The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  “Are we interrupting your beauty sleep, Fisher? Our mistake.”

  “Right.” Michael was zipping his jumpsuit. “Sorry.”

  “You’ll be even sorrier. You’ll be firing up the Bomb. Ceps will be your second. Try not to blow up your crew.”

  Distillation Tower No. 1, known as the Bomb, was the oldest of the lot, its rusty bulk held together by a combination of patch welds, baling wire, and prayer. Everybody said it was a matter of time before she was either decommissioned or launched a cooking crew halfway to Mars.

  “Thanks, boss. That’s swell of you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Karlovic swept his gaze over the group. “All right, everyone. Seven days until we ship. I want those tankers full, people. And Fisher, hang back a minute. I want a word with you.”

  The crews dispersed to their towers. Michael followed Karlovic into the hut. Christ, what now? He hadn’t been late by more than a couple of minutes, hardly worth a dressing down.

  “Listen, Dan, I’m sorry about this morning—”

  Karlovic didn’t let him finish. “Forget it, that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” Hitching up his pants, he lowered his bulk into the chair behind his desk. Karlovic was heavy in the true sense, not fat but large in every aspect, a man of weight and heft. Tacked on the wall over his head were dozens of sheets of paper—duty rosters, work flows, delivery schedules. “I had you on the Bomb anyway. You and Ceps are the best I’ve got for hotwork. Take it as a compliment I’m putting the pair of you on that cranky old bitch. If I had my druthers, that thing would be in the scrap pile.”

  Michael didn’t doubt that this was so; on the other hand, he knew strategically timed praise when he heard it. “So?”

  “So this.”

  Karlovic slid a sheet of paper across his desk. Michael’s eyes fell quickly to the signature at the bottom: Victoria Sanchez, President, Texas Republic. He quickly scanned the letter’s three short paragraphs. Well, I’ll be, he thought.

  “Any idea what this is about?”

  “What makes you think I would?”

  “You were the last crew chief on the offload. Maybe you caught wind of something while you were up there. Talk around the depot, extra military hanging around.”

  “Nothing that rings a bell.” Michael shrugged. “Have you spoken to Stark? Maybe he knows.”

  Stark was the refinery’s chief security officer. He was something of a loudmouth and liked the lick too much, but he generally commanded respect among both the oilers and DS, if for no other reason than his prowess at the poker table. His caginess with the cards had cost Michael a bundle, not that the scrip was any big loss—within the fences of the refinery, there was nothing to spend it on.

  “Not yet. This won’t sit well with him, though.” Karlovic studied Michael. “Aren’t you guys friends? That whole California thing.”

  “I know him, yeah.”

  “So maybe you can grease the gears a bit. Act as a sort of, I don’t know, unofficial liaison between DS and the military.”

  Michael allowed himself a few seconds to probe his feelings. He’d be glad to see someone from the old days, but at the same time he was aware of an inner disturbance, a sense of exposure. The self-contained life of an oiler had, in many ways, rescued him from the grief of losing his sister, occupying the mental space she had left behind. Part of him knew he was hiding, but the rest of him didn’t care.

  “It should be no problem.”

  “I’ll count it as a favor. Handle it how you like.” Karlovic angled his head toward the door. “Now get out of here, you’ve got oil to cook. And I meant what I said. Watch your ass with that thing.”

  Michael arrived at the distillation tower to find his crew, a dozen roughnecks, standing around wearing expressions of puzzlement. The tanker with its cargo of fresh slick sat idle. Ceps was nowhere to be seen.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Why aren’t you people filling this thing?”

  Ceps crawled from beneath the heating element at the base of the tower. His hands and bare arms were caked with black goo. “We’ll have to flush her first. We’ve got at least two meters of residuum in the base.”

  “Fuck sake, that will take all morning. Who was the last crew chief?”

  “This thing hasn’t been fired in months. You’d have to ask Karlovic.”

  “How much crude will we have to drain off?”

  “A couple of hundred barrels anyway.”

