Justin Cronin - The Passage

They reached the corner of the building. Wolgast could see the woods beyond it. In the other direction, toward the lights of the compound, lay the parking area. The Lexus waited at the end, facing away, no other cars around it for cover.

“We’ll just have to make a run for it,” Doyle said. “Ready?”

Wolgast, panting, did his best to nod.

Then they were up and racing toward the car.

Richards felt him before he saw him. He turned, swinging the RPG like a vaulter’s pole.

It wasn’t Babcock.

It wasn’t Zero.

It was Anthony Carter.

He was in a kind of crouch, twenty feet away. He lifted his face and twisted his head, looking at Richards appraisingly. There was something doglike about it. Blood glistened on Carter’s face, his clawlike hands, his sworded teeth, row upon row. A kind of clicking sound was coming from his throat. Slowly, in a gesture of languid pleasure, he began to rise. Richards put Carter’s mouth in his sights.

“Open up,” Richards said, and fired.

He knew, even as the grenade shot from the tube, the force of its ejection pushing Richards backward, that he’d missed. The place where Carter had stood was empty. Carter was in the air. Carter was flying. Then he was falling, down upon Richards. The grenade went off, taking out the front of the Chalet, but Richards heard this only vaguely-the noise receding, fading to some impossible distance-as he experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half.

The explosion hit Wolgast as a white sheen, a wall of heat and light that slapped the left side of his face like a punch; he was lifted from the ground and felt Amy fall away. He hit the pavement and rolled and rolled again before coming to rest on his back.

His ears were ringing; his breath felt like it was stuck in a tube, far down in his chest. Above him he saw the deep, velvety blackness of the night sky, and stars, hundreds and hundreds of stars, and some of them were falling.

He thought: Falling stars. He thought: Amy. He thought: Keys.

He lifted his head. Amy was lying on the ground a few yards away. The air was full of smoke. In the flickering light of the burning Chalet, she looked as if she might be sleeping-a character in a fairy tale, the princess who had fallen asleep and couldn’t wake. Wolgast rolled himself onto all fours and frantically patted the ground for the keys. He could tell one of his ears was messed up; it was like a curtain had fallen over the left side of his face, absorbing all sound. The keys. The keys. Then he realized they were still in his hand; he’d never let them go to begin with.

Where were Doyle and Lacey?

He went to where Amy lay. The fall didn’t seem to have hurt her any, or the explosion, as far as he could tell. He put his hands under her arms and hoisted her over his shoulder, then made for the Lexus as fast as he could.

He bent to ease Amy in, laying her across the backseat. He got in himself and turned the key. The headlights blazed across the compound.

Something hit the hood.

Some kind of animal. No: some kind of monstrous thing, throbbing with a pale green light. But when he saw its eyes, and what was inside them, he knew that this strange new being on the hood was Anthony Carter.

Carter rose as Wolgast found the gearshift and plunged it into reverse and gunned the engine. Carter fell away. Wolgast could see him in the lights of the Lexus, rolling on the ground and then, in a series of movements almost too quick for the eye, launching himself into the air, gone.

What in the name of-

Wolgast stomped the brake, turning the wheel hard to the right. The car spun and spun and came to rest, pointed at the driveway. Then the passenger door opened: Lacey. She climbed in quickly, saying nothing. There were streaks of blood on her face, her shirt. She was holding a gun in her hand. She looked at it, amazed, and dropped it on the floor.

“Where’s Doyle?”

“I do not know,” she said.

He put the car back into drive and hit the accelerator.

Then he saw Doyle. He was running toward the Lexus at an angle, waving the.45.

“Just go!” he was yelling. “Go!”

A concussive thump on the roof of the car, and Wolgast knew it was Carter. Carter was on the roof of the Lexus. Wolgast hit the brakes again, sending all of them lurching forward. Carter tumbled onto the hood but held on. Wolgast heard Doyle firing, three quick shots. Wolgast saw a round actually strike Carter in the shoulder, a quick spark of impact. Carter seemed barely to notice.

“Hey!” Doyle was yelling. “Hey!”

Carter turned his face, saw Doyle. With a compressive twitch of his body he launched himself into the air as Doyle got off a final shot. Wolgast turned in time to see the creature that had once been Anthony Carter fall upon his partner, taking him in like a giant mouth.

It was over in an instant.

Wolgast stamped on the accelerator, hard. The car shot over a strip of grass, the wheels digging and spinning, then hit the pavement with a screech. They barreled down the long drive away from the burning Chalet, through the hallway of the trees, everything streaming past. Fifty, sixty, seventy miles per hour.

“What the hell was that?” Wolgast said to Lacey. “What was that!”

“Stop here, Agent.”

“What? You can’t be serious.”

“They will catch us. They will follow the blood. You must stop the car now.” She put her hand on his elbow. Her grip was firm, insistent. “Please. Do as I ask.”

Wolgast drew the Lexus to the side of the road; Lacey turned to face him. Wolgast saw the wound in her arm, a clean shot just below the deltoid.

“Sister Lacey-”

“It is nothing,” Lacey said. “It is only flesh and blood. But I’m not to go with you. I see that now.” She touched his arm again and smiled-a final smile of benediction, sad and happy at once. A smile at the trials of a long journey, now ended.

“Take care of her. Amy is yours. You will know what to do.” Then she stepped from the car and slammed the door before Wolgast could say another word.

He lifted his eyes to the rearview and saw her running the way they’d come, waving her arms in the air. A warning? No, she was calling them down upon her. She didn’t get a hundred feet before a swoop of light shot from the trees, and then another, and then a third, so many Wolgast had to look away, and he hit the accelerator and drove away as fast as he could without looking back again.

When all time ended, and the world had lost its memory, and the man that he was had receded from view like a ship sailing away, rounding the blade of the earth with his old life locked in its hold; and when the gyring stars gazed down upon nothing, and the moon in its arc no longer remembered his name, and all that remained was the great sea of hunger on which he floated forever-still, inside him, in the deepest place, was this: one year. The mountain and the turning seasons, and Amy. Amy and the Year of Zero.

They arrived at the camp in darkness. Wolgast drove the last mile slowly, following the beams of the headlights where they broke through the trees, braking to crawl over the worst of the potholes, the deep ruts left by winter runoff. Fingering branches, dripping with moisture, scraped the length of the roof and windows as they passed. The car was junk, an ancient Corolla with huge, gaudy rims and an ashtray full of yellowed butts; Wolgast had stolen it at a mobile home park outside Laramie, leaving the Lexus with the keys in the ignition and a note on the dash: Keep it, it’s yours . An old mutt on a chain, too tired to bark, had watched with disinterest as Wolgast jimmied the ignition, then carried Amy from the Lexus to the Toyota, where he laid her across the backseat, cluttered with fast food wrappers and empty cigarette packs.