The Passage

by Justin Cronin

  Michael was sitting a few meters away on the damp ground, his back braced against a log. The days of walking had made him leaner, harder; his chin now sported a wisp of pale beard. A shotgun was resting across his lap, his finger close to the trigger.

  “No sign in what, seven days?” He spoke with his eyes closed, his face tipped toward the sun. He was wearing only a T-shirt; his jacket was tied around his waist.

  “Eight,” Alicia corrected. “That doesn’t mean we should let our guard down.”

  “I’m just saying.” He opened his eyes and turned toward Alicia, shrugging. “A lot of things could have killed that cat. Maybe it died of old age.”

  Alicia gave a laugh. “Sounds good to me,” she said.

  Amy was standing by herself at the edge of the glade. She was always drifting off like this. For a while this habit had made Peter worry, but she never went very far, and by now they were all accustomed to it.

  He rose and went to her. “Amy, you should eat something. We’re moving on soon.”

  For a moment the girl said nothing. Her eyes were directed toward the mountains, rising in the sunlight beyond the river and the grassy fields beyond.

  “I remember the snow,” she said. “Lying down in it. How cold it was.” She looked at him, squinting. “We’re close, aren’t we?”

  Peter nodded. “A few days, I think.”

  “Telluride,” Amy said.

  “Yes, Telluride.”

  She turned away again. Peter saw her shiver, though the sun was warm.

  “Will it snow again?” she asked.

  “Hollis thinks so.”

  Amy nodded, satisfied. Her face had filled with a warm light; the memory was a happy one. “I would like to lie down in it again, to make snow angels.”

  She often spoke like this, in vague riddles. Yet something felt different this time. It was as if the past were rising up before her eyes, stepping into view like a deer from the brush. Even to move would scare it away.

  “What are snow angels?”

  “You move your arms and legs, in the snow,” she explained. “Like the ones in heaven. Like the ghost Jacob Marley.”

  Peter was aware that the others were listening now. A single strand of black hair pushed over her eyes in the wind. Watching her, he felt himself transported back through the months to that night in the Infirmary when Amy had washed his wound. He wanted to ask her: How did you know, Amy? How did you know my mother misses me, and how much I miss her? Because I never told her, Amy. She was dying, and I never told her how much I would miss her when she was gone.

  “Who’s Jacob Marley?” he asked.

  Her brow furrowed with a sudden grief. “He wore the chains he forged in life,” she said, and shook her head. “It was such a sad story.”

  They followed the river, into the afternoon. They were in the foothills now, leaving the plateau behind. The land began to rise and thicken with trees—naked, twiglike aspens and huge, ancient pines, their trunks wide as houses, towering over their heads. Beneath their vast canopies, the ground was open and shaded, pillowed with needles. The air was cold with the dampness of the river. They moved, as always, without speaking, scanning the trees. All eyes.

  There was no Placerville; it was easy to see what had occurred. The narrow valley, the river carving through it. In spring, when the snowpack melted, it would be a raging torrent. Like Moab, the town had washed away.

  They sheltered that night at the river’s edge, stretching the tarp between a pair of trees to fashion a roof and laying their sleeping bags in the soft dirt. Peter was on the third shift, with Michael. They took their positions. The night was still and cold, filled with the sound of the river. Standing at his post, trying to keep motionless despite the chill, Peter thought of Sara, and the feeling he had detected between her and Hollis in that private gaze, and realized he was honestly happy for the two of them. He’d had his chance, after all, and Hollis obviously loved her, as she deserved to be loved. Hollis had told him as much, he realized, that night at Milagro, when Sara was taken: Peter, you of all people should know I have to go. Not just the words themselves but the look in his eyes—an absolute fearlessness. He’d given it up, right then; he’d given it up for Sara.

  The sky was just paling when Alicia stepped from the shelter and walked toward him.

  “So,” she said, and gave a loose-jawed yawn. “Still here.”

  He nodded. “Still here.”

  Each night without sign made him wonder how much longer their luck could hold. But he never thought about this for long; it seemed dangerous, like daring fate, to question their good fortune.

  Alicia said, “Turn around, I have to go.”

  Facing away, he heard Alicia unbuckle her trousers and lower herself to a squat. Ten meters upstream, Michael was resting on the ground with his back against a boulder. Peter realized he was fast asleep.

  “So what do you make of this business?” Alicia asked. “Ghosts and angels and all that.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Peter,” she scolded, “I don’t believe that for a second.” A moment passed, then: “Okay, you can turn around now.”

  He faced her again. Alicia was cinching her belt. “You’re the reason we’re here, after all,” she said.

  “I thought Amy was.”

  Alicia turned her eyes away, toward the trees on the far side of river. She let a silent moment pass. “We’ve been friends as long as I can remember. Nothing can change that. So what I’m going to tell you is between us. Understood?”

  Peter nodded.

  “The night before we left, the two of us were in the trailer outside the lockup. You asked me what I saw when I looked at Amy. I don’t think I ever answered, and probably I didn’t know at the time. But I’ll tell you my answer now. What I see is you.”

  She was regarding him closely, wearing an expression that was almost pained. Peter fumbled for a response. “I don’t … understand.”

