The Passage (13 page)

“Amy, did you have a bad dream?”

But Amy said nothing. In the darkness, Lacey couldn’t see the child’s face. Was she crying? She pulled the bedcovers aside to make room for her.

“It’s all right, come here,” Lacey said.

Without a word, Amy climbed into the narrow bed beside her. Her body was giving off waves of heat—not a fever, but nothing ordinary, either. She was glowing like a coal.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” Lacey said. “You’re safe here.”

“I want to stay,” the girl said.

Lacey realized she didn’t mean the room, or Lacey’s bed. She meant permanently, to live. Lacey didn’t know how to respond. By Monday she would have to tell the truth to Sister Arnette; there was simply no avoiding it. What would happen after that—to both of them—she didn’t know. But she saw it now, clearly: by lying about Amy, she had wrapped their fates together.

“We’ll see.”

“I won’t tell anyone. Don’t let them take me away.”

Lacey felt a shiver of fear. “Who, Amy? Who will take you away?”

Amy said nothing.

“Try not to worry,” Lacey said. She put her arm around Amy and pulled her close. “Now sleep. We need our rest.”

But in the dark, for hours and hours, Lacey lay awake, her eyes wide open.

It was a little after three
A.M
. when Wolgast and Doyle reached Baton Rouge, where they turned north, toward the Mississippi border. Doyle had driven the first shift, taking the wheel from Houston to a little east of Lafayette, while Wolgast tried to sleep; shortly after two they’d stopped at a Waffle House off the highway to change places, and since then, Doyle had barely stirred. A light rain was falling, just enough to mist the windshield.

To the south lay the Federal Industrial District of New Orleans, which Wolgast was glad to avoid. Just the thought of it depressed him. He had visited Old New Orleans once before, on a trip to Mardi Gras with friends from college, and been instantly taken by the city’s wild energy—its pulsing permissiveness, its vivid sense of life. For three days he’d barely slept, or felt the need to. One early morning he found himself in Preservation Hall—which was, despite its name, little more than a shack, hotter than the mouth of hell—listening to a jazz sextet playing “St. Louis Blues” and realized he’d been up for almost forty-eight hours straight. The air of the room was as tumescent as a greenhouse; everyone was dancing and shuffling and clapping along, a crowd of people of all ages and colors. Where else could you find yourself listening to six old black men, none of them a day under eighty, playing jazz at five o’clock in the morning? But then Katrina hit the city in ’05, and Vanessa a few years later—a full-blown Category 5 that roared ashore on 180-mile-per-hour winds, pushing a storm surge thirty feet tall—and that was the end of that. Now the place was little more than a giant petrochemical refinery, ringed by flooded lowlands so polluted that the water of its fouled lagoons could melt the skin right off your hand. Nobody lived inside the city proper anymore; even the sky above it was off-limits, patrolled by a squadron of fighter jets out of Kessler AFB. The whole place was ringed by fencing and patrolled by Homeland Security forces in full battle dress; beyond the perimeter, radiating outward for ten miles in all directions, was the N.O. Housing District, a sea of trailers once used for evacuees but now serving as a gigantic human storage facility for the thousands of workers who made the city’s industrial complex hum day and night. It was little more than a giant outdoor slum, a cross between a refugee camp and some frontier outpost from the Wild West; among law enforcement, it was generally known that the murder rate inside the N.O. was completely off the charts, though because it wasn’t officially a city of any kind, not even part of any state, this fact went mostly unreported.

Now, not long before sunup, the Mississippi Border Checkpoint appeared ahead of them, a twinkling village of lights in the predawn darkness. Even at this hour, the lines were long, mostly tanker trucks headed north to St. Louis or Chicago. Guards with dogs and Geiger counters and long mirrors on poles moved up and down the lines. Wolgast pulled in behind a semi with Yosemite Sam mud flaps and a bumper sticker that read:
I MISS MY EX-WIFE, BUT MY AIM IS IMPROVING
.

