The Twelve

by Justin Cronin

  “Lila, run!”

  He threw the door open, but the gas was already inside him, in his head and heart and lungs; he made it all of ten feet before he succumbed, the ground rising like a gathering wave to meet him. Time seemed undone; the world had gone all watery and far away. A great wind was pushing over his face. At the edge of his vision he saw the space-suited men lumbering toward him. Two more were dragging Lila toward the helicopter. She was suspended face-down, her body limp, her feet skimming the ground. “Don’t hurt her!” Grey said. “Please don’t hurt the baby!” But these words seemed not to matter. The figures were above him now, their faces obscured, floating bodiless over the earth, like ghosts. The stars were coming out.

  Ghosts, Grey thought. I really must be dead this time. And he felt their hands upon him.

  16

  They drove through the day; by the time the convoy halted, it was late afternoon. Porcheki emerged from the lead Humvee and strode back to the bus.

  “This is where we leave you. The sentries at the gate will tell you what to do.”

  They were in some kind of staging area: trucks of supplies, military portables, refuelers, even artillery. Kittridge guessed he was looking at a force at least the size of two battalions. Adjacent to this was a gated compound of canvas tents, ringed by portable fencing topped with concertina wire.

  “Where are you off to?” Kittridge asked. He wondered where the fight was now.

  Porcheki shrugged. Wherever they tell me to go. “Best of luck to you, Sergeant. Just remember what I said.”

  The convoy drew away. “Pull ahead, Danny,” Kittridge said. “Slowly.”

  Two masked soldiers with M16s were positioned at the gate. A large sign affixed to the wire read: FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY REFUGEE PROCESSING CENTER. NO REENTRY. NO FIREARMS PAST THIS POINT.

  Twenty feet from the entrance, the soldiers motioned for them to halt. One of the sentries stepped to the driver’s window. A kid, not a day over twenty, with a spray of acne on his cheeks.

  “How many?”

  “Twelve,” Kittridge answered.

  “City of origin?”

  The tags had long since been stripped from the bus. “Des Moines.”

  The soldier stepped back, mumbling into the radio clipped to his shoulder. The second was still standing at the sealed gate with his weapon pointing skyward.

  “Okay, kill the engine and stay where you are.”

  Moments later the soldier returned with a canvas duffel bag, which he held up to the window. “Put any weapons and cell phones in here and pass it to the front.”

  The ban on weapons Kittridge understood, but cell phones? None of them had gotten a signal in days.

  “This many people, the local network would crash if people tried to use them. Sorry, those are the rules.”

  This explanation struck Kittridge as thin, but there was nothing to be done. He received the bag and moved up and down the center aisle. When he came to Mrs. Bellamy, the woman yanked her purse protectively to her waist.

  “Young man, I don’t even go to the beauty parlor without it.”

  Kittridge did his best to smile. “And right you are. But we’re safe here. You have my word.”

  With visible reluctance she withdrew the enormous revolver from her purse and deposited it with the rest. Kittridge toted the bag to the front of the bus and left it at the base of the stairs; the first soldier reached inside and whisked it away. They were ordered to disembark with the rest of their gear and stand clear of the bus while one of the soldiers searched their luggage. Beyond the gate Kittridge could see a large, open shed where people had gathered. More soldiers were moving up and down the fence line.

  “Okay,” the sentry said, “you’re good to go. Report to the processing area, they’ll billet you.”

  “What about the bus?” Kittridge asked.

  “All fuel and vehicles are being commandeered by the United States military. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

  Kittridge saw the stricken look on Danny’s face. One of the soldiers was boarding the bus to drive it away.

  “What’s with him?” the sentry asked.

  Kittridge turned to Danny. “It’s okay, they’ll take good care of it.”

  He could see the struggle in the man’s eyes. Then Danny nodded.

  “They better,” he said.

  The space was packed with people waiting in lines before a long table. Families with children, old people, couples, even a blind man with a dog. A young woman in a Red Cross T-shirt, her auburn hair pulled back from her face, was moving up and down the lines with a handheld.

