The Passage: A Novel

For five full days the rain poured down. He sat for hours at the long table in Vorhees’s tent, sometimes just the two of them, but usually with Greer as well. He told them about Amy, and the Colony, and the signal they had come to find; he told them about Theo and Mausami, and the Haven, and all that had happened there. He told them that sixteen hundred kilometers away, on a mountaintop in California, ninety souls were waiting for the lights to go out.

“I won’t lie to you,” Vorhees said, when Peter asked them if they could send the soldiers there. It was late afternoon. Alicia had left in the morning, on patrol. Just like that, she had been subsumed into the life of Vorhees’s men.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Vorhees explained. “And this bunker of yours alone sounds like it would be worth the trip. But I’ll have to take this up the line, and that means Division. It would be next spring at the earliest before we could think about making such a trip. That’s all uncharted ground.”

“Well, they’ll have to. My biggest worry is getting out of this valley before the snow hits. This rain doesn’t let up, we could get stuck here. There’s only enough fuel to keep our lights going another thirty days.”

“What I want to know more about is this place, the Haven,” Greer cut in. Outside the walls of the tent and in the presence of any of the men, Greer’s and Vorhees’s relationship was rigidly formal; but inside, as they were now, they visibly relaxed into friendship. Greer looked at the general, his eyes darkening thoughtfully. “Sounds a little like those folks in Oklahoma.”

“Place called Homer,” Vorhees replied, picking up the thread. “Third Battalion came across them about ten years ago, way the hell and gone out in the panhandle. A whole town of survivors, over eleven hundred men, women, and children. I wasn’t there, but I heard the stories. It was like stepping back a hundred years; they didn’t even seem to know what the dracs were. Just going about their business, nice as you please, no lights or fencing, happy to see you but don’t slam the door on your way out. The CO offered them transport but they said no thanks, and in any case, the Third wasn’t really equipped to move that many bodies south to Kerrville. It was the damndest thing. Survivors, and they didn’t want to be rescued. Third Battalion left a squad behind and moved on north, up to Wichita, where got their happy asses handed to them. Lost half their men; the rest hightailed it back. When they got there, the place was empty.”

Vorhees’s eyebrows lifted sharply. “I mean empty. Not a soul, and no bodies. Everything neat as a pin, dinner dishes sitting on the table. No sign of the squad they’d left, either.”

Peter had to admit it was puzzling, but he didn’t see what this had to do with the Haven. “Maybe they decided to go somewhere safer,” Peter offered.

“Maybe. Maybe the dracs just took them so fast they didn’t have time to wash the dishes. You’re asking something I don’t know the answer to. But I will tell you this. Thirty years ago, when Kerrville sent out the First Expeditionary, you couldn’t walk a hundred meters without tripping over a drac. The First lost half a dozen men on a good day, and when Coffee’s unit disappeared, people pretty much thought it was over. I mean, the guy was a legend. The Expeditionary more or less disbanded right then. But now here you are, having traveled all the way from California. Back in the day, you wouldn’t have made it twenty steps to the latrine.”

Peter glanced at Greer, who acknowledged this truth with a nod, then looked back at Vorhees. “Are you saying they’re dying off?”

“Oh, there’s plenty, believe me. You just got to know where to look. What I’m saying is something’s different. Something’s changed. In the last sixty months, we’ve run two supply lines from Kerrville, one up as far as Hutchinson, Kansas, another through New Mexico into Colorado. What we’ve seen is that you tend to find them in clusters now. They’re burrowing deeper, too, using mines, caves, places like that mountain you found. They’re sometimes packed in there so tightly you’d need a crowbar to pry them apart. The cities are still crawling, with all the empty buildings, but there’s plenty of open countryside where you could go for days without seeing one.”

The general frowned. “Well, it isn’t. Not a hundred percent. Most of Texas is pretty bad, actually. Laredo is no place you’d ever want to go, or Dallas. Houston, what’s left of it, is like a goddamn bloodsucker swamp. The place is so polluted with petrochemicals I don’t know how they survive there, but they do. San Antonio and Austin were both pretty much leveled in the first war, El Paso, too. Fucking federal government, trying to burn the dracs out. That’s what led to the Declaration, along about the same time California split off.”

