The Twelve

by Justin Cronin

  He struggled to speak. His tongue moved heavily in his mouth: Amy? Is she—?

  Alicia, softly weeping, shook her head.

  Somehow Greer had survived. The blast had flung him far away. By all rights he should have been dead, and yet they found him lying on his back, staring at the starlit sky. His clothing was shredded and seared; otherwise he appeared untouched. It was as if the force of the blast had moved not through him but around him, his life protected by an invisible hand. For a long moment he neither spoke nor moved. Then, with an exploratory gesture, he raised a hand to his chest, patting it cautiously; he lifted it to his face, tracing his cheeks and brow and chin.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Eustace, too, would live. At first they believed he was dead; his face was drenched in blood. But the shot had gone wide; the blood was from his left ear, now gone, shorn like a plant plucked from soil and replaced by a puckered hole. Of the detonation itself he had no memory, or none he could fully assemble beyond a chain of isolated sensations: a skull-cracking blast of noise, and a scorching wave of air passing above, then something wet raining down, and a taste of smoke and dust. He would escape the night with only this one additional disfigurement to a face already bearing plentiful scars of war and a permanent ringing in his ears, which would, in fact, never abate, causing him to speak in an overly loud voice that would make people think he was angry even when he wasn’t. Over time, once he had returned to Kerrville and risen to the rank of colonel, serving as military liaison to the president’s staff, he would come to regard this as less an inconvenience than a remarkably useful enhancement to his authority; he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  Only Nina would depart the field unscathed. Hurled away by the viral that had killed Tifty, she’d been thrown clear of the blast zone. She had been moving upfield when the bomb went off, its concussive force blowing her backward off her feet; but in the preceding moment she’d been the only one to witness the death of the Twelve, their bodies consumed and scattered in a ball of light. All else was a blur; of Amy, she had seen nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  But one of them had fallen.

  They found Tifty with his gun still in his hand. He lay in the mud, broken and severed, his eyes rimmed by blood. His right arm was gone, but that was the least of it. As they gathered around him, he labored to speak through his fitful breathing. At last his lips formed words: “Where is she?”

  Greer alone seemed to understand what he was asking. He turned toward Nina. “It’s you he wants.”

  Perhaps she understood the nature of the request, perhaps not; none could tell. She lowered herself to the ground beside him. With trembling effort, Tifty lifted his hand and touched her face with the tips of his fingers, the gentlest gesture.

  “Nitia,” he whispered. “My Nitia.”

  “I’m Nina.”

  “No. You’re Nitia. My Nitia.” He gave a tearful smile. “You look … so much like her.”

  “Like who?”

  Life was ebbing from his eyes. “I told her …” His breath caught. He had begun to choke on the blood that poured from his mouth. “I told her … I would keep you safe.” Then the light in his eyes went out and he was gone.

  No one spoke. One of their own had slipped away, into darkness.

  “I don’t understand,” Alicia said. She glanced at the others. “Why did he call her that?”

  It was Greer who answered: “Because that’s her name.” Nina looked up from the body. “You didn’t know, did you?” he said. “There was no way you could.”

  She shook her head.

  “Tifty was your father.”

  In due course, there would come a full accounting. A pickup would race onto the field; they would watch three people emerge. No, four. Michael and Hollis and Sara, holding a little girl in her arms.

  But for now they stood silently in the presence of their friend, the core of his life laid bare. The great gangster Tifty Lamont, captain of the Expeditionary. They would bury him where he’d fallen, in the field. Because you never leave it, Greer explained; that’s what Tifty always said. You might think you can do it, but you can’t. Once you’d stood there, it became a part of you forever.

  No one ever left the field.

  67

  The weather failed to cooperate. January in Iowa—what had they expected? Bone-numbing day followed bone-numbing day. Food, fuel, water, electricity, the complex enterprise of keeping a city of seventy thousand souls running—the joy of victory had quickly been subsumed by more mundane concerns. For the time being the insurgency had assumed control, though Eustace, by his own admission, had no particular knack for the job. He felt overwhelmed by the volume of detail, and the hastily assembled provisional government, composed of appointed delegates from each of the lodges, did little to lighten his load; it was bloated and disorganized, half the room always squabbling with the other half, leaving Eustace to throw up his hands and make all the decisions anyway. A degree of docility among the population remained, but this wouldn’t last. There had been looting in the market before Eustace was able to secure it, and every day there were more stories of reprisals; many of the cols had tried to slip anonymously into the populace, but their faces were known. Without a justice system to try the ones who surrendered, or those who had been captured by the insurgency in advance of the mob, it was hard to know what to do with them. The detention center was bursting at the seams. Eustace had raised the possibility of retrofitting the Project—it was certainly secure enough and had the additional advantage of isolation—but this would take time and did nothing to address the problem of what to do with the prisoners when the population began to move south.

  And everybody was freezing. Well, so be it, Peter thought. What was a little cold?

