The Passage (94 page)

“Don’t play games.”

“Oh, you mean Ru
-ben
.” Another quiet laugh. Theo would have given his life to reach through the wall and smash the speaker’s face. “Forget Ru
-ben
, Theo. Things did not work out so nicely for Ru
-ben
. Ru
-ben
, you might say, is ancient history.” A pause. “So tell me. How you sleeping?”

“What?”

“You heard me. You like that fat lady?”

His breath caught in his chest. “What did you say?”

“The fucking fat lady, Theo. Come on. Work with me here. We’ve all been there. The fat lady inside your head.”

The memory burst inside his brain like a piece of rotten fruit. The dreams. The fat lady in her kitchen. A voice was outside the door and it knew what his dreams were.

“I have to say, I never did like her very much myself,” the voice was saying. “Yakkity yakkity yakkity, all day long. And that stink. What the hell is that?”

Theo swallowed, trying to still his mind. The walls around him seemed closer somehow, squeezing him in. He put his head in his hands.

“I don’t know any fat lady,” Theo managed.

“Oh, sure you don’t. We’ve all been through it. It’s not like you’re the only one. Let me ask you something else.” The voice dropped to a whisper. “You carve her up yet, Theo? With the knife? You get to that part yet?”

A swirl of nausea. His breath caught in his chest. The knife, the knife.

“So you haven’t then. Well, you will. All in time. Trust me, when you get to that part, you’re gonna feel a
lot
better. That’s kind of a turning point, you could say.”

Theo lifted his face. The slot at the bottom of the door was still open, showing the tip of a single boot, leather so scuffed it looked white.

“Theo, you listening to me in there?”

His eyes fixed on the boot with the force of an idea taking hold. Gingerly he rose from the bed and moved toward the door, stepping around the bowl of soup. He sank into a crouch.

“Are you hearing my words? Because I am talking about some serious
re
-lief.”

Theo lunged. Too late: his hand grabbed empty air. A bright explosion of pain: something came down hard, hard, on his wrist. A boot heel. It smashed the bones flat, compressing his hand into the floor. Grinding and twisting. His face was shoved against the cold steel of the door.

“Fuck!”

“It hurts, don’t it?”

Spangled motes were dancing in his eyes. He tried to pull his hand away, but the force holding him in place was too strong. He was pinned now, one hand stuck through the slot. But the pain meant something. It meant the voice was real.

“You … go … to … hell.”

The heel twisted again; Theo yelped in agony.

“That’s a good one, Theo. Where did you
think
you were? Hell is your new address, my friend.”

“I’m not … your friend,” he gasped.

“Oh, maybe not. Maybe not just at the moment. But you will be. Sooner or later, you will be.”

Then, just like that, the pressure on Theo’s hand released—an absence of torment so abrupt it was like pleasure. Theo yanked his arm through the slot and slumped against the wall, breathing hard, cradling his wrist on his lap.

“Because, believe it or not, there are things even worse than me,” the voice said. “Sleep well, Theo.” And then the slot slammed closed.

VIII

THE HAVEN

The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again
.

—S
HAKESPEARE
,
The Tempest

FORTY-SEVEN

They had been on the road for hours. With nothing to lie on but the hard metal floor, sleep was all but impossible. It seemed that every time Michael closed his eyes, the truck would hit a bump or swerve one way or the other, sending some part of his body slamming down.

He lifted his head to see a glow of daylight gathering beyond the compartment’s only window, a small porthole of reinforced glass set in the door. His mouth was bone dry; every part of him felt bruised, as if someone had been hitting him with a hammer all night long. He rose to a sitting position, pushing his back against the jostling wall of the compartment, and rubbed the gunk from his eyes. The rest of the group were propped on their packs in various postures of discomfort. Though they were all banged up to some degree, Alicia seemed the worst off. She was facing him, her back resting against the wall of the compartment; her face was pale and damp, her eyes open but drained of energy. Mausami had done her best to clean and bandage Alicia’s injured leg the night before, but Michael could tell the wound was serious. Only Amy seemed to be actually sleeping. She was curled on the floor beside him, her knees pulled to her chest. A fan of dark hair lay over her cheek, pushed to and fro by the bouncing of the truck.

The memory hit him like a slap.

Sara, his sister, was gone.

He remembered running as fast as he could, through the kitchen and out onto the loading dock and into the street with the others, only to end up surrounded—smokes
everywhere
, the street was like a goddamn smoke party—and then the truck with its immense plow driving toward them, spewing its jet of flame.
Get in, get in
, the woman on top was yelling at him. And a good thing she had, because Michael had found himself, at just that moment, paralyzed with fear. Nailed to the ground with it. Hollis and the rest of them were yelling,
Come on, come on
, but Michael couldn’t move a muscle. Like he’d forgotten
how
. The truck was no more than ten meters away but it could have been a thousand. He turned and as he turned one of the virals locked eyes with him, cocking its head in that funny way they did, and everything seemed to slow down in a way that wasn’t good.
Oh boy
, a voice in Michael’s head was saying,
oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy
, and that was when the woman hit the viral with the flamethrower, coating it with a jet of liquid fire. It crisped up like a ball of fat. Michael actually heard the pop. Then someone was pulling him by the hand—Amy of all people, whose strength was surprising, more than he would have guessed from the little thing she was—and she shoved him into the truck.

