The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  “It’s getting… harder.”

  “When the time comes—”

  “I’m not going to let it.”

  All around, the snow was falling. Alicia knew that if she didn’t leave soon, she might get stuck. One last thing needed to be said. It took all her courage to form the words.

  “Take care of Peter. You can’t let him know what happened to me. Promise me that.”

  “Lish—”

  “You can tell him anything else. Make up a story. I don’t care. But I need your word.”

  A deep quiet ensued, encasing the two of them. Alicia had been alone with this knowledge for too long; now it was shared. She searched her emotions. Loss, relief, the feeling of crossing a border into a dark country. She was giving him up.

  “In a way, I’ve always known this would happen. Even before I met you. There was always somebody else.”

  Amy made no reply. Her silence told Alicia all she needed to know.

  “You should go,” Alicia said.

  Still Amy said nothing. Her face was uncertain. Then:

  “There’s something I haven’t told you, Lish.”

  Gray day into gray day. The continent’s vast inland empire of weather. Would it snow? Would the sun ever come out again? Would the wind blow at their backs or into their frozen faces? They walked and walked, hunched forward against the weight of their packs. There were no signs, no landmarks. The roads and towns were gone, subsumed like sunken ships beneath the waves of snowy prairie. Tifty confessed that he didn’t know exactly where they were. Central Iowa, northeast of Des Moines, but anything more specific… He made no apologies; the situation was what it was. Why couldn’t you have decided to do this in summer? he said.

  They were almost out of food. They’d cut their rations in half, but half of nothing would be nothing. As they huddled inside a ruined farmhouse, Lore doled out the meager slices on the blade of her knife. Peter placed his beneath his tongue to make it last, the hardened fat dissolving slowly in the warmth of his mouth.

  They went on.

  Then, late on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth day, a vision appeared: materializing slowly from a colorless sky, a tall sign, rocking in the wind. They made their way toward it; a cluster of buildings emerged. What town was this? It didn’t matter; the need for shelter trumped every other concern. They passed through the outer commercial ring, with its husks of supermarkets and chain stores, flat roofs long collapsed under the weight of winter snow, and continued into the old town. The usual remnants and rubble, but at the heart they came to two blocks of brick buildings that appeared sound.

  “Don’t suppose we’ll find anything to eat in there,” Michael said.

  They were standing before a storefront, the front windows of which were amazingly unbroken. Faded lettering on the glass read, FANCY’S CAFÉ.

  Hollis said, “Looks like they’ve been out of business for a while.”

  They forced the door and entered. A narrow space, with booths of cracked vinyl opposite a counter with stools; except for the dust, which caked every surface, it was remarkably undisturbed. From time to time one found such a place, a museum of the past where the passage of decades had somehow failed to register, more eerie than ruins.

  Michael lifted a menu from a stack on the counter and opened it. “What’s meatloaf? I get the meat part, but a loaf of it?”

  “Jesus, Michael,” Lore said. She was shivering, her lips blue. “Don’t make it worse.”

  Hollis and Peter scouted the back. The rear door and windows had been sealed with plywood; a hammer and nails lay on the floor.

  “We’re not going to get much farther without food,” Hollis said gravely.

  “You don’t have to remind me.”

  They returned to the front of the café, where the others were bundling themselves in blankets on the floor. Darkness was falling. The room was freezing, but at least they were out of the wind.

  “I’m going to look around,” Peter said. “Maybe I can figure out where we are.”

  He slogged his way across the street, then moved down the block, peering in the storefronts. He tried some of the doors, but all were locked. Well, they could come back in the morning and open a few to see what was there.

  At the end of the second block he tried a handle without looking—he was just going through the motions now—and was startled when the door swung open. Stepping inside, he holstered his pistol and removed a match from the box in the breast pocket of his parka and struck the tip, cupping the flame against the breeze coming from the open door.

  Well, son of a bitch.

