The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  Guilder scanned it quickly. “What the hell, Fred.”

  “I guess you could say things didn’t go exactly as planned.”

  “Nobody? Not one of them? What is wrong with these people?”

  Wilkes gestured toward the paper. “The flow of oil has been at least temporarily disrupted. That’s a plus. It opens a lot of doors.”

  But Guilder was beyond consolation. First Kearney, now this. There had been a time when scooping up survivors had proved a relatively clear-cut undertaking. The woman appeared; the gates swung open, the wheel of the vault began to turn, the drawbridge descended over the moat; the woman did her stuff, like a lion tamer at the circus; and the next thing you knew, the trucks were galloping back to Iowa, packed with human cargo. The Kentucky caves. That island in Lake Michigan. The abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. More recently, the California raid had been a bona-fide bonanza, fifty-six survivors taken, most of whom had marched like lambs into the truck once the power was cut and the terms were set. (Get in or you’re meat.) The usual attrition rate—some died en route, others failed to adapt to their new circumstances—but a solid haul nonetheless.

  Since then, it had been one out-of-control bloodbath after another, starting with Roswell.

  “Apparently there wasn’t much of a negotiation phase. The convoy was pretty heavily armed.”

  “I don’t care if they had a nuclear missile. We knew that going in. These are Texans.”

  “In a manner of speaking, that’s true.”

  “We’re about to go on-line here, and this is what you tell me? We need bodies, Fred. Living, breathing bodies. Can’t she control these things anymore?”

  “We could go in the old-fashioned way. I said so from the start. We’d take some casualties, but if we keep hitting their oil supply, sooner or later their defenses will weaken.”

  “We collect people, Fred. We don’t lose them. Have I failed to make myself clear? Can you not do basic math? People are the point.”

  Wilkes shrugged defensively. “You want to talk to her?”

  Guilder rubbed his eyes. He supposed he’d have to make the gesture, but talking to Lila was like playing handball by yourself: the ball came right back no matter how hard you slapped it. One of the most significant aggravations of the job was dealing with the woman’s peculiar fantasies, a wall of delusion that Guilder could penetrate only by the roughest sort of insistence. Of all the experts he’d harvested through the years, why hadn’t he thought to get a shrink? Keeping her in babies made her calm; the woman’s special talent was an indispensable commodity that needed to be managed with care. But in the throes of motherhood she was virtually unreachable, and Guilder worried about further damaging her fragile psyche.

  Because that was the thing about Lila. Of everyone who had tasted the blood, only she was endowed with the ability to control the virals.

  More than control: in Lila’s presence, they became like pets, docile and even affectionate. The feeling was a two-way street; put the woman within two hundred yards of the feedlot, and she turned into a purring cat with a litter of kittens. The effect was nothing Guilder had been able to replicate on his own, though Lord knows he’d tried. Back in the early days, he’d been downright obsessed. Time after time he’d donned the pads and gone into the feedlot, thinking that if he could only find the right mental trick or ingratiating body language or soothing tone of voice they’d fall at his knees the way they did with her, like dogs waiting for their ears to be scratched. But this never happened. They’d tolerate his presence for a whopping three seconds before one of them tossed him in the air—he didn’t register as food, more like a man-sized toy—and the next thing Guilder knew he’d be flying around the place until somebody hit the lights to get him out.

  He’d long since stopped trying, of course. The sight of Horace Guilder, Director of the Homeland, being batted around like a beach ball wasn’t exactly the kind of confidence-inspiring image he wanted to broadcast. Nor could anybody on the medical staff explain to his satisfaction just what it was that made Lila different. Her thymus cycled faster, needing the blood every seven days, and her eyes looked different, displaying none of the retinal stain that marked the senior staffers’. But her sensitivity to light was just as pronounced, and as far as Suresh could tell, the virus in her blood was the same as theirs. In the end, the man had thrown up his hands and attributed her abilities to the less than subtle fact that Lila was a woman—the only woman in the fold, which was how Guilder wanted it.

  Maybe that’s all there is to it, Suresh had said. Maybe they just think she’s their mother.

