Justin Cronin - The Passage

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Vorhees explained. “And this bunker of yours alone sounds like it would be worth the trip. But I’ll have to take this up the line, and that means Division. It would be next spring at the earliest before we could think about making such a trip. That’s all uncharted ground.”

“I’m not sure they can wait that long.”

“Well, they’ll have to. My biggest worry is getting out of this valley before the snow hits. This rain doesn’t let up, we could get stuck here. There’s only enough fuel to keep our lights going another thirty days.”

“What I want to know more about is this place, the Haven,” Greer cut in. Outside the walls of the tent and in the presence of any of the men, Greer’s and Vorhees’s relationship was rigidly formal; but inside, as they were now, they visibly relaxed into friendship. Greer looked at the general, his eyes darkening thoughtfully. “Sounds a little like those folks in Oklahoma.”

“What folks?” Peter asked.

“Place called Homer,” Vorhees replied, picking up the thread. “Third Battalion came across them about ten years ago, way the hell and gone out in the panhandle. A whole town of survivors, over eleven hundred men, women, and children. I wasn’t there, but I heard the stories. It was like stepping back a hundred years; they didn’t even seem to know what the dracs were . Just going about their business, nice as you please, no lights or fencing, happy to see you but don’t slam the door on your way out. The CO offered them transport but they said no thanks, and in any case, the Third wasn’t really equipped to move that many bodies south to Kerrville. It was the damndest thing. Survivors, and they didn’t want to be rescued. Third Battalion left a squad behind and moved on north, up to Wichita, where got their happy asses handed to them. Lost half their men; the rest hightailed it back. When they got there, the place was empty.”

“What do you mean ‘empty’?” Peter asked.

Vorhees’s eyebrows lifted sharply. “I mean empty . Not a soul, and no bodies. Everything neat as a pin, dinner dishes sitting on the table. No sign of the squad they’d left, either.”

Peter had to admit it was puzzling, but he didn’t see what this had to do with the Haven. “Maybe they decided to go somewhere safer,” Peter offered.

“Maybe. Maybe the dracs just took them so fast they didn’t have time to wash the dishes. You’re asking something I don’t know the answer to. But I will tell you this. Thirty years ago, when Kerrville sent out the First Expeditionary, you couldn’t walk a hundred meters without tripping over a drac. The First lost half a dozen men on a good day, and when Coffee’s unit disappeared, people pretty much thought it was over. I mean, the guy was a legend. The Expeditionary more or less disbanded right then. But now here you are, having traveled all the way from California. Back in the day, you wouldn’t have made it twenty steps to the latrine.”

Peter glanced at Greer, who acknowledged this truth with a nod, then looked back at Vorhees. “Are you saying they’re dying off?”

“Oh, there’s plenty, believe me. You just got to know where to look. What I’m saying is something’s different. Something’s changed. In the last sixty months, we’ve run two supply lines from Kerrville, one up as far as Hutchinson, Kansas, another through New Mexico into Colorado. What we’ve seen is that you tend to find them in clusters now. They’re burrowing deeper, too, using mines, caves, places like that mountain you found. They’re sometimes packed in there so tightly you’d need a crowbar to pry them apart. The cities are still crawling, with all the empty buildings, but there’s plenty of open countryside where you could go for days without seeing one.”

“What about Kerrville? Why is that safe?”

The general frowned. “Well, it isn’t. Not a hundred percent. Most of Texas is pretty bad, actually. Laredo is no place you’d ever want to go, or Dallas. Houston, what’s left of it, is like a goddamn bloodsucker swamp. The place is so polluted with petrochemicals I don’t know how they survive there, but they do. San Antonio and Austin were both pretty much leveled in the first war, El Paso, too. Fucking federal government, trying to burn the dracs out. That’s what led to the Declaration, along about the same time California split off.”

“Split off?” Peter asked.

Vorhees nodded. “From the Union. Declared its independence. The California thing was a real bloodbath, pretty much open warfare for a while, like there wasn’t anything else to worry about. But Texas got lost in the shuffle. Maybe the federals just didn’t want to fight on two fronts. The governor seized all military assets, which wasn’t hard, since the Army by then was in total free fall, everything coming apart. They moved the capital to Kerrville and dug in. Walled it off, like your Colony, but the difference is, we had oil, and lots of it. Down near Freeport, there’s about five hundred million barrels sitting in underground salt domes, the old Strategic Petroleum Reserve. You got oil, you got power. You got power, you got lights. We’ve got over thirty thousand souls inside the walls, plus another fifty thousand acres under irrigation and a fortified supply line running to a working refinery on the coast.”

“The coast,” Peter repeated. The word felt heavy in his mouth. “You mean the ocean?”

“The Gulf of Mexico, anyway.” Vorhees shrugged. “Calling it the ocean would be polite. It’s pretty much a chemical slick. All those offshore platforms still pumping the crap out, plus the discharge from New Orleans. Ocean currents pushed a lot of debris in through there, too. Tankers, cargo ships, you name it. In places you can practically walk across it without getting your feet wet.”

“But you could still leave from there,” Peter tendered. “If you had a boat.”

“In theory. But I wouldn’t recommend it. The problem is getting past the barrier.”

“Mines,” Greer explained.

Vorhees nodded. “And lots of them. In the last days of the war, the NATO alliance, our so-called friends, banded together and made one last effort to contain the infection. Heavy bombing along the coasts, and not just conventional explosives. They blasted just about anything in the water. You can still see the wreckage down in Corpus. Then they laid mines, just to slam the door.”

Peter remembered the stories his father had told him. The stories of the ocean, and the Long Beach. The rusting ribs of the great ships, stretching as far as the eye could see. Never had he thought to wonder how this had come about. He had lived in a world without history, without cause, a world where things just were what they were. Talking to Vorhees and Greer was like looking at lines on a page and suddenly seeing words written there.

“What about farther east?” he asked. “Have you ever sent anybody there?”

Vorhees shook his head. “Not for years. The First Expeditionary sent two battalions that way, one north into Louisiana through Shreveport, another across Missouri toward St. Louis. They never came back.” He shrugged. “Maybe someday. For now, Texas is what we’ve got.”

“I’d like to see it,” Peter said after a moment. “The city. Kerrville.”

“And you will, Peter.” Vorhees allowed himself a rare smile. “If you take that convoy.”

They had yet to give Vorhees an answer, and Peter felt torn. They had safety, they had lights, they had found the Army after all. It might not be until spring, but Peter felt confident that Vorhees would send an expedition to the Colony and bring the others in. They had found what they had come for, in other words-more than found it. To ask his friends to continue seemed like an unnecessary risk. And without Alicia, part of him wanted to say yes, to just let the whole thing be over.