The Passage: A Novel

by Cronin, Justin

  At that moment, a second guard stepped into their headlights. He turned his hips to their vehicle and unslung his weapon. What the fuck, Wolgast thought.

  “For Pete’s sake. Is that really necessary?”

  “Hands where we can see them, sir!” the second man barked.

  “For crying out loud,” Doyle said.

  The first guard turned toward the man in the headlights. He waved his hand to tell him to lower his weapon. “Cool it, Duane. They’re feds.” The second man hesitated, then shrugged and walked away.

  “Sorry about that. Just pull around. They’ll have you out fast.”

  “They better,” Wolgast said.

  In the station, the OD took their credentials and asked them to wait while he phoned in their ID numbers. FBI, Homeland Security, even state and local cops; everybody was on a centralized system now, their movements tracked. Wolgast poured himself a cup of sludgy coffee from the urn, took a few halfhearted sips, and tossed it in the trash. There was a No Smoking sign, but the room reeked like an old ashtray. The clock on the wall said it was just past six; in about an hour the sun would be coming up.

  The OD stepped back to the counter with their credentials. He was a trim man, nondescript, wearing the ash gray uniform of Homeland Security. “Okay, gentlemen. Let’s get you on your merry way. Just one thing: the system says you were booked to fly to Denver tonight. Probably just an error, but I need to log it.”

  Wolgast had his answer ready. “We were. We were redirected to Nashville to pick up a federal witness.”

  The duty officer considered this a minute, then nodded. He typed the information into his computer. “Fair enough. Raw deal, they didn’t fly you. That must be a thousand miles.”

  “Tell me about it. I just go where I’m told.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  They returned to their car, and a guard waved them to the exit. Moments later they were back on the highway.

  “Nashville?” Doyle asked.

  Wolgast nodded, fixing his eyes on the road ahead. “Think about it. I-55 has checkpoints in Arkansas and Illinois, one just south of St. Louis and one about halfway between Normal and Chicago. But you take 40 east across Tennessee, the first checkpoint is all the way across the state, at the I-40 and 75 interchange. Ergo, this is the last checkpoint between here and Nashville, so the system won’t know we never went there. We can make the pickup in Memphis, cross into Arkansas, bypass the Oklahoma checkpoint by driving the long way around Tulsa, pick up 70 north of Wichita, and meet Richards at the Colorado border. One checkpoint between here and Telluride, and Sykes can handle that. And nowhere does it say we went to Memphis.”

  Doyle frowned. “What about the bridge on 40?”

  “We’ll have to avoid it, but there’s a pretty easy detour. About fifty miles south of Memphis there’s an older bridge across the river, connects to a state highway on the Arkansas side. The bridge isn’t rated for the big tankers coming up from the N.O., so it’s passenger cars only and mostly automated. The bar-code scanner will pick us up, and so will the cameras. But that’s easy to take care of later if we have to. Then we just work our way north and pick up I-40 south of Little Rock.”

  They drove on. Wolgast thought about turning on the radio, maybe getting a weather report, but decided against it; he was still alert, despite the hour, and needed to keep his mind focused. When the sky paled to gray, they were a little north of Jackson, making good time. The rain stopped, then started again. Around them the land rose in gentle swells like waves far out to sea. Though it seemed like days ago, Wolgast was still thinking about the message from Sykes.

  Caucasian female. Amy NLN. Zero footprint. 20323 Poplar Ave., Memphis, TN. Make pickup by Saturday noon latest. No contact. TUR. Sykes.

  TUR: travel under radar.

  Don’t just catch a ghost, Agent Wolgast; be a ghost.

  “Do you want me to drive?” Doyle asked, cutting the silence, and Wolgast could tell from his voice that he’d been thinking the same thing. Amy NLN. Who was Amy NLN?

  He shook his head. Around them, the day’s first light spread over the Mississippi Delta like a sodden blanket. He tapped the wipers to clear the mist away.

  “No,” he said. “I’m good.”

  FIVE

  Something was wrong with Subject Zero.

