“We will defend ourselves, as any nation has the right to do,” Shaw told the legislature, to thundering applause. “California, and all that it stands for, will endure.”
Reacting to the news from Sacramento, Hughes administration spokesman Tim Romer told reporters, “This is absurd on its face. Now is obviously not the time for any state or local government to take the safety of the American people into its own hands. Our position remains that California is part of the United States.”
Romer also cautioned that any military or law enforcement personnel in California who interfered with federal relief efforts would face harsh sanctions.
“Make no mistake,” Romer said. “They will be regarded as unlawful enemy combatants.”
By Wednesday, California had been recognized by the governments of Switzerland, Finland, the tiny South Pacific Republic of Palau, and the Vatican.
The government of India, apparently in response to the departure of U.S. military forces from South Asia, yesterday repeated its earlier threats to use nuclear weapons against rebel forces in eastern Pakistan.
“Now is the time to contain the spread of Islamic extremism,” Indian Prime Minister Suresh Mitra told Parliament. “The watchdog is sleeping.”
So there it was, Wolgast thought. There it was at last. There was a term he knew and thought of now; he had heard it used only in the context of aviation, to explain how, on an otherwise clear day, a plane could fall so quickly from the sky. OBE. Overcome by events. That was what was happening now. The world—the human race—had been overcome by events.
Take care of Amy, Lacey had said. Amy is yours. He thought of Doyle, placing the keys to the Lexus in his hand, Lacey’s kiss on his cheek; Doyle running after them, waving them on, yelling, “Go, go;” Lacey leaping from the car, to call the stars—for that’s how Wolgast thought of them, as human stars, burning with a lethal brightness—down upon her.
The time for sleeping, for rest, was over. Wolgast would stay awake all night, watching the door with Carl’s .38 in one hand and the Springfield in the other. It was a cool night, the temperature down in the fifties, and Wolgast had set the woodstove going when they’d returned from the store. He took the paper now and folded it into quarters, into eighths, and finally sixteenths, and opened the door to the woodstove. Then he placed the paper in the fire, watching with amazement at how quickly it disappeared.
SEVENTEEN
Summer ended, and fall came, and the world left them alone.
The first snows fell in the last week of October. Wolgast was chopping wood in the yard when he saw, from the corner of his eye, the first flakes falling, fat feathers light as dust. He’d stripped to his shirtsleeves to work, and when he paused to lift his face and felt the cold on his damp skin, he realized what was happening, that winter had arrived.
He sunk his axe into a log and returned to the house and called up the stairs. “Amy!”
She appeared on the top step. Her skin saw so little sunlight that it was a rich, porcelain white.
“Have you ever seen snow?”
“I don’t know. I think so?”
“Well, it’s snowing now.” He laughed, and heard the pleasure in his voice. “You don’t want to miss it. Come on.”
By the time he got her dressed—in her coat and boots but also the glasses and cap, and a thick layer of sunscreen over every exposed inch of her skin—the snow had begun to fall in earnest. She stepped out into the whirling whiteness, her movements solemn, like an explorer setting foot on some new planet.
“What do you think?”
She tipped her face and stuck out her tongue, an instinctive gesture, to catch and taste the snow.
“I like it,” she declared.
They had shelter, food, heat. He’d made two more trips down to Milton’s in the autumn, knowing that once winter came the road would be impassable, and had taken all the food that was left there. Rationing the canned goods, the powdered milk, the rice and dried beans, Wolgast believed he could make their stores last until spring. The lake was full of fish, and in one of the cabins he’d found an auger. A simple enough matter, then, to set up fishing lines. The propane tank was still half full. So, the winter. He welcomed it, felt his mind relax into its rhythm. No one had come after all; the world had forgotten them. They would be sealed away together, in safety.
By morning a foot of snow had piled around the cabin. The sun burst through the clouds, glaringly bright. Wolgast spent the afternoon digging out the woodpile, cutting a trail to connect it to the lodge, and then a second trail to the small cabin he planned to use as an icehouse, now that the cold weather had arrived. By now he was living an existence that was almost entirely nocturnal—it was easiest simply to adopt Amy’s schedule—and the sunlight on the snow seemed blinding to him, like an explosion he was forced to stare directly into. Probably, he thought, that was how even ordinary light felt to her, all the time. When darkness fell, the two of them went back outside.
