The Twelve

46


Houston.

The liquefied city, drowned by the sea. The great urban quagmire, none but its skyscrapered heart left standing. Hurricanes, drenching tropical rains, the unchecked slide of a continent’s waters seeking final escape to the Gulf: for a hundred years the tides had come and gone, filling the lowlands, carving out grimy bayous and contaminated deltas, erasing all.

They were ten miles from the city’s central core. The last days of travel had been a game of hopscotch, seeking out the dry places and segments of passable roadway, hacking their way through thickets of spiny, insect-infested vegetation. In these quarters, nature unveiled its true malevolent purpose: everything here wanted to sting you, swarm you, bite you. The air creaked with its saturated weight and miasma of rot. The trees, gnarled like grasping hands, seemed like something from another age entirely. They seemed positively made up. Who would invent such trees?

Darkness came on with a chemically yellowish dimming. The trip had compacted to a crawl. Even Amy had begun to show her irritation. Her signs of illness had not abated; rather, the opposite. When she thought Greer wasn’t looking, he caught her pressing her palms to her stomach, exhaling with slow pain. They quartered that night on the top floor of a house that seemed outrageous in its ruined opulence: dripping chandeliers, rooms the size of auditoriums, all of it spattered with a black, off-gassing mold. A brown line three feet above the marble floor circumscribed the walls where floodwaters had once risen. In the massive bedroom where they took shelter, Greer opened the windows to clear the air of the ammonic stench: below him, in the vine-clotted yard, lay a swimming pool full of goo.

All night long, Greer could hear the dopeys moving in the trees outside. They vaulted from limb to limb, like great apes. He listened to them rustling through the foliage, followed by the sharp animal cries of rats and squirrels and other small creatures meeting their demise. Amy’s injunction notwithstanding, he dozed fitfully, pistol in hand. Just remember. Carter’s one of us. He prayed it was true.

Amy was no better in the morning.

“We should wait,” he said.

Even standing seemed to take all the strength she could muster. She made no effort to hide her discomfort, gripping the flat of her belly, her head bowed in pain. He could see the spasms shuddering her abdomen as the cramps moved through her.

“We go,” she said, speaking through gritted teeth.

They continued east. The skyscrapers of downtown emerged in their particularity. Some had collapsed, the clay soil having expanded and contracted over the years to pulverize their foundations; others reclined against each other like drunks stumbling home from a bar. Amy and Greer traced a narrow spit of sand between weed-choked bayous. The sun was high and bright. Seaborne wreckage had begun to appear: boats, and parts of boats, splayed on their sides in the shallows as if in a swoon of exhaustion. When they reached the place where the land ended, Greer dismounted, retrieved the binoculars from his saddlebag, and pointed them across the stained waters. Dead ahead, wedged against a skyscraper, lay a vast ship, hard aground. Her stern rose impossibly high in the air, massive propellers visible above the waterline. On it was written the vessel’s name, dripping with rust: CHEVRON MARINER.

“That’s where we’ll find him,” said Amy.

There was no dry path across; they would have to find a boat. Luck favored them. After backtracking a quarter mile, they discovered an aluminum rowboat overturned in the weeds. The bottom appeared sound, the rivets tight. Greer dragged it to the lagoon’s edge and set it afloat. When it failed to sink, he helped Amy down from her mount.

“What about the horses?” he asked her.

Her face was a mask of barely bottled pain. “We should be back before dark, I think.”

He stabilized the craft as Amy boarded, then lowered himself onto the middle bench. A flat board served as a paddle. Seated in the stern, Amy had been reduced to cargo. Her eyes were closed, her hands wrapped her waist, sweat dripping from her brow. She made no sound, though Greer suspected her silence was for his benefit. As the distance narrowed, the ship expanded to mind-boggling dimensions. Its rusted sides loomed hundreds of feet over the lagoon. It was listing to one side; the surrounding water was black with oil. Greer paddled their craft into the lobby of the adjacent building and brought them to rest beside a bank of motionless escalators.

“Lucius, I think I’m going to need your help.”

He assisted her from the boat and up the nearest escalator, supporting her by the waist. They found themselves in an atrium with several elevators and walls of smoked glass. ONE ALLEN CENTER a sign read, with a directory of offices beneath. The ascent that lay ahead would be serious; they’d need to climb ten stories at least.

“Can you make it?” Greer asked.

Amy bit her lip and nodded.

They followed the sign for the stairs. Greer lit a torch, gripped her at the waist again, and began to climb. The trapped air of the stairwell was poisonous with mold; every few floors they were forced to step out just to clear their lungs. At the twelfth floor, they stopped.

“I think we’re high enough,” said Greer.

From the sealed windows of a book-lined office they looked down on the tanker’s decking, wedged hard against the building ten feet below. An easy drop. Greer took the desk chair, hoisted it over his head, and flung it through the window.

He turned to look at Amy.

She was studying her hand, holding it before her like a cup. A bright red fluid filled her palm. It was then that Greer noticed the stain on her tunic. More blood was trickling down her legs.

“Amy—”

She met his eye. “You’re tired.”

It was like being wrapped in an infinite softness. A blanketing, whole-body sleep.

“Oh, damn,” he said, already gone, and folded to the floor.





47


Peter and the others entered San Antonio on Highway 90. It was early morning; they had passed the first night in a hardbox in the city’s outer ring of suburbs, a sprawl of collapsed and scoured houses. The room lay beneath a police station, with a fortified ramp at the rear. Not a DS hardbox, Hollis explained; one of Tifty’s. It was larger than the hardboxes Peter had seen, though no less crude—just a stuffy room with bunks and a garage bay where a fat-tired pickup awaited, cans of fuel in the bed. Crates and metal military lockers were stacked along the walls. What’s in these? Michael asked, to which Hollis said, one eyebrow raised, I don’t know, Michael. What do you think?

