The Passage: A Novel

by Justin Cronin

  “Amy, honey,” he said. “Amy, you have to wake up.”

  Her eyes fluttered open and closed again. He guided her arms around his neck and stood, felt her feet clamping around his waist. But he could tell she had no strength.

  “You have to hold on, Amy. Please. You have to.”

  Her body tightened in reply. But still, he’d have to use one of his arms to support her weight. This would leave only one hand free to pull them up the ladder. Jesus.

  He turned and faced the ladder, set his foot onto the first rung. It was like a problem on a standardized test: Brad Wolgast is holding a little girl. He has to climb a ladder, fifty feet, in a poorly lit ventilation shaft. The girl is semiconscious at best. How does Brad Wolgast save both their lives?

  Then he saw how he could do it. One rung at a time, he’d use his right hand to pull them up, then hook that same elbow through the ladder, balancing Amy’s weight on his knee while he changed hands and moved up another rung. Then the left hand, then the right, and so on, moving Amy’s weight between them, rung by rung to the top.

  How much did she weigh? Fifty pounds? All suspended, at the moment he changed hands, by the strength of a single arm.

  Wolgast began to climb.

  Richards could tell from the shouts and the shooting that the sticks were outside now.

  He’d known what was happening to Sykes. Probably it would happen to him too, since Sykes had puked his goddamn infected blood all over him, but he doubted he’d live long enough for this to matter. Hey, Cole, he thought. Hey, Cole, you weasel, you little shit. Was this what you had in mind? Is this your Pax Americana? Because there’s only one outcome I can see here.

  There was just one thing Richards wanted now. A clean exit, with a good showing at the last.

  The front entrance of the Chalet was all broken glass and bullet holes, the doors ripped half off their hinges, hanging kitty-corner. Three soldiers lay dead on the floor; it looked as if they’d been shot by friendly fire in the chaos. Maybe they’d actually shot one another on purpose, just to hustle things along. Richards raised his hand and looked at the Springfield—why would he think this would do any good? The soldiers’ rifles would be no use either. He needed something larger. The armory was across the compound, behind the barracks. He’d have to make a run for it.

  He looked out the door, across the open ground of the compound. At least the lights were still on. Well, he thought. Better now than later, since probably there would be no later. He took off at a run.

  The soldiers were everywhere, scattered, running, shooting at nothing, at one another. Not even pretending to make an organized defense, let alone an assault on the Chalet. Richards ran full tilt, half-expecting to be hit.

  Richards was halfway across the compound when he saw the five-ton. It was parked at the edge of the lot, at a careless angle, its doors open. He knew what was inside it.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to make it across the compound after all.

  “Agent Doyle.”

  Doyle smiled. “Lacey.”

  They were on the first floor of the Chalet, in a small, cramped room of desks and file cabinets. Doyle had been waiting there since the shooting had started, hidden beneath a desk. Waiting for Lacey.

  He stood.

  “Do you know where they are?”

  Lacey paused. There were scratches on her face and neck, and bits of leaves caught in her hair.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “I … heard you,” Doyle said. “All these weeks.” Something huge was breaking open inside him. His throat choked with tears. “I don’t know how I did that.”

  She took his hands in hers. “It wasn’t me you heard, Agent Doyle.”

  At least Wolgast couldn’t look down. He was sweating hard now, his palms and fingers slick on the rungs as he pulled them farther up. His arms were trembling with exertion; the crooks of his elbows, where he held each rung when he traded hands, felt bruised to the bone. There was a moment, he knew, when the body simply reached its limits, an invisible line that, once crossed, could not be uncrossed. He pushed the thought aside and climbed.

  Amy’s arms, crossed behind his neck, held firm. Together they ascended, rung by rung by rung.

  The fan was closer now. Wolgast could feel a thin breeze, cool and smelling of night, spilling over his face. He craned his neck to scan the sides of the tube for an opening.

  He saw it, ten feet above him: beside the ladder, an open duct.

  He’d have to push Amy in first. Somehow he’d have to manage his own weight on the ladder and hers as well, while he swung her out from the ladder and into the duct; then he’d climb in himself.

