The Twelve

by Justin Cronin

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Just … I don’t know. Anything. Here—” She filled Sara’s hands with pillows. “Put these over there. On the whooziwhatzis.”

  “Um, you mean the sofa?”

  “Of course I mean the sofa!”

  And just like that, a light seemed to switch on in the woman’s face. A wondrous, happy, shining light. She was staring over Sara’s shoulder, toward the door.

  “Sweetheart!”

  She dropped to a crouch as a young child, a girl in a plain smock, blond ringlets bouncing, dashed past Sara into the woman’s outstretched arms. “My angel! My sweet, sweet girl!”

  The child, who was holding a sheet of colored paper, pointed at the woman’s turbaned head. “Did you take a bath, Mummy?”

  “Why, yes! You know how Mummy likes her baths. What a clever little girl you are! So, tell me,” she continued, “how were your lessons? Did Jenny read to you?”

  “We read Peter Rabbit.”

  “Wonderful!” the woman beamed. “Was it funny? Did you like it? I’m sure I’ve told you how much I adored him when I was your age.” She turned her attention to the paper. “And what do we have here?”

  The little girl held it up. “It’s a picture.”

  “Is that me? Is it a picture of the two of us?”

  “They’re birds. That one is named Martha, the other one is Bill. They’re building a nest.”

  A flicker of disappointment; then she smiled again. “Why, of course they are. Anyone could see that. It’s as plain as the nose on your pretty little face.”

  And on and on. Sara barely ingested any of it. An intense new sensation had come over her, a feeling of biological alarm. Something deep and atavistic, tidal in its weight and movement, accompanied by a focusing of her senses on the back of the little girl’s blond head. Those curls. The precise and singular dimensions that the little girl’s body occupied in space. Sara already knew without knowing, a fact she also knew, the paradox building a kind of hallway inside her, like images reflected infinitely in two opposing mirrors.

  “But how awful of me,” the woman, Lila, was saying, her voice at some impossible remove from reality, a transmission from a distant planet. “I’ve totally forgotten my manners. Eva, I need to introduce you to someone. This is our new friend …” She paused, drawing a blank.

  “Dani,” Sara managed.

  “Our wonderful new friend Dani. Eva, say how do you do.”

  The child turned. Time collapsed as Sara beheld her face. A unique amalgamation of form and features that was the only one in all the universe. There was no doubt in Sara’s mind.

  The little girl sent her a shining, closed-lip smile. “How do you do, Dani?”

  Sara was looking at her daughter.

  But in the next second something changed. A shadow fell, a dark presence descending. It jolted Sara back to the world.

  “Lila.”

  Sara turned. He was standing behind her. His face was a man’s, ordinary, forgettable, one of thousands like it, but from it radiated an invisible force of menace as incontrovertible as gravity. To behold him was to feel oneself plunging.

  He looked Sara contemptuously in the eye, piercing her utterly. “Do you know who I am?”

  Sara swallowed. Her throat was as tight as a reed. For the first time, her mind darted to the foil package secreted in the deep folds of her robe; it would not be the last.

  “Yes, sir. You’re Director Guilder.”

  His mouth curled downward with distaste. “Put down your veil, for God’s sake. Just the sight of you makes me sick.”

  With trembling fingers, she did so. Now the shadow became a shadow literally, his features mercifully blurred behind the blush of fabric, as if in mist. Guilder strode past her, to where Lila still crouched with Sara’s daughter. If his presence meant anything to the little girl, Sara couldn’t see it, but Lila was a different story. Every part of her tightened. Clutching the child in front of her like a shield, she rose to her feet.

  “David—”

  “Just stop it.” His eyes flicked disagreeably over her. “You look like hell, you know that?” Then, turning to face Sara once more: “Where is it?”

  He was, she understood, speaking of the tray. Sara pointed.

  “Bring it here.”

  Her hands, somehow, managed this.

  “Get rid of them,” Guilder said to Lila.

  “Eva, sweetie, why doesn’t Dani take you outside?” She looked quickly at Sara, her eyes beseeching. “It’s such a beautiful day. A little fresh air, what do you say?”