They drove out at first light beneath a heavy sky, Hollis at the wheel beside Peter, Michael and Lore riding in the truck’s bed. Much of the city had burned in the days of the epidemic; little remained of the central core save for a handful of the taller buildings, which stood with forlorn austerity against the backdrop of bleached hills, their scorched facades telegraphing the blackened and collapsed interiors where an army of dopeys now dozed the day away. “Just dopeys,” people always said, though the truth was the truth: a viral was a viral.

Peter was waiting for Hollis to turn off, to take them north or south, but instead he drove them into the heart of town, leaving the highway for narrow surface streets. The way had been cleared, cars and trucks hauled to the sides of the roadway. As the shadows of the buildings engulfed the truck, Hollis slid the cab’s rear window open. “You better weapon up,” he cautioned Michael and Lore. “You’ll want to watch yourself through here.”

“All eyes, hombre,” came the man’s reply.

Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.

They moved through without incident. Vegetation began to crowd the roadway as the gaps between the buildings widened.

“How much longer?” he asked Hollis.

“Don’t worry. It’s not far.”

Ten minutes later they were skirting a fence line. Hollis pulled the vehicle to the gate, removed a key from the glove box of the pickup, and stepped out. Peter was struck by a sense of the past: Hollis might have been Peter’s brother, Theo, opening the gate to the power station, all those years ago.

“Where are we?” he asked when Hollis returned to the truck.

“Fort Sam Houston.”

“A military base?”

“More like an Army hospital,” Hollis explained. “At least it used to be. Not a lot of doctoring goes on here anymore.”

They drove on. Peter had the sense of driving through a small village. A tall clock tower stood to one side of a quadrangle that might have once been the center of town. Apart from a few ceremonial cannons, he saw nothing that seemed military—no trucks or tanks, no weapon emplacements, no fortifications of any kind. Hollis brought the pickup to a halt before a long, low building with a flat roof. A sign above the door read, AQUATICS CENTER.

“Aquatics,” Lore said, after they’d all disembarked. She squinted doubtfully at the sign, a rifle balanced across her chest in a posture of readiness. “Like … swimming?”

Hollis gestured at the rifle. “You should leave that here. Wouldn’t want to make a bad impression.” He shifted his attention to Peter. “Last chance. There’s no way to undo this.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

They entered the foyer. All things considered, the building’s interior was in good shape: ceilings tight, windows solid, none of the usual trash.

“Feel that?” Michael said.

A basal throbbing, like a gigantic plucked string, was radiating from the floor. Somewhere in the building a generator was operating.

“I kind of expected there to be guards,” Peter said to Hollis.

“Sometimes there are, when Tifty wants to put on a show. But basically we don’t need them.”

Hollis led them to a pair of doors, which he pushed open to reveal a great, tiled space, the ceiling high above and, at the center of the room, a vast, empty swimming pool. He guided them to a second pair of swinging doors and a flight of descending stairs, illuminated by buzzing fluorescents. Peter thought to ask Hollis where Tifty got the gas for his generator, but then answered the question for himself. Tifty got it where he got everything; he stole it. The stairs led to a room crowded with pipes and metal tanks. They were under the pool now. They made their way through the cramped space to yet another door, though different from the others, fashioned of heavy steel. It bore no markings of any kind, nor was there an obvious way to open it; its smooth surface possessed no visible mechanisms. On the wall beside it was a keypad. Hollis quickly punched in a series of digits, and with a deep click the door unlatched, revealing a dark corridor.

“It’s okay,” Hollis said, angling his head toward the opening, “the lights go on automatically.”

As the big man stepped through, a bank of fluorescents flickered to life, their vibrancy intensified by the hospital-white walls of the corridor. Peter’s sense of Tifty was radically evolving. What had he imagined? A filthy encampment, populated by huge, apelike men armed to the teeth? Nothing he had seen even remotely conformed to these expectations. To the contrary: the display so far indicated a level of technical sophistication that seemed well beyond Kerrville’s. Nor was he alone in this shifting of opinion; Michael, too, was frankly gawking. Some place, his face seemed to say.

The corridor ended at an elevator. A camera was poised above it. Whoever was on the other side knew they were coming; they’d been observed since they’d entered the hall.

Hollis tilted his face upward to the lens, then pressed a button on the wall adjacent to a tiny speaker. “It’s all right,” he said. “They’re with me.”

A crackle of static, then: “Hollis, what the f*ck.”

“Everyone’s unarmed. They’re friends of mine. I’ll vouch for them.”

“What do they want?”

“We need to see Tifty.”

A pause, as if the voice on the other end of the intercom was conferring with somebody else; then: “You can’t just bring them here like this. Are you out of your mind?”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Just open the door, Dunk.”

An empty moment followed. Then the doors slid open.

“It’s your ass,” the voice said.

They entered; the elevator commenced its downward creep. “Okay, I’ll bite,” Michael ventured. “What is this place?”

“You’re in an old USAMRIID station. It’s an annex to the main facility in Maryland, activated during the epidemic.”

“What’s USAMRIID?” asked Lore.

It was Michael who answered. “It stands for ‘United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.’ ” He frowned at Hollis. “I don’t get it. What’s Tifty doing here?”