“I’ll show you how to make snow angels,” he said. He lay down on his back. Above him, a sky effulgent with stars. From Milton’s he’d recovered a jar of powdered cocoa, which he hadn’t told Amy about, planning to save it for a special occasion. Tonight they’d dry their wet clothes on the woodstove and sit in its glow and drink hot cocoa. “Move your arms and legs,” he told her, “like this.”
She got down in the snow beside him. Her tiny body was as light and agile as a gymnast’s. She moved her nimble limbs back and forth.
“What’s an angel?”
Wolgast thought a moment. In all their conversations, nothing of the sort had ever come up. “Well, it’s a kind of ghost, I guess.”
“A ghost. Like Jacob Marley.” They had read A Christmas Carol—or, rather, Amy had read it to him. Since that night in summer when he’d learned she could read—not just read but read expertly, with feeling and expression—Wolgast had merely sat and listened.
“I guess, yes. But not as scary as Jacob Marley.” They were still lying side by side in the snow. “Angels are … well, I guess they’re like good ghosts. Ghosts who watch over us, from heaven. Or at least some people think so.”
“Do you?”
Wolgast was taken aback. He’d never gotten completely accustomed to Amy’s directness. Her lack of inhibition struck him on the one hand as quite childlike, but it was often true that the things she said and the questions she asked him possessed a bluntness that felt somehow wise.
“I don’t know. My mother did. She was very religious, very devout. My father, probably not. He was a good man, but he was an engineer. He didn’t think that way.”
For a moment, they were silent.
“She’s dead,” Amy said quietly. “I know that.”
Wolgast sat upright. Amy’s eyes were closed.
“Who’s dead, Amy?” But as soon as he asked this, he knew whom Amy meant: My mother. My mother is dead.
“I don’t remember her,” Amy said. Her voice was impassive, as if she were telling him something he must surely know already. “But I know she’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I could feel it.” Amy’s eyes met Wolgast’s in the dark. “I feel all of them.”
Sometimes, in the early hours just before dawn, Amy dreamed; Wolgast could hear her soft cries coming from the next room, the squeak of the springs of her cot as she moved restlessly about. Not cries exactly but murmurs, like voices working through her in sleep. Sometimes she would rise and go downstairs to the main room of the lodge, the one with the wide windows that looked out over the lake; Wolgast would watch her from the stairs. Always she would stand quietly for just a few moments in the glowing light and warmth of the woodstove, her face turned toward the windows. She was obviously still asleep, and Wolgast knew better than to wake her. Then she would turn and climb the stairs and get back into bed.
How do you feel them, Amy? he asked her. What do you feel?—I don’t know, she’d say, I don’t know. They’re sad. They’re so many. They’ve f
orgotten who they were. Who were they, Amy? And she said: Everyone. They’re everyone.
Wolgast slept, now, on the first floor of the lodge, in a chair facing the door. They move at night, Carl had told him, in the trees. You get one shot. What were they, these things in the trees? Were they people, as Carter had once been a person? What had they become? And Amy. Amy, who dreamed of voices, whose hair did not grow, who seemed rarely to sleep—for it was true, he’d realized she was only pretending—or to eat; who could read and swim as if she were remembering lives and experiences other than her own: was she part of them, too? The virus was inert, Fortes had said. What if it wasn’t? Wouldn’t he, Wolgast, be sick? But he wasn’t; he felt just as he’d always felt, which was, he realized, simply bewildered, like a man in a dream, lost in a landscape of meaningless signs; the world had some use for him he didn’t understand.
Then on a night in March he heard an engine. The snow was heavy and deep. The moon was full. He had fallen asleep in the chair. He realized he’d been hearing, as he’d slept, the sound of an engine coming down the long drive toward the lodge. In his dream—a nightmare—this sound had become the roar of the fires of summer, burning up the mountain toward them; he had been running with Amy through the woods, the smoke and fire all around, and lost her.
