Justin Cronin - The Passage

Still, it would have been nice to get off the grounds every now and then, even just to have a look around. He knew they were in Colorado someplace, from the license plates on some of the cars, and every now and again somebody, probably one of the officers or else the scientific staff, who came and went as they chose, would leave a copy of The Denver Post lying around; so it was no big secret, really, where they were, no matter what Richards said. One day after a heavy snowfall, Grey and some of the other sweeps had gone up to the roof of the barracks to shovel it off, and Grey could see, rising above the line of snowy trees, what looked like some kind of ski resort, with a gondola inching up the hillside and a slope with tiny figures carving down it. It couldn’t have been more than five miles from where he stood. Funny, with a war on and the world the way it was, everything in such a mess, to see a thing like that. Grey had never skied in his life, but he knew there’d be bars and restaurants too, out there beyond the wall of trees, and things like hot tubs and saunas, and people sitting around talking and sipping glasses of wine in the steam. He’d seen that on the Travel Channel, too.

It was March, still winter, and there was plenty of snow on the ground, which meant that once the sun went down the temperature fell like a rock. Tonight a nasty wind was blowing too, and trudging back to the barracks with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his chin tucked into the neck of his parka, Grey felt like his face was getting slapped a hundred times over. All of which made him think some more about Bora-Bora, and those little houses on stilts. Never mind Zero, who apparently had lost his taste for fresh Easter Bunny; what Zero ate and did not eat was none of Grey’s business. If they told him to serve eggs Benedict on toast points from now on, he’d do it with a smile. He wondered what a house like that would cost. With a house like that, you wouldn’t even need plumbing; you could just step to the rail and do your business, any time of the day or night. When Grey had worked rigs in the Gulf, he’d liked to do that, in the early morning or late at night when no one was around; you had to mind the wind, of course, but with a breeze pushing at your back, few pleasures in life compared to taking a leak off a platform two hundred feet over the Gulf and watching it arc into the air before raining down twenty stories into the blue. It made you feel small and big at the same time.

Now the whole oil industry was under federal protection, and it seemed like practically everybody he knew from the old days had disappeared. After that Minneapolis thing, the bombing at the gas depot in Secaucus, the subway attack in L.A. and all the rest, and, of course, what happened in Iran or Iraq or whichever it was, the whole economy had locked up like a bad transmission. With his knees and the smoking and the thing on his record, no goddamn way they were taking Grey in Homeland, or anywhere else. He’d been out of work most of a year when he’d gotten the call. He’d thought for sure it was more rig work, maybe for some foreign supplier. They’d somehow made it sound that way without actually saying it, and he was surprised when he’d driven to the address and found it was just an empty storefront in an abandoned strip mall near the Dallas fairgrounds, with white soap smeared on the windows. The place had once housed a video store; Grey could still make out the name, Movie World West, in a ghostly formation of missing letters on the grimy stucco over the door. The place next to it had been a Chinese restaurant; another, a dry cleaner’s; the rest, you couldn’t say. He’d driven up and down in front a couple of times, thinking he must have had the address wrong and reluctant to climb from the air-conditioned cab of his truck for some pointless goose chase, before he’d stopped. It was about a hundred degrees out, typical for August in north Texas but still nothing you could ever get used to, the air thick and dirty-smelling, the sun gleaming like the head of a hammer coming down. The door was locked but there was a buzzer; he rang and waited a minute as the sweat started to pool under his shirt, then heard a big ring of keys jangling on the other side and the clunk of the unlocking door.

They’d set up a little desk and a couple of file cabinets in the back; the room was still full of empty racks that had once held DVDs, and a lot of tangled wires and other junk was hanging from open spaces in the droppanel ceiling. Leaned against the rear wall of the store was a life-size cardboard figure, coated with a film of dust, of some movie star Grey couldn’t place, a bald black dude in wraparounds, with biceps that bulged under his T-shirt like a couple of canned hams he was trying to smuggle out of a supermarket. The movie was nothing Grey remembered, either. Grey filled out the form but the people there, a man and a woman, barely seemed to look at it. While they typed into the computer they asked him to pee in a cup and then gave him a polygraph, but that was standard stuff. He did his best not to feel like he was lying even when he was telling the truth, and when they asked him about the time he’d done at Beeville, as he knew they would, he told them the story straight out: no way to hide it with the wires, and it was a matter of record besides, especially in Texas, with the website you could go to and see everybody’s faces and all the rest. But even this seemed not to be a problem. They seemed to know a lot about him already, and most of their questions had to do with his personal life, the stuff you couldn’t learn except by asking. Did he have friends? (Not really.) Did he live alone? (When hadn’t he?) Did he have any living family? (Just an aunt in Odessa he hadn’t seen in about twenty years and a couple of cousins he wasn’t even sure he knew the names of.) The trailer park where he was living, up in Allen-who were his neighbors? (Neighbors?) And so on, in that vein. Everything he told them seemed to make them happier and happier. They were trying to hide it, but you could see it on their faces, plain as the words in a book. When he decided they weren’t police, he realized he’d been thinking maybe they were.

Two days later-by which time he realized he’d never learned the names of the man and the woman, couldn’t even have said what they looked like-he was on the plane to Cheyenne. They’d explained the money and the part about not being able to leave for a year, which was all right by him, and made it clear that he shouldn’t tell anybody where he was going, which, in fact, he couldn’t; he didn’t know. At the airport in Cheyenne he was met by a man in a black tracksuit, whom he’d later come to know as Richards-a wiry guy no more than five foot six with a permanent scowl on his face. Richards walked him to the curb; two other men, who must have come in on different flights, were standing by a van. Richards opened the driver’s door and returned with a cloth bag the size of a pillowcase. He held it open like a mouth.

“Wallets, cell phones, any personal stuff, photographs, anything with writing on it, right down to the pen you got at the bank,” he told them. “I don’t care if it’s a fucking fortune cookie. In it goes.”

They emptied their pockets, hoisted their duffels into the luggage rack, and climbed in through the side. It was only when Richards closed the door behind them that Grey realized the windows were blacked out. From the outside the vehicle looked like an ordinary van, but inside it was a different story: the driver’s compartment was sealed off, the passenger compartment nothing but a metal box with vinyl bench seats bolted to the floor. Richards had said they were allowed to trade first names but that was all. The other two men were Jack and Sam. They looked so much like Grey he might have been staring into a mirror: middle-aged white guys with buzz cuts and puffed red hands and workingman’s tans that stopped at the wrists and collar. Grey’s first name was Lawrence, but he’d barely ever used it. It sounded odd coming from his mouth. As soon as he said it, shaking hands with the one named Sam, he felt like somebody different, like he’d boarded the plane in Dallas as one person and landed in Cheyenne as another.