The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  He spilled the dice onto the board. A three and a four. He moved his car ahead and landed on “Luxury Tax,” with its little diamond ring.

  “Not again.” He rolled his eyes and paid up. “It’s so wonderful to be here with you.” He lifted his eyes past her, to the window. “It sure is snowing out there. How long has it been snowing?”

  “I think it’s been snowing a long time.”

  “I’ve always loved it. It makes me remember being a kid. It always feels like Christmas when it snows.”

  The wood in the stove crackled. All through the dense forest the snow fell and fell. Morning would break with a soft white light and silence, though in the place they were, morning would not come.

  “Every year my parents took me to see A Christmas Carol. Wherever we were living, they’d find a theater and take me. Jacob Marley always scared me something awful. He wore the chains he forged in life. It’s so sad. But beautiful, too. So many stories are like that.” He thought for a moment. “Sometimes I wish I could stay here forever with you. Silly of me, I know. Nothing lasts forever.”

  “Some things do.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “The things we like to remember. The love we’ve felt for people.”

  “The way I love you,” said Wolgast.

  Amy nodded.

  “Because I do, you know,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

  “You didn’t need to say it. I always knew. I knew it from the start.”

  “No, I should have said it.” His tone was regretful. “It’s better when it’s said.”

  A silence descended, deep as the forest, deep as the snow that fell upon it.

  “Something is different about you, Amy.” He was studying her face. “Something’s changed.”

  “I think that it has, yes.”

  A soft darkness was moving in from the edges. It always happened this way, like lights going down on a stage until all that remained was the two of them.

  “Well, whatever it is,” he said, and grinned, “I like it.” A moment passed, then: “Did you tell Carter how sorry I was?”

  “He knows.”

  Wolgast was gazing past her. “That’s something I can never forgive myself for. I knew it just to look at him. He loved that woman with his whole heart.” He dropped his eyes to the Monopoly board. “Looks like we’re done here. I don’t know how you do it. I’ll get you next time.”

  “Would you like to read?”

  They took their place on the couch beneath the woolen blanket. Mugs of hot cocoa sat on the table, having arrived, like everything else, of their own accord. Wolgast lifted the book and riffled the pages until he found the right one.

  “The Time Machine, chapter seven.” He cleared his throat and turned his face toward her. “My brave girl. My brave Amy. I really do, you know.”

  “I love you, too,” said Amy, nestling against him.

  And in this manner they passed an infinity of hours, the barest blink of an eye, until the darkness, a blanket in its own right, settled down upon them.

  52

  They followed the eastern supply line north to Texarkana, taking food and fuel and sleeping in the hardboxes. Their vehicle was one of Tifty’s, a small cargo truck retrofitted as a portable, which they would soon need: north of Little Rock they’d be sheltering in the open. Fuel was a problem they didn’t have, Tifty explained. The truck could carry an extra two hundred gallons in reserve, and on his trip north with Greer and Crukshank, fifteen years ago, they’d scouted sources all the way to the Iowa line—airfields, diesel power plants, large commercial depots with their fields of mushrooming tanks. The truck was equipped with a filtering system they could use to strip out the contaminants, and an oxidizing compound. A slow process, but with luck and good weather, they could reach Iowa by the middle of December.

  Their first night in the portable occurred a hundred miles south of the Missouri border. As twilight fell, Tifty retrieved a large plastic jug from the cargo bed, pulled a rag over his face, and poured the contents, a clear liquid, in a line around the vehicle.

  “What’s in that stuff?” Lore asked. The stink was eye-watering.

  “Old family recipe. The dracs hate it—plus, it covers our smell. They won’t even know we’re in there.”

  They ate their dinner of beans and hardtack and bedded down on the racks. Soon Hollis was snoring away. Hollis? Peter thought. No, Lore. She slept the way she did everything: however she liked. Peter could understand why Michael was drawn to her—her attraction was powerful—but also why his friend wouldn’t come out and say so. Who could withstand being wanted so badly? Even if the quarry wanted to be caught, it put up a struggle. During their days of waiting at the refinery, Peter had wondered, more than once, if Lore was flirting with him. She was, he decided; but it was only a tactic. She was trying to draw herself deeper into Michael’s world. Once she got to the heart of it, he’d have no defenses left; Michael would be hers.

  Peter shifted on his rack, trying to make himself comfortable; he always had difficulty getting to sleep in a portable. Just when he would begin drifting off, a noise from outside would jar him into wakefulness. One time near Amarillo, the virals had pounded on the walls all night. They’d actually lifted the frame and attempted to turn it over. To keep their spirits up, the men of Peter’s squad had passed the hours playing poker and telling jokes, as if nothing of importance were happening. Hell of a racket out there was the most anyone would say. How am I supposed to concentrate on the cards? Peter would miss that life; he was AWOL nine days, as much of an outlaw as Hollis or Tifty. No matter what Gunnar might offer in Peter’s defense, the man’s message had been clear: you do this on your own; no one’s going to say they knew you.

  The next thing he was aware of, Hollis was shaking him awake. They disembarked into the cold. This far north, there could be no doubt of the change of seasons. The sky set low with heavy gray clouds like formations of airborne stone.