And then the doors of the elevator opened to the sound of weapons being cocked, and each of them was staring down the barrel of a gun.

* * *

“All of you, on your knees.”

There were six. The youngest appeared to be no more than twenty, the oldest in his forties. Scruffy beards and greasy hair and teeth clotted with grime: this was more like it. One of them, a giant of a man with a great bald head and ridges of soft fat folded at the base of his neck, had bluish tattoos all over his face and the exposed flesh of his arms. This, apparently, was Dunk.

“I told you,” Hollis said, kneeling on the floor like the rest of them, hands on top of his head, “they’re friends of mine.”

“Quiet.” His clothing was a hodgepodge of different uniforms, both military and DS. He holstered his revolver and crouched in front of Peter, sizing him up with his intense gray eyes. Viewed up close, the images on his face and arms became clear. Virals. Viral hands, viral faces, viral teeth. Peter had no doubt that beneath his clothes, the man’s body was covered with them.

“Expeditionary,” Dunk drawled, nodding gravely. “Tifty’s going to like this. What’s your name, Lieutenant?”

“Jaxon.”

“Peter Jaxon?”

“That’s right.”

Maintaining his crouch, Dunk swiveled on the heels of his boots toward the others. “How about that, gentlemen. It’s not every day we get such distinguished visitors.” He focused on Peter again. “We don’t get visitors at all, actually. Which is a bit of a problem. This isn’t what you’d call a tourist destination.”

“I need to see Tifty.”

“So I hear. Tifty, I’m afraid, is indisposed at the moment. A very private fellow, our Tifty.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Hollis said. “I told you, I’ll vouch for them. Tifty needs to hear what they have to say.”

“This is your mess, my friend. I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to be making demands. And what about you two?” he asked, addressing Lore and Michael. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“We’re oilers,” Michael replied.

“Interesting. Did you bring us any oil?” His gaze narrowed on Lore; a smile, bright with menace, flickered over his face. “Now, you I think I know. Poker, wasn’t it? Or dice. Probably you don’t remember.”

“With a mug like yours, how could I forget?”

Grinning, Dunk rose and rubbed his meaty hands together. “Well, it’s been very nice meeting all of you. A real pleasure. Before we kill you, does anyone have anything else to say? Goodbye, maybe?”

“Tell Tifty it’s about the field,” said Hollis.

Something changed; Peter could sense it at once. The words fell over Dunk’s face like a shadow.

“Tell him,” Hollis said.

The man appeared stunned into inaction. Then he drew his pistol.

“Let’s go.”

Dunk and his men escorted them down a long corridor. Peter took stock of their surroundings, though there wasn’t much to see, just more halls and closed doors. Many of the doors had keypads on the walls beside them like the one beneath the pool. Dunk brought them to a halt before one such door and gave it three hard raps.

“Enter.”

The great gangster Tifty Lamont. Once again Peter found his expectations overturned. He was a physically compact man, with glasses perched on the tip of his long, hooked nose. His pale hair flowed over his neck, thin at the top with a crown of pink scalp beneath. Seated behind a large metal desk, he was performing the improbable act of constructing a tower out of wooden sticks.

“Yes, Dunk?” he said, not looking up. “What is it?”

“We’ve captured three intruders, sir. Hollis brought them in.”

“I see.” He continued with his patient stacking. “And you did not kill them because …?”

Dunk cleared his throat. “It’s about the field, sir. They say they know something.”

Tifty’s hands halted over the model. After several seconds, he lifted his face, peering at them over his glasses.

“Who says?”

Peter stepped forward. “I do.”

Tifty studied him a moment. “And the others? What do they know?”

“They were with me when I saw her.”

“Saw who, exactly?”

“The woman.”

Tifty said nothing. His face was as rigid as a blind man’s. Then: “Everyone out. Except for you …” He wagged a finger toward Peter. “What’s your name?”

“Peter Jaxon.”

“Except for Mr. Jaxon.”

“What do you want me to do with the others?” Dunk asked.

“Use your imagination. They look hungry—why don’t you give them something to eat?”

“What about Hollis?”

“I’m sorry, did I mishear you? Didn’t you say he brought them in?”

“That’s the thing. He showed them where we are.”

Tifty sighed heavily. “Well, that is a wrinkle. Hollis, what am I going to do with you? There are rules. There’s a code. Honor among thieves. How many times do I have to say it?”

“I’m sorry, Tifty. I thought you needed to hear what he had to say.”

“Well, sorry doesn’t cut it. This is a very awkward position you’ve put me in.” He cast his eyes wearily around the room, as if his next sentence could be found somewhere among its shelves and files. “Very well. Where are you on the roster?”

“Number four.”

“Not anymore. You’re suspended from the cage until I say otherwise. I know how much you like it. I’m being generous here.”

Hollis’s face showed nothing. What was the cage? Peter thought.

“Thank you, Tifty,” Hollis said. “Now all of you get the hell out.”

The door sealed behind them. Peter waited for Tifty to speak first. The man rose from behind his desk and stepped to a small table with a pitcher of water. He poured himself a glass and drank it down. Just when the silence had begun to strain, he addressed Peter with his back turned.

“What was she wearing?”

“A dark cloak and glasses.”

“What else did you see? Was there a truck?”

Peter recounted the events on the Oil Road. Tifty let him talk. When Peter had concluded, the man moved back to his desk.

“Let me show you something.”

He opened the top drawer, removed a sheet of paper, and slid it across the desktop. A charcoal drawing, the paper stiffened and slightly discolored, of a woman and two little girls.

“You’ve seen one of these before, haven’t you? I can tell.”

