The Passage

by Justin Cronin

  “Don’t worry, you won’t wake her.” Leigh yawned into her hand and resumed her knitting. “That one, she sleeps like the dead.”

  Sara decided not to look for Mausami. Whatever was going on between her and Galen, it was none of her business. In a way she felt sorry for Gale. He had always had a thing for Maus—it was like an illness he could never quite shake off—and everyone said that when he’d asked Maus to pair with him, she’d said yes only because Theo had already refused her. That, or he’d never gotten around to asking, and Maus was trying to goad him into action. She’d hardly be the first woman who’d ever made that mistake.

  But as she moved down the path, Sara wondered: Why couldn’t some things just be easy? Because it was the same with her and Peter. Sara loved him, she always had, even back when they were just Littles in the Sanctuary. There was no explaining it; as long as she could remember, she had felt it, this love, like an invisible golden thread that bound the two of them together. It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.

  Which was the reason she had chosen to become a nurse; if she couldn’t be Watch—and she absolutely couldn’t—the Infirmary, where Prudence Jaxon presided, was the next best place to be. A hundred times she’d almost asked the woman: What can I do? What can I do to make your son love me? But in the end Sara had kept silent. She had gone about the work of learning her trade as best she could and waited for Peter, hoping he would know what she was offering him, simply by being in that room.

  Peter had kissed her, once. Or maybe Sara had kissed him. The question of who had kissed whom, exactly, seemed unimportant in the face of the thing itself. They had kissed. It was First Night, late and cold. They’d all been drinking shine, listening to Arlo strum his guitar under the lights, and as the group dispersed in the last hour before dawn, Sara had found herself walking with Peter alone. She was a little lightheaded from the shine, but she didn’t think she was drunk, and she didn’t think that he was, either. A nervous silence fell over them as they moved down the path, not an absence of sound or speech but something palpable and faintly electric, like the spaces between the notes from Arlo’s guitar. It was in this bubble of expectancy that they walked together under the lights, not touching but connected nonetheless, and by the time they reached her house, neither one having acknowledged that this was their destination—the silence was a bubble but it was also a river, pulling them along in its current—there seemed no stopping what would happen next. They were against the wall of her house, standing in a wedge of shadow, first his mouth and then the rest of him pressed against her. Not like the kissing games they’d all played in the Sanctuary, or the first clumsy fumblings of puberty—sex was not discouraged, you pretty much got around to anyone you were even vaguely interested in; the unwritten rule was this and no more, all of it, in the end, feeling like a kind of rehearsal—but something deeper, full of promise. She felt herself enveloped by a warmth she almost didn’t recognize: the warmth of human contact, of truly being with another, no longer alone. She would have given herself to him right then, whatever he wanted.

  But then it was over; suddenly he pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he managed, as if he believed she wished he hadn’t done it, though the kiss should have told him that she did, she did; but by then something had shifted in the air, the bubble had popped, and both of them were too embarrassed, too flustered, to say anything else. He left her at her door, and that was the end of it. They hadn’t been alone together since that night. They’d barely spoken a word.

  Because she knew; she knew it when he kissed her, and then after, and more and more as the days went by. Peter wasn’t hers, could never be hers, because there was another. She’d felt it like a ghost between them, in his kiss. It all made sense now, a hopeless kind of sense. While she’d been waiting for him in the Infirmary, showing him what she was, he had been on the Wall with Alicia Donadio the entire time.

  Now, on her way to the Lighthouse with the stew, Sara remembered Gabe Curtis and decided to stop at the Infirmary. Poor Gabe—just forty, and already the cancer. There wasn’t much anyone could do for him. Sara guessed it had started in the stomach, or else the liver. It didn’t really matter. The Infirmary, located across the Sunspot from the Sanctuary, was a small frame structure in the part of the Colony they called Old Town—a block of half a dozen buildings that had once held various stores and shops. The building that served as the Infirmary had once been a grocery store; when the afternoon sun hit the front windows just right, you could still make out the name—Mountaintop Provision Co., Fine Foods and Spirits, Est. 1996—etched into its frosted glass.

  A single lantern lit the outer room, where Sandy Chou—everyone called her Other Sandy, since there had once been two Sandy Chous, the first being Ben Chou’s wife, who had died in childbirth—was bent over the nurse’s desk, crushing dillonweed seeds with a mortar and pestle. The air was hot and heavy with moisture; behind the desk, a kettle was chuffing out a plume of steam from on top of the stove. Sara put the stew aside and removed the kettle from the heat, placing it on a trivet. Returning to the desk, she tipped her head toward the dillonweed, which Sandy was shaking out into a strainer.

  “Is that for Gabe?”

  Sandy nodded. Dillonweed was thought to be an analgesic, though they employed it to treat a variety of ailments—head colds, diarrhea, arthritis. Sara couldn’t say for a fact that it accomplished anything at all, but Gabe claimed it helped with the pain, and it was the only thing he was keeping down.

  “How’s he doing?”

