The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (85 page)

My brothers
, Guilder thought,
I offer you this token, this foretaste. This tender morsel, this beginning. My brothers, come forward and together we will rule the Earth
.

Nina’s team of assassins tore up the stairs. They surfaced at field level in a dugout situated just below the bleachers where the senior staff members were seated. Once Eustace began his run they would spring onto the field, turn to face their enemies, and unleash the contents of their short-barreled automatics.

But now, crouched in the final moments of their concealment, they, like everyone in the crowd, experienced an emotion that was one part terror, one part wonder, one part something else that lacked any point of reference in their lives. Peter was simultaneously attempting to process three competing visual facts. The last of the Twelve were before him, mere yards away; Amy, suspended in chains, was the bait that had drawn them forth; Amy was not Amy but a grown woman. Greer and Alicia had tried to prepare him, but no words could have readied him for this reality.

Where was Eustace?

Then Peter saw him. He was standing at the rail in the end zone—just another flatlander, dragooned into the role of witness. The eleven virals stood before Guilder like a platoon of soldiers awaiting orders.
Goddamnit
, Peter thought,
you’re too far apart. Get closer to each other, you bastards
.

Guilder raised his arms.

Lila, alone. The Dome was silent, like a great animal holding its breath. This place, she thought. This tabernacle of pain. How could such a place be allowed to exist on the earth?

The gun was empty; she placed it on the floor and darted back down the hall. Behind each door lay a person on a slab, their life force slowly draining away. There was no time to save them, that was Lila’s one regret, but at least she could release them from their torment.

Room by room she traveled, unsealing the doors with the ring of keys she’d taken from the guard. A few words of benediction for each trapped soul within; then she opened the valves on the ether tanks. A cloying sweetness filled the air. Her movements began to feel sluggish; she would have to work quickly. Leaving the doors open behind herself, she made her way down the corridor. The warning signs were posted at regular intervals on the walls of the hallway:
ETHER PRESENT. NO OPEN FLAMES
.

She came to the final door. She tried one key and then another and another, her fingers heavy and imprecise, the gas already inside her. The serrations bit and held.

Lila’s heart shattered at the sight of him. They had chained him to the floor. He lay in naked degradation, suspended eternally at the precipice of death. Monsters! How could she have let this scene of anguish pass? How could she have waited a hundred years to alleviate his pain?

“Lawrence, what have they done to you?”

She hurled herself to her knees beside him. His eyes were open, but his stare seemed to pass through her to another world. She smoothed his wrinkled cheeks, his shriveled brow. She dipped her head to his, their foreheads touching as she stroked his face. “Lawrence,” she whispered, over and over, “my Lawrence.”

His lips at last formed words: “Save … me.”

“Of course I will, my darling.” The tears were pouring forth, a torrent. The gas was in the hall. From the pocket of her gown, Lila removed the box of matches. “We will save each other.”

High above the field, Greer and Lore were also waiting for the eleven virals to move.

“Goddamnit,” Greer said, the binoculars pressed to his eyes, “why aren’t they doing anything?”

Guilder’s hands were still raised. What was happening? He dropped them to his sides and lifted them again, waving with agitation. Still no response.

“Mother
fucker
!”

Lore’s hand was poised on the switch. Her voice was frantic. “What should I do? What should I do?”

“I don’t know!”

Then Greer saw movement on the field. A figure was racing from the end zone: Eustace.

“Do it! Turn on the lights!”

Even then, it was too late.

Sara, running: she tore across the atrium—was that gunfire outside?—and down the hall to Lila’s apartment, rocketing through the door.

“Kate!”

The child was asleep in her bed. As Sara scooped her up, her eyes fluttered open. “Mummy?”

“I’m here. Baby, I’m here.”

Now she was sure of it: there was shooting outside. (Though she could not be aware of this, this was the moment when her brother, Michael, rushing up the stairs, took a bullet to his right thigh, a pain he found oddly unimportant, so fueled was he by a rush of pure adrenaline. Hollis hadn’t lied: once things got rolling, shooting somebody wasn’t hard at all, and he picked off two more guards before his leg folded beneath him, the gun slipped from his hand—the thing was empty anyway—and his vision lit with stars.) Down the hall Sara dashed, carrying her child.
My child, my child
. They would live or they would die, but whichever it was they would do it together; never would they part again.