Peter nodded. The picture wasn’t anything he could easily pull his eyes from. It possessed an overwhelming hauntedness, as if the woman and her children were gazing out of the page from someplace beyond the ordinary parameters of time and space. Like looking at a ghost, three ghosts.

“Yes, in Colorado. Greer showed it to me, after Vorhees was killed. A big stack of them.” He lifted his eyes to find Tifty watching him keenly, like a teacher giving a test. “Why do you have a copy?”

“Because I loved them,” Tifty replied. “Vor and I had our difficulties, but he always knew how I felt. They were my family, too. That’s why he gave this to me.”

“They died in the field.”

“Dee, yes, and the little one, Siri. Both were killed outright. It was fast, though you know the saying: Make it quick, but not today. The older girl, Nitia, was never found.” He frowned. “You’re surprised by all this? Not quite what you expected?”

Peter couldn’t even begin to answer.

“I’m telling you these things so you understand who and what we are. All these men have lost someone. I give them a home, a place to put their anger. Take Dunk, for instance. He may be imposing now, but when I look at him, do you know what I see? An eleven-year-old kid. He was in the field, too. Father, mother, sister, all gone.”

“I don’t see what running the trade has to do with that.”

“That’s because it’s only part of what we do. A way of paying the bills, if you like. The Civilian Authority tolerates us because it has to. In a way, it needs us as much as we need it. We’re not so very different from your Expeditionary, just the other side of the same coin.”

Tifty’s logic felt too convenient, a way to justify his crimes; on the other hand, Peter could not deny the meaning of the picture.

“Colonel Apgar said you were an officer. A scout sniper.”

Tifty’s face lit with a quick smile; there was a story there. “I should have known Gunnar would have something to do with this. What did he tell you?”

“That you made captain before you busted out. He called you the best S2 there ever was.”

“Did he? Well, he’s being kind, but only a little.”

“Why did you resign?”

Tifty shrugged carelessly. “Many reasons. You could say that military life didn’t suit me on the whole. Your presence here makes me think it may not suit you particularly well, either. My guess would be you’ve gone off the reservation, Lieutenant. How many days are you AWOL?”

Peter felt caught. “Just a couple.”

“AWOL is AWOL. Believe me, I know all about that. But in answer to your question, I left the Expeditionary because of the woman in the field. More specifically, because I told Command where she came from, and they refused to do anything about it.”

Peter was dumbstruck. “You know where she comes from?”

“Of course I know. So does Command. Why do you think Gunnar sent you here? Fifteen years ago, I was part of a squad of three sent north to locate the source of a radio signal somewhere in Iowa. Very faint, just little scratches of noise, but enough to catch it with an RDF. We didn’t know why, the Exped wasn’t in the business of chasing down every random squeak, but it was all very hush-hush, very top-down. Our orders were to scout it out and report back, nothing more. What we found was a city at least two, maybe three times the size of Kerrville. But it had no walls, no lights. By any reckoning, it shouldn’t have existed at all. And you know what we saw? Trucks like the one I saw in the field just before the attack. Like the one you saw three days ago.”

“So what did Command say?”

“They ordered us never to tell anyone.”

“Why would they do that?” Though, of course, they had told Peter exactly the same thing.

“Who knows? But my guess would be the order came from the Civilian Authority, not the military. They were scared. Whoever those people were, they had a weapon we couldn’t match.”

“The virals.”

The man nodded evenly. “Stick your fingers in your ears and hope they never came back. Maybe not wrong, but it wasn’t anything I could sit with. That was the day I resigned my commission.”

“Did you ever go back?”

“To Iowa? Why would I do that?”

Peter felt a mounting urgency. “Vorhees’s daughter could be there. Sara, too. You saw those trucks.”

“I’m sorry. Sara. Do I know this person?”

“She’s Hollis’s wife. Or would have been. She was lost at Roswell.”

A look of regret eased across the man’s face. “Of course. My mistake. I believe I knew that, though I don’t think he ever mentioned her name. Nevertheless, this changes nothing, Lieutenant.”

“But they could still be alive.”

“I don’t think it’s likely. A lot of time has passed. Either way, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Not then and not now. You’d need an army. Which the CA more or less guaranteed we didn’t have. And in the leadership’s defense, these people, whoever they are, never returned. At least until now, if what you’re saying is true.”

Something was missing, Peter thought, a detail lurking at the edge of his awareness. “Who else was with you?”

“On the scouting party? The officer in charge was Nate Crukshank. The third man was a young lieutenant named Lucius Greer.”

The information passed through Peter like a current.

“Take me there. Show me where it is.”

“And what would we do when we got there?”

“Find our people. Get them out somehow.”

“Are you listening, Lieutenant? These aren’t just survivors. They’re in league with the virals. More than that—the woman can control them. Both of us have seen it happen.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should. All you’ll accomplish is getting yourself killed. Or taken. My guess is, that would be a good deal worse.”

“Then just tell me how to find it. I’ll go on my own.”

Tifty rose from behind his desk, returned to the table in the corner, and poured himself another glass of water. He drank it slowly, sip by sip. As the silence lengthened, Peter got the distinct impression that the man’s mind had taken him elsewhere. He wondered if the meeting was over.

“Tell me something, Mr. Jaxon. Do you have children?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Indulge me.”

Peter shook his head. “No.”

“No family at all?”

“I have a nephew.”

“And where is he now?”

The questions were uncomfortably probing. And yet Tifty’s tone was so disarming, the answers seemed to spring forth of their own accord. “He’s with the sisters. His parents were killed at Roswell.”

