Justin Cronin - The Passage

If his old man could see him now, he thought. With the way he felt on the meds, Grey might even have been able to see his way to forgiving him for the things he’d done. The prison shrink, Dr. Wilder, had spoken a lot about forgiveness. Forgiveness was just about his all-time, number one favorite word. Forgiveness, Wilder explained, was the first step on a long road, the long road of recovery. It was a road, but sometimes it was a door; and only by going through this door could you make peace with your past, and face the inner demon, the “bad you” inside the “good you.” Wilder used his fingers a lot while he was talking, making little quotation marks in the air. Grey thought Wilder was basically full of shit. Probably he said the same crap to everybody. But Grey had to admit Wilder had a point with the “bad you” stuff. The bad Grey was real enough, and for a time, most of his life in fact, the bad Grey was really the only Grey there was. So that was the best thing about the meds, and why he planned to go on taking them the rest of his life, even after the court-ordered ten years were over: the bad Grey was nobody he ever wanted to meet again.

Grey trudged to the barracks through the snow and ate a plate of tacos in the commissary before returning to his room. Tuesday was Bingo Night, but Grey couldn’t work up a head of steam over that; he’d played a couple of times and come up at least twenty dollars down, and the soldiers always won, which made him think it was rigged. It was a stupid game anyway, really just an excuse to smoke, which he could do for free in his room. He lay on his bed, propped a couple of pillows behind his head and an ashtray on his stomach, and flipped on the television. A lot of the stations were blacked out; no CNN, no MSNBC, no GOVTV or MTV or E!-not that he ever looked at those stations anymore-and where commercials would have been the screen went blue for a minute or two until the program came back on. He surfed through the channels until he came to something interesting, a show on the War Network about the Allied invasion of France. Grey had always liked history, had even done pretty well in it back in school. He was good with dates and names, and it seemed that if you kept these straight in your head, the rest was just fill-in-the-blank. Stretched out on his bed, still wearing his coveralls, Grey watched and smoked. On the screen, GIs were tumbling onto the beaches by the boatload, blasting away and dodging shells and hurling their grenades. Behind them, out to sea, huge guns poured fire and thunder onto the cliff sides of Nazi-occupied France. Now that, Grey thought, was a war. The footage was jittery and out of focus half the time, but in one shot Grey could clearly see an arm-a Nazi arm-reaching out from the slotted window of a pillbox that some nice American kid had just used a flamethrower on. The arm was all burned up and smoking like a chicken wing left on a barbecue grill. Grey’s old man had done two tours as a medic in Vietnam, and he wondered what he would have said about a thing like that. Grey sometimes forgot that his father was a medic; when Grey was a kid, the guy hadn’t so much as put a Band-Aid on his knee, not once.

He smoked a last Parliament and turned off the television. Two days ago, the one named Jack and the one named Sam had up and left, not a word to anyone, so Grey had agreed to take a double shift. This would put him back on Level 4 by 06:00. It was a shame, those guys leaving like they had; unless you worked the full year, you forfeited the money. Richards had let it be known in no uncertain terms that this development did not make him one goddamn bit happy, and if anybody else was thinking of skipping, they had better think about this long and hard- very long and hard, he had said, giving the room a long, slow scan, like a pissed-off gym teacher. He gave this little speech in the dining hall during breakfast, and Grey locked his eyes on his scrambled eggs the whole time. He figured what happened to Sam and Jack was none of his business, and in any event the warning didn’t apply to him: he, for one, wasn’t going anywhere, and it wasn’t like he’d been friends with those guys, not really. They’d talked a bit about this and that, but it was really just passing the time, and their leaving meant more money for Grey. An overtime shift was an extra five hundred; you pulled three in a week, they gave you an extra hundred as a bonus, too. As long as the money kept rolling in, filling up his account with all those zeros lined up like eggs in a carton, Grey would sit there on the mountaintop until the last cat was hung.

He peeled off his coveralls and doused the light. Pellets of snow were blowing against his window, a sound like sand shaking in a paper sack; every twenty seconds the blinds flared as the beacon on the west perimeter swung across the glass. Sometimes the drugs made Grey restless or he got leg cramps, but a couple of ibuprofen usually did the trick. He sometimes got up in the middle of the night to smoke or take a leak, though usually he slept straight through. He lay in the dark and tried to calm his thoughts but found himself thinking about Zero again. Maybe it was the burned-up Nazi arm; he couldn’t seem to push the image of Zero from his mind. Zero was a prisoner of some kind. His table manners weren’t anything to brag about, and it was nothing nice to look at, the business with the rabbits. Still, food was food and Zero wasn’t having any of it. All he did was hang there like he was sleeping, though Grey didn’t think he was. The chip in Zero’s neck broadcast all kinds of data to the console, some of which Grey understood and some of which he didn’t. But he knew what sleep looked like, that it looked different from being awake. Zero’s heart rate was always the same, 102 beats per minute, give or take a beat. The technicians who came into the control room to read the data never said anything about this, just nodded and checked off the boxes on their handhelds. But 102 seemed mighty awake to Grey.

And the other thing was, Zero felt awake. There Grey went again, thinking about how Zero made him feel, which was nuts, but even so. Grey had never had much use for cats, but this was the same kind of thing. A cat sleeping on a step wasn’t really sleeping. A cat sleeping on a step was a coiled spring waiting for a mouse to totter along. What was Zero waiting for? Maybe, Grey thought, he was just tired of rabbit. Maybe he wanted Ding Dongs, or a bologna hoagie, or turkey tetrazzini. For all Grey could tell, the guy would have eaten a piece of wood. With choppers like that, there pretty much wasn’t anything he couldn’t bore right through.

Ugh , Grey thought with a shudder, the teeth , and that was when he knew he had to do something else to make himself sleep besides just lying there, stewing in his thoughts. It was already midnight. Six A.M. would jump out at him like a jack-in-the-box before he knew it. He rose and took a couple of ibuprofen, smoked a cigarette and emptied his bladder again for good measure, then slid back between the covers. The spotlights grazed the windows once, twice, three times. He made an effort to close his eyes and imagine the escalator. This was a trick Wilder had taught him. Grey was what Wilder called “suggestible,” meaning he was easily hypnotized, and the escalator was the thing Wilder had used to do this. You imagined being on an escalator, slowly going down. It didn’t matter where the escalator was, an airport or mall or whatever, and Grey’s escalator wasn’t anyplace in particular. The point was, it was an escalator, and you were on it, alone, and the escalator went down and down and down, headed toward the bottom, which wasn’t a bottom in the ordinary sense of being the end of something but a place of cool, blue light. Sometimes it was one escalator; sometimes it was a series of shorter escalators that descended one floor at a time with turns in between. Tonight it was just the one. The mechanism clicked a little under his feet; the rubber handrail was smooth and cool to the touch. Riding the escalator, Grey could feel the blueness waiting below him, but he didn’t avert his gaze to look at it, because it wasn’t a thing you saw; it came from inside you. When it filled you up and took you over, you knew you were asleep.