The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  It had taken three days. Three glorious days.

  Thus, his life and its dark investigations. Martínez had his reasons. He had his rationale. He had his particular method—the rag of spirits, the loyal cord and infinitely pliable duct tape, the dank, unseen compartments of dispatch. He chose low women, those lacking learning or culture, not because he despised them or secretly wanted them but because they were easy to ensnare. They were no match for his beautiful suits and movie-star hair and silken courtroom tongue. They were bodies without name or history or personality, and when the moment of transport approached, they offered no distraction. The timing was all, the orchestrated, simultaneous release. The old choir of sex and death singing.

  A certain amount of practice had been required. There had been misfires. There had been, he was forced to admit, a certain amount of accidental comedy. The first one had died well but too soon, the second had kicked up such a ruckus that the whole thing had dissolved into farce, the third had wept so pitiably that he could hardly pay attention. But then: Louise. Louise, with her corny waitress uniform and sensible waitress shoes and unsexily supportive waitress hose. How beautifully she’d left her life! With what exquisite rapture in the taking! She was like a door opening into the great unknowable beyond, a portal into the infinite blackness of unbeing. He had been eradicated, pulverized; the winds of eternity had blown through him, beating him clean. It was everything he’d imagined and then some.

  After that, frankly, he couldn’t get enough of it.

  As for the highway patrolman, the universe was not without its ironies. It gave and took away. To wit: the Jag with a broken taillight, and Martínez with the woman’s bagged body in the trunk; the cop’s slow saunter toward the car, his hand resting manfully on the butt of his pistol, and the downward glide of the driver’s window; the patrolman’s face pressed close, sneering with bored righteousness, his lips saying the customary words—Sir, could I see …?—and never finishing. In the harried aftermath, Martínez had managed to dispose of the body in the trunk, his nighttime practices thus to remain forever unknown, unconnected to his fate. But a dead policeman by the side of the highway, everything recorded by his dashboard video camera, well. In the end, the only thing to do, as the saying went, was for the great Julio Martínez, Esq., champion of the unchampionable, defender of the loathsomely defenseless, to pour himself a glass of thirty-year-old single-malt and toss it over his tongue while the windows of the house twirled with the lights of justice and come out with his hands dutifully up.

  Which, given the way things had worked out, hadn’t turned out to be such an unlucky turn of events, actually.

  Martínez couldn’t say he cared much for his fellows. With the exception of Carter, who struck him as purely pitiable—the man didn’t even seem to know what he was or what he’d done; Martínez hadn’t heard so much as a squeak from the man in years—they were nothing more than common criminals, their deeds random and banal. Vehicular homicide. Armed robbery gone bad. Barroom shenanigans with a body on the floor. A century marinating in their own psychological waste had done nothing to improve them. Martínez’s existence was not without its irritating aspects. The never quite being alone. The endless hunger always needing to be filled. The ceaseless talk-talk-talk inside his head, not just his brothers but Zero, too. And Ignacio: there was a piece of work. The man was a litany of self-pitying excuses. I didn’t mean to do half those things. It’s just the way I was built. After a hundred years listening to the man’s whining, Martínez wouldn’t miss him one bit.

  There had been something attractively berserk about Babcock, though. You had to hand it to the man for metaphor. Carving out his mother’s larynx with a kitchen knife; in another life, he surely would have been a poet. Over the decades, Martínez had mentally sat in that foul kitchen about a million times, and it was true: the woman would not shut up. There was a kind of person in this world who needed you to paint a picture, and Babcock’s mother was that kind.

  And then one day Babcock was simply gone, his signal silenced, like a television station suddenly off the air. The corner of Martínez’s mind where Babcock stood, endlessly gouging out the gristly nubbin of his mother’s voice box, was empty. All of them knew what had happened; their collective, blood-borne existence ordained it. One of their brothers had fallen.

  God bless and keep you, Giles Babcock. May you find in death the peace that eluded you in life, and what came after.

  And so from Twelve, Eleven. A loss, a chink in the armor, but ultimately a matter of lesser concern in the vital period to come. It had been a good century, on the whole, for Julio Martínez. He recalled the early days with poignant fondness. The days of blood and mayhem and the great unleashing of his kind upon the earth. To kill was one thing, one glorious thing; to take was another. A banquet richer still in its satisfactions. From each one Martínez had taken a flavorful bite of soul, drawing them into the fold, expanding his dominion. His Many were not merely part of him, an extension of him; they were him. As he, Julio Martínez, was one of Twelve and the Zero also, concomitant and coextensive, united with one another and with the darkness in which they permanently dwelled.

  Brothers, brothers, it is time. Brothers, brothers, the hour is at hand.

  For it was inevitable; they had built a race of pure rapaciousness. Their Many, created to protect them, had devoured the earth like locusts, leaving nothing in their wake. Feast had yielded to famine, summer’s bounty to winter’s scarcity; they would need a home, a zone of protection, of rest. To dream their dreams. To dream of Louise.

  My brothers, your new home is waiting. They will bow before you; you will live as kings.

  Martínez liked the sound of that.