  He had formed a close friendship with Eustace. Some of this was their shared bond as officers of the Expeditionary, but not all; they had discovered, as the days passed, that they possessed compatible temperaments. They decided that Peter should lead the advance team that would travel south to prepare Kerrville for the influx of refugees. Initially he’d objected; it didn’t seem right to be among the first to leave. But he was the logical choice, and in the end, Alicia sealed the case. Caleb is waiting for you, she reminded him. Go see to your boy.

  The exodus itself would have to wait till spring. Assuming Kerrville could send enough vehicles and personnel, Eustace planned to move five thousand people at a time, the composition of each group determined by a lottery. The trip would be arduous—all but the very old and very young would have to walk—but with luck the Homeland would be empty within two years.

  “Not everybody will want to go, you know,” Eustace said.

  The two of them were seated in Eustace’s office, in the back room of the apothecary, warming themselves with cups of herbal tea. Most of the buildings in the market had been taken over by the provisional government to serve various functions. The latest project to occupy them was the tallying of a census. With all the redeyes’ records having been destroyed in the Dome, they had no idea who was who, or even how many people there were. Seventy thousand was the generally accepted number, but there was no way to know precisely unless they counted.

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  Eustace shrugged. The left side of his head was still bandaged, giving his face a lopsided appearance, though balanced by his clouded eye. Sara had removed the last of Peter’s stitches the prior day; his chest and arms now bore a road map of long, pinkish scars. In private moments, Peter couldn’t stop touching them, amazed not only by the fact that he’d inflicted these wounds upon himself but also that, in the heat of the moment, he’d barely felt a thing.

  “This is what they know. They’ve lived their entire lives here. But that’s not the whole reason. It’s good to right a wrong. I don’t know how many will feel that way once we start moving people south, but some will.”

  “How will they manage?”

  “I suppose how people
always manage. Elections, the rough business of building a life.” He sipped his tea. “It’ll be messy. It might not work at all. But at least it will be theirs.”

  Nina came in from the cold, stamping waffles of snow from her boots. “Jesus, it’s freezing out there,” she said.

  Eustace offered her his cup. “Here, warm yourself up.”

  She took it in her hands and sipped, then bent to kiss him quickly on the mouth. “Thank you, husband. You really need to shave.”

  Eustace laughed. “With a face like mine? Who cares?”

  That the two of them were a couple was, as Peter had learned, the worst-kept secret of the insurgency. One of the first things Eustace had done was issue an executive order permitting flatlanders to marry. In many instances this was a technicality; people had been paired up for years or even decades. But marriage had never possessed official sanction. The list of couples waiting to be married now ran to the hundreds, and Eustace had two justices of the peace operating night and day out of a storefront down the block. He and Nina had been among the first, as had Hollis and Sara.

  “Good news,” Nina said. “I just came from the hospital.”

  “And?”

  “Two more babies were born this morning, both healthy. Mothers doing fine.”

  “Well, how about that.” Eustace grinned at Peter. “See what I’m telling you? Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.”

  Peter made his way down the hill, hunched against the wind. As a member of the executive staff he was permitted the use of a vehicle, but he preferred to walk. At the hospital he headed for Michael’s room. Power had been only partially restored, but the hospital had been one of the first buildings relit. He found Michael awake and sitting up. His right leg, encased in plaster from ankle to hip, was suspended from a sling at a forty-five-degree angle above the bed. It had been touch and go for a while, and Sara had thought he might lose the leg; but Michael was a fighter, and now, three weeks later, he was officially on the mend.

  Lore was sitting by the bed, manipulating a pair of knitting needles. Eustace had put her to work as a foreman at the biodiesel plant, but any free moment found her back at the hospital, at Michael’s bedside.

  “What are you making?” Peter asked her.

  “Hell if I can say. It was supposed to be a sweater, but it’s coming out more like socks.”

  “You should really stick to what you know,” Michael advised.

  “Just you wait till you’re out of that cast, my friend. I’ll show you what I know. It’s nothing you’ll forget.” She looked at Peter, slyly smiling to make sure he got the joke. “Oh, I’m sorry, Peter. Got a little carried away. I guess I forgot you were there.”

  He laughed. “It’s okay.”

  She gave one of her needles a wave. “I just want to mention, in case our boy here takes a turn for the worse, I’ve always thought you had a very nice look to you. Plus, you’re a war hero. I’d be interested in anything you had to say, Lieutenant.”

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Of that I have no doubt.” She dropped the yarn to her lap. “As it happens, my shift begins in thirty minutes, so I’ll leave you two to talk about me.” She rose, bagged her knitting, patted Michael on the arm, then thought better of it and kissed him on the top of his head. “Need anything before I go?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine, Michael. You’re far from fine. You scared the living hell out of me is what you did.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Keep saying it, bub. One day I’ll believe you.” She kissed him again. “Gentlemen.”

  When Lore was gone, Peter took her seat. “Sorry about that,” Michael said.

  “I don’t know why you keep apologizing for her, Michael. You’re the luckiest guy on planet Earth, as far as I’m concerned.” He tipped his head toward the bed. “So how’s the leg really?”

  “It hurts like hell. Nice of you to finally visit.”

  “Sorry about that. Eustace is keeping me busy.”

  “So how many have you found?”

