The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (16 page)

Jesus, Kittridge thought. Telluride was ground zero, the place where everything had started.

“Well, that was smart. Good thinking.” He gestured toward Danny again. He was standing ten feet off to the side with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ground. “What about your friend?”

“Danny was the one who found us. We heard him honking.”

“Well, good for you, Danny. I’d say that makes you the hero of the day.”

The man gave Kittridge a darting, sidelong glance. His face bore no expression at all. “Okay.”

“Why can’t I see what’s in the stadium?” Tim cut in again.

A look passed between April and Kittridge:
Not a good idea
.

“Never mind about the stadium,” April said. She returned her attention to Kittridge. “Have you seen anybody else?”

“Not for a while. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Probably it’s wisest if we assume we’re alone.”

Kittridge could see where this was all headed. An hour ago he’d been riding down the side of a building, fleeing for his life. Now he was facing the prospect of looking after two kids and a man who couldn’t even meet his eye. But the situation was what it was.

“That your bus, Danny?” he said.

The man nodded. “I drive the blue route. Number twelve.”

A smaller vehicle would have made more sense, but Kittridge had the feeling the man wouldn’t be leaving without it. “Feel like maybe driving us out of here?”

The girl’s expression hardened. “What makes you think you’re coming with us?”

Kittridge was taken aback; he hadn’t considered the possibility that the three of them wouldn’t want his help.

“Actually, nothing, you put it that way. I guess you’d have to invite me.”

“Why can’t I
see
?” Tim whined.

April rolled her eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Tim, just shut up about the stadium, will you?”

“You said the F word! I’m telling!”

“And who are you going to tell?”

The boy was suddenly on the verge of tears. “Don’t say that!”

“Listen,” Kittridge cut in, “this really isn’t the time. By my count we’ve got eight hours of daylight left. I don’t think we want to be anywhere near here after dark.”

Which was when the boy, sensing his opening, spun on his heels and bolted up the ramp.

“Shit,” Kittridge said. “Both of you stay here.”

He took off at a hobbling run, but with his leg, he was in no condition to close the gap; by the time Kittridge caught up to the boy, he was standing in the open mouth of one of the gates, staring dumbly at the field. Just a few seconds, but it was enough. Kittridge snatched him from behind and hoisted him to his chest. The boy went limp, collapsing against him. He made no sound at all. Jesus, Kittridge thought. Why had he let the kid get the jump on him like that?

By the time he reached the base of the ramp, Tim had begun making a sound that was half hiccup, half whimper. Kittridge lowered him to the ground in front of April.

“What do you think you were doing?” Her voice was thick with angry tears.

“I’m … s-sorry,” the boy stammered.

“You can’t go running off like that, you
can’t
.” She shook him by the arms, then pulled him into a desperate hug. “I’ve told you a thousand times, you stay with me.”

Kittridge had moved to where Danny was standing, gazing at the ground with his hands in his pockets.

“They were really all alone?” he asked quietly.

“Consuela was with them,” Danny stated. “But she left.”

“Who’s Consuela?”

He gave a loose-limbed shrug. “She waits with Tim at the bus sometimes.”

There wasn’t much else to say on the subject. Maybe Danny wasn’t all there, but he’d rescued two helpless kids whose parents were almost certainly dead. It was more than Kittridge had done.

“So how about it, my friend,” Kittridge said. “Feel like firing up that bus of yours?”

“Where are we going?”

“I was thinking Nebraska.”

11

They left an hour after dawn. Grey took whatever he could find in the kitchen that still looked edible—a few remaining cans of soup, some stale crackers, a box of Wheaties, and bottles of water—and loaded it into the Volvo. He didn’t have so much as a toothbrush of his own, but then Lila appeared in the hall with two wheeled suitcases.

“I took the liberty of packing you some clothes.”

Lila was dressed as if leaving on vacation, in dark leggings paired with a crisply-starched, long-tailed shirt. A brightly colored silk scarf lay over her shoulders. She’d washed her face and brushed her hair, and was even wearing earrings and a bit of makeup. The sight of her made Grey realize
how dirty he was. He hadn’t washed in days; probably he didn’t smell the best.

“Maybe I should clean up a bit.”

Lila directed him to the bathroom at the head of the stairs, where she’d already laid out a change of clothes for him, neatly folded on the toilet seat. A brand-new toothbrush, still in its wrapper, and a tube of Colgate rested on the vanity beside a jug of water. Grey peeled off his jumpsuit and washed his face and splashed his armpits, then brushed his teeth, facing the broad mirror. He hadn’t looked at his reflection since the Red Roof, and it still came as a shock, how young he looked—skin clear and taut, hair growing lushly over his scalp, eyes radiating a jewel-like glitter. He looked like he’d lost a lot of weight, too—not surprising, since he’d eaten nothing in two days, but the degree to which this had occurred, both in quantity and kind, was startling. He wasn’t just thinner; it was as if his body had rearranged itself. Turning to the side, holding his gaze on his reflection, he ran a hand experimentally over his belly. He’d always run on the chubby side; now he could discern the taut outline of muscles. From there it was a small step to flexing his arms, like a kid admiring himself. Well, look at that, he thought. Actual biceps. God damn.

He put on the clothing Lila had left for him—white boxers, a pair of jeans, and a checked sport shirt—discovering, to his continued amazement, that it all fit rather well. He took one last look at himself in the mirror and descended the stairs to the living room, where he found Lila sitting on the sofa, paging through a
People
magazine.

“Well, there you are.” She regarded him up and down, smiling in her airy way. “Don’t you look nice.”

