The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

Then, the hose.

  The water blasted them like a jet of ice. Water as weapon; water as battering fist. Everyone was yelling, women were tumbling, bodies were sliding on the floor. The hose’s operator enjoyed himself spectacularly, whooping like a rider on a galloping horse. He picked off one and then another. He swept them in a line. He zigzagged his pummeling probe from their faces to their breasts and farther down. The water hit you and then it stopped and then it hit you again. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide; all you could do was endure.

  It stopped.

  “Everybody on your feet.”

  They were led outside again in their shivering nakedness. Water was streaming down their faces, running in rivulets from their hair. Their skin puckered with its evaporation. A single wooden chair had been placed in the middle of the compound. One of the guards stood beside it, languidly sharpening a razor on a leather strop. Four more approached, each bearing a large plastic tub.

  “Get dressed.”

  Clothing was tossed their way—loose pants with drawstring waists, long-sleeved tunics that hung to the hips, all made of scratchy wool with a harsh chemical smell—followed by a random assortment of shoes: sneakers, plastic sandals, boots with the soles split away. Sara found her feet swimming in a pair of leather lace-ups.

  “You, step forward.”

  The man with the razor was pointing at Sara. The other women parted around her. There was something disloyal about this, though Sara hardly blamed them; she might have done the same. Doom weighing in her chest, she approached the chair and sat. She was facing the other women now. Whatever was about to happen, Sara would see it first in their eyes. The man swept her hair into his fist and yanked it taught. A single slice and it was gone. He began to chop indiscriminately at the remains, hewing close to her scalp. There was no pattern to his efforts; he might just as well have been slashing his way through a forest. Sara’s hair fell to her feet in golden ribbons.

  “Go stand with the others.”

  She returned to the group. When she touched her head, her fingers came away tacky with blood. She studied its texture with her fingertips. This is my blood, Sara thought. Because it is my blood, it means that I’m alive. The second woman was in the chair now. Sara thought her name was Caroline. She had met her briefly in the infirmary at the Roswell Garrison; like Sara, she was a nurse. A tall, impressively big-boned girl who radiated health, good cheer, competence. She wept into her hands as the barber hacked away.

  One by one they were shorn. So much came down to hair, Sara realized. In their disfigured semibaldness, something private had been stolen, melding them into an indistinguishable collective, like animals in a herd. She was so light-headed with hunger she didn’t see how she could continue standing. None of them had had a scrap to eat—no doubt to keep them compliant, so that when food was offered they would feel some gratitude to their captors.

  When the cutting was done, they were told to march across the holding area to a second concrete building for something called “processing.” They were marshaled into a line before a long table, where one of the guards, radiating the sense of being in charge, sat with a look of irritation on his face. As each was called forward, he reloaded a clipboard.

  “Name?”

  “Sara Fisher.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  He eyed her up and down. “Can you read?”

  “I can read. Yes.”

  “Special skills?”

  She hesitated. “I can ride.”

  “Ride?”

  “Horses.”

  His eyes rolled a little. “Anything useful?”

  “I don’t know.” She tried to think of something safe. “Sew?”

  He yawned. His teeth were so bad, they appeared to wiggle in his mouth. He jotted something onto the clipboard and tore off the bottom half of the page. From a bin beneath the table he retrieved a ratty blanket, a metal plate, a battered cup and spoon. He passed these to her, the paper balanced on top. Sara quickly glanced at it: her name, a five-digit string of numbers, “Lodge 216,” and, below that, “Biodiesel 3.” The handwriting had the blockiness of a child’s.

  “Next!”

  One of the guards took her by the arm and led her down a hallway of sealed doors. A tiny box of a room and another chair, though not like any chair Sara had seen before: a menacing contraption of cracked red leather and steel, its back reclined at a forty-five-degree angle, with straps at the chest, feet, and wrists. Lurking above it, like the legs of a spider descending on silken threads, was an armature of gleaming metal instruments. The guard shoved her toward it.

  “Sit down.”

  He strapped her to the chair and departed. From without the room, the sound muffled by the thick walls, came a burst of ominously high-pitched sound. Was it screaming? Sara thought she might be ill. She would have been, if there had been anything in her stomach to come up. The last of her defenses were collapsing. She would beg. She would plead. She had no strength to resist.