  They reached the opening. The fan was higher than he’d thought, another thirty feet above their heads at least. He guessed they were somewhere on the first floor of the Chalet. Maybe he was supposed to go higher, find another exit. But his strength was nearly gone.

  He positioned his right knee to take Amy’s weight and reached his left hand out. A featureless wall of cool metal met his fingertips, smooth as glass, but then he found the edge. He drew his hand back. Three more rungs should do it. He took a deep breath and ascended, positioning the two of them just above the duct.

  “Amy,” he rasped. His mouth and throat were dry as bone. “Wake up. Do your best to wake up, honey.”

  He felt her breathing change against his neck as she tried to rouse.

  “Amy, I’m going to need you to let go when I say. I’ll hold you. There’s an opening in the wall. I need you to try to get your feet into it.”

  The girl gave no reply. He hoped she had heard him. He tried to imagine how this was going to work, exactly—how he was going to get her inside the duct and then himself—and couldn’t. But he was out of options. If he waited any longer, he’d have no strength for any of it.

  Now.

  He pushed with his knee, lifting Amy up. Her arms released his neck and with his free hand he took her by the wrist, suspending her over the tube like a pendulum, and then he saw the way: he released his other hand, let her weight pull him away and to his left, toward the hole, and then her feet were inside it, she was sliding into the tube.

  He began to fall. He’d been falling all along. But as he felt his feet lose contact with the ladder, his hands madly scrabbling at the wall, his fingers found the lip of the duct, a thin metal ridge that bit into his skin.

  “Whoa!” he cried, his voice ricocheting down the length of the shaft. He seemed to be clinging to the side of the shaft by will alone; his feet were dangling in space. “Whoa now!”

  How he did it he couldn’t have explained. Adrenaline. Amy. That he didn’t want to die, not yet. He pulled with all his might, his elbows bending slowly, drawing himself inexorably upward—first his head and then his chest and then his waist and finally the rest of him, sliding into the duct.

  For a moment he lay still, gulping air into his lungs. He lifted his face then and saw a light ahead—some kind of opening in the floor. He twisted himself around and held Amy as he’d done before, scooting along on his backside, clutching her by the waist. The light grew stronger as they moved toward it. They came to a slatted grate.

  It was sealed, screwed shut from the outside.

  He wanted to cry. To come so close! Even if he’d been able to reach through the narrow slats, somehow, to find the screws with his fingers, he had no tools, no way to open it. And going back—impossible. He’d spent the last of his strength.

  He heard movement below them.

  He pulled Amy tight. He thought of the men they’d seen—Fortes, the soldier in the pool of blood, the one called Grey. It wasn’t how he wanted to die. He closed his eyes and held his breath, willing the two of them into absolute silence.

  Then a voice, quiet and searching: “Chief?”

  It was Doyle.

  One of the lockers was already resting on the ground at the rear of the truck. It looked like somebody had been unloading and then, in a panic, dropped it. Richards searched quickl
y inside the cargo compartment and found a tire iron.

  The hinge gave way with a bright snap. Inside, cradled in beds of foam, lay a pair of RPG-29s. He lifted the rack to find, beneath it, the rockets: finned cylinders, about half a meter long, tipped with tandem-charge HEATs, capable of penetrating the armor of a modern battle tank. Richards had seen what they could do.

  He’d placed the requisition when the order had come through to move the sticks. Better safe than sorry, he’d thought. Vampires, say aaah.

  He fixed the first rocket to the launcher. With a twist it issued the satisfying hum that meant the warhead was armed. Thousands of years of technical advancement, the whole history of human civilization, seemed contained within that sound, the hum of an arming HEAT. The 29 was reusable, but Richards knew he’d only get one shot. He hoisted it to his shoulder, lifted the sighting mechanism into position, and stepped away from the truck.

  “Hey!” he yelled, and, at precisely that moment, the sound of his voice streaming away into the gloom, a cold shudder of nausea burbled from his gut. The ground beneath him swayed, like the deck of a boat at sea. Beads of sweat were popping out all over. He felt the urge to blink, a random current from the brain. So. It was happening quicker than he’d thought. He swallowed hard and took two more steps into the light, swinging the RPG toward the treetops.