  “See?” Tifty said, gesturing at the ground around the truck. “No tracks at all.”

  They drove on. The absence of virals nagged at Peter’s mind. Even outside the hardboxes they’d seen no tracks, no scat. A welcome turn of events, but so unlikely as to be disturbing, as if the virals were saving something special for them.

  Their progress slowed, the roads becoming vague; frequently Tifty had to stop the truck to recalculate their course, using a compass and maps and sometimes a sextant, a device Peter had never seen before. Michael showed him how it worked. By measuring the sun’s angle to the horizon, and taking into account the time and date, it was possible to compute their location without any other points of reference. The instrument was typically used on ships at sea, Michael explained, where the horizon was unobstructed, but it could work on land, too. How do you know this stuff? Peter asked, but realized as he posed the question what the answer was. Michael had taught himself to use a sextant for that day when he would sail out to find, or not find, the barrier.

  The days of travel passed, and still no virals. By now they were openly puzzling over this, though the discussion never advanced beyond noting its oddness. Strange, they said. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky. Which they were, but luck had a way of betraying you in the end. Eleven days in, Tifty announced that they were approaching the Missouri-Iowa line. They were dirty and exhausted; tempers were short. For two full days they’d been stymied by a nameless river, backtracking mile after mile, trying to find a bridge still standing. Their fuel supply was getting low. The landscape had changed again, not quite as flat as Texas but close, with gently undulating hills subsumed under waist-high grass. The hour was approaching noon when Hollis, at the wheel, brought the truck to a halt.

  Peter, who had been dozing in the back, roused to the sound of the truck’s doors opening. He drew upright to find himself alone in the cab. Why were they stopping?

  He retrieved his rifle and climbed down. Everything was coated with a fine, pale powder—the grass, the tre
es. Snow? The air had a tart smell, like something burnt. Not snow. Ashes. Little clouds of whiteness puffed underfoot as Peter advanced to where the others were standing, at the crest of a hill. There he stopped, as his companions had stopped, pinned in place by what they saw.

  “For the love of God,” Michael said. “What the hell are we looking at?”

  53

  This woman: who was she?

  A spy. An insurgent. That much was obvious; her attempt to free the hostages had all the trademarks, and she had killed six men before making her fatal mistake. But the absence of a tag on her arm didn’t add up. That curious odor Guilder had detected; what did it mean? They’d recovered her weapon, a Browning semiautomatic with two bullets remaining in the magazine. Guilder had never seen one like it; it wasn’t one of theirs. Either the insurgency had stockpiled a cache of weapons from a source he didn’t know about, or the woman came from someplace else entirely.

  Guilder didn’t like mysteries. He liked them even less than he liked the idea of Sergio.

  The woman seemed unbreakable. She hadn’t told them so much as her name. Even Sod, that psychopath, a man of notoriously revolting appetites, had failed to extract a scrap of information. The decision to employ the man’s services had come about with curious ease. Sending people to the feedlot was one thing; the virals made mercifully short work of it, and the creatures needed to be fed. It wasn’t anything nice, but it was over fast. And as for a few blows in detention, or the cautious application of the waterboard, well, sometimes such measures were simply unavoidable. What had the term been, back in the day? Enhanced interrogation.

  But sanctioned rape: that was something new. That was a bit of a head-scratcher. It was the kind of thing that happened in small, brutal countries where men with machetes hacked people to bits for no reason other than the fact that they’d been born in the wrong village, or had slightly different ears, or preferred chocolate to vanilla. The thought should have repelled him. It should have been… beneath him. This was what Sergio had driven him to. Strange how something could seem completely crazy one day and entirely reasonable the next.

  These were the thoughts running through Guilder’s mind as he sat at the head of the conference table. If he’d had the option, he would have skipped these weekly meetings, which inevitably devolved into convoluted procedural squabbling, a classic example of too many cooks in the kitchen. Guilder was a firm believer in a clear chain of command and the dispersed authorities of the pyramidal bureaucracy. It tended to create a bloat of busywork at the bottom and an excessive appetite for paperwork and precedent, but it kept everybody in his own corner. Still, the pretense of shared governance needed to be maintained, at least for now.

  “Does anybody have anything to say?”

  No one seemed to. After an uncomfortable silence, Propaganda Minister Hoppel, who was seated to Guilder’s immediate left, next to Suresh, the Minister of Public Health, and directly across from Wilkes, cleared his throat and said, “I think what everybody is worried about, well, not so much worried as concerned, and I think I’m speaking for everyone here—”

  “For God’s sake, spit it out. And take off your glasses.”

  “Oh. Right.” Hoppel slid the smoke-colored lenses from his face and placed them with nervous delicacy on the conference table. “As I said,” he continued, and cleared his throat again. “Is it possible that, maybe, things are getting a little out of hand?”

  “You’re damn right they are. That’s the first intelligent thing anybody has said to me all day.”

  “What I mean is, the strategies we’ve employed don’t seem to be getting us where we want to be.”

  Guilder sighed with irritation. “What are you suggesting?”

