Justin Cronin - The Passage

Neither of them noticed the man-the off-duty Oklahoma state trooper who, two hours before, had seen the wire report on a girl kidnapped by two Caucasian males at the Memphis Zoo, before clocking out and heading off to the high school to meet his wife and watch his kids ride the bumper cars-following them with his eyes.

I was called… Fanning .

All that day the words sat on his lips: when he awoke at eight, as he bathed and dressed and ate his breakfast and sat on the bed in his room, flipping through the channels and smoking Parliaments, waiting for the night to come. All day long, this was what he heard:

Fanning. I was called Fanning .

The words meant nothing to Grey. The name wasn’t one he knew. He’d never met anybody named Fanning, or anything like Fanning, not that he could remember. Yet somehow, while he’d slept, the name had taken up residence in his head, as if he’d gone to sleep listening to a song played over and over, the lyrics digging a rut into his brain like a plow, and now part of his mind was still in that rut and couldn’t get out. Fanning? What the hell? It made him think of the prison shrink, Dr. Wilder, and the way he’d led Grey down into a state deeper than sleep, the room he called forgiveness, with the slow tap-tap-tap of his pen on the table, the sound snaking inside him. Now Grey couldn’t pick up the channel changer or scratch his head or light a smoke without hearing the words, their syncopating rhythm building a backbeat to every little thing he did.

I (flick)… was (light)… called (draw)… Fanning (exhale).

He sat and smoked and waited and smoked some more. What the hell was wrong with him? He felt different, and the change was no good. Antsy, out of sync with himself. Usually he could just sit still and do virtually nothing while he let the hours pass-he’d learned to do that well enough in Beeville, letting whole days slip by in a kind of thoughtless trance-but not today. Today he was jumpy as a bug in a pan. He tried to watch TV, but the words and the images didn’t even seem related to each other. Outside, beyond the windows of the barracks, the afternoon sky looked like old plastic, a washed-out gray. Gray like Grey. A perfect day to snooze away the hours. Yet here he was, sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, waiting for the afternoon to be over, his insides buzzing like a paper harmonica.

He felt like he hadn’t slept a wink, too, though he’d somehow snoozed straight through his alarm at 05:00 and missed his morning shift. It was OT, so he could make up some excuse-that it was all a mix-up or he’d simply forgotten-but he was going to hear about it either way. He was on again at 22:00. He really needed to nap, to store up some shut-eye for another eight hours of watching Zero watching him.

At 18:00 he pulled on his parka to walk across the compound to the commissary. Sunset was an hour off but the clouds were hanging low, sponging up the last of the light. A damp wind cut through him as he trudged across the open field between the barracks and the dining hall, a cinder-block building that looked like it had been built in a hurry. He couldn’t see the mountains at all, and on days like this it sometimes felt to Grey as if the compound were actually an island-that the world came to a stop, tipping into a black sea of nothingness, somewhere beyond the end of the long drive. Vehicles came and went, delivery trucks and step vans and Army five-tons loaded with supplies, but the place they came from and then went back to, wherever that was, might have been the moon for all Grey knew. Even his memory of the world was beginning to fade. He hadn’t been past the fence line in six months.

The commissary should have been busy at this hour, fifty or more bodies filling the room with heat and noise, but as he stepped through the door, unzipping his parka and stamping the snow off the soles of his shoes, Grey surveyed the space and saw just a few people scattered at the tables, alone and in small groups, not more than a dozen all told. You could tell who did what by what they wore-the med staff in their scrubs and rubber clogs; the soldiers in their winter camos, hunched over their trays and scooping the food into their mouths like farmhands; the sweeps in their UPS-brown jumpsuits. Behind the dining hall there was a lounge with a ping-pong table and air hockey, but nobody was playing or watching the big-screen television either, and the room was quiet, just a few murmuring voices and the clink of glass and flatware. For a while the lounge had held some tables with computers, sleek new vMacs for email and whatnot, but one morning in the summer, a tech crew had wheeled them all out on a dolly, right in the middle of breakfast. Some of the soldiers had complained, but it hadn’t done any good; the computers never returned, and all that remained to say they’d been there were a bunch of wires dangling from the wall. Taking them away had been some kind of a punishment, Grey figured, but he didn’t know what for. He’d never bothered with the computers himself.

Despite the nervous feeling in his body, the smell of warm food made him hungry-the Depo gave him such a voracious appetite it was a wonder he wasn’t heavier than he was-and he filled his tray as he moved down the line, his mind savoring the thought of the meal to come: a bowl of minestrone, salad with croutons and cheese, mashies and pickled beets, a slab of ham with a ring of dried-out pineapple sitting on it like a citrus tiara. He topped it all off with a wedge of lemon pie and a tall glass of ice water and carried everything back to the corner to an empty table. Most of the sweeps ate alone like he did; there wasn’t much you were allowed to actually talk about. Sometimes a whole week would pass without Grey saying so much as boo to anyone except the sentry on L3 who clocked him in and out of Containment. There had been a time, not that many months ago in fact, when the techs and medical staff would ask him questions, things about Zero and the rabbits and the teeth. They’d listen to his answers, nodding, maybe jot something down on their handhelds. But now they just picked up the reports without a word, as if the whole matter of Zero had been settled and there was nothing new to learn.

Grey moved through his meal methodically, course by course. The Fanning thing was still running through his mind like a news crawl, but eating seemed to calm it some; for a few minutes he almost forgot it was there. He was finishing the last of the pie when someone stepped up to his table: one of the soldiers. Grey thought his name was Paulson. Grey had seen him around, though the soldiers had a way of all looking the same in their camos and T-shirts and shiny boots, their hair so short their ears stuck out like somebody had pasted them to the sides of their heads as a joke. Paulson’s cut was so tight Grey couldn’t have said what color his hair really was. He took a chair at right angles to Grey and spun it around to straddle it, smiling at him in a way that Grey wouldn’t have described as friendly.

“You fellows sure like to eat, don’tcha?”

Grey shrugged.

“You’re Grey, right?” The soldier narrowed his eyes. “I’ve seen you.”

Grey put down his fork and swallowed a bite of pie. “Yeah.”

Paulson nodded thoughtfully, like he was deciding if this was a good name or not. His face wore an outward expression of calm, but there was something effortful about this. For a moment his eyes darted to the security camera hanging in the corner over their heads, then found Grey’s face again.

“You know, you fellas don’t say much,” Paulson said. “It’s a little spooky, you don’t mind my saying so.”

Spooky. Paulson didn’t know the half of it. Grey said nothing.