  For six days straight he hadn’t come out of the corner, not even to feed. He just kind of hung there, like some kind of giant insect. Grey could see him on the infrared, a glowing blob in the shadows. From time to time he’d change positions, a few feet to the left or right, but that was it, and Grey had never seen him actually do this. Grey would just lift his face from the monitor, or leave containment to get a cup of coffee or sneak a smoke in the break room, and by the time he looked again, he’d find Zero hanging someplace else.

  Hanging? Sticking? Hell, levitating?

  No one had explained a goddamn thing to Grey. Not word one. Like, for starters, what Zero actually was. There were things about him that Grey would say were sort of human. Such as, he had two arms and two legs. There was a head where a head should be, and ears and eyes and a mouth. He even had something like a johnson dangling down south, a curled-up little seahorse of a thing. But that’s where the similarities stopped.

  For instance: Subject Zero glowed. In the infrared, any heat source would do that. But the image of Subject Zero flared on the screen like a lit match, almost too bright to look at. Even his crap glowed. His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled—that was the word Grey thought of, like the skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope—and his eyes were the orange of highway cones. But the teeth were the worst. Every once in a while Grey would hear a little tinkling sound on the audio, and know it was the sound of one more tooth dropped from Zero’s mouth to the cement. They rained down at the rate of half a dozen a day. These went into the incinerator, like everything else; it was one of Grey’s jobs to sweep them up, and it gave him the shivers to see them, long as the little swords you’d get in a fancy drink. Just the thing if, say, you wanted to unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat.

  There was something about him that was different than the others, too. Not that he looked all that different. The glowsticks were all a bunch of ugly bastards, and over the six months Grey had been working on Level 4, he’d gotten used to their appearance. There were little differences, of course, that you could pick up if you looked hard. Number Six was a little shorter than the others, Number Nine a little more active, Number Seven liked to eat hanging upside down and made a goddamn mess, Number One was always chatting away, that weird sound they made, a wet clicking from deep in their throats that reminded Grey of nothing.

  No, it wasn’t something physical that made Zero stand out; it was how he made you feel. That was the best way Grey could explain it. The others seemed about as interested in the people behind the glass as a bunch of chimps at the zoo. But not Zero: Zero was paying attention. Whenever they dropped the bars, sealing Zero on the back side of the room, and Grey squeezed into his biohazard suit and went in through the air lock to clean up or bring in the rabbits—rabbits, for Christsakes; why did it have to be rabbits?—a kind of prickling climbed up his neck, like his skin was crawling with ants. He’d go about his work quickly, not even really looking up from the floor, and by the time he got out of there and into decon, he’d be glazed with sweat and breathing hard. Even now, a wall of glass two inches thick between them and Zero hanging so that all Grey could see was his big glowing backside and spreading, clawlike feet—Grey could still feel Zero’s mind roving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

  Still, Grey had to say it wasn’t a bad job on the whole. He’d certainly had worse in his life. Most of the time all he did was just sit there through an eight-hour shift, penning his way through a crossword and checking the monitor and logging in his reports, what Zero ate and didn’t eat and how much of his piss and shit went down the drain, and backing up the hard drives when they max
ed out with a hundred hours of video footage of Zero doing nothing.

  He wondered if the others weren’t eating, either. He thought he’d ask one of the techs about that. Maybe they’d all gone on some kind of hunger strike; maybe they were just tired of rabbits and wanted squirrel instead, or possum, or kangaroo. It was funny to think it, given the way the glow-sticks ate—Grey had let himself watch this only once, and that was one time too many; it had practically turned him into a vegetarian—but he had to say there was something fussy about them, like they had rules about eating, starting with the whole business with the tenth rabbit. Who knew what that was about? You gave them ten rabbits, they’d eat only nine, leave the tenth just where it was, like they were saving it for later. Grey had owned a dog once who was like that. He’d called him Brownbear, for no particular reason; he didn’t look especially bearish, and he wasn’t even really brown but kind of a mellow tan color, with flecks of white on his muzzle and chest. Brownbear would eat exactly half his bowl each morning, then finish it at night. Grey was usually asleep when this happened; he’d wake up at two or three A.M. to the sound of the dog in the kitchen, cracking the kibble on his molars, and in the morning, the dish would be sitting empty in its spot by the stove. Brownbear was a good dog, the best he’d ever had. But that was years ago; he’d had to give him up, and Brownbear would be long dead by now.