  He discarded them without ceremony. His Many, millions-fold. He called them together from all the hidden places and said to them: Die. Dawn was reaching its red-fingered hand over the horizon. They pointed their faces blindly toward it. They showed no hesitation; all that he commanded, so did they. The sun was moving toward them like a blade of light over the earth. Lie down, my sons and daughters; lie down in the sun and die.

  There followed a certain amount of screaming.

  Night by night he made his way east, across the exhausted land. His instincts were acute. The world rippled with sensuousness, caressing him with its sounds and smells. The grass. The wind. The subtlest movements of trees. He lingered, tasting all. He had been away too long. He called to his fellows, their voices threading with darkness as they made their way from every corner to the place of their renewal.

  —We are Morrison-Chávez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Lambright-Martínez-Reinhardt-Carter. Eleven of Twelve, one brother lost.

  And Zero replied in kind:

  Oh, my brothers, my pain is as great as your own. But you will be Twelve again. For I have made another, one to watch and keep you in your place of rest.

  —Who? they asked, each as one and then together. —Who is the other you have made?

  And Zero spoke from out of the darkness:

  Our sister.

  VI. THE INSURGENT

  36

  Everywhere people were whispering: there had been another bombing in the market.

  The November morning broke gray and cold, tasting of the winter to come. Sara awoke to the blare of the horn, followed by a chorus of coughing, throats clearing, bones cracking ambivalently to life. Her eyes and mouth were as dry as paper. The room smelled of unwashed skin and stale breath and delousing powder, a biological vapor of human decay, though Sara barely noticed. Some of the smell, she knew, was herself.

  Another pitiless sunrise, she thought. Another morning as a citizen of the Homeland.

  She had learned not to linger on her bunk. One minute late to the ration line and you could find yourself dragging through the day without a scrap in your stomach. A bowl of corn mush trumped a few slender minutes of tormented half sleep every time. With her stomach growling, she unwrapped her threadbare blanket and swung her weight around, ducki
ng her head, to plant her sneakered feet on the floorboards. She always slept wearing her sneakers, such as they were—a ragged pair of Reeboks inherited from a bunkmate who had died—because footwear was always being stolen. Who took my shoes! a voice would cry out, and the victim would go charging through the lodge, begging and accusing and eventually crumpling to the floor in hopeless tears. I’ll die without them! Somebody help me, please! It was true: a person would die without shoes. Though she worked at the biodiesel plant, word had gotten out in the flatland that Sara was a nurse. She had seen the blackened nuts of frozen toes, the scabs of worms burrowed in; she’d pressed her ear to the sunken chests and listened to the pneumonic rattles of lungs slowly drowning; she’d felt beneath her fingertips the drum-taut bellies of septic appendicitis, or malignancy, or simple starvation; she’d palmed the foreheads blazing with fever and dressed the weeping wounds that would devour the body with rot. And to each person, Sara said, with the taste of a lie in her teeth: You’ll be fine. Not to worry. In another few days you’ll be right as rain, I promise. It wasn’t medical care she was giving; it was a sort of blessing. You will die, and it will hurt, but you will do it here, among your own kind, and the last touch you feel will be one of kindness, because it will be mine.

  Because you didn’t want the cols to know you were sick, let alone the redeyes. Nothing was ever said aloud, but people in the flatland had few illusions what the hospital was actually for. Man or woman, old or young, it didn’t matter; you passed through those doors and nobody saw you again. Off to the feedlot you went.

  The lodges varied in size; Sara’s was one of the largest. The bunks were stacked four high, twenty bunk lengths in each row, ten rows: eight hundred souls crammed into a room the approximate dimensions of a feed shed. People were rising, jamming their children’s heads into hats, murmuring to themselves, their limbs moving with the heavy docility of livestock as they shambled to the door. Quickly scanning the area to make sure she wouldn’t be observed, Sara knelt by her bunk, lifting the mattress with one hand while sliding the other beneath it. She removed the piece of carefully folded paper from its hiding place and secreted it in the pocket of her tunic. Then she drew herself upright.

  “Jackie,” Sara said quietly, “wake up.”

  The old woman was curled in a fetal position with the blanket drawn to her chin. Her rheumy eyes stared dully at the wash of gray descending from the high windows of the lodge. Sara had listened to her coughing all night.

  “The light,” Jackie said. “It looks like winter.”

  Sara felt her forehead. No trace of fever; if anything, the woman felt cold. It was hard to say how old Jackie was. She’d been born in the flats, but her parents had come from somewhere else. Jackie wasn’t one to speak of the past, but Sara knew she had outlived three children and a husband, the last sent to the feedlot for the crime of coming to the aid of a friend who was being sticked by a col.

  The room was rapidly emptying out. “Jackie, please.” Sara shook her by the shoulder. “I know you’re tired, but we’ve really got to go.”

  The woman’s eyes drew Sara into focus. She trembled with a dry cough.

  “I’m sorry, hon,” she said, when the spasm had passed. “I don’t mean to be uncooperative.”

  “I just don’t want to miss breakfast. You need to eat.”

  “There you go, looking out for me like you always do. Help an old lady down, will you?”