“Are you close? Do you matter to him?”

“Where are you going with this?”

Tifty ignored the question. He placed his empty glass on the table and returned to his desk.

“I suspect he admires you a great deal. The great Peter Jaxon. Don’t be so modest—I know just who you are, and more than the official account. This girl of yours, Amy, and this business with the Twelve. And don’t blame Hollis. He’s not my source.”

“Who then?”

Tifty grinned. “Perhaps another time. Our subject at hand is your nephew. What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Caleb.”

“Are you a father to Caleb, is what I’m asking. Despite your gallivanting around the territories, trying to rid the world of the great viral menace, would you say that’s true?”

Suddenly Peter had the sense of having been perfectly maneuvered. It reminded him of playing chess with the boy: one minute he was drifting in the current of the game; the next he was boxed in, the end had come.

“It’s a simple question, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t know.”

Tifty regarded him another moment, then said, with a note of finality, “Thank you for your honesty. My advice to you would be to forget about all of this and go home and raise your boy. For his sake, as much as your own, I’m willing to give you a pass and let you and your friends go free, with the warning that speaking of our whereabouts will not, how shall I put this, bring happy things your way.”

Checkmate. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

“Consider it the greatest favor anybody’s ever done you. Go home, Mr. Jaxon. Live your life. You can thank me later.”

Peter’s mind scrambled for something to say that might convince the man otherwise. He gestured toward the drawing on the desk. “Those girls. You said you loved them.”

“I did. I do. That’s why I’m not going to help you. Call me sentimental, but I won’t have your death on my conscience.”

“Your conscience?”

“I do have one, yes.”

“You surprise me, you know that?” Peter said.

“Really? How do I surprise you?”

“I never thought Tifty Lamont would be a coward.”

If Peter had expected to get a rise, he saw none. Tifty rocked back in his chair, placed the tips of his fingers together, and looked at him coolly over the tops of his spectacles. “And you were thinking maybe that if you pissed me off, I’d tell you what you want to know?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Then you mistake me for somebody who cares what others think. Nice try, Lieutenant.”

“You said one of them was never found. I don’t see how you can sit here if she could still be alive.”

Tifty sighed indulgently. “Perhaps you didn’t get the news, but this isn’t a what-if world, Mr. Jaxon. Too many what-ifs are just a way to keep yourself up at night, and there’s not enough decent sleep to go around. Don’t get me wrong, I admire your optimism. Well, maybe not admire—that might be too strong a word. But I do understand it. There was a time when I wasn’t so very different. But those days are passed. What I have is this picture. I look at it every day. For now, that’s what I have to content myself with.”

Peter picked up the drawing again. The woman’s shining smile, the lift of her hair on an unseen breeze, the little girls, wide-eyed, hopeful like all children, waiting for their lives to unfold. He had no doubt that this picture was the center of Tifty’s life. Looking at it, Peter sensed the presence of a complex debt, allegiances, promises made. This picture: it wasn’t just a memorial; it was the man’s way of punishing himself. Tifty wished he’d died with them, in the field. How strange, to find himself feeling sorry for Tifty Lamont.

Peter returned the picture to its place on Tifty’s desk. “You said the trade was only part of what you do. You never told me what else.”

“I didn’t, did I?” Tifty removed his glasses and rose. “Fair enough. Come with me.”


Tifty manipulated another keypad and the heavy door swung open, revealing a spacious room with large metal cages stacked against the walls. The air was rank with a distinctly animal scent, of blood and raw meat, and the high-noted aroma of alcohol. The light glowed a cool, violety blue—“viral blue,” Tifty explained, with a wavelength of four hundred nanometers, at the very edge of the visible spectrum. Just enough, he told Peter, to keep them calm. The builders of the facility had understood their subjects well.

Michael and Lore had joined them. They passed through the room of cages and ascended a short flight of stairs. What awaited them was obvious; it was just a question of how it would be revealed.

“And this,” said Tifty, opening a panel to reveal two buttons, one green, one red, “is the observation deck.”

They were standing on a long balcony with a series of catwalks jutting over a metal shelf. Tifty pushed the green button. With a clatter of gears and chain, the shelf began to withdraw into the far wall, revealing a surface of hardened glass.

“Go on,” Tifty urged. “Look for yourselves.”

Peter and the others stepped onto the catwalk. Instantly one of the virals hurled itself upward against the glass, crashing into it with a thump before bouncing off and rolling back to the corner of its cell.

“F*ck … me,” Lore gasped.

Tifty joined them on the catwalk. “This facility was built with one purpose in mind: studying the virals. More accurately, how to kill them.”

The three of them were staring at the containers below. Peter counted nineteen of the creatures in all; the twentieth container was empty. Most appeared to be dopeys, barely reacting to their presence, but the one who had leapt at them was different—a full-blown female drac. She eyed them hungrily as they moved along the catwalks, her body tense and her clawed hands flexing.

“How do you get them?” Michael asked.

“We trap them.”

“With what, spinners?”

“Spinners are for amateurs. The gyrations immobilize them, but such devices are no good, really, unless you want to crisp them on-site. To take them alive, we use the same baited traps the builders of this facility used. A tungsten alloy, incredibly strong.”

Peter tore his gaze away from the drac. “So what have you learned?”

