The Passage

by Justin Cronin

  Last night they came again. The soldiers had set up a defense perimeter, but there were simply too many—they must have come by the hundreds of thousands, a huge swarm that blotted out the stars. Three soldiers killed, as well as Cole. He was standing right in front of me; they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury.

  Tonight it’s quiet, not a bat in the sky. We’ve built a fire line around the camp, and that seems to be keeping them at bay. Even the soldiers are pretty shaken up. The few of us who are left are now deciding what to do. A lot of our equipment has been destroyed; it’s unclear how this happened, but sometime during the attack last night, a grenade belt went into the fire, killing one of the soldiers and taking out the generator as well as most of what was in the supply tent. But we still have satcom and enough juice in the batteries to call for evac. Probably we should all just get the hell out of here.

  And yet. When I ask myself why I should turn back now, what I have to go home to, I can’t think of a single reason. It would be different if Liz were still alive. I think for the past year some part of me has been pretending that she’d simply gone away for a while, that one day I’d look up and see her standing in the door, smiling that way she did, her head cocked to the side so her hair could fall away from her face; my Liz, home at last, thirsty for a cup of Earl Grey, ready for a stroll by the Charles through the falling snow. But I know now that this isn’t going to happen. Strangely, the events of the last two days have given my mind a kind of clarity about what we’re doing, what the stakes are. I’m not one bit sorry to be here; I don’t feel afraid at all. If push comes to shove, I may press on alone.

  Paul, whatever happens, whatever I decide, I want you to know that you have been a great friend to me. More than a friend: a brother. How strange to write that sentence, sitting on a riverbank in the jungles of Bolivia, four thousand miles away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known and loved. I feel as if I’ve entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

  From: lear@amedd.army.mil

  Date: Tuesday, February 21 5:31 a.m.

  To: pkiernan@harvard.edu

  Subject: Re: don’t be dumb, get the hell out, please

  Paul,

  We radioed for the evac last night. Pickup in ten hours, which is the nick of time as far as everyone’s concerned. I don’t see how we can survive another night here. Those of us who are still healthy have decided we can use the day to press on to the site. We were going to draw straws, but it turned out everyone wanted to go. We leave within the hour, at first light. Maybe something can still be salvaged from this disaster. One bit of good news: Tim seems to have turned a corner during the last few hours. His fever’s way down, and though he’s still unresponsive, the bleeding has stopped and his skin looks better. With the others, though, I’d say it’s still touch and go.

  I know that science is your god, Paul, but would it be too much to ask for you to pray for us? All of us.

  From: lear@amedd.army.mil

  Date: Tuesday, February 21 11:16 p.m.

  To: pkiernan@harvard.edu

  Subject:

  Now I know why the soldiers are here.

  THREE

  Situated on four thousand acres of soggy East Texas piney woodland and short-grass prairie, looking more or less like a corporate office park or large public high school, the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a.k.a. Terrell, meant one thing: if you were a man convicted of capital murder in the state of Texas, this was where you came to die.

  On that morning in March, Anthony Lloyd Carter, inmate number 999642, sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murder of a Houston mother of two named Rachel Wood whose lawn he had mowed every week for forty dollars and a glass of iced tea, had been a resident of the Administrative Segregation Block of Terrell Unit for one thousand three hundred and thirty-two days—less than many, more than some, not that in Carter’s sense of things this made a lick of difference. It wasn’t like you got a prize for being there the longest. He ate alone, exercised alone, showered alone, and a week was the same as a day or a month to him. The only different thing that was going to happen would come on the day the warden and the chaplain appeared at his cell and he’d take the ride to the room with the needle, and that day wasn’t so far off. He was allowed to read, but that wasn’t easy for him, it never had been, and he had long since stopped fussing with it. His cell was a concrete box six feet by ten with one window and a steel door with a slot wide enough to slip his hands through but that was all, and most of the time he just lay there on his cot, his mind so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it. Half the time he couldn’t have said for sure if he was awake or still sleeping.

  That day began the same as every other, at 3:00 A.M., when they turned on the lights and shoved the breakfast trays through the slots. Usually it was cold cereal or powdered eggs or pancakes; the good breakfasts were when they put peanut butter on the pancakes, and this was one of the good ones. The fork was plastic and broke half the time, so Carter sat on his bunk and ate the pancakes folded up, like tacos. The other men on H-Wing complained about the food, how nasty it was, but Carter didn’t think it was so bad on the whole. He’d had worse, and there were days in his life when he’d had nothing at all, so pancakes with peanut butter were a welcome sight in the morning, even if it wasn’t morning in the sense of being light out.

