The Twelve

by Justin Cronin

  Maybe that’s all there is to it, Suresh had said. Maybe they just think she’s their mother.

  Guilder became aware that Wilkes was looking at him. What had they been talking about? Lila? No, Texas. But Wilkes had told him there was something else.

  “Which brings me to, um, the second thing.” And that was when Wilkes told Guilder about the bombing in the market.

  Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  “I know, I know,” Wilkes said, shaking his head in his Wilkesian way. “Not the best turn of events.”

  “He’s one man. One!”

  Guilder’s face, his whole body, tingled with righteous anger. Another volleying burp arose. He wanted vengeance. He wanted things to settle the hell down. He wanted this Sergio, whoever he was, with his head on a goddamn pike.

  “We’ve got people working on it. HR is asking around, and we’ve offered double rations to anybody who comes forward with a solid lead. Not everyone down the hill is so enamored.”

  “And somebody please tell me how he’s moving through the flatland like it’s a goddamn expressway? Do we not have patrols? Do we not have checkpoints? Can somebody please shed some light on this little detail?”

  “We have a theory about that. The evidence points to an organization that’s classically cellular. Clusters of just a few individuals operating within a loose operational framework.”

  “I am perfectly aware what a terrorist cell is, Fred.”

  His chief of staff made a flustered gesture with his hands. “I’m simply saying that looking for one man may not be the answer. That it’s the idea of Sergio, not Sergio per se, that we’re up against. If you follow me.”

  Guilder did, and it wasn’t a cheering thought. He’d been down this road before, first in Iraq and Afghanistan and then Saudi, after the coup. You lopped off the head but the body didn’t die; it simply grew another head. The only useful strategy in these situations was psychological. Killing the body was never enough. You had to kill the spirit.

  “How many do we have in custody?”

  Thus more paper. Guilder read the full report. According to eyewitnesses, the market bomber had been a female agricultural worker in her thirties. There’d never been any problems with her; by all accounts she was as meek as a lamb, a quality that to a disconcerting extent matched the profiles of other suicide bombers. She had no living family except for a sister; her husband and son had died six years ago, in an outbreak of salmonella. She’d apparently gotten past the checkpoints disguised in a col’s uniform (the original wearer’s body had been found stuffed into a dumpster, her throat slashed, one arm mysteriously severed at the elbow), though where she’d procured the explosives was unknown. None had been reported missing from the armory or the construction depot, but a full inventory had yet to be completed. Nine of her lodgemates plus her sister’s family, including two young children, had been detained for questioning.

  “Nobody seems to know anything,” Wilkes said with a toss of his hand. He’d taken a seat on the far side of the desk while Guilder read. “Apart from the sister, it’s like they barely knew her. We can take it up a notch, but I don’t think it’s going to produce much in the way of useful intelligence. These people would have caved already.”

  Guilder placed the file aside, among the many others. The burps, which continued unabated, had painted the walls of his mouth with a foul taste of animal decay, not unlike the stench of the decomposing Mrs. Wilkes. A fact that, if the barely concealed look of olfactory distaste on his chief of staff’s smoothly youthful face gave any indication, had not failed to escape the man’s attention.

  “No need,” Guilder said.

  Wilkes frowned doubtfully. “You want us to release them? I don’t think that’s wise. At least let’s make them cool their heels a couple more days. Rattle a few chains, see where it takes us.”

  “You said yourself that if they knew anything, they would have already talked.”

  Guilder paused, aware that he was about to cross a line. The thirteen flatlanders sitting in the detention center were, after all, people, human beings, probably not guilty of anything. More to the point, they were tangible physical assets in an economy of scarcity. But given the frustrating intractability of the Sergio situation, and the debacle in Texas, and the time-sensitive nature of Guilder’s grand designs, which were at long last coming to complex fruition; and in the grip of his own rapidly burgeoning physical need, a titanic biological imperative that, as he regarded Wilkes from across the burnished prairie of his oversized desk, was blossoming inside him like a flower in a time-lapse video, he didn’t think for too long. He came to the line, gave it one quick look, and stepped over.