“Not as much as I’d like. The chest, the roof of the mouth. There’s a third soft spot at the base of the skull, though it’s very small. They bleed to death if you dismember them, but it’s not easy cutting through the skin. Heat and cold don’t seem to have much effect. We’ve tried a variety of poisons, but they’re too smart for that. Their sense of smell is incredibly acute, and they won’t eat anything we’ve laced no matter how hungry they get. One thing we do know is that they’ll drown. Their bodies are too dense to keep them afloat, and they can’t hold their breath very long. The longest any of them lasted was seventy-six seconds.”

“What if you starve them?” Michael asked.

“We tried that. It slows them down, and they enter a kind of sleep state.”

“And?”

“As far as we can tell, they can stay that way indefinitely. Eventually we stopped trying.”

Suddenly Peter understood what he was seeing. The work of the trade was really just a cover. The man’s true purpose was right here, in this room.

“Tifty, you are full of shit.”

Everybody turned. Tifty crossed his arms over his chest and gave Peter a hard look.

“You have something on your mind, Lieutenant?”

“You always meant to go back to Iowa. You just couldn’t figure out how.”

Tifty’s expression didn’t change. His face looked suddenly older, worn down by life. “That’s an interesting theory.”

“Is it?”

For five seconds the two men stared at each other. No one else said anything. Just when the silence had gone on too long, Michael broke the tension.

“I think she likes you, Peter.”

Fifteen feet below, the big drac was looking up at him, her head rolling lazily on her gimballed neck. She uncocked her jaw like someone yawning and drew back her lips to display her glinting teeth. These are for you.

Tifty stepped forward. “Our latest addition,” he said. “We’re all very proud of this one—we’ve been tracking her for weeks. It’s not often we get a full-blown drac anymore. We call her Sheila.”

“What are you going to do to her?” Michael asked.

“We haven’t decided. More or less the usual, I suppose. A little of this, a little of that. She’s too mean for the cage, though.”

Peter recalled Hollis’s punishment. “What’s the cage?”

Tifty’s face lit with a smile. “Ah,” he said.


Midnight. During the intervening hours, the three of them had been confined to a small, unused room, with one of Tifty’s men outside. Peter had finally managed to fall asleep when a buzzer sounded and the door opened.

“Come with me,” said Tifty.

“Where are we going?” Lore asked.

“Outside, of course.”

Why “of course”? thought Peter. But this seemed to be Tifty’s way. The man had a taste for drama. “Where’s Hollis?” Peter asked.

“Not to worry, he’ll be joining us.”

A cloudy, starless night. A truck was waiting for them, parked at the steps. They climbed into the bed while Tifty got into the cab with the driver. They weren’t guarded, but unarmed, in the dark, where would they go?

A few minutes passed before the truck drew up to an immense rectangular building, like an airplane hangar. Several other vehicles were present, including a large flatbed. Men milled about in torchlight, conspicuously armed with pistols and rifles, some smoking corn silk. From inside the building came a buzz of voices.

“Now you’ll see what we’re really all about,” said Tifty.

The building’s interior was a single cavernous space, lit by torches. A huge American flag, tattered with age, hung from the rafters. At the center was the cage, a domed structure approximately fifty feet in diameter with a hooked chain descending to the floor from its apex. Surrounding it were bleachers packed with men, all talking loudly, urgently waving Austins at a figure moving up and down the rows. At Tifty’s entrance a cheer shot up from the crowd, accompanied by a thunder of pounding feet. He did nothing to acknowledge this, escorting the three of them to an empty region on the lower tier of the bleachers, just a few feet from the crisscrossing bars of the cage.

“Five minutes till the betting closes!” a voice rang out. “Five minutes!”

Hollis took a place beside them. “Is this what I think it is?” Peter said.

He nodded tersely. “Pretty much.”

“They’re actually betting on the outcome?”

“Some are. With dopeys, mostly it’s just how many minutes it will take.”

“And you’ve actually done this.”

Hollis looked at him strangely. “Why wouldn’t I?”

The conversation was cut short as a second, louder cheer erupted. Peter looked up to see a metal crate being toted into the room on a forklift. A figure entered from the other side, walking with a manful swagger: Dunk. He was wearing heavy pads and carrying a pike; a sweeper’s mask rode on top of his head, leaving his tattooed face exposed. He raised his right fist and pumped it in the air, summoning a frenzied stamping from the bleachers. The forklift operator dropped the box in the middle of the cage and backed away while a second man hooked the latch to the chain. As he moved clear, Dunk stepped inside. The door was locked behind him.

A hush fell. Tifty, seated beside Peter, got to his feet, holding a megaphone. He cleared his throat and directed his voice over the crowd. “All please rise for the national anthem.”

Everyone clambered to their feet, placed their right hands over their hearts, and began to sing:

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,

O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?



Peter, standing too, struggled to recall the words. It was a song from long ago—from the Time Before. Teacher had taught them in the Sanctuary. But the melody had been tricky and the words had made no sense his boyhood self could discern, and he’d never gotten the hang of it. He glanced at Michael, whose eyebrows lifted in shared surprise.

The last screeching note extinguished itself in another detonation of cheers. From the aural chaos emerged a repeated refrain, the beat established by thundering feet: Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk … Tifty let it run its course, then raised a hand for silence. He faced the cage again.

“Dunk Withers, do you stand ready?”

“Ready!”

“Then … start the clock!”

Pandemonium. Dunk drew his mask down, a horn sounded, the chain was pulled. For a moment nothing happened; then the dopey popped free of the crate and skittered up the cage with a quick, insectile movement, like a roach scurrying up a wall. It could have been looking for a way out or a vantage point for attack; Peter couldn’t tell. The crowd had its opinion. Instantly the cheers turned to boos and catcalls. At the top of the cage, the dopey grasped one of the bars with its feet and unfurled its body so that the top of its head was pointed toward the floor, arms held away from its sides. Dunk stood below it, shouting unhearable taunts and waving the pike, daring it to drop. Meat! the crowd chanted, clapping in syncopation. Meat! Meat! Meat!