  The door opened behind her. A man stepped into her field of vision, dressed in a gray smock. He had a little round belly and clouded glasses perched at the tip of his nose and bushy eyebrows that curled like wings at the tips. Something about his face was kind, almost grandfatherly. Like the guard at the table, he was looking at a clipboard. He raised his eyes and smiled.

  “Sara, is it?”

  She nodded, tasting bile.

  “I’m Dr. Verlyn.” He glanced at the straps, frowning as he shook his head. “Those people are idiots. I bet you’re famished. Let’s see if we can get you out of here.”

  She experienced a flash of hope that he intended to release her, but as he drew a stool beside the chair, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, she realized he meant something else. He placed his hand beneath her chin to open her jaw. He peered inside her mouth, then held up two fingers before her face.

  “Follow with your eyes, please.”

  Sara traced his fingers as they made a figure eight and pulled away. He took her pulse, then produced a stethoscope from the pocket of his smock and listened to her heart. He sat up straight and returned his attention to the clipboard, squinting through his glasses.

  “Any health problems you’re aware of? Parasites, infection, night sweats, difficulty urinating?”

  Sara shook her head.

  “How about menstruation?” He was checking off boxes. “Any problems there? Excessive bleeding, for example.”

  “No.”

  “It says here you’re …” He paused, flipped through pages. “Twenty-one. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever been pregnant?”

  Something clenched inside her.

  “It’s a simple question.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  If he detected her lie, he gave no sign. He let the clipboard fall to his lap. “Well, you appear to be in perfect health. Wonderful teeth, if you don’t mind my saying so. Nothing to be done there.”

  Was she supposed to say thank you? Above her face the spider still loomed, gleaming ominously.

  “Now then, let’s see if we can’t finish up quickly and get you on your way.”

  Suddenly something changed. Sara sensed it in a quick hardening of his features, but not just there; it was as if the air of the room had undergone some subtle alteration. The doctor began vigorously pumping a pedal beneath her chair, producing a whirring sound, then reached above her face to draw down one of the spider’s legs. At its tip, spinning in time to his foot strokes, was a buzzing drill bit.

  “This will be easier if you don’t move.”

  Some minutes later, Sara found herself standing outside, clutching her meager belongings to her chest. When she’d started to scream, the doctor had given her a leather strap to bite on. On the pale skin of the inside of her forearm, first gouged and then cauterized in place, was a shiny metal tag, engraved with the same string of digits she’d seen on the paper: 94801. That’s who you are now, the doc
tor had explained, removing the strap, now with its embedded impressions of her teeth. He’d stripped off his gloves and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. Whoever you thought you were, you’re not that person anymore. You’re flatlander number 94801.

  The semi was gone, replaced by an open-backed five-ton. Sara saw the words IOWA NATIONAL GUARD imprinted on the driver’s door—the first evidence of where she was. A guard motioned for Sara to board; a second guard was standing at the front of the cargo bay, his back braced against the cab, idly spinning his club on its leather strap. Some of the women were already there and a few of the men as well. Everyone was slumped on the benches, their faces carrying the stunned weight of all that had occurred.

  She took a place beside one of the men, a young officer she knew as Lieutenant Eustace. He had been the scout who had brought them into Roswell. As she lowered herself to the bench, he angled his shorn head close to Sara’s.

  “What the hell is this place?” he whispered.

  Before Sara could answer, the guard sparked to attention. “You,” he barked, gesturing at Eustace with the end of his club. “No talking.”

  “Who are you people? Why won’t you tell us anything?”

  “I said, keep quiet.”

  Sara understood what was about to happen. It was the implied climax of the day’s design, the one demonstration of their powerlessness that had yet to be delivered.

  “Yeah?” Eustace’s face lit with defiance, the last of his energy spitting from his lips. He knew what he was asking for; he didn’t care. “Go to hell, all of you.”

  The guard took a long stride forward and, with a look of absolute boredom, brought the club crashing down on Eustace’s knees. Eustace rocked forward, clenching his teeth in barely contained agony. Nobody moved a muscle; everyone was gazing intently at the floor.