  Peter understood that Michael was asking about the other First Colonists. “The number we’re hearing is fifty-six. We’re still trying to track everyone down. So far we’ve found Jimmy’s daughters, Alice and Avery. Constance Chou, Russ Curtis, Penny Darrell. The Littles are going to take some time to sort out. Everybody’s spread all over the place.”

  “Good news, I guess.” Michael stopped, leaving the rest unstated. So many others, gone.

  “Hollis told me what you did,” Peter said.

  Michael shrugged. He looked a little embarrassed, but proud, too. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  “You ever want a job in the Exped, you let me know. Assuming they’ll have me back. The next time we talk, I might be in the stockade.”

  “Peter, be serious. They’ll probably make you a general for this. That or ask you to run for president.”

  “Then you don’t know the Army like I do.” And yet, for just a moment, he thought: what if? “We’ll be leaving in a few days, you know.”

  “So I figured. Don’t forget to bundle up. Say hello to Kerrville for me.”

  “We’ll get you in the next trip, I promise.”

  “I don’t know, hombre, the service here is pretty good. The place kind of agrees with me. Who’s going with you?”

  “Sara and Hollis and Kate, but that’s obvious. Greer’s staying to help with the evacuation. Eustace is putting a team together.”

  “What about Lish?”

  “I’d ask her if I could find her. I’ve barely seen her at all. She’s been riding out on this horse of hers. She calls him Soldier. What she’s doing I have no idea.”

  “I’m sorry you missed her. She came by this morning.”

  “Lish was here?”

  “Said she wanted to say hello.” Michael looked at him. “Why? Is that so strange?”

  Peter frowned. “I guess not. How did she seem?”

  “How do you think? Like Lish.”

  “So there wasn’t anything different about her.”

  “Not that I noticed. She wasn’t here very long. She said she was going to help Sara with the donations.”

  As interim director of public health, Sara had discovered that the building that served as the hospital was, as she’d long suspected, a hospital in name only. There was almost no medical equipment, and no blood at all. With so many people injured in the siege, and babies being born and all the rest, she’d had a freezer brought over from the food-processing facility and had instituted a program of blood donation.

  “Lish as a nurse,” Peter said, and shook his head at the irony. “I’d like to see that.”

  What became of the redeyes themselves was never fully understood. Those that hadn’t been killed in the stadium had essentially ceased to exist. The only conclusion to be drawn, supported by Sara’s story about Lila, was that the destruction of the Dome, and the death of the man known as the Source, had caused a chain reaction similar to the one they’d seen in Babcock’s descendants on the mountain in Colorado. Those who’d witnessed it described it as a rapid aging, as if a hundred years of borrowed life were surrendered in just a few seconds—flesh shriveling, hair falling out in clumps, faces withering to the skull. The corpses they’d found, still dressed in their suits and ties, were nothing but piles of brown bones. They looked like they’d been dead for decades.

  As the day of departure approached, Sara found herself working virtually around the clock. As word had spread in the flatland that actual medical care could now be had, more and more people had come in. The complaints varied from the common cold to malnutrition to the broad bodily failures of old age. A few seemed simply curious about what seeing a doctor would be like. Sara treated the ones she could, comforted those she could not. In the end, the two felt not so very different.

  She left the hospital only to sleep, and sometimes eat, or else Hollis would bring meals to her
, always with Kate in tow. They had been quartered in an apartment in the complex at the edge of downtown—a curious place, with wide, tinted windows that created a permanent evening light within. It felt a little eerie, knowing that the former occupants had been redeyes, but it was comfortable, with large beds made with soft linens and hot water and a working gas stove, on which Hollis concocted soups and stews of ingredients she didn’t want to know about but which were nonetheless delicious. They would eat together in the candlelit dark and then fall into bed, making love with quiet tenderness so as not to wake their daughter.

  Tonight Sara decided to take a break; she was dead on her feet, and starving besides, and missed her family keenly. Her family: after all that had happened, how remarkable these two words were. They seemed the most miraculous in the history of human speech. When she had seen Hollis charging through the entrance of the Dome, her heart had instantly known what her eyes could not believe. Of course he had come for her; Hollis had moved heaven and earth, and here he was. How could it have been otherwise?

  She made her way up the hill, past the toppled wreckage of the Dome—its charred timbers had smoldered for days—and through the old downtown. To move freely, without fear, still seemed a little unreal to her. Sara thought about stopping into the apothecary, to say hello to Eustace and whoever else was around, but her feet refused this impulse, which quickly passed. With anticipation lightening her step, she ascended the six flights to the apartment.

  “Mummy!”

  Hollis and Kate were sitting together on the floor, playing beans and cups. Before Sara could uncoil the scarf from her neck, the girl leapt to her feet and flew into her arms, a soft collision; Sara hoisted Kate to her waist to look her in the eye. She had never told Kate to address her by this name, not wanting to confuse her more than necessary, but this had turned out not to matter; the girl had simply done it. Having never had a father before, Kate had taken a little more time to adapt to Hollis’s role in her life, but then one day, about a week after the liberation, she had started to call him Daddy.