The dopey seemed disoriented, almost dazed. Its bland gaze darted about the room randomly, as if the racket and commotion had short-circuited its instincts. Its features had a blurry appearance, as if its human characteristics had been dissolved by strong acid. For five more seconds it hung there, then ten.

Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!

“Enough already.” Tifty rose to his feet, taking up the megaphone. “Throw in the meat!”

From without the bars huge, blood-saturated chunks were lobbed into the cage, landing with smeary splats. This was all it took. The creature released the steel bar and dove for the nearest hunk. The upper section of a cow’s leg: the dopey scooped it off the floor and shoved its jaws into the fatty folds, not so much drinking the fluids it contained as inhaling them. Two seconds and it was drained; the creature flung the desiccated remains away.

It swiveled toward Dunk. Now the man meant something. The dopey lowered itself to a crouch, balanced on its prehensile toes and massive splayed hands. The telltale cock of the head, the moment of regard.

It charged.

As the viral leapt toward him, arms extended, claws aiming for his throat, Dunk dropped to the floor and came up swinging the pike. The crowd went wild. Peter felt it too, the raw excitement of the contest surging in his veins. Dodging the pike, the dopey scampered back up the wall of the cage. No dazed retreat this time: its intentions were clear. When they came, they came from above. Twenty feet up, the dopey pushed itself backward off the bars, tucking its body into a headfirst aerial roll, twisting like a corkscrew as it descended in a rush of movement, and alighted on its feet ten feet from Dunk. The same engagement reversed: Dunk lunged; the dopey dropped. The pike speared the empty air above its head. As Dunk fell forward, carried by his own momentum, the dopey shot from its crouch and rammed headlong into his padded midsection, blasting him across the cage.

Dunk wound up propped upright against the bars, obviously shaken. The pike lay on the floor to his left; the mask had been torn away. Peter saw him reaching for the weapon, but the gesture was weak, his hand scrabbling with fogged inaccuracy. His chest was heaving like a bellows, a trickle of blood running from his nose to his upper lip. Why hadn’t the dopey taken him yet?

Because it was a trap. The dopey seemed to suspect as much; as it contemplated the fallen warrior, Peter could sense the creature’s interior conflict. The drive to kill versus an inchoate tactical suspicion that not all was as it appeared—a vestige, perhaps, of the human capacity for reason. Which would win out? The crowd was chanting Dunk’s name, trying to rouse him from his stupor. That or goad the dopey into action. Any death would do. Just by going into the cage, Dunk had already secured the most important victory: to be human. To deny the virals’ dominion over himself, over his fellows, over the world. The rest would fall as it fell.

Blood won.

The dopey went airborne. Simultaneously, the wandering hand found and secured the pike. As the creature fell, Dunk lifted the pike to a forty-five-degree angle, aligning it with the center of the dopey’s descending chest, bracing the butt against the floor between his knees.

Did the dopey know what was about to happen? Did it experience, in that sliver of time in which the outcome was ordained, an awareness of its race toward death? Was it happy? Was it sad? And then the tip of the pike found its mark, spearing the creature so thoroughly that life breathed out of it in a single, grand, instantaneous exhalation of death.

Dunk shoved the body to the side. Peter had joined the crowd on its feet. His energy was a part of theirs; it flowed in the collective current. His voice rang with the multitude:

Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk!

Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk!

Why was this different? Peter wondered, while another part of his brain refused to care, adrift in his unanticipated elation. He had faced the virals on the rampart, in cities and deserts, forests and fields. He had dropped seven hundred feet into a crawling cave. He had given himself to death’s likelihood hundreds of times, and yet Dunk’s courage was something more, something purer, something redeeming. Peter glanced at his friends. Michael, Hollis, Lore: there was no mistaking it. They felt just as he did.

Only Tifty looked different. He’d gotten on his feet like the rest of them, but his face was emotionless. What was he seeing in his mind’s eye? Where had he gone? He had gone to the field. Not even the cage could lighten this burden. Here was Peter’s opening. He waited for the cheering to die. In the stands, bets were being counted and paid.

“Let me go in there.”

Tifty studied him with one raised eyebrow. “Lieutenant, what are you asking?”

“A wager. My life against your promise to take me to Iowa. Not just tell me where this city is. You have to go with me.”

“Peter, this is not a good idea,” Hollis warned. “I know what you’re feeling. We call it cage fever.”

“That’s not what this is.”

Tifty folded his arms over his chest. “Mr. Jaxon, how dumb do I look? Your reputation precedes you. I don’t doubt a dopey is well within your abilities.”

“Not a dopey,” he said. “Sheila.”

Tifty weighed him with his eyes. Behind him, Michael and Lore said nothing. Maybe they understood what he was doing, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were too dumbstruck by his apparent loss of his faculties to formulate a response. It didn’t matter either way.

“All right, Lieutenant, it’s your funeral. Not that there’ll be anything to bury.”


Peter was escorted to a small room at the rear of the arena by Tifty and two of his men. Michael and Hollis were with him; Lore waited in the stands. The room was bare except for a long table displaying armored pads and an array of weapons. Peter suited up. He had initially been concerned that the pads would slow him down too much, but they were surprisingly light and pliable. The mask was a different matter; Peter couldn’t see how it would be any help, and it cut down his peripheral vision. He put it aside.

