Justin Cronin - The Passage

The woman’s eyes sparkled with sudden mischief. “Shall we tell him, Amy? Shall we tell your Peter who I am?”

Amy nodded; the woman raised her face, wearing a shining smile.

“I am the one who’s been waiting for you,” she said. “My name is Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto.”

Private Sancho was dying.

Sara was riding at the back of the convoy, in one of the big trucks. Bunks had been slung from the sides of the rear compartment to carry the injured men. The space was crowded with crates of supplies; it was all Sara could do to wedge herself between them, to offer what comfort she could.

The other one, Withers, wasn’t as bad off; most of the burns were on his arms and hands. Probably he would survive, if sepsis didn’t set in. But not Sancho.

Something had happened when they’d winched down the bomb. A cable had jammed. The fuse wouldn’t light. Something. The story had come to Sara in bits and pieces from a dozen different sources, all with a slightly different version of events. It was Sancho who had entered the mine shaft, shimmying down the cable on a harness, to fix whatever had gone wrong; he had either still been down the hole or was just emerging, Withers running toward him, reaching for him, pulling him free, when the drums of fuel exploded.

The flames had engulfed him utterly. She could see the path the fire had taken, moving up his body, fusing his uniform to his flesh. That he had survived was a miracle, though not, Sara thought, a happy one; she could still hear the screams that had torn from his lips as, with the help of two soldiers, she had peeled the blackened remains of his uniform from his body, taking most of the skin of his legs and chest with it, and again, as she had done her best to scrub away the debris, revealing a raw, red flesh beneath it. Already the burns on his legs and feet had begun to suppurate, mixing the sick-sweet odor of charred skin with the stink of infection. His chest and arms and hands and shoulders: the fire had consumed them all. His face was a smooth pink nub, like the eraser on a pencil. After she’d finished the abrasion-a horrible ordeal-he’d made scarcely any sound at all, lapsing into a fitful sleep from which he awoke only to beg for water. She was surprised when, in the morning, he was still alive, and then the next day also. The night before their departure, she had offered, in a moment of bravery that surprised her, to stay behind with him. But Greer would have none of it. We’ve left enough men in these woods, he said. Do your best to make him comfortable.

For a while the convoy had traveled east, but now they were moving south again, on what felt to Sara like a road; the worst of the bouncing, the lurching from side to side and the sound of spinning mud and snow, spattering against the wheel wells beneath her, had stopped. She felt nauseated and cold, chilled to the core, her limbs achy from the hours of banging in the back of the truck. The convoy of vehicles and horses and men proceeded in fits and starts, as Alicia’s scouting party gave the all clear. The goal for their first day of travel was Durango, where a fortified shelter in an old grain elevator, one of nine such refuges along the supply road to Roswell, offered safety for the night.

She had decided she wasn’t angry that Peter had left without telling her. She had been at first, when Hollis came to the mess to give her the news; but with Sancho and Withers to take care of, she hadn’t dwelt on these feelings for long. And the truth was, she’d sensed it coming-if not Peter’s and Amy’s departure exactly, then something like it. Something final. When she and Hollis had discussed leaving with the convoy, always in the background, unstated, was the feeling that Peter and Amy wouldn’t be going with them.

But Michael had been angry. More than angry-furious. Hollis had practically had to restrain him from heading off after the two of them, into the snow. Strange how Michael had become so brave, almost recklessly so, over the months. She had always felt herself to be a kind of stand-in parent, responsible for him in some deep, incontrovertible way. Somewhere along the way, she had let these feelings go. So maybe it wasn’t Michael who had changed; perhaps it was she herself.

She wanted to see Kerrville. The name hung in her mind with a shimmering weightlessness. To think: thirty thousand souls. It gave her a hope she hadn’t felt since the day Teacher had taken her out the door of the Sanctuary, into the broken world. Because it wasn’t broken, after all; the little girl Sara had been, the one who slept in the Big Room and played with her friends and felt the sun on her face as she swung on the tire in the courtyard, believing the world to be a fine place that she could be a part of-that little girl had been right all along. Such a simple thing to want. To be a person; to live a human life. That was what she would have in Kerrville, with Hollis. Hollis, who loved her, and told her so, again and again. It was as if he’d opened something up inside her, something long clenched; for the feeling had filled her at once, that first night on watch, somewhere in Utah, when he’d put his rifle down and kissed her; and again each time he said the words in his quiet, almost embarrassed way, their faces so close she could feel the tangles of his beard on her cheeks, as if he were confessing the deepest truth of himself. He told her he loved her and she loved him in return, at once and infinitely. She did not believe in fate; the world seemed far chancier than that, a series of mishaps and narrow escapes you somehow managed to survive until, one day, you didn’t. Yet that’s what loving Hollis felt like: like fate. As if the words were already written down someplace, and all she had to do was live out the story. She wondered if her parents had felt that way about each other. Though she did not like to think about them and avoided this whenever she could, she found herself, riding in the back of the cold truck, wishing they were still alive, so she could ask this question.

It wasn’t fair, what they had done. It was Michael, poor Michael, who had found the two of them in the shed that terrible morning. He was eleven; Sara had just turned fifteen. Part of her believed that their parents waited until she was old enough to look after her brother, that her age was part of the rationale for what they’d done. By the time Michael’s yells had pulled her out of bed and down the stairs and across the yard to the shed behind their house, he had flung his arms around their legs, trying to hold them up; she’d stood in the door, speechless and immobile, Michael crying and begging her to help him, and known that they were dead. What she had felt at that moment was not horror or grief but something like wonder-a mute amazement at the factually declarative nature of the scene, its merciless mechanics. They had used ropes and a pair of wooden stools. They had tied the ropes around their necks, slipping the knots tight, and kicked the stools aside, employing the weight of their bodies to strangle themselves. She wondered: Did they do it together? Had they counted to three? Did first one go and then the other? Michael was pleading, Please Sara, help me, help me save them , and yet that was all she saw. The night before, her mother had made johnnycake; the pan was still sitting on the kitchen table. Sara had searched her mind for some evidence that her mother had gone about this task in any way that seemed different, knowing, as she must have, that she was preparing a breakfast she would not eat, for children she would never see again. And yet Sara could remember nothing.

As if obeying some final, tacit command, she and Michael had eaten it all, every bite. And by the time they were done, Sara knew, as Michael surely did as well, that she would take care of her brother from that day forward, and that part of this care was the unspoken agreement that they would never speak of their parents again.