  Peter knew a supply cache when he saw one. Burlap bags were stacked against the walls of the otherwise bare room. He knelt and opened the nearest bag with a flick of his blade: dried beans. In another he found potatoes, in a third apples. He lit another match and raised it over the floor; there were footprints all around in the dust. Who had left this here? What did it mean?

  Their situation was dire, but at least they wouldn’t starve. Better to think about what to do next on a full stomach. He sank his teeth into an apple. It was flavorless, hard as a chunk of ice. He polished it off in a frenzy, jammed more into his pockets, and scanned the room for something he could use to carry food back to the others. In the corner he found a bucket full of copper wire. He dumped the wire on the floor, filled the bucket with apples and potatoes, and returned to the street.

  He was instantly aware of something odd. The night seemed brighter. The moon? But there was no moon. A prickle of alarm danced over his skin, then he heard the sound. He turned his face away from the wind, listening hard. A distant rumbling. The sound was coming closer, becoming more distinct by the second.

  Engines.

  He dropped the pail and raced up the block toward the café. A line of vehicles was roaring toward him. He heard voices yelling, then a series of pops. Jets of snow flew up around him.

  Somebody was shooting at him.

  He tore through the door of the café just as a phalanx of guns opened fire, exploding the windows. Get down! he yelled, Get down!, but everybody already had. He dove over the counter, landing on top of Lore, who was holding her hands over her head. The blaze of the vehicles’ headlights filled the room. Things were splintering, crashing, round after round being pumped into the tiny room.

  “Michael! Where are you?”

  His voice came from under one of the banquettes: “Who are they? What do they want?”

  The question was rhetorical: whoever they were, they wanted to kill them.

  “Tifty? Hollis?”

  Michael again: “They’re with me! Tifty’s cut, but he’s okay!”

  “I’ve got Lore!”

  A pause in the shooting; then they opened fire again.

  “Can anybody see anything?”

  “Three vehicles straight outside,” Hollis called. “More down the street!”

  “Maybe we should surrender!” Michael yelled.

  “I don’t think these are the sort of people you surrender to!”

  The room was being pummeled. Peter had only his pistol; he’d left his rifle by the door. They’d never make it to the back, and the doors and windows were boarded up, anyway. The café was a death trap.

  “What do you want to do?” Hollis called.

  “Can Tifty move on his own?”

  “I’m okay!”

  Flattened to the floor, Peter swiveled his face to Lore. “What do you have?”

  She showed him her knife. “Just this.”

  He aimed his voice over the counter: “We go on three! Somebody toss us a gun!”

  It arrived from Michael’s direction, dropping on top of them. Lore took it and racked the slide. The guns outside had fallen silent again. Nobody out there was in any hurry.

  “Shooting our way out of here isn’t much of a plan,” Lore said.

  “I’d be happy to hear a better one.”

  Peter was rising to his knees when Lore stopped him with a hand. “Listen,” she whispe
red.

  He heard footsteps crunching snow, followed by a tinkle of glass underfoot. He raised a finger to his lips. How many were there? Two? A hostage, he thought suddenly. It was their only chance. There was no way to communicate with the others; he’d have to go on his own. He pointed to Lore, gesturing toward the far end of the counter, away from the door. He mouthed: Make a noise.

  Lore slithered along the floor. Peter holstered his pistol and compressed his body to a crouch. When Lore was in position she looked at him, her face set, and nodded.

  “Help me,” she moaned.

  Peter leapt to the top of the bar. As the nearest man turned, Peter drew his pistol and fired at the backlit shape and sailed down upon the second man, sending the two of them crashing to the floor. Peter’s pistol clattered away. A moment of mad scrambling, arms and legs tangling; the man had a good thirty pounds on him, but surprise was on Peter’s side. A semi was strapped to the man’s thigh. Locking a forearm around his adversary’s neck, Peter pulled him into a backward embrace, yanked the gun free of its holster, and shoved the muzzle into the curve of his jaw beneath his flowing silver hair.

  “Tell them to hold fire!”

  From their place on the floor, Peter found himself staring directly at Michael, hidden beneath one of the tables. His eyes grew very wide. “Peter—”

  “I mean it,” Peter told the man, pressing the barrel deeper. “Yell it, so everyone can hear.”