Now it was morning. Michael felt himself pushed forward as the vehicle decelerated. Beside him, Amy’s eyes shot open; she rolled into a sitting position and drew her knees to her chest once more, her gaze fixed on the door.

The truck drew to a halt. Caleb scrambled to the window and peered outside.

“What do you see?” Peter had risen to a crouch; his hair was matted with dried blood.

“There’s some kind of structure, but it’s too far away.”

Footsteps on the roof, the sound of the driver’s door, opening and closing again.

Hollis was reaching for his rifle.

Peter put a hand out to stop him. “Wait.”

Caleb: “Here they come—”

The door swung open, blazing their eyes with daylight. Two backlit figures stood before them, clutching shotguns. The woman was young, with dark hair shorn close to her scalp; the man, much older, had a soft, wide face and a nose that looked punched and a few days’ growth of beard. Both were still encased in their bulky body armor, making their heads seem strangely undersized.

“Hand over your weapons.”

“Who the hell are you people?” Peter demanded.

The woman cocked her shotgun. “Everything. Knives, too.”

They disarmed, sliding their guns and blades along the floor in the direction of the door. Michael didn’t have much more than a screwdriver left—he’d lost his rifle in the dash from the hotel, never having fired the damn thing once—but he handed it over anyway. He certainly didn’t want to get shot over a screwdriver. While the woman collected their weapons, the second figure, who had yet to utter a word, kept his gun trained on all of them. In the distance, Michael could make out the shape of a long, low building set against a bulge of barren hills.

“Where are you taking us?” Peter asked.

The woman lifted a metal pail from the ground and placed it on the floor of the truck. “If you have to piss, use this.” Then she slammed the door.

Peter slapped the wall of the truck.
“Fuck.”

They drove on. The temperature was rising steadily. The truck decelerated again, turning west. For a long time the vehicle bounced violently; then they began to climb. By now the air in the cabin had become intolerably hot. They drank the last of their water; no one had used the pail.

Peter pounded on the wall that separated them from the truck’s cab. “Hey, we’re roasting back here!”

Time passed, and passed some more. No one spoke; just breathing was an effort. It seemed that some terrible joke had been played on them. They had been rescued from the virals only to be cooked to death in the back of a truck. Michael had begun to drift in and out of a state that felt like sleep but not exactly. He was hot, so hot. At some point he realized they were descending, though this detail seemed trivial, as if it pertained to some other person.

Gradually the fact seeped into Michael’s awareness that the vehicle had stopped. He had been lost in a vision of water, cool water. It was pouring over and through him, and his sister was there, and Elton too, smiling that off-kilter smile of his. Everyone was there, Peter and Mausami and Alicia and even his parents, they all were swimming in it together, its healing blueness, and for a moment Michael willed his mind to return to it, this beautiful dream of water.

“My God,” a voice said.

Michael opened his eyes to a harsh white light and smell, unmistakable, of animal dung. He rolled his face toward the door and saw a pair of figures—he knew he had seen them before but could not say when—and standing between them, brilliantly backlit so that he seemed almost to hover, a tall man with steel-gray hair, wearing what appeared to be an orange jumpsuit. “My God, my God,” the man was saying. “Seven of them. It’s beyond belief.” He turned to the others. “Don’t just stand there. We need stretchers.
Hurry
.”

The pair jogged away. The thought reached Michael’s brain that something was very wrong. Everything seemed to be happening at the far end of a tunnel. He could not have said where he was or why, although he also sensed that this knowledge had abandoned him only recently, a feeling like déjà vu in reverse. It was a kind of joke but the joke wasn’t funny, not at all. Some large, dry object was in his mouth, fat as a fist, and he realized this was his own tongue, choking him. He heard Peter’s voice, a labored croak: “Who … are … you?”

“My name is Olson. Olson Hand.” A smile lit up his wind-chapped face, only it wasn’t the silver-haired man anymore, it was Theo—it was Theo’s face at the far end of the tunnel—and that was the last thing Michael saw before the tunnel collapsed and all thought left him.

He did not come to so much as slowly surface, ascending through layers of darkness over a period of time that felt both short and long, an hour turned into a day, a day turned into a year. Darkness yielding to a widening whiteness above him, and the gradual reassembly of consciousness, distinct from his surroundings. His eyes were open, blinking. No other part of him seemed capable of movement, just his eyes, the damp plink of his lids. He heard the sound of voices, moving over him like the songs of distant birds, calling to one another across a vast expanse of sky. He thought: Cold. He was cold. Wonderfully, amazingly cold.

He slept, and when he opened his eyes again, some unknown interval of time having passed, he knew that he was in a bed, that the bed was in a room, and that he wasn’t alone. Lifting his head was out of the question; his bones felt as heavy as iron. He was in some kind of infirmary, white walls and white ceiling, angled beams of white light falling upon the white sheet that covered his body and beneath which, it seemed, he was naked. The air was cool and moist. From a place somewhere above and behind came the rhythmic throb of machinery and the drip of water falling into a metal pan.