The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (87 page)

Amy, run
.

And:
Father—

And:
I love you
.

And as Wolgast dove into their midst, one clawed thumb poised on the plunger; and as Amy likewise swooped down upon Peter to hurl him away, taking the brunt of the destruction in his stead; and as the last of
the Twelve in their fury fell upon Wolgast—Wolgast the True, the Father of All, and the One Who Loved—a hole in space opened where he had stood, dark night burst to brightest day, and the heavens rent with thunder.

66

It came to feel as if there were two cities in the minutes that followed: the grandstands, where chaos reigned, and the field below, a zone of aftermath, of sudden calm. A beginning and an ending, standing adjacent but apart. Soon the two would merge, as the crowd, the violence of its uprising exhausted, absorbed the amazing fact of its liberty and began to disperse, going where it liked, including the field; they would find it one by one, drifting down, moving tentatively as their bodies tasted freedom. But in the near term, the combatants on the field were left to themselves, to take a final measure of the living and the lost.

It was Alicia whom Peter awakened to see. She was blackened, bruised, bloodied. Much of her hair had been burned away, tendrils of smoke still rising. Peter, she was saying. She hovered above him, tears streaming down her cheeks. Peter.

He struggled to speak. His tongue moved heavily in his mouth: Amy? Is she—?

Alicia, softly weeping, shook her head.

Somehow Greer had survived. The blast had flung him far away. By all rights he should have been dead, and yet they found him lying on his back, staring at the starlit sky. His clothing was shredded and seared; otherwise he appeared untouched. It was as if the force of the blast had moved not through him but around him, his life protected by an invisible hand. For a long moment he neither spoke nor moved. Then, with an exploratory gesture, he raised a hand to his chest, patting it cautiously; he lifted it to his face, tracing his cheeks and brow and chin.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

Eustace, too, would live. At first they believed he was dead; his face was drenched in blood. But the shot had gone wide; the blood was from his left ear, now gone, shorn like a plant plucked from soil and replaced by a puckered hole. Of the detonation itself he had no memory, or none he could fully assemble beyond a chain of isolated sensations: a skull-cracking
blast of noise, and a scorching wave of air passing above, then something wet raining down, and a taste of smoke and dust. He would escape the night with only this one additional disfigurement to a face already bearing plentiful scars of war and a permanent ringing in his ears, which would, in fact, never abate, causing him to speak in an overly loud voice that would make people think he was angry even when he wasn’t. Over time, once he had returned to Kerrville and risen to the rank of colonel, serving as military liaison to the president’s staff, he would come to regard this as less an inconvenience than a remarkably useful enhancement to his authority; he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

Only Nina would depart the field unscathed. Hurled away by the viral that had killed Tifty, she’d been thrown clear of the blast zone. She had been moving upfield when the bomb went off, its concussive force blowing her backward off her feet; but in the preceding moment she’d been the only one to witness the death of the Twelve, their bodies consumed and scattered in a ball of light. All else was a blur; of Amy, she had seen nothing.

Nothing at all.

But one of them had fallen.

They found Tifty with his gun still in his hand. He lay in the mud, broken and severed, his eyes rimmed by blood. His right arm was gone, but that was the least of it. As they gathered around him, he labored to speak through his fitful breathing. At last his lips formed words: “Where is she?”

Greer alone seemed to understand what he was asking. He turned toward Nina. “It’s you he wants.”

Perhaps she understood the nature of the request, perhaps not; none could tell. She lowered herself to the ground beside him. With trembling effort, Tifty lifted his hand and touched her face with the tips of his fingers, the gentlest gesture.

“Nitia,” he whispered. “My Nitia.”

“I’m Nina.”

“No. You’re Nitia. My Nitia.” He gave a tearful smile. “You look … so much like her.”

“Like who?”

Life was ebbing from his eyes. “I told her …” His breath caught. He had begun to choke on the blood that poured from his mouth. “I told
her … I would keep you safe.” Then the light in his eyes went out and he was gone.

No one spoke. One of their own had slipped away, into darkness.

“I don’t understand,” Alicia said. She glanced at the others. “Why did he call her that?”

It was Greer who answered: “Because that’s her name.” Nina looked up from the body. “You didn’t know, did you?” he said. “There was no way you could.”

She shook her head.

“Tifty was your father.”

In due course, there would come a full accounting. A pickup would race onto the field; they would watch three people emerge. No, four. Michael and Hollis and Sara, holding a little girl in her arms.

But for now they stood silently in the presence of their friend, the core of his life laid bare. The great gangster Tifty Lamont, captain of the Expeditionary. They would bury him where he’d fallen, in the field. Because you never leave it, Greer explained; that’s what Tifty always said. You might think you can do it, but you can’t. Once you’d stood there, it became a part of you forever.