  Hoppel’s eyes darted involuntarily at his colleagues. You better back me up here—I’m not going out on this limb by myself.

  “Perhaps we should de-escalate. For a time.”

  “De-escalate. We’re getting hammered out there.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. There’s a lot of talk in the flatland, and it’s not going our way. Maybe we should try ratcheting things down a bit. See where that leaves us.”

  “Have you lost your mind? Have all of you lost your minds?”

  “You said yourself that things aren’t really working out the way we’d like.”

  “I didn’t say that, you did.”

  “Be that as it may, a few of us were talking—”

  “That’s the worst-kept secret in this room.”

  “Right. So, okay. What we came up with was the idea that maybe we should go in the opposite direction. More of a hearts-and-minds approach. If you follow.”

  Guilder took a calming breath. “So what you’re suggesting, and excuse the paraphrase, is that we should look like pussies.”

  “Director Guilder, if I may.” This was Suresh. “The pattern of a successful insurgency—”

  “They’re killing people. They’re killing flatlanders. What about this isn’t clear? These people are butchers.”

  “No one is saying different,” Suresh continued with a bland look. “And for a while that worked in our favor. But the roundups haven’t produced any usable intelligence. We still don’t know where Sergio is or how he moves. No one’s come forward. And in the meantime, the reprisals have been an effective recruitment tool for the insurgency.”

  “Do you know how you sound? I’ll tell you how you sound. You sound rehearsed.”

  Suresh ignored the barb. “Let me show you something.”

  From a folder on the table he withdrew a sheet of paper, which he slid toward Guilder. One of their own propaganda bulletins, but on the other side was scrawled a different message.

  Flatlanders, Rise Up!

  The Last Days of the Redeyes Are at Hand!

  Join Your Brethren in the Insurgency!

  Every Act of Disobedience Strikes a Blow Against the Regime!

  And so on, in that vein. Guilder lifted his head to find everyone staring at him, as if he were a bomb that might go off.

  “So? What does this prove?”

  “HR personnel have found fifty-six of these so far,” Suresh replied. “I’ll give you an example of the problem this is causing. This morning at roll call, an entire lodge refused to sing the anthem.”

  “And were they beaten?”

  “There were over three hundred of them. And we can only hold half that number in detention. We simply don’t have the room.”

  “So cut their rations in half.”

  “The flatlanders are on a subsistence diet already. We reduce it any further and they won’t be able to work.”

  It was maddening. Every point Guilder made was instantly parried. He was looking down the barrel of nothing less than an organized insurrection among the senior staff.

  “Get out, all of you.”

  “I think,” Suresh pressed with infuriating composure, “that we should come to some consensus on a strategy.”

  A hot rush of blood shot to Guilder’s face. The veins were pounding in his head; he was practically apoplectic. He picked up the paper and waved it in the air.

  “Hearts and minds. Do you hear what you’re saying? Did you read this?”

  “Director Guilder—”

  “I have nothing more to say to you. Go.”

  Papers were gathered, briefcases closed, anxious glances exchanged around the table. Everybody rose and started moving toward the exit. Guilder put his head in his hands. Jesus Christ, this was all he needed. Something had to be done, and it had to be done immediately.

  “Wilkes, wait a second.”

  The man turned, eyebrows raised.

  “You stay.”

  The others departed. His chief of staff lingered by the door.

  “Sit.”

  Wilkes returned to his chair.

  “You mind telling me what the hell that was about? I’ve always trusted you, Fred. Relied on you to keep things running. Don’t bullshit me now.”

  “They’re just worried.
”

  “Worried is one thing. I won’t tolerate division in the ranks. Not when we’re so close. They could get here any day now.”

  “Everybody understands that. They just don’t want… well, for things to get out of control. They caught me by surprise, too.”

  Save your excuses, thought Guilder. “What do you think? Have they gotten out of control?”

  “Do you really want to ask me that?” When Guilder said nothing, Wilkes shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

  Guilder rose, removed his glasses from his jacket pocket, and pulled the drapes aside. This dismal place. This middle of goddamned nowhere. He found himself suddenly nostalgic for the past, the old world of cars and restaurants and stores and dry cleaners and tax returns and traffic jams and waiting in line at the movies. He hadn’t felt this depressed in a long time.

  “People are going to have to have more babies.”

  “Sir?”

  He spoke with his back to the man. “Babies, Fred.” He shook his head at the irony. “Funny, I’ve never really known much about them. Never really felt the urge. You had a couple, didn’t you?”

  It was an unwritten rule not to ask about their former lives. Guilder could feel Wilkes’s hesitation in his answer. “The missus and I had three. Two boys and a girl. Seven grandkids, too.”

  “Do you think about them?”

  Guilder turned from the window. Wilkes had put on his glasses, too. Was it the light or something else?

  “Not anymore.” One corner of Wilkes’s mouth gave a little twitch. “Are you testing me, Horace?”

  “Maybe I am, a little.”

  “Don’t.”

  The word had more force behind it than Guilder had ever heard from the man. He couldn’t decide if this was reassuring or not.

  “We’re going to have to get everybody on the same page, you know. Can I count on you?”