  There were visiting days, of course, but Carter hadn’t had a visitor in all the time he’d been in Terrell except for the once, when the woman’s husband had come and told him that he’d found Christ Jesus who was the Lord and that he’d prayed on what Carter had done, taking his beautiful wife away from him and his babies forever and ever; and that through the weeks and months of praying, he’d come to terms with this and decided to forgive him. The man did a lot of crying, sitting on the other side of the glass with the phone pressed to his head. Carter had been a Christian man himself from time to time and appreciated what the woman’s husband was saying to him; but the way he spoke the words made it seem like his forgiving Carter was something he’d chosen to do, to make himself feel better. He certainly didn’t say anything about putting a stop to what was going to happen to Carter. Carter couldn’t see how saying anything on the subject would improve the situation, so he thanked the man and said God bless you and I’m sorry, if I see Mrs. Wood in heaven I’ll tell her what you did here today, which made the man get up in a hurry and leave him there, holding the phone. That was the last time anybody had come to see Carter at Terrell, two years ago at least.

  The thing was, the woman, Mrs. Wood, had always been nice to him, giving him an extra five or ten, and coming out with the iced tea on the hot days, always on a little tray, like folks did in restaurants, and the thing that had happened between them was confusing; Carter was sorry about it, sorry right down to his bones, but it still didn’t make sense in his head, no matter how he turned it around. He’d never said he hadn’t done it, but it didn’t seem right to him to die on account of something he didn’t understand, at least before he had the chance to figure it out. He went over it in his mind, but in four years it never had come any clearer to him. Maybe coming to terms, like Mr. Wood had done, was the thing Carter hadn’t been able to see his way to. If anything, the whole thing made less sense than ever; and with the days and weeks and months all mashed together in his brain the way they were, he wasn’t even sure he was remembering the thing right to begin with.

  At 6:00 A.M., when the shift changed, the guards woke everybody up again, to call out names and numbers, then moved down the hallway with the laundry bags to swap out boxers and socks. This meant today was a Friday. Carter didn’t get a chance to shower but once a week or see the barber except every sixty days, so it was good to have clean clothes. The sticky feeling of his skin was worse in summer, when you sweated all day onto yourself even if you lay still as a stone,
but from what his lawyer had told him in the letter he’d sent six months ago, he wouldn’t have to go through another Texas summer in his life. The second of June would be the end of it.

  His thoughts were broken by two hard bangs on the door. “Carter. Anthony Carter.” The voice belonged to Pincher, head of the shift.

  “Aw, come on, Pincher,” Anthony said from his bunk. “Who’d you think was in here?”

  “Present for cuffs, Tone.”

  “Ain’t time for rec. Ain’t my day for the shower neither.”

  “You think I got all morning to stand here talking about it?”

  Carter eased himself off the bunk, where he’d been looking at the ceiling and thinking about the woman, that glass of iced tea on the tray. His body felt achy and slow, and with effort he lowered himself onto his knees with his back facing the door. He’d done this a thousand times but still didn’t like it. Keeping your balance was the tricky part. Once he was kneeling, he pulled his shoulder blades inward, twisted his arms around, and guided his hands, palms up, through the slot that the food came through. He felt the cold bite of the metal as Pincher cuffed his wrists. Everybody called him Pincher on account of how tight he did the cuffs.

  “Stand back now, Carter.”

  Carter pushed one foot forward, his left knee making a grinding sound as he shifted his center of gravity, then rose carefully to his feet, simultaneously withdrawing his cuffed hands from the slot. From the far side of the door came the clanking of Pincher’s big ring of keys, and then the door opened to show him Pincher and the guard they called Dennis the Menace, on account of his hair, which looked like the kid’s in the cartoon, and the fact that he liked to menace you with the stick. He had a way of finding spots on your body that you never knew could hurt so bad with just a little poke of wood.

  “Seems like somebody’s come to see you, Carter,” Pincher said. “And it isn’t your mother or your lawyer.” He didn’t smile or anything, but Dennis looked to be enjoying himself. He gave that stick of his a twirl like a majorette.

  “My mom’s been with Jesus since I was ten years old,” Carter told him. “You know that, Pincher, I told you that about a hundred times. Who is it wants me?”

  “Can’t say. Warden set it up. I’m just supposed to take you to the cages.”

  Carter supposed this was no good. It’d been so long since the woman’s husband had come to visit; maybe he’d come to say goodbye, or else to tell him I changed my mind, I don’t forgive you after all, go straight to hell, Anthony Carter. Either way Carter didn’t have anything else to say to the man. He’d said sorry to everyone over and over and felt done with it.

  “Come on with you then,” Pincher said.

