The Twelve

by Justin Cronin

  “Your father?”

  “Pleeease.”

  She laughed. “All right, then. Your father. First of all, he was very brave. A brave man. He loved your mother very much.”

  “But sad.”

  “True, he was sad. But that was what made him so brave, you see. Because he did the bravest thing of all. You know what that is?”

  “To have hope.”

  “Yes. To have hope when there seems to be none. You must always remember that, too.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead, moist with childlike heat. “Now, it’s late. Time for sleep. Tomorrow is another day.”

  “Did they … love me?”

  Amy was taken aback. Not by the question itself—he had asked this on numerous occasions, seeking assurance—but by his uncertain tone.

  “Of course, Caleb. I have told you many times. They loved you very much. They love you still.”

  “Because they’re in heaven.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where all of us are together, forever. The place the soul goes.” He glanced away. Then: “They say you’re very old.”

  “Who says so, Caleb?”

  “I don’t know.” Wrapped in his cocoon of blankets, he gave a tiny shrug. “Everyone. The other sisters. I heard them talking.”

  It was not a matter that had come up before. As far as Amy was aware, only Sister Peg knew the story.

  “Well,” she said, gathering herself, “I’m older than you, I know that much. Old enough to tell you it’s time for sleep.”

  “I see them sometimes.”

  The remark caught her short. “Caleb? How do you see them?”

  But the boy wasn’t looking at her; his gaze had turned inward. “At night. When I’m sleeping.”

  “When you’re dreaming, you mean.”

  The boy had no answer for this. She touched his arm through the blankets. “It’s all right, Caleb. You can tell me when you’re ready.”

  “It’s not the same. It’s not like a dream.” He returned his eyes to hers. “I see you too, Amy.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re different, though. Not how you are now.”

  She waited for him to say more but there was nothing. Different how?

  “I miss them,” the boy said.

  She nodded, content for the moment to let the matter pass. “I know you do. And you will see them again. But for now you have me. You have your uncle Peter. He’ll be coming home soon, you know.”

  “With the … Expe-dishunary.” A look of determination glowed in the boy’s face. “When I grow up, I want to be a soldier like Uncle Peter.”

  Amy kissed his brow again, rising to go. “If that’s what you want to be, then that is what you’ll be. Now, sleep.”

  “Amy?”

  “Yes, Caleb?”

  “Did anyone love you like that?”

  Standing at the boy’s bedside, she felt the memories wash over her. Of a spring night, and a wheeling carousel, and a taste of powdered sugar; of a lake and a cabin in the woods and the feel of a big hand holding her own. Tears rose to her throat.

  “I believe that they did. I hope they did.”

  “Does Uncle Peter?”

  She frowned, startled. “What makes you ask that, Caleb?”

  “I don’t know.” Another shrug, faintly embarrassed. “The way he looks at you. He’s always smiling.”

  “Well.” She did her best to show nothing. Was it nothing? “I think he is smiling because he’s happy to see you. Now, sleep. Do you promise?”

  He groaned with his eyes. “I promise.”

  Outside, the lights were pouring down: not a brightness as total as the Colony’s—Kerrville was much too big for that—but, rather, a kind of lingering dusk, lit at the edges with a crown of stars above. Amy crept from the courtyard, keeping to the shadows. At the base of the wall she located the ladder. She made no effort to conceal her ascent; at the top she was met by the sentry, a broad-chested man of middle years with a rifle held across his chest.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  But that was all he said. As sleep took him, Amy eased his body to the catwalk, propping him against the rampart with his rifle across his lap. When he awoke he would possess only a fragmented, hallucinatory memory of her. A girl? One of the sisters, wearing the rough gray tunic of the Order? Perhaps he would not awaken on his own but would be found by one of his fellows and hauled away for sleeping at his post. A few days in the stockade but nothing serious, and in any event, no one would believe him.

  She made her way down the catwalk to the empty observation platform. The patrols moved through every ten minutes; that was all she had. The lights spilled their beams onto the ground below like a shining liquid. Closing her eyes, Amy cleared her mind and directed her thoughts outward, sending them soaring over the field.