  “Here, kitty, kitty!”

  An anxious minute passed as Doyle scrabbled through various drawers until he found a penknife. Standing on a chair, he used the blade to undo the screws. Wolgast lowered Amy into Doyle’s arms, then dropped to the floor himself.

  He didn’t at first know whom he was seeing.

  “Sister Lacey?”

  She was holding the sleeping girl against her chest. “Agent Wolgast.”

  Wolgast looked at Doyle. “I don’t—”

  “Get it?” Doyle lifted his eyebrows. He was, like Wolgast, wearing scrubs. They were too large, hanging loosely on his body. He gave a little laugh. “Trust me, I don’t get it either.”

  “This place is full of dead men,” Wolgast said. “Something … I don’t know. There was an explosion.” He couldn’t explain himself.

  “We know,” Doyle said, nodding. “It’s time for us to go.”

  They stepped from the room into the hall. Wolgast guessed they were somewhere near the rear of the Chalet. It was quiet, though they could hear scattered pops of gunfire from outside. Quickly, without speaking, they made their way to the front entrance. Wolgast saw the dead soldiers sprawled there.

  Lacey turned to him. “Take her,” she said. “Take Amy.”

  He did. His arms were still weak from his ascent up the ladder, but he held her hard against him. She was moaning a little, trying to wake up, fighting the force that was keeping her in twilight. She needed to be in a hospital, but even if he could get her to one, what would he say? How would he explain any of this? The air near the doors was wintry cold, and in her thin gown Amy shivered against him.

  “We need a vehicle,” Wolgast said.

  Doyle ducked out the door. A minute later he returned, holding a set of keys. He’d gotten a gun from somewhere, too, a .45. He took Wolgast and Lacey to the window and pointed.

  “The one all the way down, at the edge of the lot. The silver Lexus. See it?”

  Wolgast did. The car was a hundred yards away, at least.

  “Nice ride like that,” Doyle said, “you’d think the driver wouldn’t just leave the keys under the visor.” Doyle pressed them into Wolgast’s hand. “Hold on to these. They’re yours. Just in case.”

  It took Wolgast a moment. Then he understood. The car was for him, for him and Amy. “Phil—”

  Doyle held up his hands. “That’s how it has to be.”

  Wolgast looked at Lacey, who nodded. Then she stepped toward him. She kissed Amy, touching her hair, and then she kissed him, too, once, on the cheek. A deep calm and a feeling of certainty seemed to radiate through his entire body from the place where she had kissed him. He’d never felt anything like it.

  They stepped from the door, Doyle leading them. Together they moved quickly under the cover of the building. Wolgast could barely keep up. He heard more gunfire from somewhere, but it didn’t seem aimed at them. The shots seemed to be going up and away, into the trees, at the rooftops; random shots, like some kind of sinister celebration. Each time it happened he’d hear a scream, a moment of silence, and then the shooting would start up again.

  They reached the corner of the building. Wolgast could see the woods beyond it. In the other direction, toward the lights of the compound, lay the parking area. The Lexus waited at the end, facing away, no other cars around it for cover.

  “We’ll just have to make a run for it,” Doyle said. “Ready?”

  Wolgast, panting, did his best to nod.

  Then they were up and racing toward the car.

  Richards felt him before he saw him. He turned, swinging the RPG like a vaulter’s pole.

  It wasn’t Babcock.

  It wasn’t Zero.

  It was Anthony Carter.

  He was in a kind of crouch, twenty feet away. He lifted his face and twisted his head, looking at Richards appraisingly. There was something doglike about it. Blood glistened on Carter’s face, his clawlike hands, his sworded teeth, row upon row. A kind of clicking sound was coming from his throat. Slowly, in a gesture of languid pleasure, he began to rise. Richards put Carter’s mouth in his sights.

  “Open up,” Richards said, and fired.