  “Yes, you do. You may not know it, but you do. You never talk about your father, or the Long Rides. I’ve never pressed. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t know what they meant to you. You’ve been waiting for something like Amy to come along your whole life. You can call it destiny if you want, or fate. Auntie would probably call it the hand of God. Believe me, I’ve heard those speeches too. I don’t think it matters what name you give it. It is what it is. So you ask me why we’re here, and I’ll say, sure, we’re here because of Amy. But she’s only half the reason. The funny thing is, everybody knows it but you.”

  Peter didn’t know what to say. Ever since Amy had come into his life, he had felt himself caught in a strong current, and that this current was pulling him toward something, something he had to find. Every step along the way had told him so. But it was also true that each of them had played a part, and a great deal had simply come down to luck.

  “I don’t know, Lish. It could have been anyone that day at the mall. It could have been you. Or Theo.”

  She dismissed this with a wave. “You give your brother too much credit, but you always did. And where is he now? Don’t get me wrong, I think he did the right thing. Maus was in no shape to travel, and I said so from the start. But that’s not the only reason he stayed behind.” She shrugged. “I’m only saying this because you might need to hear it. This is your Long Ride, Peter. Whatever’s up that mountain, it’s yours to find. Whatever else happens, I hope you get that chance.”

  Another silence fell. Something about the way she was speaking disturbed him. It was as if these words were final ones. As if she were saying goodbye.

  “You think they’re all right?” he asked. “Theo and Maus.”

  “I couldn’t say. I hope so.”

  “You know,” he said, and cleared his throat, “I think Hollis and Sara—”

  “Are together?” She gave a quiet laugh. “And here I was, thinking you hadn’t noticed. You should tell them you know. Personally, it will be a load off everyone’s mind.”
/>   He was completely astounded. “Everyone knows?”

  “Peter.” She met his eye with a correcting frown. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s all well and good to save the human race. You could say I’m in favor. But you might want to pay a little more attention to what’s right in front of you.”

  “I thought I was.”

  “That’s what you thought. We’re just people. I don’t know what’s up that mountain, but I do know that much. We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load. You should tell them it’s okay. They’re waiting to hear from you.”

  It still confounded him, how slow he’d been to detect what was happening with Sara and Hollis. Perhaps, he thought, it was something he hadn’t wanted to see. Looking at Alicia now, her hair shining in the morning light, he found himself recalling their night together on the roof of the power station, the two of them talking about pairing, having Littles; that strange and amazing night, when Alicia had given him the gift of stars. At the time, just the idea of it, of living a normal life, or what passed for one, had seemed as distant and impossible as the stars themselves. Now here they were, more than a thousand kilometers from home—a home they would probably never see again—the same people they had always been, but also not the same, because something had happened; love was among them.

  That’s what Alicia was telling him now; that’s what she had been trying to tell him that night on the roof of the power station, in that last easy hour before everything had happened. That what they did, they did for love. Not just Sara and Hollis; all of them.

  “Lish—” he began.

  But she shook her head, cutting him off. Her face was suddenly flustered. Behind her, Sara and Hollis were emerging from the shelter, into the morning.

  “Like I said, we’re all here because of you,” Alicia said. “Me more than anyone. Now, are you going to wake up the Circuit or am I?”

  They broke camp; by the time they were moving downriver, the sun had lifted over the crest of the valley, filling the branches of the trees with a vaporous light.

  It was almost half-day when Alicia, at the head of the line, abruptly halted. She raised a hand to silence everyone.

  “Lish,” Michael called from the rear, “why are we stopping?”

  “Quiet.”

  She was sniffing the air. Peter smelled it too: a strange and powerful odor, stinging his nostrils.

  Behind him, Sara whispered, “What is that?”

  Hollis pointed with his rifle over their heads. “Look—”

  Suspended from the limbs above their heads were dozens of long strands of small, white objects, bunched like fruit.

  “What the hell is that?”

  But Alicia was looking at the ground now, anxiously scanning the carpeted earth beneath their feet. She dropped to a knee and brushed the heavy covering of dead leaves aside.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Peter heard the groan of the dropping weight. Before he could speak the net had swallowed them; they were rising, lifting through the air, all of them yelling and tumbling, their bodies caught in its weave. It reached the apex of its ascent, everything cradled in suspension for one weightless instant, and then they descended, a hard drop, their bodies jamming together as the ropes compressed them into a single, twisting, captive mass.

  Peter was upside down. Somebody, Hollis, was on top of him. Hollis and also Sara and a sneaker, close to his face, which he recognized as Amy’s. It was impossible to tell where one body ended and the next began. They were spinning like a top. His chest was compressed so tightly he could barely breathe. The skin of his cheek was pressed against the ropes, which were made of some heavy, fibrous twine. The ground was twirling under him, a rush of undifferentiated color.

  “Lish!”

  “I can’t move!”

  “Can anyone?”

  Michael: “I think I’m going to be sick!”

  Sara, her voice shrill with panic: “Michael, don’t you dare!”

