat too many of them all at once you get cramps, but it’s good to have a full belly again. We’re bedding down tonight in a rusted metal shed that’s full of old cars and stinks like pigeons. It seems we’ve lost the road for good now, but Peter says that if we continue walking straight east, we should hit Highway 15 in a day or so. The map we found at the gas station in Caliente is all we have to go by .

Amy is talking a little bit more every day. It all still seems new to her, just to have someone to talk to, and sometimes she seems to struggle for the words, like she’s reading a book in her mind and looking for the right ones. But I can tell that talking makes her happy. She likes to use our names a lot, even when it’s clear who she’s speaking to, which sounds funny but by now we are all used to it and even doing it ourselves. (Yesterday she saw me stepping behind a bush and asked me what I was doing, and when I said, I have to pee, she beamed like I’d just given her the best news in the world and said, too loudly, I have to pee also, Sara. Michael burst out laughing, but Amy didn’t seem to mind, and when we were done with our business she said, very politely-she is always polite-I’d forgotten that was what it’s called. Thank you for peeing with me, Sara.)

Which isn’t to say that we always understand her, because half the time we don’t. Michael says it reminds him of talking to Auntie only worse, because with Auntie you always knew she was fooling with you. Amy doesn’t appear to remember anything about where she comes from, except that it was a place with mountains and that it snowed there, which could be Colorado, though we don’t really know. She doesn’t seem afraid of the virals at all, not even the ones, like Babcock, who she calls the Twelve. When Peter asked her what she did in the ring to make him not kill Theo, Amy shrugged and said, as if this were nothing, I asked him to please not do it. I didn’t like that one, she said. He’s full of bad dreams. I thought it would be better to use my please and thank you .

A viral, and she actually said please!

But the thing that sticks in my mind most of all is what happened when Michael asked her how she’d known to blow the coupler. A man named Gus told me, Amy said. I never even knew that Gus was on the train, but Peter explained what had happened to Gus and Billie, that they’d been killed by the virals, and Amy said, nodding, That was when. Peter got very quiet for a moment, staring at her. What do you mean that was when? he said, and Amy answered, That was when he told me, after he’d fallen off the train. The virals didn’t kill him, I think he broke his neck. But he was around for a little bit after. He was the one who put the bomb between the cars. He saw what was going to happen to the train and thought someone should know .