  “Any unaccompanied minors?” Like Porcheki, she’d given up on the mask. Her eyes were harried, drained by sleeplessness. She looked at April and Tim. “What about you two?”

  “He’s my brother,” April said. “I’m eighteen.”

  The woman looked doubtful but said nothing.

  “We’d like to all stay together,” said Kittridge.

  The woman was jotting on her handheld. “I’m not supposed to do this.”

  “What’s your name?” Always good, Kittridge thought, to get a name.

  “Vera.”

  “The patrol that brought us in said we’d be evacuated to Chicago or St. Louis.”

  A strip of paper slid from the handheld’s port. Vera tore it off and passed it to Kittridge. “We’re still waiting on buses. It shouldn’t be long now. Show this to the worker at the desk.”

  They were assigned a tent and given plastic disks that would serve as ration coupons, then moved into the noise and smells of the camp: wood smoke, chemical toilets, the human odors of a crowd. The ground was muddy and littered with trash; people were cooking on camp stoves, hanging their laundry on tent lines, waiting at a pump to fill buckets with water, stretched out in lawn chairs like spectators at a tailgate party, a look of dazed exhaustion on their faces. All the garbage cans were overflowing, clouds of flies hovering. A cruel sun was beating down. Apart from the Army trucks, Kittridge saw no vehicles; all the refugees appeared to have come in on foot, their gasless cars abandoned.

  Two people had already been billeted in their tent, an older couple, Fred and Lucy Wilkes. They were from California but had family in Iowa and had been visiting for a wedding when the epidemic hit. They’d been in the camp six days.

  “Any word on the buses?” Kittridge asked. Joe Robinson had gone off to find out about rations, Wood and Delores to see about water. April had let her brother run off with some children from the adjacent tent, warning him not to wander far. Danny had accompanied him. “What are people saying?”

  “Always it’s tomorrow.” Fred Wilkes was a trim man of at least seventy, with bright blue eyes; in the heat he’d removed his shirt, displaying a fan of downy white chest hair. He and his wife, as generously proportioned as he was undersized—Jack Sprat and the missus—were playing gin rummy, sitting across from each other on a pair of cots and using a cardboard box as a table. “If it doesn’t happen soon, people are going to lose patience. And what then?”

  Kittridge stepped back outside. They were surrounded by soldiers, safe for the time being. Yet the whole thing felt stopped, everyone waiting for something to happen. Infantrymen were stationed along the fence line at one hundred meter intervals. All of them were wearing surgical masks. The only way in or out seemed to be the front gate. Abutting the camp to the north he saw a low-slung, windowless building without visible markings or signage, its entrance flanked by concrete barricades. While Kittridge watched, a pair of sleek black heliocpters approached from the east, turned in a wide circle, and touched down on the rooftop. Four figures emerged from the first helicopter, men in dark glasses and baseball caps and Kevlar vests, carrying automatic rifles. Not military, Kittridge thought. Blackbird, maybe, or Riverstone. One of those outfits. The four men proceeded to take up positions at the corners of the roof.

  The doors of the second helicopter opened. Kittridge placed a hand to his brow to get a better look. For
a moment, nothing happened; then a figure emerged, wearing an orange biosuit. Five more followed. The rotors of the helicopters were still turning. A brief negotiation ensued, then the biosuited figures removed a pair of long steel boxes from the helicopter’s cargo section, each the approximate dimensions of a coffin, with wheeled frames that dropped from their undercarriages. They guided the two boxes to a small, hutlike structure on the roof—a service elevator, Kittridge guessed. A few minutes passed; the six reappeared and boarded the second helicopter. First one and then the other lifted off, thudding away.

  April came up behind him. “I noticed that, too,” she said. “Any idea what it is?”

  “Maybe nothing.” Kittridge dropped his hand. “Where’s Tim?”

  “Already making friends. He’s off playing soccer with some kids.”

  They watched the helicopters fade from sight. Whatever it was, Kittridge thought, it wasn’t nothing.

