Poor Hollis. He was so worn out I never got the chance to tell him the news. So tonight will be the last night for me to be alone with my secret, before someone else knows. I wonder if there’s anyone here who can marry us. Maybe the CO can do it. But Crukshank doesn’t seem the type, and I should wait until Michael’s with us, in Kerrville. He should be the one to give me away. It wouldn’t be fair to do it without him.
I should be exhausted, but I’m not. I’m much too keyed up to sleep. Probably it’s my imagination, but when I close my eyes and sit very still, I swear I can feel the baby inside me. Not moving, nothing like that, it’s far too early. Just a kind of warm and hopeful presence, this new soul my body carries, waiting to be born into the world. I feel … what’s the word? Happy. I feel happy.
Shots outside. I am going to look.
*****END OF DOCUMENT*****
Recovered at Roswell Site (“Roswell Massacre”)
Area 16, Marker 267
33.39 N, 104.50 W
2nd striation. Depth: 2.1 meters
Accession BL1894.02
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For advocacy, encouragement, counsel, inspiration, expertise, friendship, camaraderie, patience, shelter, sustenance, and the general tossing of meat through the bars, thanks and ponies to: Ellen Levine and Claire Roberts at Trident Media Group; Mark Tavani and Libby McGuire at Ballantine Books; Gina Centrello, president of the Random House Publishing Group; Bill Massey at Orion; the spectacular publicity, marketing, and sales teams at Ballantine and Orion; Rich Green at Creative Artists Agency; Michael Ellenberg and Ridley Scott at Scott Free Productions; Rodney Ferrell and Elizabeth Gabler at Fox 2000; my brilliant and intrepid readers, Jenny Smith, Tom Barbash, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Ivan Strausz; my many wonderful colleagues and students at Rice University; Bonnie Thompson; John Logan; Alex Parsons; Andrea White and The House of Fiction; ACC, best boy ever; IAC, the girl who saves the world; Leslie, Leslie, Leslie.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in New England, JUSTIN CRONIN is the award-winning author of The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil. Having earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cronin is now a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his family in Houston, Texas.
The Passage is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Cronin
Map copyright © 2010 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint five lines of “The Wild Iris” from The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck, copyright © 1992 by Louise Gluck. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Cronin, Justin.
The passage : a novel / Justin Cronin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51686-2
1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Human experimentation in medicine—Fiction. 3. Virus diseases—Fiction. 4. United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.R542P37 2010
813′.54—dc22 2010007455
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0
The Passage: A Novel Page 98