  —Come to me.

  —Come to me come to me come to me.

  They came, gliding from the blackness. First one and then another and another, forming a glowing phalanx where they crouched at the edge of the shadows. And in her mind she heard the voices, always the voices, the voices and the question:

  Who am I?

  She waited.

  Who am I who am I who am I?

  How Amy missed him. Wolgast, the one who had loved her. Where are you? she thought, her heart aching with loneliness, for night after night, as this new thing had begun happening inside her, she had felt his absence keenly. Why have you left me alone? But Wolgast was nowhere, not in the wind or the sky or the sound of the earth’s slow turning. The man he was, was gone.

  Who am I who am I who am I who am I who am I who am I?

  She waited as long as she dared. The minutes ticked away. Then, footsteps on the catwalk, coming closer: the sentry.

  —You are me, she told them. You are me. Now go.

  They scattered into the darkness.

  2

  SEVENTY-SIX MILES SOUTH OF ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO

  On a warm September evening, many miles and weeks from home, Lieutenant Alicia Donadio—Alicia of Blades, the New Thing, adopted daughter of the great Niles Coffee and scout sniper of the Second Expeditionary Forces of the Army of the Republic of Texas, baptized and sworn—awakened to the taste of blood on the wind.

  She was twenty-seven years old, five foot seven, solidly built in the shoulders and hips, red hair shorn close to her scalp. Her eyes, which had once been only blue, glowed with an orange hue, like twin coals. She traveled lightly, nothing wasted. Feet shod in sandals of cut canvas with treads of vulcanized rubber; denim trousers worn thin at the knees and seat; a cotton jersey with the sleeves cut away for speed. Crisscrossing her upper body she wore a pair of leather bandoliers with six steel blades ensheathed, her trademark; at her back, slung on a lanyard of sturdy hemp, her crossbow. A Browning .45 semiautomatic with a nine-shot magazine, her weapon of last resort, was holstered to her thigh.

  Eight and one, was the saying. Eight for the virals, one for yourself. Eight and one and done.

  The town was called Carlsbad. The years had done their work, sweeping it clean like a giant broom. But still some structures remained: empty husks of houses, rusted sheds, the becalmed and ruined evidence of time’s passage. She had spent the day resting in the shade of a filling station whose metal awning somehow still stood, awakening at dusk to hunt. She took the jack on her cross, one shot through the throat, then skinned it and roasted it over a fire of mesquite, picking the stringy flesh from its haunches as the fire crackled beneath it.

  She was in no hurry.

  She was a woman of rules, rituals. She would not kill the virals while they slept. She would not use a gun if she could help it; guns were loud and sloppy and unworthy of the task. She took them on the blade, swiftly, or on the cross, cleanly and without regret, and always with a blessing of mercy in her heart. She said: “I send you home, my brothers and sisters, I release you from the prison of your existence.” And when the killing was done, and she had withdrawn her w
eapon from its lethal home, she touched the handle of her blade first to her brow and then her chest, the head and heart, consecrating the creatures’ deliverance with the hope that, when that day should come, her courage would not fail her and she herself would be delivered.

  She waited for night to fall, doused the flames of her fire, and set out.

  For days she had been following a broad plain of lowland scrub. To the south and west rose the shadowed shape of mountains, shoulders shrugging from the valley floor. If Alicia had ever seen the sea, she might have thought: That’s what this place is, the sea. The floor of a great, inland ocean, and the mountains, cave-pocked, time-stilled, the remains of a giant reef from a time when monsters unimaginable had roamed the earth and waves.

  Where are you tonight? she thought. Where are you hiding, my brothers and sisters of blood?

