The Passage (113 page)

“I saw them leaving this morning, with Raimey’s squad.”

Raimey’s unit, one of six, was doing short recon patrols to the southeast. When Peter had asked Vorhees how long they’d be gone, he had answered, enigmatically, “However long it takes.”

“How’d she look?”

“Like one of them.” Hollis paused. “I waved to her, but I don’t think she saw me. Know what they’re calling her?”

Peter shook his head.

“The Last Expeditionary.” Hollis frowned at this. “Kind of a mouthful, if you ask me.”

They fell silent; there was nothing more to say. If they were extra limbs, Alicia felt to Peter like a missing one. He kept looking for her in his mind, turning his thoughts to the place where Alicia should be. It wasn’t the kind of thing he thought he could ever really get used to.

“I don’t think they really believe us about Amy,” Peter said.

“Would you?”

Peter shook his head, conceding the point. “I guess not.”

Another silence descended.

“So what do you think?” Hollis said. “About the evac.”

With all the rain, the battalion’s departure had been delayed another week. “Vorhees keeps urging us to go. He may be right.”

“But you don’t think so.” When Peter hesitated, Hollis put down his fork and looked him in the eye. “You know me, Peter. I’ll do whatever you want to do.”

“Why am I in charge? I don’t want to decide for everyone.”

“I didn’t say you were. I think it’s just a case of what
is
, Peter. If you don’t know yet, you don’t know. It’ll keep until the rain lets up.”

Peter felt a twinge of guilt. Since they’d arrived at the garrison, he had somehow never quite found the moment to tell Hollis that he knew about him and Sara. With Alicia gone, part of him didn’t want to face the fact that the force that held them all together was dissolving. The three men had been billeted in a tent adjacent to the one where Sara and Amy now bided their time, playing hands of go-to and waiting for the rain to stop; for two nights running, Peter had awakened to find that Hollis’s bunk was empty. But always he was there in the morning, snoring away. Peter wondered if Hollis and Sara were staging this for his benefit or for Michael’s, who was, after all, her brother. As for Amy: after a period of time, a day or so, in which she had seemed nervous, even a little afraid of the soldiers who brought them their meals and escorted them to the latrine, she appeared to have moved into a state of hopeful, even cheerful waiting, content to bide her time but wholly expecting to press forward.
Will we be
leaving soon?
she had asked Peter, her voice gently urging.
Because I would like to see the snow
. To which Peter had only said, I don’t know, Amy. We’ll see, after the rain stops. The truth, yet even as he’d spoken, the words had the hollow taste of a lie.

Hollis tipped his head toward Peter’s plate. “You should eat.”

He pushed the tray aside. “I’m not hungry.”

They were joined by Michael, who swept down to the table in a rain-beaded poncho, carrying a tray piled high with food. Of all of them, he alone had found some use for his time: Vorhees had assigned him to the motor pool, helping to ready the vehicles for the trip south. He placed the tray on the table, sat before it, and dug in greedily, using a piece of corn bread to shovel beans into his mouth with his oil-stained hands.

“What’s the matter?” he said, looking up. He swallowed a mouthful of bread and beans. “The two of you look like somebody died.”

One of the soldiers moved past their table with his tray. A jug-eared private, his bald head shimmering with a downy fuzz.

“Hey, Lugnut,” he said to Michael.

Michael brightened. “Sancho. What’s the ups?”

“De nada
. Listen. A bunch of us were talking, thought maybe you’d like to join us later.”

Michael smiled around a mouthful of beans. “Sure thing.”

“Nineteen hundred in the mess.” The soldier looked at Peter and Hollis as if noticing them for the first time. “You strags can come too, if you want.”

Peter had never quite gotten used to this term. There was always a note of derision in it.

“Come where?”

“Thanks, Sancho,” Michael said. “I’ll run it by them.”

When the soldier had moved on, Peter narrowed his eyes at Michael. “Lugnut?”

Michael had resumed eating. “They’re big on names like that. I kind of like it better than Circuit.” He mopped the last of the beans from his plate. “They’re not bad guys, Peter.”

“I didn’t say they were.”

“What’s tonight?” Hollis asked after a moment.