  Guilder became aware that Wilkes was looking at him. What had they been talking about? Lila? No, Texas. But Wilkes had told him there was something else.

  “Which brings me to, um, the second thing.” And that was when Wilkes told Guilder about the bombing in the market.

  Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  “I know, I know,” Wilkes said, shaking his head in his Wilkesian way. “Not the best turn of events.”

  “He’s one man. One!”

  Guilder’s face, his whole body, tingled with righteous anger. Another volleying burp arose. He wanted vengeance. He wanted things to settle the hell down. He wanted this Sergio, whoever he was, with his head on a goddamn pike.

  “We’ve got people working on it. HR is asking around, and we’ve offered double rations to anybody who comes forward with a solid lead. Not everyone down the hill is so enamored.”

  “And somebody please tell me how he’s moving through the flatland like it’s a goddamn expressway? Do we not have patrols? Do we not have checkpoints? Can somebody please shed some light on this little detail?”

  “We have a theory about that. The evidence points to an organization that’s classically cellular. Clusters of just a few individuals operating within a loose operational framework.”

  “I am perfectly aware what a terrorist cell is, Fred.”

  His chief of staff made a flustered gesture with his hands. “I’m simply saying that looking for one man may not be the answer. That it’s the idea of Sergio, not Sergio per se, that we’re up against. If you follow me.”

  Guilder did, and it wasn’t a cheering thought. He’d been down this road before, first in Iraq and Afghanistan and then Saudi, after the coup. You lopped off the head but the body didn’t die; it simply grew another head. The only useful strategy in these situations was psychological. Killing the body was never enough. You had to kill the spirit.

  “How many do we have in custody?”

  Thus more paper. Guilder read the full report. According to eyewitnesses, the market bomber had been a female agricultural worker in her thirties. There’d never been any problems with her; by all accounts she was as meek as a lamb, a quality that to a disconcerting extent matched the profiles of other suicide bombers. She had no living family except for a sister; her husband and son had died six years ago, in an outbreak of salmonella. She’d apparently gotten past the checkpoints disguised in a col’s uniform (the original wearer’s body had been found stuffed into a dumpster, her throat slashed, one arm mysteriously severed at the elbow), though where she’d procured the explosives was unknown. None had been reported missing from the armory or the construction depot, but a full inventory had yet to be completed. Nine of her lodgemates plus her sister’s family, including two young children, had been detained for questioning.

  “Nobody seems to know anything,” Wilkes said with a toss of his hand. He’d taken a seat on the far side of the desk while Guilder read. “Apart from the sister, it’s like they barely knew her. We can take it up a notch, but I don’t think it’s going to produce much in the way of useful intelligence. These people would have caved already.”

  Guilder placed the file aside, among the many others. The burps, which continued unabated, had painted the walls of his mouth with a foul taste of animal decay, not unlike the stench of the decomposing Mrs. Wilkes. A fact that, if the barely concealed look of olfactory distaste on h
is chief of staff’s smoothly youthful face gave any indication, had not failed to escape the man’s attention.

  “No need,” Guilder said.

  Wilkes frowned doubtfully. “You want us to release them? I don’t think that’s wise. At least let’s make them cool their heels a couple more days. Rattle a few chains, see where it takes us.”

  “You said yourself that if they knew anything, they would have already talked.”

  Guilder paused, aware that he was about to cross a line. The thirteen flatlanders sitting in the detention center were, after all, people, human beings, probably not guilty of anything. More to the point, they were tangible physical assets in an economy of scarcity. But given the frustrating intractability of the Sergio situation, and the debacle in Texas, and the time-sensitive nature of Guilder’s grand designs, which were at long last coming to complex fruition; and in the grip of his own rapidly burgeoning physical need, a titanic biological imperative that, as he regarded Wilkes from across the burnished prairie of his oversized desk, was blossoming inside him like a flower in a time-lapse video, he didn’t think for too long. He came to the line, gave it one quick look, and stepped over.

  “It seems to me,” said Director Horace Guilder, “the time has come to sell this thing.”