  Eight thousand gallons of partially refined petroleum that had been sitting for who knew how long: they would need a large waste tanker, then a pumper truck and high-pressure steam hoses to flush the tower. They were looking at twelve hours minimum, sixteen to refill it and light the heating element, twenty-four before the first drop came out of the pipe. Karlovic would pop an aneurysm.

  “Well, we better get started. I’ll call in the order, you get the hoses ready.” Michael shook his head. “I find who did this, I will kick his sorry ass.”

  The draining took the rest of the morning. Michael declared the leftover oil unusable and sent the truck to the waste pools for burning. Bleeding off the junk was the easy part; flushing the tank was the job everyone dreaded. Water injected into the top of the tower would clean out most of the residuum—the sticky, toxic residue of the refining process—but not all; three men would have to suit up and go inside to brush down the base and flush out the asphalt drain. The only way in was a blind port, a meter wide, through which they’d have to crawl on their hands and knees. The term for this was “going up the anus”—not an inaccurate description, in Michael’s opinion. Michael would be one of the three. There was no rule about this; it was simply his habit, a gesture toward morale. For the other two, the custom was to draw straws.

  The first to pull a short straw was Ed Pope, the oldest man on the crew. Ed had been Michael’s trainer, the one to show him the ropes. Three decades on the cookers had taken their toll; the man’s body read like a logbook of catastrophes. Three fingers sheered off by the thrown blade of a rebar cutter. One side of his head and neck seared to a hairless pink slab by a propane explosion that had killed nine men. He was deaf in that ear, and his knees were so shot that watching him bend made Michael wince. Michael thought about giving him a pass, but he knew Ed was too proud to accept, and he watched as the man made his way to the hut to suit up.

  The second short straw was Ceps. “Forget it, I need you out here on the pumps,” said Michael.

  Ceps shook his head. The day had left them all impatient. “The hell with it. Let’s just get this done.”

  They wriggled into their hazard suits and oxygen packs and gathered their gear together: heavy brushes on poles, buckets of solvent, high-pressure wands that would feed back to a compressor. Michael pulled his mask down over his face, taped the seals on his gloves, and checked his O2. Though they’d vented the tower, the air inside it was still as lethal as it got—an airborne soup of petroleum vapors and sulfides that could sear your lungs into jerky. Michael felt a positive pop of pressure in the mask, switched on his headlamp, and knelt to unbolt the port.

  “Let’s go, hombres.”

  He slithered through, dropping down to find himself in three inches of standing muck. Ed and Ceps crawled in behind him.

  “What a mess.”

  Michael reached down into the sludge and opened the asphalt drain; the three of them began to sweep the residuum toward it. The temperature inside the tower was at least a hundred degrees; the sweat was raining off them, the trapped moisture of their breath fogging their faceplates. Once they’d cleared the worst of it, they dumped the solvent, hooked up their wands, and commenced spraying down the walls and floor.

  Inside their suits, with the roar of the compressor, conversation was just about impossible. The only thing to think about was finishing the job and getting out. They’d been at it for only a couple of minutes when Michael felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see Ceps pointing at Ed. The man was just standing there, facing the wall like a statue,
his wand held loosely at his side. While Michael watched, it slipped from his hand, though Ed seemed not to notice.

  “Something’s wrong with him!” Ceps yelled over the racket.

  Michael stepped forward and turned Ed by the shoulders. All he got was a blank stare.

  “Ed, you okay?”

  The man’s face startled to life. “Oh, hey, Michael,” he said, too brightly. “Hey-hey, hey-hey. Woo-woo.”

  “What’s he saying?” Ceps called out.

  Michael drew a finger over his throat to tell Ceps to cut the compressor. He looked at Ed squarely. “Talk to me, buddy.”

  A girlish giggle escaped the man’s lips. He was heaving for breath, one hand lifting toward his faceplate. “Ashblass. Minfuth. Minfuth!”