  “I want you to take me,” the girl protested. “You never go outside.”

  Lila’s voice was like a song she was being made to sing. “I know, sweetheart, but you know how sensitive Mummy is to the sun. And Mummy has to take her medicine now. You know how Mummy gets when she takes her medicine.”

  Reluctantly, the child complied. Breaking away from Lila, she moved to where Sara was standing beside the door.

  With excruciating miraculousness, she took Sara by the hand.

  Flesh meeting flesh. The unbearable corporeal smallness of it, its discrete power, its infusion of memory. All of Sara’s senses molded around the exquisite sensation of her child’s tiny hand in her own. It was the first time their bodies had touched since one was inside the other, though now it was the opposite: Sara was the one inside.

  “Run along, you two,” Lila croaked. She gave a wave of absolute misery toward the door. “Have fun.”

  Without a word, Kate—Eva—led Sara from the room. Sara was floating; she weighed a million pounds. Eva, she thought. I have to remember to call her Eva. A short hallway and then a flight of stairs: a pair of doors at the bottom pushed into a small, fenced yard with a teeter-totter and a rusted swing set. The sky looked down with a solemn, snow-filled light.

  “Come on,” the child said. And broke away.

  She climbed aboard a swing. Sara took her place behind her.

  “Push me.”

  Sara drew back the chains, suddenly nervous. How much was safe? This precious and beloved being. This holy, miraculous, human person. Surely three feet was more than enough. She released the chains, and the girl arced away, vigorously pumping her legs.

  “Higher,” she commanded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Higher, higher!”

  Each sensation a piercing. Each a painless engraving in the heart. Sara caught her daughter at the small of her back and thrust her away. Up and out she rose, into the December air. With each arc her hair volleyed backward, suffusing the air behind her with the sweet scent of her person. The girl swung silently; her happiness was bound into a pure occupation of the act itself. A little girl, swinging in winter.

  My darling Kate, thought Sara. My baby, my one. She pushed, and pushed again; the girl flew away, always returning to her hands. I knew, I knew, I always knew. You are the ember of life I blew on, a thousand lonely nights. Never could I let you die.

  46

  Houston.

  The liquefied city, drowned by the sea. The great urban quagmire, none but its skyscrapered heart left standing. Hurricanes, drenching tropical rains, the unchecked slide of a continent’s waters seeking final escape to the Gulf: for a hundred years the tides had come and gone, filling the lowlands, carving out grimy bayous and contaminated deltas, erasing all.

  They were ten miles from the city’s central core. The last days of travel had been a game of hopscotch, seeking out the dry places and segments of passable roadway, hacking their way through thickets of spiny, insect-infested vegetation. In these quarters, nature unveiled its true malevolent purpose: everything here wanted to sting you, swarm you, bite you. The air creaked with its saturated weight and miasma of rot. The trees, gnarled like grasping hands, seemed like something from another age entirely. They seemed positively made up. Who would invent such trees?

  Darkness came on with a chemically yellowish dimming. The trip had compacted to a crawl.
Even Amy had begun to show her irritation. Her signs of illness had not abated; rather, the opposite. When she thought Greer wasn’t looking, he caught her pressing her palms to her stomach, exhaling with slow pain. They quartered that night on the top floor of a house that seemed outrageous in its ruined opulence: dripping chandeliers, rooms the size of auditoriums, all of it spattered with a black, off-gassing mold. A brown line three feet above the marble floor circumscribed the walls where floodwaters had once risen. In the massive bedroom where they took shelter, Greer opened the windows to clear the air of the ammonic stench: below him, in the vine-clotted yard, lay a swimming pool full of goo.

  All night long, Greer could hear the dopeys moving in the trees outside. They vaulted from limb to limb, like great apes. He listened to them rustling through the foliage, followed by the sharp animal cries of rats and squirrels and other small creatures meeting their demise. Amy’s injunction notwithstanding, he dozed fitfully, pistol in hand. Just remember. Carter’s one of us. He prayed it was true.

  Amy was no better in the morning.

  “We should wait,” he said.