Beside him, Doyle stirred, rubbing his eyes. He sat up in his seat and looked around. “Are we there yet, Dad?”

“It’s just a checkpoint. Go back to sleep.”

Wolgast pulled the car out of line and drew up to the nearest uniform. He rolled down the window and held up his credentials.

“Federal agents. Any way you can wave us through?”

The guard was just a kid, his face soft and spotted with pimples. The body armor bulked him up, but Wolgast could tell he was probably no more than a welterweight. He should be back at home, Wolgast thought, wherever that was, snug in bed and dreaming of some girl in his algebra class, not standing on a highway in Mississippi wearing thirty pounds of Kevlar, holding an assault rifle over his chest.

He eyed Wolgast’s credentials with only vague interest, then tipped his head toward a concrete building sitting off the highway.

“You’ll have to pull over to the station, sir.”

Wolgast sighed with irritation. “Son, I don’t have time for this.”

“You want to skip the lines, you do.”

At that moment, a second guard stepped into their headlights. He turned his hips to their vehicle and unslung his weapon.
What the fuck
, Wolgast thought.

“For Pete’s sake. Is that really necessary?”

“Hands where we can see them, sir!” the second man barked.

“For crying out loud,” Doyle said.

The first guard turned toward the man in the headlights. He waved his hand to tell him to lower his weapon. “Cool it, Duane. They’re feds.” The second man hesitated, then shrugged and walked away.

“Sorry about that. Just pull around. They’ll have you out fast.”

“They better,” Wolgast said.

In the station, the OD took their credentials and asked them to wait while he phoned in their ID numbers. FBI, Homeland Security, even state and local cops; everybody was on a centralized system now, their movements tracked. Wolgast poured himself a cup of sludgy coffee from the urn, took a few halfhearted sips, and tossed it in the trash. There was a No Smoking sign, but the room reeked like an old ashtray. The clock on the wall said it was just past six; in about an hour the sun would be coming up.

The OD stepped back to the counter with their credentials. He was a trim man, nondescript, wearing the ash gray uniform of Homeland Security. “Okay, gentlemen. Let’s get you on your merry way. Just one thing: the system says you were booked to fly to Denver tonight. Probably just an error, but I need to log it.”

Wolgast had his answer ready. “We were. We were redirected to Nashville to pick up a federal witness.”

The duty officer considered this a minute, then nodded. He typed the information into his computer. “Fair enough. Raw deal, they didn’t fly you. That must be a thousand miles.”

“Tell me about it. I just go where I’m told.”

“Amen, brother.”

They returned to their car, and a guard waved them to the exit. Moments later they were back on the highway.

“Nashville?” Doyle asked.

Wolgast nodded, fixing his eyes on the road ahead. “Think about it. I-55 has checkpoints in Arkansas and Illinois, one just south of St. Louis and one about halfway between Normal and Chicago. But you take 40 east across Tennessee, the first checkpoint is all the way across the state, at the I-40 and 75 interchange. Ergo, this is the last checkpoint between here and Nashville, so the system won’t know we
never
went there. We can make the pickup in Memphis, cross into Arkansas, bypass the Oklahoma checkpoint by driving the long way around Tulsa, pick up 70 north of Wichita, and meet Richards at the Colorado border. One checkpoint between here and Telluride, and Sykes can handle that. And nowhere does it say we went to Memphis.”

Doyle frowned. “What about the bridge on 40?”

“We’ll have to avoid it, but there’s a pretty easy detour. About fifty miles south of Memphis there’s an older bridge across the river, connects to a state highway on the Arkansas side. The bridge isn’t rated for the big tankers coming up from the N.O., so it’s passenger cars only and mostly automated. The bar-code scanner will pick us up, and so will the cameras. But that’s easy to take care of later if we have to. Then we just work our way north and pick up I-40 south of Little Rock.”