  Michael saw what was about to happen. As Ed reached for his mask, Michael seized him by the arms. The man was no kid, but he was no weakling either. He wriggled fiercely in Michael’s grasp, trying to break free, his face blue with panic. Not panic, Michael realized: hypoxia. His body convulsed with a massive twitch, his knees melting under him, his full weight crashing into Michael’s arms.

  “Ceps, help me get him out of here!”

  Ceps grabbed the man by his feet. His body had gone limp. Together they carried him to the port.

  “Somebody take him!” Michael yelled.

  Hands appeared to pull from the far side; Michael and Ceps shoved his body through. Michael scrambled into the port, tearing off his faceplate and gloves the moment he hit fresh air. Ed was lying face-up on the hardpan; someone had stripped off his mask and backpack. Michael dropped to his knees beside the body. An ominous stillness: the man wasn’t breathing. Michael placed the heel of his right hand at the center of Ed’s chest, positioned the left on top, laced his fingers together, and pushed. Nothing. Again and again he pushed, counting to thirty, as he had learned to do, then slipped one hand behind Ed’s neck to tip his airway open, pinched his nose, and pressed his mouth over the man’s blue lips. One breath, two breaths, three. Michael’s mind was clear as ice, his thoughts held in the grip of a singular purpose. Just as all seemed lost, he felt a sharp contraction of the diaphragm; Ed’s chest inflated, taking in a voluminous breath of air. He turned his face to the side, gasping and coughing.

  Michael rocked back on his heels, landing ass-down in the dust, his pulse pounding with adrenaline. Somebody handed him a canteen: Ceps.

  “You okay, pal?”

  The question didn’t even make sense to him. He took a long drink, swishing the water inside his mouth, and spat it away. “Yeah.”

  Eventually somebody helped Ed to his feet. Michael and Ceps escorted him into the hut and sat him down on one of the benches.

  “How you feeling?” Michael asked.

  A bit of color had flowed back into Ed’s cheeks, though his skin was damp and clammy-looking. He shook his head miserably. “I don’t know what happened. I could have sworn I checked my oxygen.”

  Michael had already looked; the bottles were empty. “Maybe it’s time, Ed.”

  “Jesus, Michael. Are you firing me?”

  “No. It’s your choice. I’m just saying there’s no disgrace in calling it a day.” When Ed made no reply, Michael rose to his feet. “Give it some thought. I’ll back you, whatever you want to do. You want a ride to the barracks?”

  Ed was staring disconsolately into space. Michael could read the truth in his face: the man had nothing else.

  “I think I’ll sit here a while. Get my strength back.”

  Michael stepped from the hut to find the rest of the crew hovering by the door. “What the hell are you all standing around for?”

  “The shift’s over, Chief.”

  Michael checked his watch: so it was.

  “Not for us it isn’t. Show’s over, everybody. Get your lazy asses back to work.”

  It was past midnight when Lore said to him, “Lucky thing, about Ed.”

  The two of them were curled in Michael’s berth. Despite Lore’s best efforts, his mind had been unable to move on from the day’s events. All he kept seeing when he closed his eyes was the look on Ed’s face in the hut, like someone being marched to the gallows.

  “What do you mean, lucky?”

  “That you were there, I mean. That thing you did.”

  “It wasn’t anything.”

  “Yes, it was. The man could have died. How did you know how to do that?”

  The past loomed up inside him, a wave of pain.

  “My sister taught me,” said Michael. “She was a nurse.”

  30

  THE CITY

  Kerrville, Texas

  They arrived behind the rain. First the fields, sodden with moisture, the air rich with the smell of dirt, then, as they ascended out of the valley, the walls of the city, looming eight stories tall against the brown Texas hills. At the gate they found themselves in a line of traffic—transports, heavy mechanicals, DS pickups crowded with men in their thick pads. Peter climbed out, asked the driver to deposit his locker at the barracks, and showed his orders to the guard at the pedestrian tunnel, who waved him through.

  “Welcome home, sir.”

  After sixteen months in the territories, Peter’s senses were instantly assaulted by the vast, overwhelming humanness of the place. He’d spent little time in the city, not enough to adjust to its claustrophobic density of sounds and smells and overflowing faces. The Colony had never numbered more than a hundred souls; here there were over forty thousand.