  They led him down the corridor, Pincher gripping him hard by an elbow to steer him like a kid through a crowd, or a girl he was dancing with. This was how they took you anywhere, even to the shower. Part of you got used to people’s hands being on you this way, and part of you didn’t. Dennis led the way, opening the door that sealed administrative segregation from the rest of H-Wing and then the outer, second door that took them down the hall through general population to the cages. It’d been almost two years since Carter had been off H-Wing—H for “hellhole,” H for “hit my black ass with that stick some more,” H for “Hey, Mama, I’m off to see Jesus any day now”—and walking with his eyes pointed at the ground, he still let himself peek around, if only to give his eyes something new to look at. But it was all still Terrell, a maze of concrete and steel and heavy doors, the air dank and sour with the smell of men.

  At the visiting area they reported to the OD and entered an empty cage. The air inside was ten degrees warmer and smelled like bleach so strong it made Carter’s eyes sting. Pincher undid the cuffs; while Dennis held the point of his stick against the soft spot under Carter’s jaw, they shackled him in the front, legs too. There were signs all over the wall telling Carter what he could and couldn’t do, none of which he wanted to take the trouble to read or even look at. They shuffled him over to the chair and gave him the phone, which Carter could manage to hold in place against his ear only if he bent his legs halfway up his chest—more damp crunches from his knees—pulling the chain taut across his chest like a long zipper.

  “Didn’t have to wear the shackles the last time,” Carter said.

  Pincher barked a nasty laugh. “I’m sorry, did we forget to ask you nicely? Fuck you, Carter. You got ten minutes.”

  Then they left, and Carter waited for the door on the other side to open and show him who it was had come to see him after all this time.

  Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.

  He hated the weather, which was hot as an oven one minute and freezing the next, the air so damp it felt like a wet towel over your head. He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown nothingness of it. He hated the billboards and the freeways and faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly steaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belt buckles and the way people talked, y’all this and y’all that, as if they spent the day ropin’ and ridin’, not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

  Most of all, he hated it because his parents had made him live here, back in junior high. Wolgast was forty-four, still in decent shape but with the miscellaneous aches and thinning hair to show for it; sixth grade was long ago, nothing to regret, but still, driving with Doyle up Highway 59 north from Houston, springtime Texas spread all around, the wound felt fresh to him. Texas, state-sized porkchop of misery: one minute he’d been a perfectly happy kid in Oregon, fishing off the pier at the mouth of the Coos River and playing with his friends in the woods behind their house for endless, idle hours; the next he was stuck in the urban swamp of Houston, living in a crappy ranch house without a scrap of shade, walking to school in one-hundred-degree heat that felt like a big shoe coming down on his head. The end of the world, he’d thought. That’s where he was. The end of the world was Houston, Texas. On his first day of sixth grade, the teacher had made him stand up to recite the Texas Pledge of Allegiance, as if he’d signed up to live in a whole different country. Three miserable years; he’d never been so glad to leave a place, even the way it happened. His father was a mechanical engineer; his parents had met when his father had taken a job the year after college as a math teacher on the reservation in Grande Ronde, where his mother, who was half Chinook—her mother’s family name was Po-Bear—was working as a nurse’s aide. They’d gone to Texas for the money, but then his father was laid off when the oil bust hit in ’86; they tried to sell the house but couldn’t, and in the end, his father had simply dropped the keys off at the bank. They moved to Michigan, then Ohio, then upstate New York, chasing little bits of work, but his father had never righted himself after that. When he’d died of pancreatic cancer two months before Wolgast graduated from high school—his third in as many years—it was easy to think that Texas had somehow done it. His mother had moved back to Oregon, but now she was gone too.

  Everyone was gone.

  He’d gotten the first man, Babcock, from Nevada. Others came from Arizona and Louisiana and Kentucky and Wyoming and Florida and Indiana and Delaware. Wolgast didn’t care much for those places, either. But anything was better than Texas.

  Wolgast and Doyle had flown into Houston from Denver the night before. They’d stayed the night at a Radisson near the airport (he’d considered a brief side trip into the city, maybe tracking down his old house, but then wondered what in hell he’d want to do a thing like that for), picked up the rental car in the morning, a Chrysler Victory so new it smelled like the ink on a dollar bill, and headed north. The day was clear with a high,
blue sky the color of cornflowers; Wolgast drove while Doyle sipped his latte and read the file, a mass of paper resting on his lap.

  “Meet Anthony Carter,” Doyle said, and held up the photo. “Subject Number Twelve.”

  Wolgast didn’t want to look. He knew just what he’d see: one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely ever learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long. These men were black or white, fat or thin, old or young, but the eyes were always the same: empty, like drains that could suck the whole world down into them. It was easy to sympathize with them in the abstract, but only in the abstract.

  “Don’t you want to know what he did?”

  Wolgast shrugged. He was in no hurry, but now was as good a time as any.

  Doyle slurped his latte and read: “Anthony Lloyd Carter. African American, five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds.” Doyle looked up. “That explains the nickname. Take a guess.”