  “You think we’ll be okay here?” April asked.

  “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “I don’t know.” Though her face said she did; she was thinking the same thing he was. “Last night, in the lab … What I mean is, I can be like that sometimes. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t want to.”

  She was somehow looking both toward him and away. At such moments she had a way of seeming older than she was. Not seeming, Kittridge thought: being.

  “Are you really eighteen?”

  She seemed amused. “Why? Don’t I look it?”

  Kittridge shrugged to hide his embarrassment; the question had just popped out. “No. I mean yes, you do. I was just … I don’t know.”

  April was plainly enjoying herself. “A girl’s not supposed to tell. But to put your mind at ease, yes, I’m eighteen. Eighteen years, two months, and seventeen days. Not that I’m, you know, counting.”

  Their eyes met and held in the way they seemed to want to. What was it about this girl, Kittridge wondered, this April?

  “I still owe you for the gun,” she said, “even if they took it. I think it might be the nicest present anybody ever gave me, actually.”

  “I liked the poem. Call it even. What was that guy’s name again?”

  “T. S. Eliot.”

  “He got any other stuff?”

  “Not much that makes sense. You ask me, he was kind of a one-hit wonder.”

  They had no weapons, no way to get a message to the outside world. Not for the first time, Kittridge wondered if they shouldn’t have just kept driving.

  “Well, when we get out of here, I’ll have to check him out.”

  17

  Grey.

  Whiteness, and the sensation of floating. Grey became aware that he was in a car. This was strange, because the car was also a motel room, with beds and dressers and a television; when had they started making cars like this? He was sitting on the foot of one of the beds, driving the room—the steering column came up at an angle from the floor; the television was the windshield—and seated on the adjacent bed was Lila, clutching a pink bundle to her chest. “Are we there yet, Lawrence?” Lila asked him. “The baby needs changing.” The baby? thought Grey. When had that happened? Wasn’t she months away? “She’s so beautiful,” said Lila, softly cooing. “We have such a beautiful baby. It’s too bad we have to shoot her.” “Why do we have to shoot her?” Grey asked. “Don’t be silly,” said Lila. “We shoot all the babies now. That way they won’t be eaten.”

  Lawrence Grey.

  The dream changed—one part of him knew he was dreaming, while another part did not—and Grey was in the tank now. Something was coming to get him, but he couldn’t make himself move. He was on his hands and knees, slurping the blood. His job was to drink it, drink it all, which was impossible: the blood had begun to gush through the hatch, filling the compartment. An ocean of blood. The blood was rising above his chin, his mouth and nose were filling, he was choking, drowning—

  Lawrence Grey. Wake up.

  He opened his eyes to a harsh light. Something felt caught in his throat; he began to cough. Something about drowning? But the dream was already breaking apart, its images atomizing, leaving only a residue of fear.

  Where was he?

  Some kind of hospital. He was wearing a gown, but that was all; he felt the chill of nakedness beneath it. Thick straps bound his wrists and ankles to the rails of the bed, holding him in place like a mummy in a sarcophagus. Wires snaked from beneath his gown to a cart of medical equipment; an IV was threaded into his right arm.

  Somebody was in the room.

  Two somebodies in fact, the pair hovering at the foot of the bed in their bulky biosuits, their faces shielded by plastic masks. Behind them was a heavy steel door and, positioned high on the wall in the corner, watching the scene with its unblinking gaze, a security camera.

  “Mr. Grey, I’m Horace Guilder,” the one on the left said. His tone of voice struck Grey as oddly cheerful. “This is my colleague Dr. Nelson. How are you feeling?”

  Grey did his best to focus on their faces. The one who’d spoken looked anonymously middle-aged, with a heavy, square-jawed head and pasty skin; the second man was considerably younger, with tight dark eyes and a scraggly little Vandyke. He didn’t look like any doctor Grey had ever met.

  He licked his lips and swallowed. “What is this place? Why am I tied up?”

