Justin Cronin - The Passage

“Watch this,” he told him.

Before Wolgast could answer there was blinding flash of light, like a gigantic camera going off; a concussive thump rocked the chopper. Wolgast gripped Amy by the waist and held on. When he looked out the window again, all that remained of the Tahoe was a smoking hole in the earth, big enough to fit a house in. He heard Richards laughing through the headset. Then the helicopter banked once more, the force of its acceleration pressing them into their seats, and took them all away.

That he was dead was a fact. Wolgast accepted it, as he accepted any fact of nature. When everything was over-in whatever manner this occurred-Richards would take him to a room somewhere, give him the same cool, final look he’d given Price and Kirk-like a man performing some simple test of accuracy, lining up a cue ball or tossing a piece of wadded paper into the trash-and that would be the end of it.

It was possible Richards would take him outside to do it. Wolgast hoped he would, someplace he could see trees and feel the touch of sunlight on his skin, before Richards put a bullet in his head. Maybe he’d even ask. Would you mind? he’d say. If it’s not too much trouble. I’d like to be looking at the trees.

He’d been at the compound for twenty-seven days. By his count it was the third week of April. He didn’t know where Amy was, or Doyle. They’d been separated the minute they landed, Amy hustled away by Richards and a group of armed soldiers, Wolgast and Doyle with a coterie of their own-but then they’d been split up, too. Nobody had debriefed him, which at first struck him as strange, but when enough time had passed, Wolgast understood the reason. None of it had officially happened. Nobody was going to debrief him because his story was just that, a story. The only remaining question for him to puzzle over was why Richards hadn’t just shot him in the first place.

The room they’d locked him in was like something in a cheap motel, though plainer: no carpet on the floor, no drapes on the lone window, heavy institutional furniture, bolted down. A tiny closet of a bathroom with a floor as cold as ice. A tangle of wires on the wall where a TV had once been. The door to the hall was thick and opened with a buzz from the outside. His only visitors were the men who brought him his meals: silent, hulking figures wearing unmarked brown jumpsuits who left his trays of food on the small table where Wolgast passed most of each day, sitting and waiting. Probably Doyle was doing the same thing, assuming Richards hadn’t shot him already.

The view wasn’t anything, just empty pine forest, but sometimes Wolgast would stand and look out there for hours, too. Spring was coming. The woods were sodden with melting snow, and from everywhere came the sound of running water-dripping from the roofs and branches, running down the gutters. If he stood on his toes, Wolgast could just make out a fence line through the trees, and figures moving along it. One night at the beginning of the fourth week of his imprisonment, a heavy rainstorm blew through. The force of it was practically biblical; thunder rocked over the mountains all night long, and in the morning he looked out his window and saw that winter was over, rinsed away by the rain.

For a while he’d tried to talk to the men who brought him his meals and, every other day, a clean set of surgical scrubs and slippers for him to wear, even just to ask them their names. But none had offered so much as one word in reply. They moved heavily, their movements clumsy and imprecise, their expressions benumbed and incurious, like the living dead in some old movie. Corpses gathering outside a farmhouse, moaning and tripping over their feet, wearing the tattered uniforms of their forgotten lives: he’d loved such films when he was a boy, not understanding how true they really were. What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?

It was possible, he understood, for a person’s life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more instance in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas and, for whatever reason, made them your own. That was the truth he’d learned on the carousel with Amy, though the thought had been building in him for a while, most of a year, in fact. Wolgast had more than enough time now to think this over. You couldn’t look into the eyes of a man like Anthony Carter and fail to see how this worked. It was as if, that night in Oklahoma, he’d had his first real idea in years. His first since Lila, since Eva. But Eva had died, three weeks short of her first birthday, and since that day he’d walked the earth like the living dead, or a man holding a ghost, the empty space in his arms where Eva had been. That’s why he’d been so good with Carter and the others: he was just like them.

He wondered where Amy was, what was happening to her. He hoped she wasn’t lonely and afraid. More than hoped: he held the idea with the fierceness of a prayer, trying to make it so with his mind. He wondered if he’d ever see her again, and the thought made him rise from his chair and go to the window, as if he might find her out there, in the shifting shadows of the trees. And more hours would somehow go by, the passage of time marked only by the changing light from the window and the comings and goings of the men with his meals, most of which he barely touched. All night long he slept a dreamless sleep that left him dazed in the morning, his arms and legs heavy as iron. He wondered how much longer he had.

Then, on the morning of the thirty-fourth day, someone came to see him. It was Sykes, but he was different. The man he’d met a year ago was all spit and polish. This man, though he was wearing the same uniform, looked like he’d slept under a highway overpass. His uniform was wrinkled and stained; his cheeks and chin were glazed with gray stubble; his eyes were as bloodshot as a boxer’s after a few rounds of a badly mismatched fight. He sat heavily at the table where Wolgast was. He folded his hands, cleared his throat, and spoke.

“I’m here to ask a favor.”

Wolgast hadn’t uttered a word in days. When he tried to answer, his windpipe felt half-closed, thickened from disuse; his voice emerged as a croak.

“I’m done with favors.”

Sykes drew in a long breath. A stale smell was rising off him, dried sweat and old polyester. For a moment he let his eyes drift around the tiny room.

“Probably this all seems a little… ungrateful. I admit that.”

“Fuck yourself.” It pleased Wolgast enormously to say this.

“I’m here about the girl, Agent.”

“Her name,” Wolgast said, “is Amy.”

“I know her name. I know a great deal about her.”

“She’s six. She likes pancakes and carnival rides. She has a toy rabbit named Peter. You’re a heartless prick, you know that, Sykes?”

Sykes withdrew an envelope from the pocket of his coat and placed it on the table. Inside were two photographs. One was a picture of Amy, taken, Wolgast guessed, at the convent. Probably it was the same one that had gone out with the Amber Alert. The second was a high school yearbook photo. The woman in the picture was obviously Amy’s mother. The same dark hair, the same delicate arrangement of the facial bones, the same deep-set, melancholy eyes, though suffused, at the instant that the shutter opened, with a warm, expectant light. Who was this girl? Did she have friends, family, a boyfriend? A favorite subject in school? A sport she loved and was good at? Did she have secrets, a story of herself that no one knew? What did she hope her life would become? She was positioned at a three-quarter angle to the camera, looking over her right shoulder, wearing what looked like a prom dress, pale blue; her shoulders were bare. At the bottom of the photo was a caption: “ Mason Consolidated High School, Mason, IA. ”