  He knew, even as the grenade shot from the tube, the force of its ejection pushing Richards backward, that he’d missed. The place where Carter had stood was empty. Carter was in the air. Carter was flying. Then he was falling, down upon Richards. The grenade went off, taking out the front of the Chalet, but Richards heard this only vaguely—the noise receding, fading to some impossible distance—as he experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half.

  The explosion hit Wolgast as a white sheen, a wall of heat and light that slapped the left side of his face like a punch; he was lifted from the ground and felt Amy fall away. He hit the pavement and rolled and rolled again before coming to rest on his back.

  His ears were ringing; his breath felt like it was stuck in a tube, far down in his chest. Above him he saw the deep, velvety blackness of the night sky, and stars, hundreds and hundreds of stars, and some of them were falling.

  He thought: Falling stars. He thought: Amy. He thought: Keys.

  He lifted his head. Amy was lying on the ground a few yards away. The air was full of smoke. In the flickering light of the burning Chalet, she looked as if she might be sleeping—a character in a fairy tale, the princess who had fallen asleep and couldn’t wake. Wolgast rolled himself onto all fours and frantically patted the ground for the keys. He could tell one of his ears was messed up; it was like a curtain had fallen over the left side of his face, absorbing all sound. The keys. The keys. Then he realized they were still in his hand; he’d never let them go to begin with.

  Where were Doyle and Lacey?

  He went to where Amy lay. The fall didn’t seem to have hurt her any, or the explosion, as far as he could tell. He put his hands under her arms and hoisted her over his shoulder, then made for the Lexus as fast as he could.

  He bent to ease Amy in, laying her across the backseat. He got in himself and turned the key. The headlights blazed across the compound.

  Something hit the hood.

  Some kind of animal. No: some kind of monstrous thing, throbbing with a pale green light. But when he saw its eyes, and what was inside them, he knew that this strange new being on the hood was Anthony Carter.

  Carter rose as Wolgast found the gearshift and plunged it into reverse and gunned the engine. Carter fell away. Wolgast could see him in the lights of the Lexus, rolling on the ground and then, in a series of movements almost too quick for the eye, launching himself into the air, gone.

  What in the name of—

  Wolgast stomped the
brake, turning the wheel hard to the right. The car spun and spun and came to rest, pointed at the driveway. Then the passenger door opened: Lacey. She climbed in quickly, saying nothing. There were streaks of blood on her face, her shirt. She was holding a gun in her hand. She looked at it, amazed, and dropped it on the floor.

  “Where’s Doyle?”

  “I do not know,” she said.

  He put the car back into drive and hit the accelerator.

  Then he saw Doyle. He was running toward the Lexus at an angle, waving the .45.

  “Just go!” he was yelling. “Go!”

  A concussive thump on the roof of the car, and Wolgast knew it was Carter. Carter was on the roof of the Lexus. Wolgast hit the brakes again, sending all of them lurching forward. Carter tumbled onto the hood but held on. Wolgast heard Doyle firing, three quick shots. Wolgast saw a round actually strike Carter in the shoulder, a quick spark of impact. Carter seemed barely to notice.

  “Hey!” Doyle was yelling. “Hey!”

  Carter turned his face, saw Doyle. With a compressive twitch of his body he launched himself into the air as Doyle got off a final shot. Wolgast turned in time to see the creature that had once been Anthony Carter fall upon his partner, taking him in like a giant mouth.

  It was over in an instant.

  Wolgast stamped on the accelerator, hard. The car shot over a strip of grass, the wheels digging and spinning, then hit the pavement with a screech. They barreled down the long drive away from the burning Chalet, through the hallway of the trees, everything streaming past. Fifty, sixty, seventy miles per hour.

  “What the hell was that?” Wolgast said to Lacey. “What was that!”

  “Stop here, Agent.”

  “What? You can’t be serious.”

  “They will catch us. They will follow the blood. You must stop the car now.” She put her hand on his elbow. Her grip was firm, insistent. “Please. Do as I ask.”

  Wolgast drew the Lexus to the side of the road; Lacey turned to face him. Wolgast saw the wound in her arm, a clean shot just below the deltoid.