  “It seems to me,” said Director Horace Guilder, “the time has come to sell this thing.”

  * * *

  Guilder waited a few minutes after Wilkes was gone to stage his departure. As he had reminded himself many times, a great deal of his authority boiled down to a sense of dignity in his public movements, and it was better for people not to witness him in such an agitated state. He took the ring of keys from his desk and stepped out. Strange, how the hunger had come on so quickly. Usually it crept up on him over a period of days, not minutes. From the base of the cupola, a winding flight of stairs descended to the ground floor, its downward passage flanked by oil portraits of various dukes and generals and barons and princes of the realm, a parade of disapproving, heavy-jawed faces in period costume. (At least he hadn’t resorted to having his picture painted—though, come to think of it, why not?) He peered over the rail. Fifty feet below were the tiny figures of the uniformed security detail; members of the leadership, in their dark suits and ties, scuttling briskly to and fro with their officious briefcases and clipboards; even a couple of attendants, flowing diaphanously across the polished stone floor in their nunnish costumes, like a pair of paper boats. It was Wilkes he was looking for, and there he was: by the massive front door with its inlaid carvings of assorted prairie kitsch (a fist gripping wheat, a plow merrily tilling the bountiful Iowa topsoil), his loyal chief of staff had paused to confer with two of the leadership, Ministers Hoppel and Chee. Guilder supposed that Wilkes was already setting the day’s orders in motion, bringing them up to speed, but this assumption was belied when Hoppel reared back his head, clapped his hands together, and barked a laugh that ricocheted through the marbled space like a bullet in a submarine. Guilder wondered what the fuck was so funny.

  He turned from the rail and made his way to the second, more conventional, and highly unobservable stairway that was his alone to use. By now his insides were roaring. It was all he could do not to take the stairs three at a time, which in his present condition would have probably resulted in some bone-breaking pratfall that would heal within hours but still hurt like hell. Bearing himself like a crystal chalice that might at any moment spill its contents to the floor, Guilder descended one cautious step at a time. The salivation had started, a veritable waterfall he had to suck back between his teeth. Vampire bibs, he thought wryly; now, that would be a moneymaker.

  The basement at last, with its heavy, vaultlike door. Guilder withdrew the keys from the pocket of his suit coat. Hands trembling with anticipation, he keyed the door, turned the heavy wheel, and shouldered it aside.

  By the time he was halfway down the hall he’d stripped to the waist and was kicking off his shoes. He was riding this thing full-bore now, a surfer skimming down a wave. Door after door sailed past. Guilder could hear the muffled cries of the damned coming from within, a sound that had long since ceased to arouse even a grain of pity within him, if it ever had. He blasted past the warning signs—ETHER PRESENT, NO OPEN FLAME—hit the freezer room at a dead sprint, turned the final corner, and narrowly avoided collision with a lab-coated technician. “Director Guilder!” he gasped. “We didn’t know …!” But these words were cut short as Guilder, with more violence than was called for, applied the full swinging weight of his left forearm to the side of the man’s head, sending him crashing into the w
all.

  It was blood he wanted, and not just any blood. There was blood and there was blood.

  He came to the final door, skidding to a halt. With fumbling hands he undid his trousers and tossed them away, then keyed the door and opened it.

  “Hello, Lawrence.”

  38

  In the morning, Jackie was gone.

  Sara awoke to find the woman’s cot empty. Lit with panic, she tore through the lodge, cursing herself for sleeping so deeply. The old woman who bunked in the second row? Had anyone seen her? But no one had, or so they said. At morning roll, Sara detected only the smallest hitch of silence in the space where Jackie’s number should have been. Everyone was looking down. Just like that, the waters had closed over her friend. It was as if she’d never existed at all.

  She moved through the day in a fog, her mind teetering on the razor-thin edge between desperate hope and outright despair. Probably there was nothing to be done. People disappeared; that was the way of things. And yet Sara could not talk herself out of the idea that if the woman was still in the hospital, if she hadn’t been taken to the feedlot yet, there might be a chance. But how could Jackie have been taken right from under Sara’s nose like that? Wouldn’t she have heard something? Wouldn’t the woman have protested? It simply didn’t add up.