No one ever left the field.

67

The weather failed to cooperate. January in Iowa—what had they expected? Bone-numbing day followed bone-numbing day. Food, fuel, water, electricity, the complex enterprise of keeping a city of seventy thousand souls running—the joy of victory had quickly been subsumed by more mundane concerns. For the time being the insurgency had assumed control, though Eustace, by his own admission, had no particular knack for the job. He felt overwhelmed by the volume of detail, and the hastily assembled provisional government, composed of appointed delegates from each of the lodges, did little to lighten his load; it was bloated and disorganized, half the room always squabbling with the other half, leaving Eustace to throw up his hands and make all the decisions anyway. A degree of docility among the population remained, but this wouldn’t last. There had been looting in the market before Eustace was able to secure it, and every day there were more stories of reprisals; many of the cols had tried to slip anonymously into the populace, but their faces were known. Without a justice system to try the ones who surrendered, or those who had been captured by the insurgency in advance of the mob, it was hard to know what to do with them. The detention center was bursting at the seams. Eustace had raised the possibility of retrofitting the Project—it was certainly secure enough and had the additional advantage of isolation—but this would take time and did nothing to address the problem of what to do with the prisoners when the population began to move south.

And everybody was freezing. Well, so be it, Peter thought. What was a little cold?

He had formed a close friendship with Eustace. Some of this was their shared bond as officers of the Expeditionary, but not all; they had discovered, as the days passed, that they possessed compatible temperaments. They decided that Peter should lead the advance team that would travel south to prepare Kerrville for the influx of refugees. Initially he’d objected; it didn’t seem right to be among the first to leave. But he was the logical choice, and in the end, Alicia sealed the case. Caleb is waiting for you, she reminded him. Go see to your boy.

The exodus itself would have to wait till spring. Assuming Kerrville
could send enough vehicles and personnel, Eustace planned to move five thousand people at a time, the composition of each group determined by a lottery. The trip would be arduous—all but the very old and very young would have to walk—but with luck the Homeland would be empty within two years.

“Not everybody will want to go, you know,” Eustace said.

The two of them were seated in Eustace’s office, in the back room of the apothecary, warming themselves with cups of herbal tea. Most of the buildings in the market had been taken over by the provisional government to serve various functions. The latest project to occupy them was the tallying of a census. With all the redeyes’ records having been destroyed in the Dome, they had no idea who was who, or even how many people there were. Seventy thousand was the generally accepted number, but there was no way to know precisely unless they counted.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

Eustace shrugged. The left side of his head was still bandaged, giving his face a lopsided appearance, though balanced by his clouded eye. Sara had removed the last of Peter’s stitches the prior day; his chest and arms now bore a road map of long, pinkish scars. In private moments, Peter couldn’t stop touching them, amazed not only by the fact that he’d inflicted these wounds upon himself but also that, in the heat of the moment, he’d barely felt a thing.

“This is what they know. They’ve lived their entire lives here. But that’s not the whole reason. It’s good to right a wrong. I don’t know how many will feel that way once we start moving people south, but some will.”

“How will they manage?”

“I suppose how people always manage. Elections, the rough business of building a life.” He sipped his tea. “It’ll be messy. It might not work at all. But at least it will be theirs.”

Nina came in from the cold, stamping waffles of snow from her boots. “Jesus, it’s freezing out there,” she said.

Eustace offered her his cup. “Here, warm yourself up.”

She took it in her hands and sipped, then bent to kiss him quickly on the mouth. “Thank you, husband. You really need to shave.”

Eustace laughed. “With a face like mine? Who cares?”

That the two of them were a couple was, as Peter had learned, the worst-kept secret of the insurgency. One of the first things Eustace had done was issue an executive order permitting flatlanders to marry. In many instances this was a technicality; people had been paired up for
years or even decades. But marriage had never possessed official sanction. The list of couples waiting to be married now ran to the hundreds, and Eustace had two justices of the peace operating night and day out of a storefront down the block. He and Nina had been among the first, as had Hollis and Sara.

“Good news,” Nina said. “I just came from the hospital.”

“And?”

“Two more babies were born this morning, both healthy. Mothers doing fine.”

“Well, how about that.” Eustace grinned at Peter. “See what I’m telling you? Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.”

Peter made his way down the hill, hunched against the wind. As a member of the executive staff he was permitted the use of a vehicle, but he preferred to walk. At the hospital he headed for Michael’s room. Power had been only partially restored, but the hospital had been one of the first buildings relit. He found Michael awake and sitting up. His right leg, encased in plaster from ankle to hip, was suspended from a sling at a forty-five-degree angle above the bed. It had been touch and go for a while, and Sara had thought he might lose the leg; but Michael was a fighter, and now, three weeks later, he was officially on the mend.