  She was a woman of three lives, two befores and one after. In the first before, she had been just a little girl. The world was all lurching figures and flashing lights, it moved through her like a breeze in her hair, telling her nothing. She was eight years old the night the Colonel had taken her outside the walls of the Colony and left her with nothing, not even a blade. She’d sat under a tree and cried all night, and when the morning sun found her, she was different, changed; the girl she’d been was no more. Do you see? the Colonel asked her, kneeling before her where she sat in the dust. He would not hold her for comfort but faced her squarely, like a soldier. Do you understand now? And she did; she understood. Her life, the meager accident of her existence, meant nothing; she had given it up. She had taken the oath that day.

  But that was long ago. She had been a child, then a woman, then: what? The third Alicia, the New Thing, neither viral nor human but somehow both. An amalgamation, a composite, a being apart. She traveled among the virals like an unseen spirit, part of them but also not, a ghost to their ghosts. In her veins was the virus, but balanced by a second, taken from Amy, the Girl from Nowhere; from one of twelve vials from the lab in Colorado, the others destroyed by Amy herself, cast into the flames. Amy’s blood had saved her life, yet in a way it hadn’t. Making her, Lieutenant Alicia Donadio, scout sniper of the Expeditionary, the only being like herself in all the living world.

  There were times, many times, all the time, when Alicia herself could not have said precisely what she was.

  She came upon a shed. A pockmarked and pitted thing, half-buried in the sand, with a sloping metal roof.

  She … felt something.

  Which was strange, nothing that had happened before. The virus had not given her that power, which was Amy’s alone. Alicia was yang to Amy’s yin, endowed with the physical strength and speed of the virals but disconnected from the invisible web that bound them together, thought to thought.

  And yet, did she not? Feel something? Feel them? A tingling at the base of her skull, and in her mind a quiet rustling, faintly audible as words:

  Who am I? Who am I who am I who am I who am I …?

  There were three. They had all been women, once. And even more: Alicia sensed—how was it possible?—that in each one lay a single kernel of memory. A hand shutting a window and the sound of rain. A brightly colored bird singing in a cage. A view from a doorway of a darkened room and two small children, a boy and a girl, asleep in their beds. Alicia received each of these visions as if it were her own, its sights and sounds and smells and emotions, a mélange of pure existence like three tiny fires flaring inside her. For a moment she was held captive to them, in mute awe of them, these memories of a lost world. The world of the Time Before.

  But something else. Wrapping each of these memories was a shroud of darkness, vast and pitiless. It made Alicia shudder to the very core. Alicia wondered what this was, but then she knew: the dream of the one called Martínez. Julio Martínez of El Paso, Texas, Tenth of Twelve, sentenced to death for the murder of a peace officer. The one Alicia had come to find.

  In Martínez’s dream, he was forever raping a woman named Louise—the name was written in a curling script on the pocket of the woman’s blouse—while simultaneously strangling her with an electric cord.

  The door of the shed was hanging kitty-corner on its rusted hinges. Tight quarters: Alicia would have preferred more room, especially with three. She crept forward, following the point of her cross, and eased into the shed.

  Two of the virals were suspended upside down from the rafters, the third crouched in a corner, gnawing on a hunk of meat with a sucking sound. They had just fed on an antelope; the desiccated remains lay sundered on the floor, clumps of hair and bone and skin. In the dazed aftermath of feeding, the virals took no notice of her entry.

  “Good evening, ladies.”

  She took the first one in the rafters with her cross. A thud and then a squeal, abruptly squelched, and its body crashed to the floor. The other two were rousing now; the second released its hold on the rafter, tucked its knees to its chest, and rolled in the midst of its decent to land on its clawed feet, facing away. Dropping the cross, Alicia drew a blade and in a single liquid motion sent it spinning into the third, which had risen to face her.

  Two down, one to go.

  It should have been easy. Suddenly it wasn’t. As Alicia drew a second blade, the remaining viral turned and swatted her hand with a force that sent the weapon spiraling into the dark. Before the creature could deliver another blow, Alicia dropped to the floor and rolled away; when she rose, fresh blade in hand, the viral was gone.

  Shit.

  She snatched her cross from the floor, loaded a fresh bolt, and dashed outside. Where the hell was it? Two quick steps and Alicia launched herself to the roof of the shed, landing with a clang. Quickly she surveyed the landscape. Nothing, no sign.