Vorhees nodded. “From the Union. Declared its independence. The California thing was a real bloodbath, pretty much open warfare for a while, like there wasn’t anything else to worry about. But Texas got lost in the shuffle. Maybe the federals just didn’t want to fight on two fronts. The governor seized all military assets, which wasn’t hard, since the Army by then was in total free fall, everything coming apart. They moved the capital to Kerrville and dug in. Walled it off, like your Colony, but the difference is, we had oil, and lots of it. Down near Freeport, there’s about five hundred million barrels sitting in underground salt domes, the old Strategic Petroleum Reserve. You got oil, you got power. You got power, you got lights. We’ve got over thirty thousand souls inside the walls, plus another fifty thousand acres under irrigation and a fortified supply line running to a working refinery on the coast.”

“The coast,” Peter repeated. The word felt heavy in his mouth. “You mean the ocean?”

“The Gulf of Mexico, anyway.” Vorhees shrugged. “Calling it the ocean would be polite. It’s pretty much a chemical slick. All those offshore platforms still pumping the crap out, plus the discharge from New Orleans. Ocean currents pushed a lot of debris in through there, too. Tankers, cargo ships, you name it. In places you can practically walk across it without getting your feet wet.”

“But you could still leave from there,” Peter tendered. “If you had a boat.”

“In theory. But I wouldn’t recommend it. The problem is getting past the barrier.”

Vorhees nodded. “And lots of them. In the last days of the war, the NATO alliance, our so-called friends, banded together and made one last effort to contain the infection. Heavy bombing along the coasts, and not just conventional explosives. They blasted just about anything in the water. You can still see the wreckage down in Corpus. Then they laid mines, just to slam the door.”

Peter remembered the stories his father had told him. The stories of the ocean, and the Long Beach. The rusting ribs of the great ships, stretching as far as the eye could see. Never had he thought to wonder how this had come about. He had lived in a world without history, without cause, a world where things just were what they were. Talking to Vorhees and Greer was like looking at lines on a page and suddenly seeing words written there.

“What about farther east?” he asked. “Have you ever sent anybody there?”

Vorhees shook his head. “Not for years. The First Expeditionary sent two battalions that way, one north into Louisiana through Shreveport, another across Missouri toward St. Louis. They never came back.” He shrugged. “Maybe someday. For now, Texas is what we’ve got.”

“I’d like to see it,” Peter said after a moment. “The city. Kerrville.”

“And you will, Peter.” Vorhees allowed himself a rare smile. “If you take that convoy.”

They had yet to give Vorhees an answer, and Peter felt torn. They had safety, they had lights, they had found the Army after all. It might not be until spring, but Peter felt confident that Vorhees would send an expedition to the Colony and bring the others in. They had found what they had come for, in other words—more than found it. To ask his friends to continue seemed like an unnecessary risk. And without Alicia, part of him wanted to say yes, to just let the whole thing be over.

But whenever he thought this, his next thought would be of Amy. Alicia had been right: to come so close and turn away felt like something he would regret, probably for the rest of his life. Michael had tried to pick up the signal from the radio in the general’s tent, but their radio equipment was all short range, worthless in the mountains. In the end, Vorhees said he had no reason to doubt their story, but who knew what the signal meant?

“The military left all kinds of crap behind. Civilians, too. Believe me, we’ve seen it before. You can’t go chasing every squeak.” He spoke with the weariness of a man who had seen a lot, more than enough. “This girl of yours, Amy. Maybe she’s a hundred years old, like you say, and maybe she isn’t. I have no reason to disbelieve you, except for the fact that she looks about fifteen and scared shitless. You can’t always explain these things. My guess is she’s just some poor traumatized soul who survived somehow and by a stroke of luck just wandered into your camp.”

“Well, what about it?” Vorhees’s tone wasn’t mocking, merely factual. “Hell, maybe she’s Russian or Chinese. We’ve been waiting for those people to show up, assuming there’s even anyone left alive out there.”

“The truth is, we don’t know. Some people say the quarantine worked, that the rest of the world is just humming right along out there without us. This raises the question as to why we wouldn’t hear anything over the wireless, but I suppose it’s possible they set up some kind of electronic barricade in addition to the mines. Others believe—and I think the major and I share this opinion—that everybody’s dead. This is all conjecture, mind you, but the story goes that the quarantine wasn’t quite as tight as people thought. Five years after the outbreak, the continental United States was pretty much depopulated, ripe for the picking. The gold depository at Fort Knox. The vault at the Federal Reserve in New York. Every museum and jewelry shop and bank, right down to the corner savings and loan, all just sitting there, nobody minding the store. But the real prize was all that American military ordnance just lying around, including upwards of ten thousand nuclear weapons, any one of which could shift the balance of power in a world without the United States to babysit it. Frankly, I don’t think it’s a question of if anyone came ashore, but how many and who. Chances are, they took the virus back with them.”