She hit the atrium at a sprint just as a man came blasting through the front doors. There was blood on his shirt; he was holding a gun. His bearded face was lit with a look of wild determination. Sara stopped in her tracks.

Hollis?

From her position high above the ground, Amy took in the whole of the scene. The crowd of thousands in its wild uproar; Guilder, his arms irrelevantly raised; the emergence of Nina’s team from the dugout, and the subsequent unleashing of their firepower upon the rows of suited men, who screamed and dove for cover and sometimes did nothing at all, sitting with uncomprehending composure as their bodies were splashed with rosy arcs of death; Alicia appearing on the field, weapon drawn, ready to charge; Eustace streaming toward them from the end zone, the bomb clutched to his chest, and behind him the col who dropped to one knee, raised his rifle, and took him in its sights; the spurt of blood, and Eustace spinning and tumbling, the bomb squirting away. These events
moved around her like planets in their orbits, a whirling cosmos of activity, yet their presence touched her only in passing, brushing her senses like a breeze. She stood at the center, she and her kinsmen, and it was there, on that stage, that all would be decided.

—My brothers, hello. It’s been a while.

We are Morrison-Chávez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Lambright-Martínez-Reinhardt …

—I am Amy, your sister.

That was when she felt him. In the midst of evil, a shining light. Amy sought out Carter with her eyes. He stood slightly apart, his body crouched in the posture of his kind.

It wasn’t Carter.

—Father.

Yes, Amy. I am here
.

A rush of love swelled her heart. Tears rose to her throat.

—Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry. Look away. Look away.

As the field blazed with light, Amy closed her eyes. It would be like opening a door. That was how she had imagined it. An act not of will but of surrender, to give away this life, this world. Images flashed through her mind, swifter than thought. Her mother kneeling to hug her, the bright force of her embrace, then a view of her back as she walked away; Wolgast, his big hand poised at her spine, standing beside her as she rode the carousel beneath the lights and music; a view of a starlit winter sky, on the night when they had made the snow angels; Caleb watching her with his knowing eyes as she tucked him into bed, asking, “Did anyone love you?”; Peter, standing at the door of the orphanage, their hands meeting in space, saying with touch what could not be said with words. The days flowed through her one by one, and when they had passed, Amy sent her mind outward to those she cherished, saying goodbye.

She opened the door.

At the edge of the field, Peter and the others, having emptied their magazines into the lower tiers, were dropping their clips to reload. They did not yet know that Eustace had been shot, only that the lights had come on as planned, signaling the start of his run; at any moment they expected the explosion to come from behind them.

It didn’t.

Peter spun toward the platform. The virals, doused by the lights, had adopted various postures of self-protection. Some were staggering backward with their faces buried in the crooks of their arms. Others had
dropped to the ground, curling in on themselves like babes in their cribs. It was an awesome sight, one Peter would remember all the days of his life, yet it paled in comparison to what was occurring above the platform.

Something was happening to Amy. She was convulsing against the chains, wracked by contractions of such violence it seemed she might shatter into pieces. Spasm after spasm, their power intensifying. With a final, bone-breaking jolt she went limp; for a hopeful moment Peter thought it was over.

It wasn’t over.

With a deep animal howl, Amy threw back her head. Now Peter understood what he was seeing. Something that should have taken hours was happening in seconds. The facial features melting into fetal vagueness. The spine elongating, fingers and toes stretching into clawed prehensility. Teeth ejected in advance of the picketlike rows, and the skin hardening into its thick, crystalline carapace. The space around her had begun to glow, as if the air itself were lit by the accelerated force of her transformation. With a violent jerk Amy pulled the chains across her chest, snapping them clean from their blocks, and by the time she reached the ground, crouching with liquid grace to absorb the impact of her fall, there were not eleven virals on the field but twelve.

There were Twelve.

She rose. She roared.

Which was when, in the basement of the Dome, Lila Kyle and Lawrence Grey, their fates never to be known, joined hands, counted to three, brushed the match across the striker, and all the lights went out.