  The man had relaxed in his arms. Peter felt him shudder, though not with pain. The man had started to laugh.

  “Stand down!” a new voice said—a woman’s. “Everybody cease fire!”

  The second man wasn’t a man after all. She was sitting on the floor with her back braced against one of the booths, her right arm held across her chest to clutch her wounded shoulder.

  “Flyers, Peter.” Alicia drew her bloodied hand away. Now she was laughing, too. “Lucius, can you believe he fucking shot me?”

  62

  At the base of the ladder, Amy touched the map to her torch. The paper caught instantly, snatched away in a flash of blue flame. She doused the torch in the trickle of water at her feet, ascended the ladder, and shoved the manhole cover aside.

  She was in the alley behind the apothecary shop. She sealed the plate and peeked around the corner of the building; above the heart of the city, the Dome stood imperiously, its hammered surface shining with light. She drew down her veil and walked briskly from the alleyway. Men with dogs were moving along the barricades. She strode up to the guardhouse, where two men were blowing on their hands, and displayed her pass.

  “This doesn’t look right.” He showed it to the second man. “Does this look right to you?”

  The col glanced at it quickly, then looked at Amy. “Lift your veil.”

  She did as he asked. “Is there something wrong?”

  He studied her face a moment. Then he handed back the pass. “Forget it. It’s fine.”

  Amy threaded past them and headed up the stairs. None of the other men paid her any note; the guards at the gate had verified her presence as warranted. Inside, she marched past the guard at the desk, who barely glanced at her, crossed the lobby to the elevator, and rode it to the sixth floor.

  The elevator opened on a circular balcony circumscribing the building’s atrium. Four corridors led away, like spokes on a wheel. Amy made her way around the balcony to the third corridor and down its length to the last door, where the guard, a droopy-faced man with a tonsure of gray hair, was sitting on a folding metal chair, flipping through the brittle pages of a hundred-year-old magazine. On the cover was the image of a woman in an orange bikini, her hands pushed upward through her hair.

  “The Director asked to see me,” Amy told him, drawing up her veil.

  His eyes broke from the page, finding Amy’s, and that was all it took. She eased him to the floor, propped his back against the wall, and took the key from his belt. His chin was rocked forward onto his chest. She put her lips close to his ear.

  “I’m going to go inside now. I want you to count to sixty—can you do that?”

  His eyes were closed. He nodded slightly, making a murmur of assent.

  “Good. Count to sixty, and when you get there, throw yourself off the balcony.”

  She unlocked the door and stepped inside. There was something deceptively benign about the room. Two wingback chairs faced an enormous desk, its polished surface gleaming faintly. The floor was covered in thick carpet, muffling everything but the sound of Amy’s breathing. One whole wall was books; another displayed a large painting, lit by a tiny spotlight, of three figures sitting at a long counter and a fourth man in a white hat, all seen through a window on a darkened street. Amy paused to read the small plaque at the base of its frame: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942.

  To her right was a pair of parlor doors with windows of leaded glass. Amy turned the knob and eased through.

  Guilder was lying on top of the blankets in his underwear. A pile of cardboard folders floated in the sea of bedding beside him. Soft, windy snores were issuing from his nose. Where should she stand? She chose the foot of the bed.

  “Director Guilder.”

  He jerked violently awake, darting a hand beneath his pillow. He pushed himself up the headboard, scrambling away from her; with both hands he leveled the pistol at her and cocked the hammer. He was trembling so profoundly Amy thought he might shoot her by accident.

  “How did you get in here?”

  She sensed his uncertainty. The robe of an attendant, but the face was none he knew. “The guard was very accommodating. Why don’t you put that down?”

  “Goddamnit, who are you?”

  She heard voices from the hall, fists pounding on the outer door.

  “I am Sergio,” she said. “I’ve come here to surrender.”

