The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  “Looks like you made quite an impression on our boy there. I told you it would be a hard story to keep quiet.”

  “It’s still strange to hear it,” Peter said. “How are you doing?”

  Greer shrugged. “Oh, I get by. And you? You look well, Peter. The uniform suits you.”

  “Lish says hello. She just got bumped to captain.”

  Greer nodded equably. “A remarkable girl, our Lish. Destined for big things, I’d say. So how goes the fight? Or do I have to ask?”

  “Not so good. We’re oh-for-three. The whole Martínez thing was a catastrophe. Now it looks like Command is having second thoughts.”

  “That’s always what they’ve been best at. Not to worry, the winds will turn. One thing you learn in here is patience.”

  “It’s not the same without you. I can’t help thinking it would be different if you were there.”

  “Oh, I very much doubt that. This has always been your show. I knew it the moment I met you. Caught upside down in a spinning net, wasn’t it?”

  Peter laughed at the memory. “Michael puked all over us.”

  “That’s right, I remember now. How is he? I imagine he’s not the same kid I knew back then. Always had an answer to everything.”

  “I doubt he’s changed much. Either way, I’ll find out tomorrow. They’re posting me down to the refinery.”

  Greer frowned. “Why there?”

  “Some new initiative to secure the Oil Road.”

  “DS will love that. I’d say you’ve got your hands full with that lot.” He gave his knees a slap to change the subject. “And Hollis, what do you hear of him?”

  “Nothing good. He took Sara’s death hard. The story is he’s on the trade.”

  Greer considered this news for a moment. “On the whole, I can’t say I blame him. That may seem strange to say, knowing Hollis, but more than one man has gone that way under those circumstances. I imagine he’ll come around sooner or later. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

  “And what about you? You’re getting out soon. If you want, I can put a word in with Command. Maybe they’d let you reenlist.”

  But Greer shook his head. “I’m afraid those days are over for me, Peter. Don’t forget, I’m a deserter. Once you cross that line, there’s no going back.”

  “What will you do?”

  Greer smiled mysteriously. “I imagine something will come along. It always does.”

  For a while they talked of the others, bits of news, stories from the past. Being with Greer, Peter felt a warm contentment, but accompanying that, a sense of loss. The major had entered his life just when Peter needed him; it was Greer’s steadfast presence that had given him the will to move forward in the days when his resolve had wavered. It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage. Peter sensed that Greer’s incarceration had changed him. He was still the same man, although something inside him ran deeper, a river of inner calm. He seemed to have drawn strength from his isolation.

  As the end of the ten minutes approached, Peter told the major about the cave, and the strange man, Ignacio, and Alicia’s theory about what he was. Even as he spoke the words, he realized how far-fetched the idea sounded; and yet he felt its rightness. If anything, his feeling that the information was important had grown over the days.

  “There may be something to that,” Greer agreed. “He said, ‘He left us’?”

  “Those were his words.”

  Greer fell silent, stroking his long beard. “The question, of course, is where did Martínez go. Did Alicia have any ideas about that?”

  “Not that she told me.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think finding the Twelve is going to be more complicated than we planned on.”

  He waited, watching Greer’s face. When the major made no reply, he said, “My offer still stands. We could really use you.”

  “You overestimate me, Peter. I was always just along for the ride.”

  “Not to me. Alicia would say the same thing. All of us would.”

  “And I accept the compliment. But it doesn’t change a thing. What’s done is done.”

  “It still doesn’t seem right that you’re in here.”

  Greer shrugged carelessly. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Believe me, I’ve brooded plenty on the subject. The Expeditionary was my whole life, and I miss it. But I did what I thought was right in the moment. In the end, that’s all a man has to measure his life, and it’s plenty.” His eyes narrowed on Peter. “Which isn’t something I need to tell you, is it?”

  The major had him dead to rights. “I suppose not.”

  “You’re a good soldier, Peter. You always have been, and I wasn’t lying about that uniform. It does suit you. The question is, do you suit it?”

  The question wasn’t accusing—if anything, the opposite. “Some days I wonder,” Peter confessed.

  “Everybody does. The military is what it is. You can hardly take a trip to the latrine without filling out a form in triplicate. But in your case, I’d say the question runs deeper. The man I met hanging upside down in that spinner—he wasn’t following anybody’s orders but his own. I don’t think he would have even known how. Now here you are, five years later, informing me that Command wants to give up the hunt. Tell me, are they right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And can you make them understand that? Make them change their minds?”

  “I’m just a junior officer. They’re not going to listen to me.”

  Greer nodded. “And I agree. So there we are.”

  A silence followed. Then Greer said, “Maybe this will help. Do you remember what I said to you that night in Arizona?”

  “There were lots of nights, Lucius. A lot of things got said.”

  “So there were. But this one in particular—I’m not sure where we were exactly. A couple of days out from the Farmstead, anyway. We were sheltering underneath a bridge. Crazy-looking rocks everywhere. I remember that part because of the way the light hit them at sunset, like they were lit from the inside. The two of us got to talking. It was the night I asked you what you intended to do with the vials Lacey gave you.”