65

The explosion in the basement, fueled by the fiery ignition of thirty-two hundred pounds of highly compressed diethyl ether inhalant, produced a release of energy roughly equivalent to the crash of a small passenger jet. With nowhere else to go, its explosive force rocketed upward, seeking any alley of travel to accommodate its rapidly oxygenating expansion—stairwells, hallways, ductwork—before folding back on itself and blasting through the floor. Once it was unleashed into the larger spaces of the
building, the rest was up for grabs. Windows blew. Furniture went airborne. Walls were suddenly there no longer. It rose and as it rose it expelled a gyring wake of pure destruction like a tornado in reverse, everything flung up and out from its white-hot heart, until it found the bones of the structure itself, the steel girders and meticulously chiseled limestone blocks that had suspended its roof above the Iowa prairie since the days of the pioneers, and blew them all to pieces.

The Dome began to fall.

Three miles away, the spectators in the stadium experienced the destruction of the Dome as a chain of discrete sensory occurrences: first a flash, then a boom, followed by a deep seismic rattle and a clamping down of blackness as the city’s power grid collapsed. Everybody froze, but in the next instant something changed. A new force roused to life inside them. Who could say who started it? Insurgents planted in the stands had already begun their assault on the guards, but now they weren’t alone. The crowd rose up in violence, a wild mob. So ferocious was their undammed fury that as they fell upon their captors it was as if their individuality had dissolved into a single animal collective. A swarm. A stampede. A pod. They became their enemy, as all must do; they ceased to be slaves, and so became alive.

On the field, Guilder was … dissolving.

He felt this first in the backs of his hands—an abrupt constriction of the skin, as if he were being shrink-wrapped. He held them up to his face. In numb incomprehension—the pain had yet to arrive—he watched as the flesh of his hands puckered and began to split open in long, bloodless seams. The sensation spread, dancing over the surface of his body. His fingertips found his face. It felt like touching a skull. His hair was falling out, his teeth. His back bent inward, drawing him into an old man’s stoop. He fell to his knees in the mud. He felt his bones collapsing, crumbling to dust.

“Grey, what did you do?”

A shadow fell.

Guilder lifted his face. The virals filled his darkening vision with a final image of their magnificence.
My brothers
, he thought,
what is happening to me? Help me, my brothers, I am dying
. But he saw no kinship in their eyes.

Betrayer
.

Betrayer
.

Betrayer betrayer betrayer …

Other things were occurring—gunshots, voices yelling, figures running
in the dark. But Guilder’s consciousness of these events was instantly subsumed into the larger awareness, cold and final, of what was about to happen to him.

Shawna
, he thought,
Shawna, all I wanted was a little company. All I wanted was not to die alone
.

And then they were upon him.

The conclusive unfolding of events, which accounted for just thirty-seven seconds in the lives of the participants, occurred in overlapping frames of simultaneous movement collapsing toward the center. Illuminated only by firelight—the barrels at the periphery continued to burn—and the virals’ phosphorescent glow, the scene possessed a whiff of hell. The virals, finished with Guilder, his body scattered in desiccated pieces that were more dust than corpse, had assembled in a loose line. They appeared to be regarding Amy with a look of caution. Perhaps they did not know yet what she portended; perhaps they were afraid of her. Peter, his weapon reloaded, was firing in bursts into their massive figures, though without visible effect; the bullets skimmed pointlessly off their armored bodies in bright sparks; they didn’t so much as glance in his direction. From the other side of the field, Alicia was moving forward with her pistol raised, just as Nina and Tifty were racing downfield to flank them. The plan was now moot; they had only their instincts. Standing erect on the platform, Amy raised her arms. From each wrist hung a long length of chain. She jerked them into the air and began to rotate them at her wrists, swinging them in wide, accelerating arcs. Spinners, Peter realized. Amy was making spinners, to disorient the virals. Faster and faster the chains whirred in the air above her head, a hypnotic blur of movement. The creatures froze, entranced. With an avian dart, Amy’s head tipped to the side; her gaze compacted, calculating the angle of attack. Peter knew what was about to happen.