A blaze of light in the windows, and footsteps on the porch—heavy, stumbling. Wolgast rose quickly, all his senses instantly alert. The Springfield was in his hand. He racked the slide and released the safety. The door shook with three hard pounds.
“Somebody’s outside.” The voice was Amy’s. Wolgast turned and saw her standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“Upstairs!” Wolgast spoke to her in a harsh whisper. “Go, quickly!”
“Is anybody inside there?” A man’s voice on the porch. “I can see the smoke! I’ll step away!”
“Amy, upstairs, now!”
More pounding on the door. “For godsakes, somebody, if you can hear me, open the door!”
Amy retreated up the stairs. Wolgast moved to the window and looked out. Not a car or truck but a snowmobile, with containers lashed to its chassis. In the headlights, at the foot of the porch, was a man in a parka and boots. He was positioned in a crouch, his hands on his knees.
Wolgast opened the door. “Keep back,” he warned. “Let me see your hands.”
The man lifted his arms weakly. “I’m not armed,” he said. He was panting, and that was when Wolgast saw the blood, a bright ribbon down the side of his parka. The wound was in his neck.
“I’m sick,” the man said.
Wolgast stepped forward and raised his gun. “Get out of here!”
The man sank to his knees. “Jesus,” he moaned. “Jesus Christ.” Then he tipped his face forward and retched onto the snow.
Wolgast turned to see Amy, standing in the doorway.
“Amy, go inside!”
“That’s right honey,” the man said, lifting a bloody hand to give a listless wave. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do what your daddy says.”
“Amy, I said inside, now.”
Amy closed the door.
“That’s good,” the man said. He was on his knees, facing Wolgast. “She shouldn’t see this. Jesus, I feel like shit.”
“How did you find us?”
The man shook his head and spat onto the snow. “I didn’t come looking for you, if that’s what you mean. Six of us were holed up about forty miles west of here. A friend’s hunting camp. We’d been there since October, after they took out Seattle.”
“Who’s they?” Wolgast asked. “What happened to Seattle?”
The man shrugged. “Same thing as everywhere else. Everybody’s sick, dying, ripping each other to shreds, the Army shows up, then poof, the place goes up in smoke. Some people say it’s the U.N. or the Russians. It could be the man in the moon, for all I know. We headed south, into the mountains, thought we’d ride out the winter and then try to make it into California. Then those fuckers came. None of us even got a shot off. I hauled ass out of there, but one of them bit me. Bitch just swooped down out of nowhere. I don’t know why she didn’t kill me like the rest, but they say they do that.” He smiled weakly. “I guess it was my lucky day.”
“Were you followed?”
“Fuck if I know. I smelled your smoke at least a mile from here. Don’t know how I did that. Like bacon in a pan.” He lifted his face with a look abject wretchedness. “For godsakes, I’m begging you. I’d do it myself if I had a gun.”
It took Wolgast a moment to understand what the man was asking. “What’s your name?” Wolgast asked.
“Bob.” The man licked his lips with a dry, heavy tongue. “Bob Saunders.”
Wolgast gestured with the Springfield. “We have to move away from the house.”
They walked into the woods, Wolgast following at five paces. The man’s progress was slow in the deep snow. Every few steps he paused to brace himself with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.
“You know what’s funny?” he said. “I used to be an actuarial analyst. Life and casualty. You smoke, you drive without a seat belt, you eat Big Macs for lunch every day, I could tell you when you were going to die pretty much to the month.” He was clutching a tree for balance. “I guess nobody ever ran the tables on this, did they?”
Wolgast said nothing.
“You’re going to do this thing, aren’t you?” Bob said. He was looking away, into the trees.
“Yes,” Wolgast said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. Don’t beat yourself up about it.” He breathed heavily, licking his lips. He turned and touched his chest as Carl had done, all those months ago, to show Wolgast where to shoot. “Right through here, okay? You can shoot me through the head first, if you want, but make sure you put one in here.”