  There was no way Peter could reach his blade; even if he could have, severing the ropes would have sent them all plunging headlong to the ground. The spinning motion slowed, then stopped, then started again, its velocity increasing as they were flung in the opposite direction. Somewhere above him in the jumble of bodies he heard Michael retch.

  They spun and spun and spun some more. It was on the sixth rotation that Peter detected, from the corner of his rolling eye, a tremulous motion in the brush. Like the woods were moving, coming to life. But by then he was too disoriented to speak. Part of him felt fear, but the rest of him could not seem to find this part.

  “Holy goddamn,” a voice below them said, “they’re strags.”

  And then Peter saw: they were soldiers.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  In the first days, Mausami slept—sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours at a stretch. Theo had chased the mice away from the upstairs bedroom, whisking them down the stairs and out the door with a broom and a great deal of yelling. In a closet they had found, folded with an eerie care, smelling of time and dust, a pile of sheets and blankets, even a couple of pillows, one for her head and a second to fold between her knees to straighten her back. Random electric currents, exquisitely painful, had begun to shoot down one of her legs—the baby, compressing her spine. She took it as a sign that the baby was doing what it was supposed to do, making space for himself in the densely packed room of her body. Theo came and went, fussing over her like a nurse, bringing her meals and water. He slept during the afternoons on the old saggy sofa downstairs, and when evening fell he dragged a chair out to the porch, where he sat through the night, a shotgun on his lap, staring into the dark.

  Then one morning she awoke to a fresh, new vigor coursing through her. The drought of energy was over; the days of rest had done their work. She drew up to a sitting position and saw that the sun was shining in the window. The air was cool and dry, pushing a gentle breeze that shifted in the curtains. She did not remember opening the window but perhaps Theo had done this, sometime in the night.

  The baby was sitting on her bladder. Theo had left a pail for her, but she didn’t want to use this, now that she no longer needed to. She would make the long march to the privy, to show Theo that she was finally awake.

  Even now, she could detect his movements somewhere in the house below. She rose, pulled a sweater over her long-tailed shirt—she was suddenly much too big for the only pair of gaps she had—and descended the stairs. Her center of gravity seemed to have shifted overnight; the frank bulge of her stomach made her feel top-heavy and clumsy. She supposed this was just something to get used to. Not even six months, and here she was, huge already.

  She stepped into a room she barely remembered; it took her a moment to absorb the fact that a great deal had changed. The sofa and chairs, which before had been pushed against the walls, now stood in the middle of the room at right angles to the fireplace, facing one another. Between them rested a small wooden table atop a threadbare woolen rug. The floor under her bare feet was free of dirt, swept clean. Theo had laid more blankets over the sofa, tucking the edges in, to cover the places where it was worn through and stained.

  But what drew her attention were the pictures propped on the mantel. A series of yellowed photographs—the same people, at different ages and in different configurations, all posed before the very house in which she now stood. A man and his wife and three children, a boy and two girls. The photos seemed to have been taken at intervals of a year; in each, the children had grown. The youngest, a baby in the first photograph, held in his mother’s arms—a tired-looking woman wearing a pair of dark glasses perched above her forehead—was, by the final image, a boy of five or six. He was standing in front of his older sisters, grinning greedily for the camera, showing the gap in his smile where he had lost a tooth. His T-shirt read, incomprehensibly, UTAH JAZZ.

  “They’re something, aren’t they?”

  Mausami turned to discover Theo observi
ng her from the kitchen door.

  “Where did you find them?”

  He approached the mantel and took the last photograph, with the smiling boy, in his hands. “They were in a crawl space, under the stairs. See this here?” He tapped the glass to show her: in the background, at the edge of the photo, an automobile, packed to the tops of its windows, with more belongings lashed to the roof. “It’s the same car we found in the barn.”

  Mausami regarded the photos another moment. How happy they all looked. Not just the smiling boy but his parents and sisters, as well—all of them.

  “You think they lived here?”

  Theo nodded, returning the picture to its place on the mantel with the others. “My guess is, they came here before the outbreak and got stranded. Or else they just decided to stay on. And don’t forget the four graves out back.”

  Mausami was about to point out that there were four graves, not five. But then she realized her error. The fourth grave would have been dug by the last survivor, who couldn’t bury himself.

  “Hungry?” Theo asked her.

  She ran a hand through her dirty hair. “What I’d really like is a bath.”

  “As it happens, I thought you might.” He was wearing a sly smile. “Come on.”

  He led her out to the yard. A large cast-iron pot now hung from a length of chain over a pile of glowing embers; beside it was a metal trough, long and deep enough for a person to sit in. He used a plastic bucket to fill the trough with water from the pump, then, gripping the handle with a heavy cloth, lifted the metal pot and poured the steaming contents into the trough as well.

  “Go on, get in,” Theo said.

  She felt suddenly embarrassed.

  “It’s okay,” he said, laughing gently, “I won’t watch.”

  It seemed foolish, after everything, to be shy about her body. And yet she was. With Theo’s eyes averted, she removed her clothing quickly, standing naked for a moment in the autumn sunshine. The air was cold against her tightening skin, the taut, round shape of her belly. She eased herself into the water, which rose to cover her stomach, her swollen breasts, laced with a nimbus of blue veins.