  “Mother… fucker,” he gasped.

  The guard spun the club around and backhanded the heavy end into Eustace’s nose. A wet exoskeletal crunch, like the sound of an insect stamped underfoot; a crimson spray arced into the air, spattering Sara across the face. Eustace’s head snapped back, his eyes fluttering in their sockets. He ran his tongue along the inside of his upper lip and spat a shard of a tooth away.

  “I said… fuck… you.”

  Blow after hammering blow: his face, his head, the bony joints of his hands. By the time Eustace toppled over, his eyes rolled back into his skull, his features crushed into a pulpy mass, blood had rained down on them all.

  “Get used to it.” The guard paused to wipe his baton on his pant leg and dragged his eyes over the group. “It’s pretty much how we do things.”

  As the truck pulled away, Sara drew Eustace toward her to cradle his ruined face in her lap. The man was barely conscious, his breath gurgling in his throat. Perhaps he would die; it seemed likely. And yet there was a feeling of victory in what he’d done. She bent at the neck and whispered into his ear:

  “Thank you.”

  Thus, in blood, it began.

  “One People! One Director! One Homeland!”

  How many times had Sara been forced to shout these words? With the morning roll call and the singing of the anthem complete, everyone dispersed to their designated transports. Sara helped Jackie up, then climbed aboard. She saw a new face, one she recognized: Constance Chou, Old Chou’s wife. They acknowledged each other with tight nods, but that was all. What had happened at the Colony had come to Sara in bits and pieces over the years. The story was no different from the others she’d heard and differed from the events at Roswell only by degree; in many ways, the greater shock had been that so many other islands of humanity had existed at all. By the time Sara arrived, the Colony’s survivors had already dispersed across the flatland. The number Sara heard was fifty-six. How easy it was for fifty-six people to be subsumed into the masses; with their chopped hair and identical tunics, everybody looked the same. Yet every now and then, a familiar face leapt out. She had glimpsed a woman she thought was Penny Darrell, and another who she swore was Belle Ramirez, Rey’s wife, though when Sara had called her name, the woman hadn’t answered. One morning in the ration line, her bowl had been filled by a man she had seen many times without recognizing as Russell Curtis, her own cousin. He appeared so much older than the man Sara recalled that when their eyes met, it took her a moment to place him. For the better part of a year she had been housed in the same lodge as Karen Molyneau, Jimmy’s widow, and her two daughters, Alice and Avery. It was from Karen that Sara took the most information, including the names of the dead. Ian Patal, who had been killed defending the power station. Hollis’s sister-in-law, Leigh, and her baby, Dora, who had perished on the trip to the Homeland; Other Sandy, who had died shortly after arrival, Karen wasn’t sure how; Gloria and Sanjay Patal. As dark as this news was, Sara still regarded her year with Karen and her girls as a brief respite, a period in which she’d felt connected to the past. But they were always moving people around between the lodges, and one day the three of them were gone, strangers sleeping in the bunks where they had lain their heads for a year. Sara hadn’t seen them since.

  The ride to the biodiesel plant took them along the river, through a maze of squalid lodges to the industrial zone at the north edge of the flatlands. The day gave no promise of improvement; a bitter wind spit kernels of rain into their faces. The air was ripe with the stenches of the flatland, pooling animal waste and a compressed and filthy humanity and, behind it, like a curtain of scent, the dark earthiness of the river. They passed through a juggernaut of checkpoints, fences opening and closing, the cols with their clipboards and pens and inexhaustible appetite for paperwork and the structures of authority waving them through. The far side of the river gave onto open floodplain, denuded and colorless, the crops long picked for winter; to the east, ascending in steps above the river, rose the Hilltop, where all the redeyes lived, and at its apex the Capitol Dome, capped with its crown of gold. It was said that this structure, and those surrounding it, had at one time been a university, which was a kind of school, though with only the Sanctuary for comparison, Sara had difficulty absorbing this fact. Sara had never been up the hill, let alone inside the Dome. Some workers were allowed inside, gardeners and plumbers and kitchen help, and of course the attendants, who were women selected to serve the Director and his staff of redeyes. Everybody said the attendants were the lucky ones, that they lived in luxury with good food and hot water and soft beds to sleep in, but the information was all secondhand. No attendant had ever returned to the flatland; once they went in, the Dome became their lives.