  It was all coming back. The red rocks, the deep silence of the landscape, the easy flow of conversation as the two of them sat by the fire. It was as if the memory had been floating in Peter’s mind for five years, never quite touching the surface until now. “I remember.”

  Greer nodded. “I thought you might. And let me just say, when you volunteered to be injected with the virus, that was, hands down, the ballsiest thing I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen some ballsy things. It was nothing I ever could have done myself. I had a lot of respect for you before that, but after …” He paused. “That night, I said something to you. ‘Everything that’s happened, it feels like more than chance.’ I was really just talking to myself at the time, trying to put something into words I couldn’t quite figure out, but I’ve given the matter a lot of thought. You finding Amy, me finding you, Lacey, Babcock, everything that happened on that mountain. Events can seem random while you’re living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more? I’ll tell you what I see, Peter. A clear path. More than that. A true path. What are the chances these things would have just happened on their own? Each piece falling into place exactly when we needed it? There’s a power at work here, something beyond our understanding. You can call it what you like. It doesn’t need a name, because it knows yours, my friend. So you wonder what it is I do all day in here, and the answer is very simple. I’m waiting to see what happens next. Trusting in God’s plan.” He gave Peter an enigmatic smile; the film of sweat that dampened his face and his bare, muscled chest sharpened the air of the room. “Does it seem strange to hear me say that?” His manner lightened. “Probably you’re thinking, That poor guy, all alone in this little box, he must have lost his mind. You wouldn’t be the first.”

 
It took Peter a moment to answer. “Actually, no. I was thinking how much you reminded me of someone.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Her name was Auntie.”

  Now it was Greer’s turn to remember. “Of course. The woman we buried when we got back to the Colony. You never told me anything about her, and I wondered. But I didn’t want to pry.”

  “You could have. You could say we were close, though with Auntie it was hard to tell. Half the time I think she thought I was somebody else. I used to go around to check up on her. She liked to talk about God, too.”

  “Is that right?” Greer seemed pleased. “And what did she have to say?”

  How strange, thought Peter, to find himself thinking of Auntie now. Like Greer’s story of their night in Arizona, his memory of the old woman, and the time they’d spent together, emerged in his mind as if it were yesterday. Her overheated kitchen, and the awful cups of tea; the precise, even reverential arrangement of objects in her cramped house, furniture and books and pictures and mementos; her gnarled old feet, always shoeless, and her puckered, toothless mouth and the vaporous tangle of white hair that seemed to hover in the air around her head, not even really attached to anything. As Auntie herself was unattached; alone in her shack at the edge of the glade, the woman seemed to exist in a wholly different realm, a pocket of accumulated human memory, outside of time. Now that Peter considered it, probably that was what had drawn him to her. In Auntie’s presence, the daily struggles of his life always felt lighter.

  “More or less the same. She wasn’t the easiest woman to make sense of.” A specific recollection bubbled to the surface. “There is one thing. It was the same night Amy appeared outside the gate.”

  “Oh?”

  “She said, ‘The God I know about wouldn’t give us no chance.’ ”

  Greer was watching him with studious intensity. “She said that to you.”

  He was still a little surprised by the clarity of the memory. “At the time I just thought it was, you know, Auntie.”

  Greer broke the mood with a sudden, flashing smile. “Well,” he said, “it sounds to me like the woman knew a thing or two. I’m sorry I never met her. I bet the two of us would have gotten on just fine.”

  Peter laughed. “You know, I think you would have.”

  “So maybe it’s time for you to trust a little more, Peter. That’s really all I’m saying. Let things come to you.”

  “Like Martínez, you mean.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way to know until you know. I’ve never asked you what you believe, Peter, and I’m not going to. Every man gets to decide that for himself. And don’t get me wrong—I’m a soldier, too, or at least I was. The world needs its warriors, and the day will come when very little else is going to matter. You’ll be there for the fight, my friend, I have no doubt. But there’s more to this world than meets the eye. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that much.”

  “I wish I had your confidence.”

  The major shrugged this away. “Oh, you’re just trying to work things out, same as the rest of us. When I was growing up in the orphanage, the sisters always taught us that a person of faith is someone who believes something he can’t prove. I don’t disagree, but that’s only half the story. It’s the end, not the means. A hundred years ago, humanity just about destroyed itself. It’d be easy to think that God doesn’t like us very much. Or that there is no God, there’s no rhyme or reason to anything and we might just as well hang it up and call it a day. Thanks, planet Earth, it was nice knowing you. But that’s not you, Peter. For you, hunting the Twelve isn’t an answer. It’s a question. Does anybody out there care? Are we worth saving? What would God want from me, if there is a God? The greatest faith is the willingness to ask in the first place, all evidence to the contrary. Faith not just in God, but in all of us. It’s a hard place you’re in, and my guess is you’ll be in it for a while. But it’s the right one, and it’s yours.”

  It was then that Peter understood what he was seeing. Greer was free, a free man. The walls of his cage held no meaning for him at all; his life was entirely elsewhere, unbounded by physical things. How surprising, to envy a man whose whole life was conducted in a prison cell not much larger than a good-sized latrine.