Peter gave himself a moment to absorb all this. Vorhees was telling him the world was empty, an empty place.

“If it’s any help, I don’t think so either. She’s just a kid, Peter. How she survived out there is anybody’s guess. Maybe she’ll find a way to tell you.”

“That’s what you believe. And I won’t disagree with you. But I’ll tell you something else. I knew a woman growing up, crazy old lady lived in a shack behind our housing section, an old falling-down dump of a place. Wrinkled as a raisin, kept about a hundred cats, place absolutely reeked of cat piss. This woman claimed she could hear what the dracs were thinking. We kids would tease the hell out of her, though of course we couldn’t get enough of her, either. The kind of thing you feel bad about later, but not at the time. She was what you all call a Walker, just appeared at the gates one day.” Vorhees concluded with a shrug: “Time to time you hear stories like this. Old people mostly, half-crazy mystics, never a young one like this girl. But it’s not a new story.”

Greer leaned forward. He seemed suddenly interested. “What happened to her?”

“The woman?” The general rubbed his chin as he searched his memory. “As I recall, she took the trip. Hanged herself in her cat-piss-smelling house.” When neither Peter nor Greer said anything, the general went on: “You can’t overthink these things. Or at least we can’t. I’m sure the major will agree with me. We’re here to clear out as many dracs as we can, lay in supplies, find the hot spots and burn them out. Maybe someday it’ll all add up to something. I’m sure it’s nothing I’ll live to see.”

The general pushed back from the table, and Greer as well; the time for talk was over, at least for the day. “In the meantime, think about my offer, Jaxon. A ride home. You’ve earned it.”

By the time Peter had stepped to the door, Greer and Vorhees were already leaning over the table, where a large map had been unrolled. Vorhees raised his face, frowning.

“It’s just …” What did he want to say? “I was wondering about Alicia. How she’s doing.”

“She’s fine, Peter. However Coffee did it, he taught her well. You probably wouldn’t even recognize her.”

“I know you would. But it’s just not a good idea right now.” When Peter didn’t move from the door, Vorhees said, with barely concealed impatience, “Is that all?”

Peter stepped through the flap, into the darkening afternoon. The rain had let up, but the air felt completely saturated, heavy with bone-chilling dampness. Beyond the walls of the garrison, a dense fogbank was drifting over the ridge. Everything was spattered with mud. He hugged his jacket around himself as he crossed the open ground between Vorhees’s tent and the mess hall, where he caught sight of Hollis, sitting alone at one of the long tables, spooning beans into his mouth from a battered plastic tray. More soldiers were scattered around the room, quietly talking. Peter fetched a tray and filled it from the pot and went to where Hollis was sitting.

“They’re all taken,” Hollis said glumly. “They’re just letting me borrow this one.”

Peter took a place on the bench. He knew what Hollis meant; they were like extra limbs here, something vestigial, with nothing to do, no role to play. Sara and Amy had been relegated to their tent, but for all his relative freedom, Peter felt just as trapped. And none of the soldiers would have anything to do with them. The unstated assumption was that they had nothing worth saying and would be leaving soon anyway.

He updated Hollis on all he had learned, then asked the question that was really on his mind: “Any sign of her?”

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.”

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

“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.

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.”

“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.

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.

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

“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.

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.”

“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.

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—”

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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

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.

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.

“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.

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:

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.”

“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.

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

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.

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.

Part of Peter knew it was all fake, nothing to take seriously, and yet as the story continued, he found himself worried for the girl, Mina, the daughter of the doctor—Dr. Seward, owner of the sanatorium, whatever that was—and whose husband, the ineffectual Harker, seemed to have no idea how to help her, always standing around with his hands in his pockets, looking helpless and lost. None of them knew what to do, except for Van Helsing, the vampire hunter. He wasn’t like any hunter Peter had ever seen—an old man with thick, distorting eyeglasses, given to vast, windy pronouncements that were the object of the soldiers’ most outspoken mockery. “Gentlemen, we are dealing with the unthinkable!” and “The superstitions of tomorrow can become the scientific reality of today!” The catcalls flew each time, and yet a great deal of what Van Helsing said seemed true to Peter, especially the part about a vampire being “a creature whose life has been unnaturally prolonged.” If that didn’t describe a smoke, he didn’t know what did. He found himself wondering if Van Helsing’s trick with the jewelry-box mirror wasn’t some version of what had happened with the pans in Las Vegas, and if, as Van Helsing claimed, a vampire “must sleep each night in his native soil.” Was that why they always came home, the ones who’d been taken up? At times the movie seemed almost to be a kind of instruction manual. Peter wondered if it wasn’t a made-up tale at all but an account of something that had actually happened.