  “Get a look at that,” Jackie murmured.

  Sara’s thoughts had wandered off, her awareness blunted by the cold. They were cutting away from the river on the access road; to the north, beyond the boundaries of the Homeland, Sara could make out the shape of the cranes spiking through the treetops like a pair of huge, skeletal birds. The Project, it was called: a decades-long undertaking to erect a massive steel-and-concrete structure of unknown purpose. Flatlanders who worked there, nearly all of them men, were searched each day going to and coming from the site; even to talk about what they did there was regarded as treason and could get you sent to the feedlot, though rumors abounded. One theory would hold sway for a time before yielding to another and then to a third, the first eventually reemerging to start the cycle anew. Even the men who worked there, when they could be convinced to speak of it at all, did not appear to know what they were constructing. There was talk of mazelike hallways, vast chambers, foot-thick doors of solid steel. Some claimed it was a monument to the Director, others that it was a factory. A few claimed it was nothing at all, merely a distraction concocted by the redeyes to keep the flatlanders occupied. A fourth hypothesis, one that had gained currency in recent months, was that the Project was an emergency bunker. Should the Director’s mysterious power to keep the virals at bay ever fail, the structure could serve as a refuge for the population. Whatever it was, the work appeared to be approaching completion; fewer and fewe
r men would board the transports to the site each morning, and they were all older, most having worked there for years.

  But the cranes weren’t the object of Jackie’s attention. As the five-ton drew toward the last guardhouse, Sara saw two words imprinted on the perimeter wall, painted in broad, dripping strokes of white:

  SERGIO LIVES!

  A pair of flatlanders were dousing long-armed brushes in buckets of soapy water, preparing to scrub it off. A col stood beside them with a rifle cradled over his chest. He glowered as the transport passed, meeting Sara’s eye for an icy instant. She looked away.

  “Fisher, you see anything that interests you?”

  The voice belonged to one of the two cols riding in the back of the truck, a trim man of twenty-five or so, who went by the name Vale.

  “No, sir.”

  For the final five minutes of the ride, she kept her eyes glued to the floor. Sergio, Sara thought. Who was Sergio? The name, rarely spoken in the open, possessed an almost incantatory power: Sergio, leader of the insurgency, bomber of markets and police stations and guardhouses, who, with his unseen fellows, seemed to glide like ghosts through the Homeland, igniting weapons of destruction. Sara understood the words on the fence to be a kind of taunt. We were here, they said, we stood right where you are standing now, we are everywhere among you. Sergio’s methods were marked by an almost incomprehensible cruelty. The insurgents’ targets were anywhere the cols might gather, a program of assassination and disruption, but if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, your presence made no difference. A man or woman would open their coat to reveal the rows of dynamite strapped to their chest, and that would be the end of you. And always, in the final instant, as their thumb found the trigger on the detonator, sending themselves and anyone within the blast radius into oblivion, they would utter these two words: Sergio lives.

  The transport pulled up to the plant, and the workers disembarked. A yeasty odor hung in the air. Four more trucks of workers pulled in behind them. Sara and Jackie were assigned to the grinders, as were most of the women. Why this should be so, Sara had never understood—the job was neither more nor less arduous than anything else—but that’s how things were done. Corn would be mashed, then combined with fungal enzymes and fermented to make fuel. The smell was so intense that it seemed to be part of Sara’s very skin, though she had to admit there were far worse jobs: tending the hogs, or working at the waste treatment plant or slurry pens. They got into line to check in with the foreman, tied their kerchiefs around their faces, then made their way through the cavernous space to their workstations. The corn was stored in large bins with spouts at the bottom; from these openings they would retrieve one bushel at a time and load it into the grinders, where rotating paddles pummeled the kernels into meal. As the moisture in the corn was released it formed a gluey paste, which adhered to the interior walls of the grinder; it was the operator’s job to dislodge it, a task requiring great dexterity and quickness, as the paddles did not stop rotating. The difficulty was compounded by the cold, which made even the simplest movements feel sluggish and imprecise.