  Guilder answered with a calming tone. “That’s for your own protection, Mr. Grey. Until we figure out what’s wrong with you. As for where you are,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that just yet. Suffice it to say that you’re among friends here.”

  Grey realized they must have sedated him; he could barely move a muscle, and it wasn’t just the straps. His limbs felt like iron, his thoughts moving through his brain with a lazy aimlessness, like guppies in a tank. Guilder was holding a cup of water to his lips.

  “Go on, drink.”

  Grey’s stomach turned—just the smell of it was revolting, like some hideously overchlorinated pool. Thoughts came back to him, dark thoughts: the blood in the tank, and Grey’s face buried greedily in it. Had that actually happened? Had he dreamed it? But no sooner had these questions formed in his mind than a kind of roaring seemed to fill his head, a vast hunger lurching to life inside him, so overwhelming that his entire body clenched against the straps.

  “Whoa now,” Guilder said, backing away suddenly. “Steady there.”

  More images were coming back to him, rising through the fog. The tank in the road, the dead soldiers, and explosions all around; the feel of his hand crashing through the Volvo’s window, and the fields detonating with fire, and the car sailing through the corn, and the bright lights of the helicopter, and the space-suited men, dragging Lila away.

  “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

  Guilder glanced toward Nelson, who frowned. Interesting, his face seemed to say.

  “You needn’t worry, Mr. Grey, we’re taking good care of her. She’s right across the hall, in fact.”

  “Don’t you hurt her.” His fists were clenched; he was straining against the straps. “You touch her and I’ll—”

  “And you’ll what, Mr. Grey?”

  But there was nothing; the straps held firm. Whatever they had given him, it had taken his strength away.

  “Try not to excite yourself, Mr. Grey. Your friend is perfectly fine. The baby, too. What we’re a little unclear on is just how the two of you came to be together. I was hoping you might help us with that.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  One eyebrow lifted incredulously behind the faceplate. “For starters, it seems that the two of you are the last people to come out of Colorado alive. Believe me when I tell you, this is a matter of some interest to us. Was she at the Chalet? Is that where you met her?”

  Just the word made Grey’s mind clench with panic. “The Chalet?”

  “Yes, Mr. Grey. The Chalet.”

  He shook his head. “No.”
>
  “Then where?”

  He swallowed. “At the Home Depot.”

  For just a moment, Guilder said nothing. “Where was this?”

  Grey tried to put his thoughts together, but his brain had gone all fuzzy again. “Denver someplace. I don’t know exactly. She wanted me to paint the nursery.”

  Guilder quickly turned toward the second man, who shrugged. “Could be the fentanyl,” Nelson said. “It may take him a little while to sort things out.”

  But Guilder was undeterred. There was something more forceful about the man’s gaze now. It seemed to bore right into him. “We need to know what happened at the Chalet. How did you get away?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Was there a girl there? Did you see her?”

  There was a girl? What were they talking about?

  “I didn’t see anyone. I just … I don’t know. It was all so confusing. I woke up at the Red Roof.”

  “The Red Roof? What’s that?”

  “A motel, on the highway.”

  A puzzled frown. “When was this?”

  Grey tried to count. “Three days ago? No, four.” He nodded his head against the pillow. “Four days.”

  The two men looked at each other. “It doesn’t make sense,” Nelson said. “The Chalet was destroyed twenty-two days ago. He’s not Rip Van Winkle.”

  “Where were you for those three weeks?” Guilder pressed.

  The question made no sense. Three weeks?

  “I don’t know,” Grey said.

  “I’ll ask you again, Mr. Grey. Was Lila at the Chalet? Is that where you met her?”

  “I told you,” he said. He was pleading now, his resistance gone. “She was at the Home Depot.”

  His thoughts were swirling like water going down a drain. Whatever they’d given him, it had screwed him up good. With a thump in his gut, Grey realized what the straps were all about. They were going to study him. Like the sticks. Like Zero. And when they were done with him, Richards, or somebody like him, would put the red light on Grey, and that would be the end of him.