  Even standing seemed to take all the strength she could muster. She made no effort to hide her discomfort, gripping the flat of her belly, her head bowed in pain. He could see the spasms shuddering her abdomen as the cramps moved through her.

  “We go,” she said, speaking through gritted teeth.

  They continued east. The skyscrapers of downtown emerged in their particularity. Some had collapsed, the clay soil having expanded and contracted over the years to pulverize their foundations; others reclined against each other like drunks stumbling home from a bar. Amy and Greer traced a narrow spit of sand between weed-choked bayous. The sun was high and bright. Seaborne wreckage had begun to appear: boats, and parts of boats, splayed on their sides in the shallows as if in a swoon of exhaustion. When they reached the place where the land ended, Greer dismounted, retrieved the binoculars from his saddlebag, and pointed them across the stained waters. Dead ahead, wedged against a skyscraper, lay a vast ship, hard aground. Her stern rose impossibly high in the air, massive propellers visible above the waterline. On it was written the vessel’s name, dripping with rust: CHEVRON MARINER.

  “That’s where we’ll find him,” said Amy.

  There was no dry path across; they would have to find a boat. Luck favored them. After backtracking a quarter mile, they discovered an aluminum rowboat overturned in the weeds. The bottom appeared sound, the rivets tight. Greer dragged it to the lagoon’s edge and set it afloat. When it failed to sink, he helped Amy down from her mount.

  “What about the horses?” he asked her.

  Her face was a mask of barely bottled pain. “We should be back before dark, I think.”

  He stabilized the craft as Amy boarded, then lowered himself onto the middle bench. A flat board served as a paddle. Seated in the stern, Amy had been reduced to cargo. Her eyes were closed, her hands wrapped her waist, sweat dripping from her brow. She made no sound, though Greer suspected her silence was for his benefit. As the distance narrowed, the ship expanded to mind-boggling dimensions. Its rusted sides loomed hundreds of feet over the lagoon. It was listing to one side; the surrounding water was black with oil. Greer paddled their craft into the lobby of the adjacent building and brought them to rest beside a bank of motionless escalators.

  “Lucius, I think I’m going to need your help.”

  He assisted her from the boat and up the nearest escalator, supporting her by the waist. They found themselves in an atrium with several elevators and walls of smoked glass. ONE ALLEN CENTER a sign read, with a directory of offices beneath. The ascent that lay ahead would be serious; they’d need to climb ten stories at least.

  “Can you make it?” Greer asked.

  Amy bit her lip and nodded.

  They followed the sign for the stairs. Greer lit a torch, gripped her at the waist again, and began to climb. The trapped air of the stairwell was poisonous with mold; every few floors they were forced to step out just to clear their lungs. At the twelfth floor, they stopped.

  “I think we’re high enough,” said Greer.

  From the sealed windows of a book-lined office they looked down on the tanker’s decking, wedged hard against the building ten feet below. An easy drop. Greer took the desk chair, hoisted it over his head, and flung it through the window.

  He turned to look at Amy.

  She was studying her hand, holding it before her like a cup. A bright red fluid filled her palm. It was then that Greer noticed the stain on her tunic. More blood was trickling down her legs.

  “Amy—”

  She met his eye. “You’re tired.”

  It was like being wrapped in an infinite softness. A blanketing, whole-body sleep.

  “Oh, damn,” he said, already gone, and folded to the floor.

  47

  Peter and the others entered San Antonio on Highway 90. It was early morning; they had passed the first night in a hardbox in the city’s outer ring of suburbs, a sprawl of collapsed and scoured houses. The room lay beneath a police station, with a fortified ramp at the rear. Not a DS hardbox, Hollis explained; one of Tifty’s. It was larger than the hardboxes Peter had seen, though no less crude—just a stuffy room with bunks and a garage bay where a fat-tired pickup awaited, cans of fuel in the bed. Crates and metal military lockers were stacked along the walls. What’s in these? Michael asked, to which Hollis said, one eyebrow raised, I don’t know, Michael. What do you think?