  Sara gave Jackie a shoulder for balance and eased her to the floor. Her body was practically weightless, a form of sticks and air. Another cough hacked through her chest, a sound like pebbles being shaken in a sack. She slowly drew herself erect.

  “There now.” Jackie took a moment to swallow. Her face was flushed; beads of dampness had risen on her forehead. “All better.”

  Sara pulled the blanket off her bunk and draped it over the woman’s shoulders. “It’s going to be a cold one. Stay by me, okay?”

  Her lips stretched into a toothless smile. “Where else would I go, hon?”

  Sara retained only fleeting images of her capture. A sense of certain death, everything over and done, and then a huge force, merciless in its energy, seizing her bodily. A glimpse of the ground dropping away as the viral hurled her into the air—why hadn’t it just killed her?—and then another massive jolt as she was snatched once more, plucked from the air by the second viral, and then the third, and so on, each aerial vault catapulting her farther away from the walls and lights of the garrison and into the enveloping blackness, her person passed from airborne hand to airborne hand like a ball in a children’s game, all of it beyond the boundaries of her comprehension, and then the final brain-battering impact as she was slammed into the truck. The awful coming to consciousness, like climbing a ladder from hell into hell. Days without water, without food. The endless bone-banging hours and whispered, unanswerable questions. Where were they going? What was happening to them? Nearly all the captives were women, part of the civilian corps stationed at Roswell, though a handful of soldiers were among them. The cries of the injured and frightened. The smothering darkness.

  Sara’s mind had not returned to full awareness until their arrival. It was as if time had stretched for the duration of their journey only to snap back into shape when the door opened onto a disorienting splash of daylight. Revealing… what? Half of the truck’s human cargo had perished—a few dead at the outset and filling the compartment with a stink of gray decay, others from injuries sustained in their capture, the rest from some combination of hunger and thirst and suffocating hopelessness. Sara was lying on the floor, as they all were, both the living and the dead, inertly limbed and thick-tongued, her back propped against the wall, her eyes clenched against the unaccustomed brightness. An inversion of her physical proportions seemed to have occurred, such that most of her mass had lodged in her head. Over her lifetime, she had seen a lot of people die; lying among them was a first. The boundary separating her from them seemed a membrane as permeable as gauze. Through stinging slits, she watched as a half dozen expressionless men in ragged khaki and heavy, floor-banging boots boarded the compartment and commenced a perfunctory toting away of the deceased. She gathered that the unstructured weight of a dead body was something these men were accustomed to, its purposeless association of parts warranting no more consideration than any other awkward object a person might be forced to carry. Body after body, unceremoniously hauled away. When they came for her, Sara lifted a hand in protest; she might have said something like “Please” or “Wait” or “You can’t do this.” But these meager efforts were instantly silenced by a hot slap across her cheek, followed, for good measure, by the thrust of a boot that would have caught her midsection had Sara not protectively folded around herself.

  “Shut. The fuck. Up.”

  She did. She shut the fuck up. The man who had struck her was a col Sara would come to know as Sod. Among the citizens of the flatland, all the cols had nicknames. Sod was Sod because he liked raping people. A lot of them did, it was like a game to them, but Sod distinguished himself by the breadth of his appetites. Women, men, children, livestock. Sod would have raped the wind if it had a hole in it.

  Sara’s turn in the shed would come: brief, brutal, over. In the near term, the pain of his blows had the counterintuitive effect of restoring her senses. Strategies began to form; priorities stepped into line. On balance, staying alive seemed desirable, and the shutting-the-fuck-up seemed the best way to accomplish this. Be quiet, she told herself. Blend in. See what you can see without seeming to. If they want to kill you, they’ll do it anyway.

  Don’t mention the baby.

  The clubs came out, poking and prodding as they were marched into the sunshine. They were someplace green. Its lushness mocked her, the cruelest of jokes. The truck had parked in a kind of holding area, a wired compound of stubby concrete buildings with glinting metal roofs; adjacent to this, at a distance of several hundred yards, was a massive, tiered structure, unlike anything Sara had ever seen. It
looked like an enormous bathtub. Tall banks of lights lifted from its curving walls, ascending hundreds of feet into the air. While Sara watched, a gleaming silver semitruck, identical to the one they’d just disembarked, drew up to the building’s base. Men were jogging alongside, carrying rifles. They wore bulky pads; caged masks were drawn down over their faces. As the truck approached the wall, it seemed to sink into the earth—a ramp, Sara realized, taking it belowground. A gate opened, and it was gone.

  “Eyes down. No talking. Two lines, women to the left, men to the right.”

  Inside one of the huts, they were told to strip and deposit their clothes in a pile. Now they stood naked, twenty-three women in identically reflexive postures of self-protection, one arm held horizontally to shield their breasts, the other extended downward over their genitals. Three of the uniformed men looked on, rocking on their heels, alternating frank leers with laughing faces of disgust. There were gutters in the floor, drains. Slants of light descended from a series of long, barred windows at the roofline. Twenty-three naked women wordlessly staring at the floor, most of them in tears: to speak would be to violate some implied contract to go on living. Whatever was headed their way seemed to be taking its time getting there.