He wheeled the suitcases to the Volvo. The morning air was weighted with dew; birds were singing in the trees. As if the two of them were just taking a drive in the country, Grey thought, shaking his head. Yet as he stood in the driveway wearing another man’s clothes, this almost seemed true. It was as if he had stepped into a different life—the life, perhaps, of the man whose jeans and sport shirt now graced his newly slender, muscled body. He took a deep sniff, expanding his chest. The air felt fresh and clean in his lungs, full of scent. Grass, and new green leaves, and damp earth. It seemed to contain no trace of the terrors of the night before, as if the light of day had cleansed the world.

He sealed the hatch and looked up to see Lila standing at the front door. She turned the lock, then removed something from her purse: an envelope. She withdrew a roll of masking tape from her purse and taped
the envelope to the door, standing back to look at it. A letter? Grey thought. Who would it be for? David? Brad? One of these, probably, but Grey still had no idea who was who. The two seemed virtually interchangeable in Lila’s mind.

“There,” she announced. “All set.” At the Volvo, she handed him the keys. “Would it be all right if you drove?”

And Grey liked that, too.

Grey decided it would be best to stay off the main roads, at least until they were out of the city. Though this fact was unstated, it also seemed part of his agreement with Lila that he should avoid passing the sorts of things that might upset her. This turned out not to matter: the woman barely looked up from her magazine. He picked his way through the suburbs; by midmorning, they were in a parched, rolling land of empty fields the color of burnt toast, moving east on a rural blacktop. The city faded away behind them, followed by the blue bulk of the Rockies, vaporizing in the haze. The scene around them possessed a barren, forgotten quality—just a scrim of feathery clouds high overhead, and the dry fields, and the highway unspooling under the Volvo’s wheels. Eventually Lila gave up her reading and fell asleep.

The oddness of the situation was inarguable, yet as the miles and hours passed, Grey felt a swelling rightness in his chest. Never in his life had he really mattered to anyone. He searched his mind for something, anything to compare the feeling to. The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt—a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn’t been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else’s baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.

And the thing was, Grey liked women; he always had. The other thing, with the boys, was different. It wasn’t about what he liked or didn’t like but what he
had
to do, because of his past and the things that had been done to him. That was how Wilder, the prison shrink, had explained it. The boys were a compulsion, Wilder told him, Grey’s way of returning to the moment of his own abuse, to reenact it and, in so doing, seek to understand it. Grey no more decided to touch the boys than he decided to scratch an itch. A lot of what Wilder said sounded like bullshit to Grey, but not that part, and it made him feel a little better, knowing he wasn’t entirely at fault. Not that it let him off the hook any; Grey had beaten himself up plenty. He’d actually felt relieved when they sent him
away. The Old Grey—the one who’d found himself lingering on the edges of playgrounds and cruising slowly past the junior high at three o’clock and dragging his feet in the locker room at the community swimming pool on summer afternoons
—that
Grey was nobody he ever wanted to know again.

His mind returned to the hug in the kitchen. It wasn’t a boy-girl thing, Grey knew that, but it wasn’t nothing either. It made Grey think of Nora Chung, the one girl he’d dated in high school. She hadn’t been a girlfriend, exactly; they’d never actually done anything. The two of them were in the band together—for a brief period, Grey had gotten it in his head to play the trumpet—and sometimes after practice Grey would walk her home, the two of them not even touching, though something about those walks made him feel for the first time that he wasn’t alone on the earth. He wanted to kiss her, but he’d never summoned the courage; eventually she’d drifted away. Curious that Grey should remember her now. He hadn’t so much as thought her name in twenty years.

By noon, they were approaching the Kansas border. Lila was still sleeping. Grey himself had lapsed into a half-dream state, barely paying attention to the road. He’d managed to avoid towns of any considerable size, but this couldn’t last; they’d need gas soon. Ahead he saw a water tower poking from the plain.

The town was named Kingwood—just a short, dusty main street, half the store windows papered over, and a few blocks of dismal houses on either side. It looked harmlessly abandoned; the only evidence that anything had happened was an ambulance parked in front of the fire station with its rear doors hanging open. And yet Grey sensed something, a tingling at his extremities, as if their progress was being observed from the shadows. He cruised the length of the town, finally coming to a filling station on its eastern edge, an off-brand place called Frankie’s.

Lila stirred when Grey shut the engine off. “Where are we?”

“Kansas.”

She yawned, squinting through the windshield at the desolate town. “Why are we stopping?”

“We need gas. I’ll just be a sec.”

Grey tried the pump, but no dice: the power was off. He’d have to siphon some off somehow, but for that he’d need a length of hose and a can. He stepped into the office. A battered metal desk, covered with stacks of paper, stood by the front window; an old office chair rested behind it, rocked back on its hinges, giving the ghostly impression of having only recently been vacated. He moved through the door that led to the service bays, a cool, dark space that smelled of oil. A Cadillac
Seville, late-’90s vintage, was perched on one of the lifts; the second bay was occupied by a Chevy 4×4 with a jacked-up suspension and fat, mud-choked tires. Resting on the floor was a five-gallon gas can; on one of the workbenches, Grey located a length of hose. He severed off a six-foot section, slid one end into the 4×4’s fuel port, drew in a sip that he spat away, and began to siphon gas into the can.

The can was nearly full when he heard a scuffling above his head. Every nerve in his body fired simultaneously, clenching him in place.

Slowly he lifted his face.

The creature was suspended from one of the ceiling beams, hanging upside down with its knees folded over the strut like a kid on monkey bars. It was smaller than Zero, more human-seeming. As their eyes locked, Grey’s heart froze between beats. From deep inside the creature’s throat came a trilling sound.