  * * *

  Guilder waited a few minutes after Wilkes was gone to stage his departure. As he had reminded himself many times, a great deal of his authority boiled down to a sense of dignity in his public movements, and it was better for people not to witness him in such an agitated state. He took the ring of keys from his desk and stepped out. Strange, how the hunger had come on so quickly. Usually it crept up on him over a period of days, not minutes. From the base of the cupola, a winding flight of stairs descended to the ground floor, its downward passage flanked by oil portraits of various dukes and generals and barons and princes of the realm, a parade of disapproving, heavy-jawed faces in period costume. (At least he hadn’t resorted to having his picture painted—though, come to think of it, why not?) He peered over the rail. Fifty feet below were the tiny figures of the uniformed security detail; members of the leadership, in their dark suits and ties, scuttling briskly to and fro with their officious briefcases and clipboards; even a couple of attendants, flowing diaphanously across the polished stone floor in their nunnish costumes, like a pair of paper boats. It was Wilkes he was looking for, and there he was: by the massive front door with its inlaid carvings of assorted prairie kitsch (a fist gripping wheat, a plow merrily tilling the bountiful Iowa topsoil), his loyal chief of staff had paused to confer with two of the leadership, Ministers Hoppel and Chee. Guilder supposed that Wilkes was already setting the day’s orders in motion, bringing them up to speed, but this assumption was belied when Hoppel reared back his head, clapped his hands together, and barked a laugh that ricocheted through the marbled space like a bullet in a submarine. Guilder wondered what the fuck was so funny.

  He turned from the rail and made his way to the second, more conventional, and highly unobservable stairway that was his alone to use. By now his insides were roaring. It was all he could do not to take the stairs three at a time, which in his present condition would have probably resulted in some bone-breaking pratfall that would heal within hours but still hurt like hell. Bearing himself like a crystal chalice that might at any moment spill its contents to the floor, Guilder descended one cautious step at a time. The salivation had started, a veritable waterfall he had to suck back between his teeth. Vampire bibs, he thought wryly; now, that would be a moneymaker.

  The basement at last, with its heavy, vaultlike door. Guilder withdrew the keys from the pocket of his suit coat. Hands trembling with anticipation, he keyed the door, turned the heavy wheel, and shouldered it aside.

  By the time he was halfway down the hall he’d stripped to the waist and was kicking off his shoes. He was riding this thing full-bore now, a surfer skimming down a wave. Door after door sailed past. Guilder could hear the muffled cries of the damned coming from within, a sound that had long since ceased to arouse even a grain of pity within him, if it ever had. He blasted past the warning signs—ETHER PRESENT, NO OPEN FLAME—hit the freezer room at a dead sprint, turned the final corner, and narrowly avoided collision with a lab-coated technician. “Director Guilder!” he gasped. “We didn’t know …!” But these words were cut short as Guilder, with more violence than was called for, applied the full swinging weight of his left forearm to the side of the man’s head, sending him crashing into the wall.

  It was blood he wanted, and not just any blood. There was blood and there was blood.

  He came to the final door, skidding to a halt. With fumbling hands he undid his trousers and tossed them away, then keyed the door and opened it.

  “Hello, Lawrence.”

  38

  In the morning, Jackie was gone.

  Sara awoke to find the woman’s cot empty. Lit with panic, she tore through the lodge, cursing herself for sleeping so deeply. The old woman who bunked in the second row? Had anyone seen her? But no one had, or so they said. At morning roll, Sara detected only the smallest hitch of silence in the space where Jackie’s number should have been. Everyone was looking down. Just like that, the waters had closed over her friend. It was as if she’d never existed at all.

  She moved through the day in a fog, her mind teetering on the razor-thin edge between desperate hope and outright despair. Probably there was nothing to be done. People disappeared; that was the way of things. And yet Sara could not talk herself out of the idea that if the woman was still in the hospital, if she hadn’t been taken to the feedlot yet, there might be a chance. But how could Jackie have been taken right from under Sara’s nose like that? Wouldn’t she have heard something? Wouldn’t the woman have protested? It simply didn’t add up.

