Justin Cronin - The Passage

“Stand back now, Carter.”

Carter pushed one foot forward, his left knee making a grinding sound as he shifted his center of gravity, then rose carefully to his feet, simultaneously withdrawing his cuffed hands from the slot. From the far side of the door came the clanking of Pincher’s big ring of keys, and then the door opened to show him Pincher and the guard they called Dennis the Menace, on account of his hair, which looked like the kid’s in the cartoon, and the fact that he liked to menace you with the stick. He had a way of finding spots on your body that you never knew could hurt so bad with just a little poke of wood.

“Seems like somebody’s come to see you, Carter,” Pincher said. “And it isn’t your mother or your lawyer.” He didn’t smile or anything, but Dennis looked to be enjoying himself. He gave that stick of his a twirl like a majorette.

“My mom’s been with Jesus since I was ten years old,” Carter told him. “You know that, Pincher, I told you that about a hundred times. Who is it wants me?”

“Can’t say. Warden set it up. I’m just supposed to take you to the cages.”

Carter supposed this was no good. It’d been so long since the woman’s husband had come to visit; maybe he’d come to say goodbye, or else to tell him I changed my mind, I don’t forgive you after all, go straight to hell, Anthony Carter. Either way Carter didn’t have anything else to say to the man. He’d said sorry to everyone over and over and felt done with it.

“Come on with you then,” Pincher said.

They led him down the corridor, Pincher gripping him hard by an elbow to steer him like a kid through a crowd, or a girl he was dancing with. This was how they took you anywhere, even to the shower. Part of you got used to people’s hands being on you this way, and part of you didn’t. Dennis led the way, opening the door that sealed administrative segregation from the rest of H-Wing and then the outer, second door that took them down the hall through general population to the cages. It’d been almost two years since Carter had been off H-Wing-H for “hellhole,” H for “hit my black ass with that stick some more,” H for “Hey, Mama, I’m off to see Jesus any day now”-and walking with his eyes pointed at the ground, he still let himself peek around, if only to give his eyes something new to look at. But it was all still Terrell, a maze of concrete and steel and heavy doors, the air dank and sour with the smell of men.

At the visiting area they reported to the OD and entered an empty cage. The air inside was ten degrees warmer and smelled like bleach so strong it made Carter’s eyes sting. Pincher undid the cuffs; while Dennis held the point of his stick against the soft spot under Carter’s jaw, they shackled him in the front, legs too. There were signs all over the wall telling Carter what he could and couldn’t do, none of which he wanted to take the trouble to read or even look at. They shuffled him over to the chair and gave him the phone, which Carter could manage to hold in place against his ear only if he bent his legs halfway up his chest-more damp crunches from his knees-pulling the chain taut across his chest like a long zipper.

“Didn’t have to wear the shackles the last time,” Carter said.

Pincher barked a nasty laugh. “I’m sorry, did we forget to ask you nicely? Fuck you, Carter. You got ten minutes.”

Then they left, and Carter waited for the door on the other side to open and show him who it was had come to see him after all this time.

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.

He hated the weather, which was hot as an oven one minute and freezing the next, the air so damp it felt like a wet towel over your head. He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown nothingness of it. He hated the billboards and the freeways and faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly steaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belt buckles and the way people talked, y’all this and y’all that , as if they spent the day ropin’ and ridin’, not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

Most of all, he hated it because his parents had made him live here, back in junior high. Wolgast was forty-four, still in decent shape but with the miscellaneous aches and thinning hair to show for it; sixth grade was long ago, nothing to regret, but still, driving with Doyle up Highway 59 north from Houston, springtime Texas spread all around, the wound felt fresh to him. Texas, state-sized porkchop of misery: one minute he’d been a perfectly happy kid in Oregon, fishing off the pier at the mouth of the Coos River and playing with his friends in the woods behind their house for endless, idle hours; the next he was stuck in the urban swamp of Houston, living in a crappy ranch house without a scrap of shade, walking to school in one-hundred-degree heat that felt like a big shoe coming down on his head. The end of the world, he’d thought. That’s where he was. The end of the world was Houston, Texas. On his first day of sixth grade, the teacher had made him stand up to recite the Texas Pledge of Allegiance, as if he’d signed up to live in a whole different country. Three miserable years; he’d never been so glad to leave a place, even the way it happened. His father was a mechanical engineer; his parents had met when his father had taken a job the year after college as a math teacher on the reservation in Grande Ronde, where his mother, who was half Chinook-her mother’s family name was Po-Bear-was working as a nurse’s aide. They’d gone to Texas for the money, but then his father was laid off when the oil bust hit in ’86; they tried to sell the house but couldn’t, and in the end, his father had simply dropped the keys off at the bank. They moved to Michigan, then Ohio, then upstate New York, chasing little bits of work, but his father had never righted himself after that. When he’d died of pancreatic cancer two months before Wolgast graduated from high school-his third in as many years-it was easy to think that Texas had somehow done it. His mother had moved back to Oregon, but now she was gone too.

Everyone was gone.

He’d gotten the first man, Babcock, from Nevada. Others came from Arizona and Louisiana and Kentucky and Wyoming and Florida and Indiana and Delaware. Wolgast didn’t care much for those places, either. But anything was better than Texas.

Wolgast and Doyle had flown into Houston from Denver the night before. They’d stayed the night at a Radisson near the airport (he’d considered a brief side trip into the city, maybe tracking down his old house, but then wondered what in hell he’d want to do a thing like that for), picked up the rental car in the morning, a Chrysler Victory so new it smelled like the ink on a dollar bill, and headed north. The day was clear with a high, blue sky the color of cornflowers; Wolgast drove while Doyle sipped his latte and read the file, a mass of paper resting on his lap.

“Meet Anthony Carter,” Doyle said, and held up the photo. “Subject Number Twelve.”

Wolgast didn’t want to look. He knew just what he’d see: one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely ever learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long. These men were black or white, fat or thin, old or young, but the eyes were always the same: empty, like drains that could suck the whole world down into them. It was easy to sympathize with them in the abstract, but only in the abstract.