  Sandy was pouring the water through the strainer into a ceramic mug, the lip chipped and worn. On it were the words NEW DADDY, the letters spelled with the image of safety pins.

  “He was asleep a while ago. The jaundice is worse. His boy just left, Mar’s in there with him now.”

  “I’ll bring him the tea.”

  Sara took the mug and stepped through the curtain. The ward had six cots in it, but only one was occupied. Mar was sitting in a ladder-backed chair beside the cot on which her husband lay, covered by a blanket. A thin, almost birdlike woman, Mar had shouldered the load of Gabe’s care through the months of his illness, a burden plain to see in the crescents of sleeplessness hung beneath her eyes. They had one child, Jacob, sixteen or so, who worked in the dairy with his mother: a large, hulking boy with a face of perpetually vacant sweetness, who could neither read nor write and never would, who was capable of basic tasks as long as someone was there to direct him. A hard, unlucky life, and now this. Past forty, and with Jacob to look after, it was unlikely that Mar would marry again.

  As Sara approached, Mar looked up, holding a finger to her lips. Sara nodded and took a chair beside her. Sandy was right: the jaundice was worse. Before he’d gotten sick, Gabe had been a large man—large as his wife was small—with great knotty shoulders and bulky forearms made for work and a prosperously round belly that hung over his belt like a meal sack: a solidly useful man whom Sara had never once seen in the Infirmary until the day he’d come in complaining of back pain and indigestion, apologizing for this fact as if it were a sign of weakness, a failure of character rather than the onset of a serious illness. (When Sara had palped his liver, the tips of her fingers instantly registering the presence that was growing there, she realized he must have been in agony.)

  Now, half a year later, the man Gabe Curtis had once been was gone, replaced by a husk that clung to life by will alone. His face, once as full and richly hued as a ripe apple, had withered to a collection of lines and angles, like a hastily drawn sketch. Mar had trimmed his beard and nails; his crack
ed lips were glazed with glistening ointment from a wide-mouthed pot on the cart beside his bed—a small comfort, small and useless as the tea.

  She sat awhile with Mar, the two of them not speaking. It was possible, Sara understood, for life to go on too long, as it was also possible for it to end too soon. Maybe it was his fear of leaving Mar alone that was keeping Gabe alive.

  Eventually Sara rose, placing the mug on the cart. “If he wakes up, see if he’ll drink this,” she said.

  Tears of exhaustion hung on the corners of Mar’s eyes. “I told him it’s all right, he can go.”

  It took Sara a moment. “I’m glad you did,” she said. “Sometimes that’s what a person needs to hear.”

  “It’s Jacob, you see. He doesn’t want to leave Jacob. I told him, We’ll be fine. You go now. That’s what I told him.”

  “I know you will, Mar.” Her words felt small. “He knows it too.”

  “He’s so damn stubborn. You hear that, Gabe? Why do you have to be so goddamn stubborn all the time?” Then she dropped her face to her hands and wept.

  Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman’s pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody’s business but yours.

  “I’m sorry, Sara,” Mar said finally, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have had to hear that.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

  “If he wakes up, I’ll tell him you were here.” Through her tears, she managed a sad smile. “I know Gabe always liked you. You were his favorite nurse.”

  It was half-night by the time Sara got to the Lighthouse. She quietly opened the door and stepped inside. Elton was alone, fast asleep at the panel, earphones clamped to his head.

  He twitched awake as the door closed behind her on its springs. “Michael?”

  “It’s Sara.”

  He removed the earphones and turned in his chair, sniffing the air. “What’s that I smell?”

  “Jack stew. It’s probably ice-cold by now, though.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” He sat up straight in his chair. “Bring it here.”

  She placed it before him. He took a dirty spoon from the counter that faced the panel. “Light the lamp if you want.”

  “I like the dark. If you don’t mind.”

  “It’s all the same to me.”

  For a while she watched him eat in the glow of the panel. There was something almost hypnotic about the motions of Elton’s hands, guiding the spoon into the pot and then to his waiting mouth with smooth precision, not a single gesture wasted.

  “You’re watching me,” Elton said.

  She felt the heat rising to her cheeks. “Sorry.”

  He polished off the last of the stew and wiped his mouth on a rag. “Nothing to be sorry about. You’re about the best thing that ever comes in here, as far as I’m concerned. Pretty girl like you, you watch me all you want.”

  She laughed—out of embarrassment or disbelief, she didn’t know. “You’ve never seen me, Elton. How can you possibly know what I look like?”

  Elton shrugged, his useless eyes rolling upward behind their drooping lids—as if, in the darkness of his mind, her image was there for him to see. “Your voice. How you speak to me, how you speak to Michael. How you look after him like you do. Pretty is as pretty does, I always say.”

  She heard herself sigh. “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Trust old Elton,” he said, and gave a quiet laugh. “Somebody’s going to love you.”

  There was always something about being around Elton that made her feel better. He was a shameless flirt, for starters, but that wasn’t the real reason. He simply seemed happier than anyone she knew. It was true what Michael said about him: his blindness wasn’t something missing; it was simply something different.