They drove on. Wolgast thought about turning on the radio, maybe getting a weather report, but decided against it; he was still alert, despite the hour, and needed to keep his mind focused. When the sky paled to gray, they were a little north of Jackson, making good time. The rain stopped, then started again. Around them the land rose in gentle swells like waves far out to sea. Though it seemed like days ago, Wolgast was still thinking about the message from Sykes.

Caucasian female. Amy NLN. Zero footprint. 20323 Poplar Ave., Memphis, TN. Make pickup by Saturday noon latest. No contact. TUR. Sykes
.

TUR: travel under radar.

Don’t just catch a ghost, Agent Wolgast;
be
a ghost.

“Do you want me to drive?” Doyle asked, cutting the silence, and Wolgast could tell from his voice that he’d been thinking the same thing. Amy NLN. Who was Amy NLN?

He shook his head. Around them, the day’s first light spread over the Mississippi Delta like a sodden blanket. He tapped the wipers to clear the mist away.

“No,” he said. “I’m good.”

FIVE

Something was wrong with Subject Zero.

For six days straight he hadn’t come out of the corner, not even to feed. He just kind of hung there, like some kind of giant insect. Grey could see him on the infrared, a glowing blob in the shadows. From time to time he’d change positions, a few feet to the left or right, but that was it, and Grey had never seen him actually do this. Grey would just lift his face from the monitor, or leave containment to get a cup of coffee or sneak a smoke in the break room, and by the time he looked again, he’d find Zero hanging someplace else.

Hanging? Sticking? Hell,
levitating?

No one had explained a goddamn thing to Grey. Not word one. Like, for starters, what Zero actually
was
. There were things about him that Grey would say were sort of human. Such as, he had two arms and two legs. There was a head where a head should be, and ears and eyes and a mouth. He even had something like a johnson dangling down south, a curled-up little seahorse of a thing. But that’s where the similarities stopped.

For instance: Subject Zero glowed. In the infrared, any heat source would do that. But the image of Subject Zero flared on the screen like a lit match, almost too bright to look at. Even his
crap
glowed. His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled—that was the word Grey thought of, like the skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope—and his eyes were the orange of highway cones. But the teeth were the worst. Every once in a while Grey would hear a little tinkling sound on the audio, and know it was the sound of one more tooth dropped from Zero’s mouth to the cement. They rained down at the rate of half a dozen a day. These went into the incinerator, like everything else; it was one of Grey’s jobs to sweep them up, and it gave him the shivers to see them, long as the little swords you’d get in a fancy drink. Just the thing if, say, you wanted to unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat.

There was something about him that was different than the others, too. Not that he
looked
all that different. The glowsticks were all a bunch of ugly bastards, and over the six months Grey had been working on Level 4, he’d gotten used to their appearance. There were little differences, of course, that you could pick up if you looked hard. Number Six was a little shorter than the others, Number Nine a little more active, Number Seven liked to eat hanging upside down and made a goddamn mess, Number One was always chatting away, that weird sound they made, a wet clicking from deep in their throats that reminded Grey of nothing.

No, it wasn’t something physical that made Zero stand out; it was how he made you
feel
. That was the best way Grey could explain it. The others seemed about as interested in the people behind the glass as a bunch of chimps at the zoo. But not Zero: Zero was paying attention. Whenever they dropped the bars, sealing Zero on the back side of the room, and Grey squeezed into his biohazard suit and went in through the air lock to clean up or bring in the rabbits—
rabbits
, for Christsakes; why did it have to be rabbits?—a kind of prickling climbed up his neck, like his skin was crawling with ants. He’d go about his work quickly, not even really looking up from the floor, and by the time he got out of there and into decon, he’d be glazed with sweat and breathing hard. Even now, a wall of glass two inches thick between them and Zero hanging so that all Grey could see was his big glowing backside and spreading, clawlike feet—Grey could still feel Zero’s mind roving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.