  They drove out at first light beneath a heavy sky, Hollis at the wheel beside Peter, Michael and Lore riding in the truck’s bed. Much of the city had burned in the days of the epidemic; little remained of the central core save for a handful of the taller buildings, which stood with forlorn austerity against the backdrop of bleached hills, their scorched facades telegraphing the blackened and collapsed interiors where an army of dopeys now dozed the day away. “Just dopeys,” people always said, though the truth was the truth: a viral was a viral.

  Peter was waiting for Hollis to turn off, to take them north or south, but instead he drove them into the heart of town, leaving the highway for narrow surface streets. The way had been cleared, cars and trucks hauled to the sides of the roadway. As the shadows of the buildings engulfed the truck, Hollis slid the cab’s rear window open. “You better weapon up,” he cautioned Michael and Lore. “You’ll want to watch yourself through here.”

  “All eyes, hombre,” came the man’s reply.

  Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.

  They moved through without incident. Vegetation began to crowd the roadway as the gaps between the buildings widened.

  “How much longer?” he asked Hollis.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not far.”

  Ten minutes later they were skirting a fence line. Hollis pulled the vehicle to the gate, removed a key from the glove box of the pickup, and stepped out. Peter was struck by a sense of the past: Hollis might have been Peter’s brother, Theo, opening the gate to the power station, all those years ago.

  “Where are we?” he asked when Hollis returned to the truck.

  “Fort Sam Houston.”

  “A military base?”

  “More like an Army hospital,” Hollis explained. “At least it used to be. Not a lot of doctoring goes on here anymore.”

  They drove on. Peter had the sense of driving through a small village. A tall clock tower stood to one side of a quadrangle that might have once been the center of town. Apart from a few ceremonial cannons, he saw nothing that seemed military—no trucks or tanks, no weapon emplacements, no fortifications of any kind. Hollis brought the pickup to a halt before a long, low building with a flat roof. A sign above the door read, AQUATICS CENTER.

  “Aquatics,” Lore s
aid, after they’d all disembarked. She squinted doubtfully at the sign, a rifle balanced across her chest in a posture of readiness. “Like … swimming?”

  Hollis gestured at the rifle. “You should leave that here. Wouldn’t want to make a bad impression.” He shifted his attention to Peter. “Last chance. There’s no way to undo this.”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  They entered the foyer. All things considered, the building’s interior was in good shape: ceilings tight, windows solid, none of the usual trash.

  “Feel that?” Michael said.

  A basal throbbing, like a gigantic plucked string, was radiating from the floor. Somewhere in the building a generator was operating.

  “I kind of expected there to be guards,” Peter said to Hollis.

  “Sometimes there are, when Tifty wants to put on a show. But basically we don’t need them.”

  Hollis led them to a pair of doors, which he pushed open to reveal a great, tiled space, the ceiling high above and, at the center of the room, a vast, empty swimming pool. He guided them to a second pair of swinging doors and a flight of descending stairs, illuminated by buzzing fluorescents. Peter thought to ask Hollis where Tifty got the gas for his generator, but then answered the question for himself. Tifty got it where he got everything; he stole it. The stairs led to a room crowded with pipes and metal tanks. They were under the pool now. They made their way through the cramped space to yet another door, though different from the others, fashioned of heavy steel. It bore no markings of any kind, nor was there an obvious way to open it; its smooth surface possessed no visible mechanisms. On the wall beside it was a keypad. Hollis quickly punched in a series of digits, and with a deep click the door unlatched, revealing a dark corridor.

  “It’s okay,” Hollis said, angling his head toward the opening, “the lights go on automatically.”

  As the big man stepped through, a bank of fluorescents flickered to life, their vibrancy intensified by the hospital-white walls of the corridor. Peter’s sense of Tifty was radically evolving. What had he imagined? A filthy encampment, populated by huge, apelike men armed to the teeth? Nothing he had seen even remotely conformed to these expectations. To the contrary: the display so far indicated a level of technical sophistication that seemed well beyond Kerrville’s. Nor was he alone in this shifting of opinion; Michael, too, was frankly gawking. Some place, his face seemed to say.