“Oh, that.” Michael shrugged dismissively, his face reddening. “I’m surprised no one told you. It’s movie night.”

By 18:30, all the tables had been pulled from the mess hall, the benches assembled in rows. With nightfall had come a distinct cooling and drying of the air; the rain had blown through. All the soldiers had gathered outside, noisily talking among themselves in a way that Peter had not seen before, laughing and joking and passing flasks of shine. He took a bench with Hollis at the back of the hall, facing the screen, a sheet of plywood covered in whitewash. Michael was somewhere up forward, among his new friends from the motor pool.

Michael had done his best to explain how the movie would work, but still Peter did not quite know what to expect, and he found the idea vaguely troubling, not rooted in any physical logic he understood. The projector, which rested on a high table behind them, would beam a current of moving images onto the screen—but if that was true, where did these images come from? If they were reflections, what did they reflect? A long electric cable had been run from the projector, out the door of the mess to one of the generators; Peter could not help but think how wasteful it was to use precious fuel for the simple purpose of entertainment. But as Major Greer stepped forward, to the excited hoots of sixty men, Peter felt it too: a pure anticipation, an almost childlike thrill.

Greer held up a hand to quiet the men, which only made them hoot louder.

“Shut up, you bloodbags!”

“Bring on the Count!” someone yelled.

More hooting and shouting. Standing in front of the screen, Greer wore a thinly concealed smile; for the moment, the hard carapace of military discipline had been allowed to crack. Peter had spent enough time in Greer’s company to know this was no accident.

Greer allowed the excitement to die down on its own, then cleared his throat and spoke: “All right, everyone, that’ll do. First, an announcement. I know you all have enjoyed your stay out here in the north woods—”

“Fucking A right!”

Greer shot a frown in the direction of the man who’d spoken. “Interrupt me again, Muncey, and you’ll be sucking latrines for a month.”

“Just saying how happy I am to be here poking dracs, sir!”

More laughter. Greer let it go.

“As I was saying, with the break in the weather, we have some news. General?”

Vorhees stepped forward from where he’d been waiting, off to the side. “Thank you, Major. Good evening, Second Battalion.”

A shouted chorus: “Good evening, sir!”

“It looks like we’ve got ourselves a bit of a window here with the weather, so I’m calling it. Oh-five-hundred, report to your squad leaders after morning chow for your sections. We need this place racked and packed by lights tomorrow. When Blue Squad gets back, we’re moving south. Any questions?”

A soldier raised his hand. Peter recognized him as the one who had spoken to Michael in the mess hall. Sancho.

“What about the heavy mechs, sir? They won’t make it in the mud.”

“The decision’s been made to leave them in place. We’ll be traveling L and Q. Your squad leaders will go over this with you. Anyone else?”

Silence from the crowd.

“All right then. Enjoy the show.”

The lanterns were doused; at the back of the room, the wheels of the projector began to turn. So there it was, Peter thought; the moment to decide was upon them. A week had suddenly become no time at all. Peter felt someone slip onto the bench next to him: Sara. Beside her was Amy, wearing a dark woolen blanket over her shoulders, against the cold.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Peter whispered.

“The hell with that,” Sara said quietly. “You think I’d miss this?”

The screen blazed with light. Encircled numbers, descending in sequence: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Then:

CARL LAEMMLE

PRESENTS
“DRACULA”
by BRAM STOKER
FROM THE PLAY ADAPTED BY
HAMILTON DEANE & JOHN L. BALDERSTON
A
TOD BROWNING
PRODUCTION

A chorus of cheers rose up from the benches as, incredibly, the screen was filled with the moving image of a horse-drawn carriage, racing along a mountain road. The picture was bleached of all color, composed entirely of tones of gray—the palette of a half-remembered dream.

“Dracs,” said Hollis. He turned to Peter, frowning. “Dracula?”

“Sound!” one of the soldiers bellowed, followed by others. “Sound! Sound!”

The soldier operating the projector was frantically checking connections, twisting knobs. He jogged briskly forward and knelt by a box positioned under the screen.

“Wait, there, I think that’s it—”

A crackling boom of static: Peter, entranced by the moving image on the screen—the carriage was entering a village now, people running to meet it—reflexively bolted in his chair. But then he realized what had occurred, what the box under the screen was. The clop of horses, the creak of the carriage on its springs and the voices of the villagers, speaking to one another in a strange language he had never heard before: the images were more than pictures, more than light. They were alive and breathing with sound.