  That was when Sara figured it out. She hadn’t heard anything, because there had been nothing to hear. Not like this. Not for me. Jackie had left the lodge of her own accord.

  She’d done it to protect Sara.

  By midafternoon she knew she had to do something. Her guilt was excruciating. She never should have tried to get Jackie out of the plant, never confronted Sod the way she had. She’d all but painted a target on the woman’s back. The minutes were ticking away. The virals in the feedlot ate just after dusk; Sara had seen the trucks. Livestock carriers crammed with lowing cows, but also the windowless vans that were used to move prisoners from the detention center. One was always parked at the rear of the hospital, its meaning plain to anyone who cared to consider it.

  The cols supervising the grinding teams were Vale and Whistler. Vale she thought she could have worked with, but with Whistler watching, Sara didn’t see how. There was only one solution she could think of. She topped off her bushel basket, lifted it from the ground, took three steps toward the grinder, and stopped.

  “Oh,” Sara cried. She let the basket drop, clutching her stomach. “Oh. Oh.”

  She melted, moaning, to her knees. For a moment it seemed that amid the noise of the grinders her demonstration had gone unnoticed. She amplified her cries, curling her legs to her chest, hugging her midriff.

  “Sara, what is it?” One of the other women—Constance Chou—was crouching over her.

  “It hurts! It hurts!”

  “Get up or they’ll see you!”

  Another voice broke through: Vale’s. “What’s going on here?”

  Constance backed away. “I don’t know, sir. She just … collapsed.”

  “Fisher? What’s wrong with you?”

  Sara didn’t answer, just kept up with the moaning, rocking at the waist and throwing in a few spastic kicks for good measure. A circle of onlookers had formed around her. “Appendix,” she said.

  “What did you say?”

  She clenched her face with manufactured pain. “I think … it’s my … appendix.”

  Whistler charged through the crowd, pushing onlookers aside with her baton. “What’s her problem?”

  Vale was scratching his head. “She says something’s wrong with her pendix.”

  “What are you people looking at?” Whistler barked. “Get back to work.” Then, to Vale: “What do you want to do with her?”

  “Fisher, can you walk?”

  “Please,” she gasped. “I need a doctor.”

  “She says she needs a doctor,” Vale reported.

  “Yeah, I heard that, Vale.” The woman huffed a sigh. “All right, let’s get her out of here.”

  They helped her to a pickup parked behind the plant and laid her in the back. Sara kept up the rocking and moaning. A brief negotiation ensued: should one of them take her or should they call for a driver?

  “Fuck it, I’ll take her,” Whistler said. “Knowing you, you’ll dither all day.”

  The trip to the hospital took ten minutes; Sara used them to formulate a plan. All she’d been thinking about was getting to the hospital, to find Jackie before the van took her away; she hadn’t considered the next step. It seemed to her now that she held only two good cards. First, she wasn’t really sick; once she experienced a miraculous recovery, it didn’t seem likely that they’d ship a perfectly able-bodied woman off to the feedlot. Second, she was a nurse. Sara wasn’t sure how she’d put this fact to use—she’d have to improvise—but she might be able to use her medical knowledge to convince the person in charge that Jackie wasn’t as ill as she appeared.

  Or maybe nothing she did would matter. Maybe once she passed through the hospital doors, she’d never come out. This prospect, as she weighed it, did not appear entirely bad, thus giving her a third card to play: the card of not caring anymore if she lived or died.

  Whistler pulled up to the hospital entrance, strode back to the cargo bed, and drew down the tailgate.

  “Out with you. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t think I can walk.”

  “Well, you’ll have to try, because I’m not carrying you.”

  Sara sat up. The sun had peeked from behind the clouds, sharpening the scene with its cold brightness. The hospital was a three-story brick building, part of a cluster of low, workaday structures at the southern edge of the flatland. At a distance of twenty yards stood one of three major HR substations. A dozen cols guarded the entrance, which was flanked by concrete barricades.