  All the civilian workers, the sweeps and some of the technicals, were housed together in the barracks at the south end of the compound. The rooms weren’t bad, with cable and a hot shower, and no bills to pay. Nobody was going anywhere for a while, that was part of the deal, but Grey didn’t mind; everything he needed he had right here, and the pay was good, right up there with oil-rig money, all piling up in an offshore account with his name on it. They weren’t even taking out any taxes, some kind of special arrangement for civilians employed under the Federal Emergency Homeland Protection Act. A year or two of this, Grey figured, and as long as he didn’t piss away too much at the commissary on smokes and snacks, he’d have enough socked away to put some serious mileage between himself and Zero and all the rest of them. The other sweeps were an okay bunch, but he preferred to keep to himself. In his room at night, he liked to watch the Travel Channel or National Geographic, picking places he’d go when this was all over. For a while he’d been thinking Mexico; Grey figured there’d be plenty of room, since about half the country seemed to have emptied out and was now standing around the parking lot of the Home Depot. But then last week he’d seen a program on French Polynesia—the water blue like he’d never seen blue before, and little houses on stilts sitting right out over it—and now was giving that some serious consideration. Grey was forty-six years old and smoked like a fiend, so he figured he had only about ten good years left to enjoy himself. His old man, who’d smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he’d done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.

  Still, it would have been nice to get off the grounds every now and then, even just to have a look around. He knew they were in Colorado someplace, from the license plates on some of the cars, and every now and again somebody, probably one of the officers or else the scientific staff, who came and went as they chose, would leave a copy of The Denver Post lying around; so it was no big secret, really, where they were, no matter what Richards said. One day after a heavy snowfall, Grey and some of the other sweeps had gone up to the roof of the barracks to shovel it off, and Grey could see, rising above the line of snowy trees, what looked like some kind of ski resort, with a gondola inching up the hillside and a slope with tiny figures carving down it. It couldn’t have been more than five miles from where he stood. Funny, with a war on and the world the way it was, everything in such a mess, to see a thing like that. Grey had never skied in his life, but he knew there’d be bars and restaurants too, out there beyond the wall of trees, and things like hot tubs and saunas, and people sitting around talking and sipping glasses of wine in the steam. He’d seen that on the Travel Channel, too.

  It was March, still winter, and there was plenty of snow on the ground, which meant that once the sun went down the temperature fell like a rock. Tonight a nasty wind was blowing too, and trudging back to the barracks with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his chin tucked into the neck of his parka, Grey felt like his face was getting slapped a hundred times over. All of which made him think some more about Bora-Bora, and those little houses on stilts. Never mind Zero, who apparently had lost his taste for fresh Easter Bunny; what Zero ate and did not eat was none of Grey’s business. If they told him to serve eggs Benedict on toast points from now on, he’d do it with a smile. He wondered what a house like that would cost. With a house like that, you wouldn’t even need plumbing; you could just step to the rail and do your business, any time of the day or night. When Grey had worked rigs in the Gulf, he’d liked to do that, in the early morning or late at night when no one was around; you had to mind the wind, of course, but with a breeze pushing at your back, few pleasures in life compared to taking a leak off a platform two hundred feet over the Gulf and watching it arc into the air before raining down twenty stories into the blue. It made you feel small and big at the same time.