  Then the viral was behind her. A trap, Alicia realized; it must have been hiding, lying flush to the far side of the roof. Two things happened simultaneously. Alicia spun on her heels, aiming the cross instinctively; and with a sound of splintering wood and tearing metal, the roof gave way beneath her.

  She landed face-up on the floor of the shed, the viral crashing on top of her. Her cross was gone. Alicia would have drawn a blade, but both of her hands were now occupied in the stalemated project of holding the viral at arm’s length. Left and right and left again the creature darted its face, jaws snapping, toward the curve of Alicia’s throat. An irresistible force meeting an immovable object: how long could this go on? The children in their beds, Alicia thought. That’s who this one was. She was the woman looking through the doorway at her sleeping children. Think about the children, Alicia thought, and then she said it:

  “Think about the children.”

  The viral froze. A wistful expression came into its face. For the thinnest instant—not more than half a second—their eyes met and held in the darkness. Mary, Alicia thought. Your name was Mary. Her hand was reaching for her blade. I send you home, my sister Mary, thought Alicia. I release you from the prison of your existence. And with an upward thrust she sank her blade, tip to hilt, into the sweet spot.

  Alicia rolled the corpse away. The others lay where they had fallen. She collected her blade and bolt from the first two, wiped them clean, then knelt by the body of the last. In the aftermath Alicia usually felt nothing beyond a vague hollowness; it surprised her now to discover that her hands were shaking. How had she known? Because she had; with absolute clarity, she had known that the woman’s name was Mary.

  She pulled the blade free, touched it to her head and heart. Thank you, Mary, for not killing me before my work is complete. I hope you are with your little ones now.

  Mary’s eyes were open, gazing at nothing; Alicia closed them with her fingertips. It wouldn’t do to leave her where she was. Alicia hoisted the body into her arms and carried it outside. A rind of moon had risen, washing the landscape in its glow, a darkness visible. But moonlight wasn’t what Mary needed. A hundred years of nighttime sky were enough, Alicia thought, and laid the woman on a patch of open ground where, come morning, the sun would
find her and cast her ashes to the wind.

  Alicia had begun to climb.

  A night and a day had passed. She was in the mountains now, ascending a dry creekbed through a slim defile. The feeling of the virals was stronger here: she was headed toward something. Mary, she thought, what were you trying to tell me?

  It was nearly dawn by the time she reached the top of the ridge, the horizon jumping away. Below her, in the wind-scraped blackness, the valley floor unfurled, none but the stars for company. Alicia knew it was possible to parse discrete figures from their arbitrary-seeming arrangement, the shapes of people and animals, but she had never learned to do this. They appeared to her only as a random scattering, as if each night the stars were flung anew against the sky.

  Then she saw it: a gaping maw of blackness, set in a bowl-like depression. The opening was a hundred feet tall or more. Curved benches, like an amphitheater, carved from the rocky face of the mountain, were situated at the cave’s mouth. Bats were flicking through the sky.

  It was a door to hell.

  You’re down there, aren’t you? Alicia thought, and smiled. You son of a bitch, I’ve found you.

  3

  Denver Police Dept.

  Case File 193874

  District 6

  Transcript of Interview with Lila Beatrice Kyle

  VIA: Det. Rita Chernow

  3 May 4:17 A.M.

  RC: Let the record show that the subject has been fully apprised of her rights and has declined to have an attorney present at this interview. Questioning conducted by Detective Rita Chernow, Denver PD, District Six. The time is four-seventeen A.M. Dr. Kyle, would you please state your full name?

  LK: Lila Beatrice Kyle.

  RC: And you’re an orthopedic surgeon at Denver General Hospital, is that correct?

  LK: Yes.

  RC: And do you know why you’re here?

  LK: Something happened at the hospital. You wanted to ask me some questions. What is this room? I don’t know it.

  RC: We’re in the police station, Dr. Kyle.

  LK: Am I in trouble?