  “Am I talking to myself here?”

  She was; Sara was barely listening. She was focused on the car, a small sedan of the type the cols used to move among the lodges. It was headed toward them at high speed, dragging a boiling plume of dust. Sara clambered down from the bed. Simultaneously, she sensed a figure rushing at her from behind. The car was bearing down, its speed unabated. There was something odd about it, and not just the wild velocity of its approach. The windows were blacked out, obscuring the driver; something was written on the hood, the letters scrawled in streaks of white paint.

  SERGIO LIVES

  As the vehicle sailed toward the barricades, somebody smashed her from behind. In the next instant she was flat on the ground, her body smothered, as the truck exploded with a blast of sound and a wave of superheated pressure she didn’t believe could actually exist in the world. The air was sucked from her lungs. Things were falling. Things were sailing through the air and impacting like meteors around her, flaming, heavy things. There was a screeching sound of metal, a rain of tinkling glass. The world was noise and heat and the weight of a body on top of her, and then a sudden silence and a wash of warm breath close to her ear and a voice saying:

  “Come with me now. Do exactly as I say.”

  Sara was on her feet. A woman, no one she knew, was pulling her by the hand against the inertia of her wonderment. Something had happened to her hearing, bathing the scene around her in a milky unreality. The substation was a smoking crater. The pickup was gone; it lay on its side where the entrance to the hospital was, or had been. Something wet was on Sara’s hands and face. Blood. She was covered in it. And sticky things, biological things, and a fine, jeweled dust she realized was composed of tiny bits of glass. How amazing, she thought, how very amazing everything was, especially what had happened to Whistler. It was striking, what a body looked like when it wasn’t one thing anymore but had been dispersed in recognizably human pieces over a wide area. Who would have guessed that when a body blew apart, as had evidently happened, it actually did that: it blew apart.

  She broke away, first her vision and then the rest of her; the woman was running and so was she, running and also being dragged, the energy of her rescuer—fo
r Sara understood that this woman had protected her from the blast—passing into her body through their gripping hands. Behind them the silence had given way to a chorus of screams and shouts, a weirdly musical sound, and the woman skidded to a halt behind a building that somehow still stood (hadn’t all the buildings in the world just blown up?) and dropped on the ground. In her hand was a kind of hook, and with this hook she drew aside the manhole cover.

  “Get in.”

  Sara did. She got in. She lowered herself into the hole where a ladder waited. Something smelled bad. Something smelled like shit because it was. As Sara’s feet touched the bottom, her sneakers filling with the horrible water, the woman reached over her head and resealed the manhole with a clank, plunging Sara into an absolute darkness. Only then did it occur to her in fullest measure that she had been in an explosion of many deaths and much destruction and that in its immediate aftermath, an interval of probably less than a minute, she had given herself completely to a woman she did not know, and that this woman had whisked her into a kind of nonexistence: that Sara had, in effect, disappeared.

  “Wait.”

  The glow of a small bluish flame igniting: the woman was holding a lighter, touching it to the head of a torch. A blaze leapt forth, illuminating her face. Somewhere in her twenties, with a long neck and small, dark eyes, full of intensity. There was something familiar about her, but Sara couldn’t fix her mind on it.

  “No more talking. Can you run?”

  Sara nodded yes.

  “Come on.”

  The woman began to move at a trot down the sewer pipe, Sara following. This went on for some time. At each of many intersections, the woman decisively chose a direction. Sara had begun to take stock of her injuries. The explosion had not occurred without effect. There was a variety to her pains, some of them quite sharp, others more like a generally dispersed thudding. Yet none was so severe as to prevent her from keeping up with the woman. After more time had passed, Sara realized that the distance they had traveled must have surely placed them beyond the wired boundaries of the Homeland. They were escaping! They were free! A ring of light appeared before them: an exit. Beyond it lay the world—a dangerous world, a lethal world where virals roamed unchecked, but even so it loomed before her like a golden promise, and she stepped into the light.