  XI. THE DARKEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR

  63

  Events had followed just as Amy had foreseen. The time and place of her execution were set; only the method had yet to be revealed—the final detail on which their plan depended. Would Guilder simply shoot her? Hang her? But if such a meager display was all he intended, why had he ordered the entire population, all seventy thousand souls in the Homeland, to observe? Amy had baited the hook; would Guilder take it?

  Peter passed the next four days lurching between emotional poles—alternating states of worry and astonishment, both overlain with a powerful feeling of déjà vu. Everything possessed a striking familiarity, as if no time had passed since they’d faced Babcock on the mountaintop in Colorado. Here they all were, together once more, their fates drawn together as if by a powerful gravitational force. Peter, Alicia, Michael, Hollis, Greer: they had converged upon this place by different routes, for different reasons. Yet it was Amy, once again, who had led them.

  Greer had related the story of her transformation: Houston, Carter, the Chevron Mariner; Amy’s journey into the bowels of the ship and then her return. The full measure of what had passed between Amy and Carter, Greer couldn’t tell them; all he knew was that Carter had directed them here. Beyond that, Amy either wouldn’t or couldn’t say.

  That night at the orphanage, the two of them standing at the door, the tips of their fingers colliding in space: had she known what was happening to her? And had he? Peter had felt in Amy’s touch the pressure of something unstated. I am going away. The girl you know will not be here when next we meet. Which she had; the girl who Amy was had gone away. In her place was now a woman.

  The group clothed their anxieties in unnecessary repetitions of their various preparations. The cleaning of weapons. The examination of blueprints and maps. The going over of checklists and the assorted mental inventories they would carry into war. Hollis and Michael became, in the last days, a kind of closed loop; their purpose had narrowed to Sara and Kate. Alicia dealt with the anxiety the way she dealt with everything—by pretending it wasn’t important. The bullet from Peter’s pistol had missed the bone and exited cleanly, a lucky thing, but even so.
She would be healed in a day or two, but in the meantime the sling on her arm was a constant reminder to Peter of how close he’d come to killing her. When she wasn’t barking orders, she retreated into unreachable silence, letting Peter know, without saying so, that she had entered the zone of battle. Greer intimated that something had happened to her in the cell, that she’d been beaten badly, but any attempt to ask her more about this, to offer comfort, was sternly rebuffed. “I’m all right,” Alicia said with a peremptory tone that could only mean she wasn’t. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.” She seemed, in fact, to be actively avoiding him, disappearing for long stretches; if he didn’t know better, he would have said she was angry with him. She would return hours later smelling of horse sweat, but when Peter asked her where she’d gone, all she would say was that she’d been scouting the perimeter. He had no reason to doubt this, yet the explanation felt thin, a cover for something unstated.

  Tifty, too, had undergone a subtle but significant change. His reunion with Greer had meant more than Peter had expected. They had served in the Expeditionary together, an inarguable bond, but Peter had not anticipated the depth of their friendship. A genuine warmth flowed between them. Peter puzzled over this at first, but the reason was obvious: Greer and Tifty had been here before, with Crukshank, all those years ago. The story of the field, and Dee, and the two little girls: of any man living, Greer best knew the heart of Tifty Lamont.

  In this manner the hours, and then the days, moved by. Over everything two questions hovered: Would the plan work? And if it did, could they get to Amy in time?

  On the third night, when Peter couldn’t stand the waiting for one more second, he left the basement of the police station where everyone was sleeping, ascended the stairs, and stepped outside. The front of the building was protected by a broad overhang that kept the area clear of snow. Alicia was sitting with her back against the wall and her knees pulled to her chest. The sling had come off. In one hand she held a long, gleaming bayonet, serrated near the base; in the other was a sharpening stone. With calm, even strokes she was running the blade of the knife along the stone, first one side and then the other, pausing at the conclusion of each pass to examine her work. She seemed not to notice Peter at first, so intent was her focus; then, sensing his presence, she lifted her eyes toward him. It seemed her moment to speak, but she didn’t say anything; her face bore no expression at all, beyond a kind of vague distraction.