  The sound of turning tumblers; their time was at an end. As Sanders entered the cell, the two men rose.

  “So,” Greer said, and clapped his hands conclusively. “A little downtime in Freeport, courtesy of Command. Not the best-smelling town, but the view is nice. A good place to get a little thinking done. You’ve certainly earned it.”

  “That’s what Colonel Apgar said.”

  “Smart fellow, Apgar.” Greer extended his hand. “It was good to see you, my friend.”

  They shook. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

  Greer grinned through the pocket of his beard. “You know what they say. Three hots and a cot. It’s not such a bad life when you get down to it. And as for the rest, I know you, Peter. You’ll figure things out when the time is right. That’s a lesson you taught me, actually.”

  Sanders escorted him into the hall. Only then did it occur to Peter that he’d forgotten to ask Greer about his other visitor. And something else: the major had never asked about Amy.

  “Listen,” Sanders said as they were passing through the second door, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but could you sign this?”

  He was holding out a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil.

  “It’s for my wife,” he explained. “To prove I met you.”

  Peter accepted the paper, scrawled his name, and handed it back. For a moment Sanders just looked at it.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Uncle Peter!”

  Breaking away from the other children, Caleb flew toward him across the playground. At the last instant he took three bounding steps and catapulted into Peter’s arms, nearly knocking him over.

  “Whoa now, easy.”

  The boy’s face was lit with joy. “Amy said you were coming! You’re here! You’re here!”

  Peter wondered how she had known. But he quickly corrected himself; Amy simply seemed to know things, as if her mind were linked to the world’s hidden rhythms. Holding Caleb in his arms, Peter was washed with his distinctive physical presence: his boyish weight and heat; the warmth of his breath; the milky smell of his hair and skin, moist with exertion, mixed with the lingering scent of the harsh lye soap the sisters used. Across the playground, the other children were watching. Peter caught a glimpse of Sister Peg eyeing him coolly from the monkey bars, his unannounced presence a disruption to her beloved routine.

  “Let me have a look at you.”

  He lowered Caleb to the ground. As always, Peter was struck by the boy’s uncanny resemblance to Theo. He felt a stab of regret at the time he’d carelessly allowed to pass.

  “You’re getting so big. I can hardly believe it.”

  The little boy’s chest puffed with pride. “Where have you been, what did you see?”

  “Lots of stuff. I was in New Mexico.”

  “New Mexico!” The look of wonder on his face was total; Peter might just as well have told him he’d visited the moon. Although the prevailing custom in Kerrville was not to shelter the children from knowledge of the virals, as had been done in the Colony, his child’s mind had yet to absorb the ramifications. To Caleb, the Expeditionary was a grand adventure, like pirates crossing the seas or tales of the knights of old that the sisters read to them from storybooks. “How long can you stay?” the boy pleaded.

  “Not long, I’m afraid. But we have the rest of the afternoon. And I’ll be back soon, probably just a week or so. What would you like to do?”

  Caleb’s answer was instantaneous: “Go to the dam.”

  “Why there?”

  “You can see everything!”

  Peter smiled. At such moments he felt something of himself in his nephew, the same undeniable force of curiosity that had governed his life. “The dam i
t is.”

  Sister Peg came up behind the boy. Possessing a birdlike slightness, Sister Peg was nonetheless an intimidating figure, her dark eyes capable of shrinking your insides with a single censorious glance. Peter’s comrades who had been raised in the orphanage—men who weathered horrible conditions and constant peril—spoke of her with an awe verging on terror. My God, they all said, that woman scared the living shit out of us.

  “Hello, Sister.”

  Her face, a weathered topography of deep crevices and arid planes, possessed the immobility of judgment withheld. She had taken a position just beyond a normal conversational distance, a small but significant alteration that magnified her commanding presence. Her teeth were stained a yellowish brown from puffing on corn silk—an incomprehensible habit, widespread in Kerrville, that Peter regarded with a combination of wonder and revulsion.

  “Lieutenant Jaxon, I didn’t expect you.”

  “Sorry, it was all pretty sudden. Do you mind if I take him for the rest of the day?”

  “It would have been better if you could have sent word. Things here run a certain way.”

  Caleb’s body was jangling with energy. “Please, Sister!”

  Her imperious gaze flicked down toward the boy, taking accounts. Delta-like fans of wrinkles deepened at the corners of her mouth as she sucked in her cheeks. “I suppose under the circumstances it would be all right. An exception, you understand, and keep an ear to the horn, Lieutenant. I know you Expeditionary feel yourselves to be above the rules, but I can’t allow it.”

  Peter let the barb pass; it did, after all, possess an element of truth. “I’ll have him back by six.” Under her withering gaze, he found himself, with the next question, attempting to sound curiously offhanded. “Is Amy around? I’d like to visit with her before we go.”

  “She’s gone to the market. You’ve just missed her.” This declaration was followed by a tart sigh. “I suppose you’ll want to stay for dinner.”

  “Thank you, Sister. That’s kind of you.”

  Caleb, bored by these formalities, was tugging at his hand. “Please, Uncle Peter, I want to go.”