  Peter made his way to the quartermaster to collect his pay. He’d never really gotten used to the idea of money, either. “Equal share,” the governing economic unit of the Colony, had made sense to him. You had your share, and you used it how you liked, but it was the same as everybody else’s, never less or more. How could these slips of inked paper—Austins they were called, after the man whose image, with its high, domed forehead and beaked nose and perplexing arrangement of clothing, adorned each bill—actually correspond to the value of a person’s labor?

  The clerk, a civilian, doled out the scrip from the lockbox, snapping the bills onto the counter, and shoved a clipboard toward him through the grate, all without once meeting his eye.

  “Sign here.”

  The money, a fat wad, felt odd in Peter’s pocket. As he stepped back into the brightening afternoon, he was already scheming how to be rid of it. Six hours remained until curfew—barely enough time to visit both the orphanage and the stockade before reporting to the barracks. The afternoon was all he had; the transport to the refinery was leaving at 0600.

  Greer would come first; that way Peter wouldn’t have to disappoint Caleb by leaving before the horn. The stockade was located in the old jailhouse on the west edge of downtown. He signed in at the desk—in Kerrville you were always signing things, another oddity—and stripped off his blade and sidearm. He was about to proceed when the guard stopped him.

  “Have to pat you down, Lieutenant.”

  As a member of the Expeditionary, Peter was accustomed to a certain automatic deference—certainly from a junior domestic, not a day over twenty. “Is that really necessary?”

  “I don’t make the rules, sir.”

  Irritating, but Peter didn’t have time for an argument. “Just be quick about it.”

  The guard ran his hands up and down Peter’s arms and legs, then produced a heavy ring of keys and led him back into the holding area, a long hall of heavy steel doors. The air was dense and smelled of men. They came to the cell marked with the number 62.

  “Funny,” the guard remarked, “Greer doesn’t see anyone in close to three years, and now he’s had two visitors in just a month.”

  “Who else was here?”

  “I wasn’t on duty. You’d have to ask him.”

  The guard located the correct key, inserted it into the tumbler, and swung the door open to a sound of groaning hinges. Greer, shoeless, clothed only in a pair of rough canvas trousers cinched at his waist, was seated on the edge of his bunk. His broad ch
est gleamed with perspiration; his hands were serenely folded in his lap. His hair, what remained of it, a silvering white, fanned to his massive shoulders, while a great tangle of beard—the beard of a prophet, a wanderer in the wilderness—straggled halfway up his cheeks. A deep stillness radiated off him; the impression he communicated was one of composure, as if he had reduced his mind and body to their essences. For an unsettling moment, he gave no indication that he was aware of the two figures standing in the doorway, causing Peter to wonder if the isolation had done something to his mind. But then he lifted his eyes, his face brightening.

  “Peter. There you are.”

  “Major Greer. It’s good to see you.”

  Greer laughed ironically, his voice thick with disuse. “Nobody’s called me that in some time. It’s just Lucius now. Or Sixty-two, if you prefer. Most people seem to.” Greer addressed the guard. “Give us a few minutes, will you, Sanders?”

  “I’m not supposed to leave anyone alone with a prisoner.”

  Peter shot him a cold glare. “I think I can take care of myself, son.”

  A moment’s hesitancy; then the guard relented. “Well, seeing as it’s you, sir, I guess ten minutes would be okay. After that my shift ends, though. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  Peter frowned. “Do we know each other?”

  “I saw your signature. Everybody knows who you are. You’re the guy from California. It’s, like, a legend.” All pretense of his authority was gone; suddenly he was just a starstruck kid, his face beaming with admiration. “What was it like? Coming all that way, I mean.”

  Peter wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “It was a long walk.”

  “I don’t know how you did it. I would have been scared shitless.”

  “Take my word for it,” Peter assured him, “that was a big part of it.”

  Sanders left them alone. Peter took the room’s only chair, straddling it backward across from Greer.