The girl, Mina, was taken up; Harker and Van Helsing pursued the vampire to his lair, a dank basement. Peter realized where the story was headed: they were going to perform the Mercy. They were going to hunt down Mina and kill her, and it was Harker, Mina’s husband, who would have to perform this terrible duty. Peter braced himself. The soldiers had finally grown quiet, their antics put aside as they were caught up, despite themselves, in the story’s final, grim unfolding.

The movie was instantly forgotten; all the soldiers bolted from their chairs. Weapons were coming out, pistols, rifles, blades. In the rush to get to the door, someone tripped over the projector’s power cable, sinking the room into darkness. Everyone was pushing, shouting, calling out orders; Peter heard the pop of rifle fire from outside. As he followed the crowd from the tent, he saw a pair of flares rocketing over the walls toward the muddy field beyond the gate. Michael was running past him with Sancho; Peter seized him by the arm.

Michael barely broke his stride. “It’s Blue Squad!” he said. “Come on!”

From the chaos of the mess hall had emerged a sudden orderliness; everyone knew what to do. The soldiers had broken into distinct groups, some quickly ascending the ladders to the catwalk at the tops of the pickets, others taking positions behind a barricade of sandbags just inside the gate. More men were swiveling the spotlights to aim them across the muddy field beyond the opening.

“Open it now!” Greer shouted from the base of the wall. “Open the goddamn gate!”

A deafening barrage of cover fire from the catwalk as half a dozen soldiers leapt into the space over the yard, holding the ropes that connected through a system of pulleys and blocks to the gate’s hinges. Peter was momentarily arrested by the coordinated grace of it all, the practiced beauty of their synchronized movements. As the soldiers descended, the gates began to part, revealing the light-bathed ground beyond the walls and a group of figures racing toward them. Alicia was leading the way. They hit the gate at a dead sprint, six of them, dropping and rolling in the dust as the men behind the sandbags opened fire, releasing a stream of rounds over their heads. If there were virals back there, Peter didn’t see any. It was all too fast, too loud, and then, just like that, it was over: the gates were sealed behind them.

Peter ran to where Alicia lay with the others. She was on all fours in the dirt, breathing hard; the paint was dripping down her face, her bald head shining like polished metal under the harsh glare of the spotlights.

As she rocked back onto her knees, their eyes met quickly. “Peter, get the hell out of here.”

From above, a few last halfhearted shots. The virals had scattered, retreating from the lights.

“I mean it,” she said fiercely. Every part of her seemed clenched. “Go.”

Others were crowding around. “Where’s Raimey?” Vorhees bellowed, moving through the men. “Where the hell’s Raimey?”

Vorhees turned to where Alicia was kneeling in the mud. When he saw Peter, his eyes flashed with anger. “Jaxon, you don’t belong here.”

“We found it, sir,” Alicia said. “Stumbled right into it. A regular hornet’s nest. There must be hundreds of them.”

Vorhees waved to Hollis and the others. “All of you, back to your quarters, now.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to Alicia. “Private Donadio, report.”

All that summer Vorhees’s men had been looking for it: the entrance shaft to an old copper mine, hidden somewhere in the hills. It was thought that this was one of the hot spots Vorhees had spoken of, a nest where the virals slept. Using old geological survey maps and tracking the creatures’ movements with the nets, they had narrowed their search to the southeast quadrant, an area of roughly twenty square kilometers above the river. Blue Squad’s mission had been one last attempt to locate it before the evac. It was sheer chance that they had; as Peter heard the story from Michael, Blue Squad had simply wandered into it, just before sundown—a soft depression in the earth, into which the point man had vanished with a scream. The first viral who emerged took two more men before anyone could get off a shot. The rest of the squad was able to form some kind of firing line, but more virals swarmed out, braving the last of daylight in their blood fury; once the sun went down, the unit would be quickly overwhelmed, the location of the mine shaft lost with them. The flares they carried would buy them a few minutes, but that was all. They broke into two groups; the first would make a run for it while the second, led by Lieutenant Raimey, would cover their escape, holding the creatures off as long as they could, until the sun went down and all the flares were gone, and that would be the end of it.