  “I just came back from the Infirmary.”

  “Well, there you are,” he said, nodding along. “Always looking after folks. How’s Gabe doing?”

  “Not so good. He looks really terrible, Elton. And Mar’s taking it hard. I wish there was more I could do for him.”

  “Some things you can, and some things you can’t. It’s Gabe’s time now. You’ve done all you could.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “It never is.” Elton turned to search the counter with his hands, locating the earphones, which he held out to her. “Now, since you’ve brought me a present, I’ve got one for you. A little something to cheer you up.”

  “Elton, I wouldn’t have a clue what I was hearing. It’s all static to me.”

  A cagey smile was on his face. “Just do like I say. Close your eyes, too.”

  The phones were warm against her ears. She sensed Elton moving his hands over the panel, his fingers gliding here and there. Then she heard it: music. But not like any music she knew. It reached her first as a distant, hollow sound, like a breath of wind, and then, rising behind it, high birdlike notes that seemed to dance inside her head. The sound built and built, seeming to come from all directions, and she knew what she was hearing, that it was a storm. She could picture it in her mind, a great storm of music sweeping down. She had never heard anything so beautiful in her life. When the last notes died away, she pulled the headphones from her ears.

  “I don’t get it,” she said, astounded. “This came through the radio?”

  Elton chuckled. “Now, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  He did something to the panel again. A small drawer opened, ejecting a silver disc: a CD. She’d never paid much attention to them; Michael told her they were just noise. She took the disc in her hand, holding it by the edges. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting.

  “I just thought you should hear what you look like,” said Elton.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “The thing I don’t understand,” Theo was saying, “is why the three of you aren’t dead.”

  The group was sitting at the long table in the control room, all except Finn and Rey, who had returned to the barracks to sleep. Peter’s daze of adrenaline had worn off, and the pain in his ankle, which did not seem to be broken, had settled to a low throb; someone had chipped a piece of ice off one of the condensers, and Peter was holding this, wrapped in a sodden rag, to the injured joint. The fact that he had just killed Zander Phillips, a man he had known, had yet to produce in him any emotion he could actually name. The information was simply too strange to process. But the station key had still been around Zander’s neck, so there could be no doubt who it was. There had been no choice, of course; Zander had been fully turned. Strictly speaking, the viral who had tried to force its way through the hatch hadn’t been Zander Phillips anymore. And yet Peter could not suppress the feeling that at the last instant before he’d squeezed the trigger, he’d detected a glimmer of recognition in the viral’s eyes—a look, even, of relief.

  In the aftermath of the attack, Theo had questioned Caleb carefully. The boy’s story didn’t quite add up, but it was also clear that he was suffering from exhaustion and exposure. His lips were swollen and cracked, he had a big purple bruise on his forehead, and both of his feet were laced with cuts. The lost shoes seemed to pain him most of all; they were black Nike Push-Offs, he explained, brand-new in their box from the Foot Locker at the mall. They’d come off somehow in his race across the valley, but he’d been so scared he’d barely noticed.

  “We’ll get you a new pair,” Theo had said. “Just tell me about Zander.”

  Caleb was eating as he spoke, gnawing off bites of hardtack and washing them down with gulps of water. Well, everything had been normal, Caleb explained, until about six days ago, when Zander had begun to act … odd. Very odd. Even for Zander, which was saying something. He didn’t want to go outside the fence, and he wasn’t sleeping at all. All night long he’d be up pacing the control room, mu
ttering to himself. Caleb thought it was just too much time at the station, that when the relief crew showed, Zander would snap out of it.

  “So then one day he announces we’re going out to the field, and tells me to get the cart packed and ready. I was sitting here eating my lunch, and he just marches in and announces this. He wants to swap out one of the governors in the west section. Okay, I say, but what’s the big emergency? Isn’t it a little late in the day to be going to the field? He’s got this crazy look in his eyes, and he smelled bad. I mean, he stank. You feeling okay, I ask him, and he says, Just get your gear, we’re going.”

  “When was this?”

  Caleb swallowed. “Three days ago.”

  Theo leaned forward in his chair. “You’ve been outside three days?”

  Caleb nodded. He’d finished off the last of the hardtack and started on a dish of soybean paste, scooping it out with his fingers. “So we ride out with the jenny, but here’s the thing. We don’t go to the west field. We go to the east field. Nothing’s worked over there for years; they’re all dead sticks. And it takes forever to get there, two hours with the cart at least. It’s past half-day, we’re cutting it close as it is. I’m like, Zander, west is that way, buddy, what the hell are we doing out here? Are you trying to get us killed? So we get to the tower he says he wants to fix, and the thing’s a rust bucket. Completely backblown. I can see that from the ground. No chance swapping the governor’s going to do anything. But that’s what he wants to do, so I haul my ass up the ladder and set the winch and start stripping out the old housing, working as fast as I can. I’m thinking, Okay, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, as far as I can tell we’re risking our necks for nothing, but maybe he knows something I don’t. Anyway, that was when I heard the scream.”