Wolgast could only nod, caught short by the man’s frankness, his matter-of-fact tone.
“You can tell your daughter I drew on you,” he added. “She shouldn’t know about this. And burn the body when you’re done. Gasoline, kerosene, something hot like that.”
They were approaching the bank above the river. In the moonlight, the scene possessed an unearthly stillness, bathed in blue. Wolgast could hear, beneath the snow and ice, the river’s quiet gurgle. As good a place as any, Wolgast thought.
“Turn around,” he said. “Face me.”
But the man, Bob, seemed not to have heard him. He took two more steps forward in the snow and stopped. He had begun, unaccountably, to undress, removing his bloody parka and dropping it into the snow, then unfolding the suspenders of his bibbed snowpants to pull his sweatshirt over his head.
“I said, Turn around.”
“You know what sucks?” Bob said. He had removed his thermal undershirt and was kneeling to unlace his boots. “How old’s your daughter? I always wanted to have kids. Why didn’t I do that?”
“I don’t know, Bob.” Wolgast raised the Springfield. “Get up and face me, now.”
Bob rose. Something was happening. He was fingering the bloody tear on his neck. Another spasm shook him, but the expression on his face was pleasurable, almost sexual. In the moonlight, his skin seemed almost to glow. He arched his back like a cat, his eyes heavy-lidded with pleasure.
“Whoa, that’s good,” Bob said. “That’s really … something.”
“I’m sorry,” Wolgast said.
“Hey, wait!” With a start, Bob opened his eyes; he held out his hands. “Hang on a second here!”
“I’m sorry, Bob,” Wolgast repeated, and then he squeezed the trigger.
• • •
The winter ended in rain. For days and days the rain poured down, filling the woods, swelling the river and lake, washing away what remained of the road.
He’d burned the body just as Bob had instructed, dousing it with gasoline and, when the flames died out, soaking the ashes with laundry bleach and burying it all beneath a mound of rocks and earth. The next morning he searched the snowmobile. The containers
strapped to the frame turned out to be gas cans, all empty, but in a leather pouch slung from the handlebars he found Bob’s wallet. A driver’s license with Bob’s picture and a Spokane address, the usual credit cards, a few dollars in cash, a library card. There was also a photograph, shot in a studio: Bob in a holiday sweater, posed with a pretty blond woman who was obviously pregnant and two children, a little girl in tights and a green velvet dress and an infant in pajamas. All of them were smiling fiercely, even the baby. On the back of the photograph was written, in a feminine hand, “Timothy’s first Christmas.” Why had Bob said he’d never had children? Had he been forced to watch them die, an experience so painful that his mind had simply erased them from his memory? Wolgast buried the wallet on the hillside, marking the spot with a cross he fashioned from a pair of sticks bound together with twine. It didn’t seem like much, but it was all he could think to do.
Wolgast waited for others to come; he assumed Bob was just the first. He left the lodge only to perform the most necessary chores, and only in the daytime; he kept the Springfield with him at all times and left Carl’s .38, loaded, in the glove compartment of the Toyota. Every few days he turned the engine over and let it run, to keep the battery charged. Bob had said something about California. Was it still safe there? Was any place safe? He wanted to ask Amy: Do you hear them coming? Do they know where we are? He had no map to show her where California was. Instead he took her up to the roof of the lodge one evening, just after sunset. See that ridge? he said, pointing to the south. Follow my hand, Amy. The Cascades. If anything happens to me, he said, follow that ridge. Run and keep on running.
But the months passed, and still they were alone. The rains ended, and Wolgast stepped from the lodge one morning to the taste and smell of sunshine and the feeling that something had changed. Birdsong swelled the trees; he looked toward the lake and saw open water where before had been a solid disk of ice. A sweet green haze dressed the air, and at the base of the lodge, a line of crocuses was pushing from the dirt. The world could be blowing itself apart, yet here was the gift of spring, spring in the mountains. From every direction came the sounds and smells of life. Wolgast didn’t even know what month it was. Was it April or May? But he had no calendar, and the battery in his watch, unworn since autumn, had long since died.
The Passage Page 32