All night long, the camp buzzed with activity. Peter could feel the change: the days of waiting, of hunt-and-peck missions in the forest, were over; Vorhees’s men were preparing themselves for battle. Michael was gone, helping to ready the vehicles that would carry the explosives, drums of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate with a grenade-cluster igniter, known as a “flusher.” These would be lowered by winch straight into the exposed shaft. The explosion would no doubt kill many of the virals inside; the question was, where would the survivors emerge? In a hundred years the topography might have changed, and for all Vorhees and the others knew, a landslide or earthquake had opened an entirely new access point. While one squad put the explosives in place, the rest of the men would do their best to sniff out any other openings. With luck, everyone would be in position when the bomb went off.

The lights came down to a gray dawn. The temperature had dropped in the night, and all the puddles in the yard were encrusted with ice. The vehicles were being loaded; Vorhees’s soldiers were assembled at the gate, all but a single squad, which would stay behind to man the garrison. Alicia had spent many of the intervening hours in Vorhees’s tent. It was she who had led the survivors back to the garrison, using the route they had first traveled along the river. Now Peter saw her up front with the general, the two of them with a map spread over the hood of one of the Humvees. Greer, on horseback, was supervising the final loading of supplies. Watching from the sidelines, Peter felt a growing unease, but something else, too—a strong attractive force, instinctual as breathing. For days he had drifted between the poles of his uncertainty, knowing he should press on but unable to leave Alicia behind. Now, as he watched the soldiers completing their preparations at the gate, Alicia among them, a single desire pushed itself forward. Vorhees’s men were going to war; he wanted to be part of it.

As Greer moved down the line, Peter stepped forward. “Major, I’d like to speak with you.”

Greer’s face and voice were distracted, hasty. He looked over Peter’s head as he spoke: “What is it, Jaxon?”

“Just put me at the rear. There must be something I can do. I can, I don’t know, be a runner or something.”

Greer’s focus shifted to the back of one of the trucks, where a group of four men, including Michael, were winching the drums of fuel into place over the tailgate.

“Sergeant,” Greer barked to the squad sergeant, a man named Withers, “can you take over for me here? And Sancho, watch that chain—it’s all wrapped up.”

“These are bombs, son. For Christsakes, be careful.” Then, to Peter: “Come with me.”

The major dismounted and took Peter aside, out of earshot. “I know you’re worried about her,” he said. “Okay? I get it. If it were up to me, I’d probably let you come.”

“That’s not going to happen. I’m sorry.” A curious expression came into Greer’s face, a flickering indecision. “Look. What you told me about the girl, Amy. You should know something.” He shook his head, glancing away. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. Maybe I really have been out in these woods too long. What’s that thing called? When you think something’s happened before, like you dreamed it. There’s a name for it.”

Greer still wasn’t looking at him. “Déjà vu. That’s it. I’ve been feeling that way since I first found you guys. A big bad case of déjà vu. I know it doesn’t look like it now, but when I was a kid, I was a scrawny little thing, sick all the time. My parents died when I was small, I never even really met them, so probably it was just the orphanage where I was raised, fifty kids all crammed together, all that snot and dirty hands. You name it, I caught it. About a dozen times the sisters were ready to write me off. Fever dreams like you wouldn’t believe, too. Nothing I could really describe, or even remember. Just the feeling of it, like being lost in the dark for a thousand years. But the thing was, I wasn’t alone. That was part of the dream, too. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, not until you all showed up. That girl. Those eyes of hers. You think I didn’t notice that? Jesus, it’s like I’m right back there, six years old and sweating my brains out with fever. I’m telling you, she was the one. I know it sounds crazy. She was in the dream with me.”

An expectant silence hung around his final words. Peter felt a shiver of recognition.

“Are you kidding? What would I say? Hell, son, I’m not even telling you.”

To show Peter that the conversation was over, Greer took his mount by the reins and swung back up into the saddle. “That’s all. But you ask me why you can’t go, there’s my answer. We don’t come back, Red Squad has orders to evacuate you down to Roswell. That’s official. Unofficially, I will tell you they won’t stop you if you decide to press on.”

He heeled his mount to take his place at the head of the line. A roar of engines; the gates swung open. Peter watched as the men, five squads plus the horses and vehicles, moved slowly through. Alicia was somewhere in there, Peter thought, probably up front with Vorhees. But he couldn’t find her anywhere.

SIXTY