Now for armaments. He was permitted two. No firearms were allowed, only piercing weapons. Blades, crossbows, pikes and swords and axes of various lengths and weights. The cross was tempting, but in such close quarters it would take too long to reload. Peter chose a five-foot pike with a barbed steel tip.

As for the second: he cast his eyes around for something that would serve his purpose. In the corner of the room was a galvanized trash can. He removed the lid and examined it.

“Somebody give me a rag.”

A rag was produced. Peter wet it with spit and rubbed the inside of the lid. His reflection began to emerge—not with any distinctiveness, barely more than a blurry shape; but it would have to suffice.

“This is what I want.”

Tifty’s men burst into laughter. A trash can lid! Some pathetic little shield against a full-blown drac! Did he intend to commit suicide?

“Your foolishness is one thing, Lieutenant,” said Tifty. “But this. I can’t allow it.”

Michael looked at him with a quizzical frown. “Like … Las Vegas?”

Peter gave him the barest nod, turned to Tifty again. “You said anything in the room.”

“That I did.”

“Then I’m ready.”

He was led into the arena. The crowd erupted in roars and stamping, but the sound was different than it had been with Dunk. Their allegiances had reversed. Peter wasn’t one of them; they were excited to watch him die, this arrogant soldier of the Expeditionary who dared to think he could take on a drac. The box was already in position at the center of the ring. As Peter approached, he thought he could see it shaking. He heard, from the bleachers, “All bets now closing!”

“Not too late to back out,” Hollis said. “We could make a run for it.”

“What kind of odds are they giving me?”

“Ten to one you survive thirty seconds. A hundred to one you make it a minute.”

“You get one down?”

“Took you to win in forty-five. I’ll be set for life.”

“The usual arrangement, okay?” Peter didn’t need to elaborate: If I’m bitten but survive, don’t let me. Make it fast.

“You don’t have to worry.”

“Michael? Hold him to that.”

The man’s face was bereft. “Jesus, Peter. You did it once. Maybe it was something else that slowed them down. Did you think about that?”

Peter looked at the box in the middle of the ring. It was shuddering like an engine. “Thanks—I’m thinking about it now.”

They shook hands. A grave moment, but they had been through similar ones before. Peter stepped inside the cage; one of Tifty’s men sealed the door behind him. Hollis and Michael took their places on the bleachers with Lore. Tifty rose with his megaphone.

“Lieutenant Jaxon of the Expeditionary, do you stand ready?”

A chorus of boos. Peter did his best to tune them out. He had been running on pure conviction, but now that the moment was here, his body had begun to doubt his mind. His heart was racing, his palms damp. The pike felt absurdly heavy in his hand. He filled his chest with air. “Ready!”

“Then … start the clock!”


In the aftermath, Peter was to learn that the contest had lasted a grand total of twenty-eight seconds. This seemed both long and short; it had happened slowly and all at once, a blur of events that didn’t correspond to the ordinary course of time.

What he would remember was this:

The drac’s explosion from the box, like water shot from a hose; her majestic airborne leap, a force of undiluted nature, straight to the top of the cage, and then three quick ricochets as she bounded side to side, too fast for Peter’s eyes to follow; the picture in his mind’s eye of her anticipated release and the arc her body would employ as she fell upon him, and then the moment of its occurrence, exactly as he’d foreseen; the blast of force as their bodies collided, one stationary, one in headlong flight; the drac sending him careening across the cage, and his body—breathless, broken, his own for a moment or two more but no longer—rolling and rolling and rolling.

He was on his stomach. The trash can lid and pike were gone. He rolled onto his back and scrabbled backward on his hands and feet, and then he found what was left of the pike. The pole had snapped two feet from its pointed steel end. He wrapped it with his fist and rose. He would go down swinging; he would die on his feet at least. On a distant planet, crowds were cheering. The viral was moving toward him in a manner he would have described as leisurely, almost sauntering. She cocked her head and opened her jaws to give him a good, long look at her teeth.

Their eyes met.

Really met. A bona fide, soul-searching gaze. The moment locked, and in that moment Peter felt his mind plunging into hers: its sensations and memories, thoughts and desires, the person she’d been and the pain of the terrible thing she’d become. Her expression had softened, her posture relaxed a discernible notch. The ferocity of her expression contained something else now: a profound melancholy. A human being was still inside her, like a tiny flame in the dark. Don’t look away, Peter told himself. Whatever you do, don’t break her gaze. The pike was in his hand.

He took one step, then another. Still she did not move. He felt a kind of quiet shuddering within himself, not of fear but of longing; this was what she wanted. The crowd had silenced. It was as if the two of them were alone in some immense, still space. An empty church. An abandoned theater. A cave. He drew back the pike, placing his free hand on her shoulder for balance. Please, her eyes said.

Then it was over.

The crowd was absolutely still. Peter realized he was shaking. Something irrevocable had happened, beyond knowing. He looked down at the body. He had felt her soul leaving her. It had brushed him like a breeze, only the breeze was inside him, made of words. Thank you, thank you. I am free.

Tifty was waiting for him when he exited the cage.

“Her name wasn’t Sheila,” Peter said. “It was Emily.”

Tifty said nothing, wearing an expression of pure bewilderment.

“She was seventeen when she was taken up. Her last memory was of kissing a boy.”

“I don’t understand.”

Hollis, Michael, and Lore were coming down the bleachers. Peter moved toward them, stopped, then turned back to Tifty.

“You want to know how to kill them?”

The man nodded, slack-jawed.

“Look them in the eye.”