On the screen, a man in a white hat waved a walking stick at the carriage man. As he opened his mouth to speak, all the soldiers chimed in as one:

“Don’t take my luggage down, I’m going on to Borgo Pass tonight!”

An explosion of general hilarity. Peter tore his gaze away to glance at Hollis. But his friend’s eyes, glowing with reflected light, were raptly focused on the moving images before them. He turned to Sara and Amy; they were the same.

On the screen, a heavyset man was speaking to the driver of the carriage, a burble of meaningless sounds. He returned to the first fellow, in the hat, his words amplified by the shouted recitation of the men:

“The driii-ver. He eez … afraid. Good fellow he eez. He wants me to ask if you can wait, and go on after sunrise.”

The first man waved his cane arrogantly, having none of it. “Well, I’m sorry, but there’s a carriage meeting me at Borgo Pass at midnight.”

“Borgo Pass? Whose carriage?”

“Why, Count Dracula’s.”

The mustached man’s eyes widened with terror. “Count … 
Dracula’s?”

“Don’t do it, Renfield!” one of the soldiers yelled, and everybody laughed.

It was a story, Peter realized. A story, like the old books in the Sanctuary, the ones Teacher read to them in circle, all those years ago. The people on the screen looked like they were pretending because they were; their exaggerated motions and expressions called to mind the way Teacher would act out the voices of the characters in the books she read. The heavy man with the mustache knew something that the man in the hat did not; there was danger ahead. Despite this warning, the traveler resumed his journey, to more mocking shouts from the soldiers. In darkness, the carriage ascended a mountain road, approaching a massive structure of turrets and walls, drenched in a forbidding moonlight. What lay ahead was obvious: the mustached man had more or less explained it. Vampires. An old word, but one Peter knew. He waited for the virals to appear, falling on the carriage and tearing the traveler to shreds, but this didn’t happen. The carriage pulled through the gate; the man, Renfield, stepped out to find that he was alone; the driver was gone. A creaking door, opening of its own accord, beckoned him inside, where he found himself in a great ruined cave of a room. Renfield, unaware, his innocence almost laughable, backed toward a massive flight of stairs, where a figure in a dark cloak, holding a single candle, was descending. As the cloaked figure reached the bottom, Renfield turned, the whites of his eyes expanding with such horror it was as if he’d stumbled on a whole pod of smokes, not a single man in a cape.

“I am … 
Drrrrrac-ulaaah
.”

Another tent-shaking detonation of whoops, whistles, cheers. One of the soldiers in the front row shot to his feet.

“Hey, Count, eat this!”

A flash of spinning steel through the stream of light from the projector: the tip of the blade met the wood of the screen with a meaty thunk, burying itself squarely in the chest of the caped man, who seemed, surprisingly, to take no notice of this.

“Muncey, what the fuck!” the projector operator yelled.

“Get your blade,” someone else shouted, “it’s in the way!”

But the voices weren’t angry; everybody thought it was hilarious. Under a storm of catcalls, Muncey bounded to the screen, the images washing over him, to yank his blade free of the wood. He turned, grinning, and gave a little bow.

Despite it all—the chaotic interruptions, the laughter and mocking recitations of the soldiers, who anticipated every line—Peter soon found himself sliding into the story. He sensed that some pieces of the film were missing; the narrative leapt ahead in confusing jerks, leaving the castle behind for a ship at sea, then for a place called London. A city, he realized. A city from the Time Before. The Count—some kind of viral, though he didn’t look like one—was killing women. First a girl handing out flowers in the street, then a young woman asleep in her bed, with great sleepy curls of hair and a face so composed she looked like a doll. The Count’s movements were comically slow, as were his victim’s; everyone in the movie seemed trapped in a dream in which they couldn’t make themselves move fast enough, or even at all. Dracula himself possessed a pale, almost womanly face, his lips painted to look bowed, like the wings of a bat; whenever he was about to bite someone, the screen would hold for a long, lingering moment on his eyes, which were lit from below to glow like twin candle flames.