  That was when Sara figured it out. She hadn’t heard anything, because there had been nothing to hear. Not like this. Not for me. Jackie had left the lodge of her own accord.

  She’d done it to protect Sara.

  By midafternoon she knew she had to do something. Her guilt was excruciating. She never should have tried to get Jackie out of the plant, never confronted Sod the way she had. She’d all but painted a target on the woman’s back. The minutes were ticking away. The virals in the feedlot ate just after dusk; Sara had seen the trucks. Livestock carriers crammed with lowing cows, but also the windowless vans that were used to move prisoners from the detention center. One was always parked at the rear of the hospital, its meaning plain to anyone who cared to consider it.

  The cols supervising the grinding teams were Vale and Whistler. Vale she thought she could have worked with, but with Whistler watching, Sara didn’t see how. There was only one solution she could think of. She topped off her bushel basket, lifted it from the ground, took three steps toward the grinder, and stopped.

  “Oh,” Sara cried. She let the basket drop, clutching her stomach. “Oh. Oh.”

  She melted, moaning, to her knees. For a moment it seemed that amid the noise of the grinders her demonstration had gone unnoticed. She amplified her cries, curling her legs to her chest, hugging her midriff.

  “Sara, what is it?” One of the other women—Constance Chou—was crouching over her.

  “It hurts! It hurts!”

  “Get up or they’ll see you!”

  Another voice broke through: Vale’s. “What’s going on here?”

  Constance backed away. “I don’t know, sir. She just… collapsed.”

  “Fisher? What’s wrong with you?”

  Sara didn’t answer, just kept up with the moaning, rocking at the waist and throwing in a few spastic kicks for good measure. A circle of onlookers had formed around her. “Appendix,” she said.

  “What did you say?”

  She clenched her face with manufactured pain. “I think… it’s my… appendix.”

  Whistler charged through the crowd, pushing onlookers aside with her baton. “What’s her problem?”

  Vale was scratch
ing his head. “She says something’s wrong with her pendix.”

  “What are you people looking at?” Whistler barked. “Get back to work.” Then, to Vale: “What do you want to do with her?”

  “Fisher, can you walk?”

  “Please,” she gasped. “I need a doctor.”

  “She says she needs a doctor,” Vale reported.

  “Yeah, I heard that, Vale.” The woman huffed a sigh. “All right, let’s get her out of here.”

  They helped her to a pickup parked behind the plant and laid her in the back. Sara kept up the rocking and moaning. A brief negotiation ensued: should one of them take her or should they call for a driver?

  “Fuck it, I’ll take her,” Whistler said. “Knowing you, you’ll dither all day.”

  The trip to the hospital took ten minutes; Sara used them to formulate a plan. All she’d been thinking about was getting to the hospital, to find Jackie before the van took her away; she hadn’t considered the next step. It seemed to her now that she held only two good cards. First, she wasn’t really sick; once she experienced a miraculous recovery, it didn’t seem likely that they’d ship a perfectly able-bodied woman off to the feedlot. Second, she was a nurse. Sara wasn’t sure how she’d put this fact to use—she’d have to improvise—but she might be able to use her medical knowledge to convince the person in charge that Jackie wasn’t as ill as she appeared.

  Or maybe nothing she did would matter. Maybe once she passed through the hospital doors, she’d never come out. This prospect, as she weighed it, did not appear entirely bad, thus giving her a third card to play: the card of not caring anymore if she lived or died.

  Whistler pulled up to the hospital entrance, strode back to the cargo bed, and drew down the tailgate.

  “Out with you. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t think I can walk.”

  “Well, you’ll have to try, because I’m not carrying you.”

  Sara sat up. The sun had peeked from behind the clouds, sharpening the scene with its cold brightness. The hospital was a three-story brick building, part of a cluster of low, workaday structures at the southern edge of the flatland. At a distance of twenty yards stood one of three major HR substations. A dozen cols guarded the entrance, which was flanked by concrete barricades.