  Now the whole oil industry was under federal protection, and it seemed like practically everybody he knew from the old days had disappeared. After that Minneapolis thing, the bombing at the gas depot in Secaucus, the subway attack in L.A. and all the rest, and, of course, what happened in Iran or Iraq or whichever it was, the whole economy had locked up like a bad transmission. With his knees and the smoking and the thing on his record, no goddamn way they were taking Grey in Homeland, or anywhere else. He’d been out of work most of a year when he’d gotten the call. He’d thought for sure it was more rig work, maybe for some foreign supplier. They’d somehow made it sound that way without actually saying it, and he was surprised when he’d driven to the address and found it was just an empty storefront in an abandoned strip mall near the Dallas fairgrounds, with white soap smeared on the windows. The place had once housed a video store; Grey could still make out the name, Movie World West, in a ghostly formation of missing letters on the grimy stucco over the door. The place next to it had been a Chinese restaurant; another, a dry cleaner’s; the rest, you couldn’t say. He’d driven up and down in front a couple of times, thinking he must have had the address wrong and reluctant to climb from the air-conditioned cab of his truck for some pointless goose chase, before he’d stopped. It was about a hundred degrees out, typical for August in north Texas but still nothing you could ever get used to, the air thick and dirty-smelling, the sun gleaming like the head of a hammer coming down. The door was locked but there was a buzzer; he rang and waited a minute as the sweat started to pool under his shirt, then heard a big ring of keys jangling on the other side and the clunk of the unlocking door.

  They’d set up a little desk and a couple of file cabinets in the back; the room was still full of empty racks that had once held DVDs, and a lot of tangled wires and other junk was hanging from open spaces in the droppanel ceiling. Leaned against the rear wall of the store was a life-size cardboard figure, coated with a film of dust, of some movie star Grey couldn’t place, a bald black dude in wraparounds, with biceps that bulged under his T-shirt like a couple of canned hams he was trying to smuggle out of a supermarket. The movie was nothing Grey remembered, either. Grey filled out the form but the people there, a man and a woman, barely seemed to look at it. While they typed into the computer they asked him to pee in a cup and then gave him a polygraph, but that was standard stuff. He did his best not to feel like he was lying even when he was telling the truth, and when they asked him about the time he’d done at Beeville, as he knew they would, he told them the story straight out: no way to hide it with the wires, and it was a matter of record besides, especially in Texas, with the website you could go to and see everybody’s faces and all the rest. But even this seemed not to be a problem. They se
emed to know a lot about him already, and most of their questions had to do with his personal life, the stuff you couldn’t learn except by asking. Did he have friends? (Not really.) Did he live alone? (When hadn’t he?) Did he have any living family? (Just an aunt in Odessa he hadn’t seen in about twenty years and a couple of cousins he wasn’t even sure he knew the names of.) The trailer park where he was living, up in Allen—who were his neighbors? (Neighbors?) And so on, in that vein. Everything he told them seemed to make them happier and happier. They were trying to hide it, but you could see it on their faces, plain as the words in a book. When he decided they weren’t police, he realized he’d been thinking maybe they were.

  Two days later—by which time he realized he’d never learned the names of the man and the woman, couldn’t even have said what they looked like—he was on the plane to Cheyenne. They’d explained the money and the part about not being able to leave for a year, which was all right by him, and made it clear that he shouldn’t tell anybody where he was going, which, in fact, he couldn’t; he didn’t know. At the airport in Cheyenne he was met by a man in a black tracksuit, whom he’d later come to know as Richards—a wiry guy no more than five foot six with a permanent scowl on his face. Richards walked him to the curb; two other men, who must have come in on different flights, were standing by a van. Richards opened the driver’s door and returned with a cloth bag the size of a pillowcase. He held it open like a mouth.

  “Wallets, cell phones, any personal stuff, photographs, anything with writing on it, right down to the pen you got at the bank,” he told them. “I don’t care if it’s a fucking fortune cookie. In it goes.”

  They emptied their pockets, hoisted their duffels into the luggage rack, and climbed in through the side. It was only when Richards closed the door behind them that Grey realized the windows were blacked out. From the outside the vehicle looked like an ordinary van, but inside it was a different story: the driver’s compartment was sealed off, the passenger compartment nothing but a metal box with vinyl bench seats bolted to the floor. Richards had said they were allowed to trade first names but that was all. The other two men were Jack and Sam. They looked so much like Grey he might have been staring into a mirror: middle-aged white guys with buzz cuts and puffed red hands and workingman’s tans that stopped at the wrists and collar. Grey’s first name was Lawrence, but he’d barely ever used it. It sounded odd coming from his mouth. As soon as he said it, shaking hands with the one named Sam, he felt like somebody different, like he’d boarded the plane in Dallas as one person and landed in Cheyenne as another.