The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (15 page)

She wanted to tell Brad about it. More than wanted: his name produced a longing so powerful it brought tears to her eyes. She hadn’t meant to marry David! Why had Lila married David—sanctimonious, overbearing, eternally do-gooding David—when she was already married to Brad? Especially now, with Eva on the way, coming to make them a family again?

Lila still loved him; that was the thing. That was the sad and sorrowful mystery of it all. She’d never stopped loving Brad, nor he her, not for a second, even when their love was too much pain for either to carry, because their little girl was gone. They had parted as a way to forget, neither being able to accomplish this in the company of the other—a sad, inevitable sundering, like the primordial separation of continents. Until the very end they’d fought it. The night before he’d moved out, his suitcases in the hall of the house on Maribel Street, the lawyers properly apprised, so many tears having been shed that no one even knew what they were crying about anymore—a condition as general as the weather, a world of everlasting tears—he’d come to her in the bedroom he had long since vacated, slid beneath the covers, and for a single hour they’d been a couple again, silently moving together, their bodies still wanting what their hearts could no longer bear. Not a word had passed between them; in the morning Lila awoke alone.

But now all of that had changed. Eva was coming! Eva was practically here! She would write Brad a letter; that’s what Lila would do. Surely he was going to come look for her, it was just the kind of man he was, you could always count on Brad when things went to hell in a handbasket, and how would it be for him to find she wasn’t there? Her spirits restored by this decision, Lila crept to the little desk under the windows, fumbling in the drawer for a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper. Now,
what words to choose?
I am going away. I don’t know quite where. Wait for me, my darling. I love you. Eva will be here soon
. Simple and clear, elegantly capturing the essence of the thing. Satisfied, she folded the paper into thirds, slid it into an envelope, wrote “Brad” on the outside, and propped it on the desk so she would see it in the morning.

She lay back down. From across the room, the letter watched her, a rectangle of glowing whiteness. Closing her eyes, Lila let her hands drift down to the hard curve of her belly. A feeling of fullness, and then, from within, a gaseous twitch, then another and another. The baby was hiccupping.
Hiccup!
went the tiny baby. Lila closed her eyes, allowing the sensation to wash over her. Inside her, in the space beneath her heart, a small life was waiting to be born, but even more: she, Eva, was coming home. The day was catching up to her, Lila knew; her mind was riding the currents of sleep like a surfer paddling on the curve of a wave; in another moment the wave would wash over her, taking her under. Eva had quieted under her fingertips. I love you, Eva, thought Lila Kyle, and with that she fell asleep.

10

It was nearly ten
A.M
. by the time they got to Mile High. Driving into downtown, Danny found himself caught in a maze of barricades: abandoned Humvees, machine-gun positions with their piles of sandbags, even a few tanks. A dozen times he was forced to backtrack in search of an alternate route, only to find his passage blocked. Finally, as the last of the morning haze was burning off, he found a clear path under the freeway and ascended the ramp to the stadium.

The parking area was a grid of olive-green tents, eerily becalmed under the morning sun. Surrounding this was a ring of vehicles, passenger cars and ambulances and police cruisers, many of them looking half-crushed: windows smashed, fenders torn from the frames, doors ripped off their hinges. Danny brought the bus to a halt.

They disembarked into a stench of decay so thick that Danny nearly gagged. Worse than Momma, worse than all the bodies he’d seen that morning, walking to the depot. It was the kind of smell that could snake inside you, into your nose and mouth, and linger there for days.

“Hello!” April called. Her voice echoed across the lot. “Is anybody here? Hello!”

Danny had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Some of this was the smell, but some wasn’t. He had the jangly feeling all over.

“Hello!” April called again, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Can anyone hear me?”

“Maybe we should go,” Danny suggested.

“The Army’s supposed to be here.”

“Maybe they left already.”

April removed her backpack, unzipped the top, and withdrew a hammer. She gave it a swing, as if to test its weight.

“Tim, you stay by me. Understand? No wandering off.”

The boy was standing at the base of the bus’s steps, pinching his nose. “But it smells gross,” he said in a nasal voice.

April slid her arms into the straps. “The whole
city
smells gross. You’ll just have to deal with it. Now come on.”

Danny didn’t want to go either, but the girl was determined. He followed the two of them as they made their way into the maze of vehicles. Step by step, Danny began to comprehend what he was seeing. The cars had been positioned around the tents as a defense. Like in pioneer times, the way settlers would circle the covered wagons when the Indians attacked. But these weren’t Indians, Danny knew, and whatever had happened here, it looked to be long over. There were corpses, somewhere—the smell seemed to intensify the farther they went—but so far they’d seen no trace of them. It was as if everyone had vanished.

They came to the first of the tents. April entered first, holding the hammer up before her, ready to swing. The space was a mess of overturned gurneys and IV poles, debris strewn everywhere—bandages, basins, syringes. But still there were no bodies.

They looked in another tent, then a third. Each was the same. “So where did everybody go?” April said.

The only place left to look was the stadium. Danny didn’t want to, but April wouldn’t take no for an answer. If the Army said to come here, she insisted, there had to be a reason. They moved up the ramp toward the entrance. April was leading the way, clutching Tim with one hand, the hammer with the other. For the first time, Danny noticed the birds. A huge black cloud wheeling over the stadium, their hoarse calls seeming to break the silence and to deepen it at the same time.

Then, from behind them, a man’s voice:

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

*  *  *

The Ferrari had died as Kittridge was pulling into the parking area. By this time the car was bucking like a half-broke horse, plumes of oily smoke pouring from the hood and undercarriage. There was no mistaking what had happened: Kittridge’s rocket ride out of the parking ramp—that leap into space and then the hard bang on the pavement—had cracked the oil pan. As the oil had drained away, the motor had gradually overheated, metal expanding until the pistons had seized in their cylinders.

Sorry about your car, Warren. It sure was good while it lasted.

After what he’d seen in the stadium, Kittridge needed some time to collect himself. Jesus, what a scene. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t have predicted, but staring it in the face was something else. It sickened him to the core. His hands were actually shaking; he thought he might be ill. Kittridge had seen some things in his life, horrible things. Bodies in pits lined up like cordwood; whole villages gassed, families lying where they’d fallen, their hands reaching out in vain for the last touch of a loved one; the indecipherable remains of men and women and children, blasted to bits in a marketplace by some lunatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. But never anything even remotely on this scale.

He’d been sitting on the hood of the Ferrari, considering his options, when in the distance he’d heard a vehicle approaching. Kittridge’s nerves snapped to attention. A large diesel engine by the sound of it: an APC? But then, lumbering up the ramp, came the surreal vision of a big yellow school bus.

How about that, Kittridge thought. Holy son of a bitch. A goddamned school bus, like a class trip to the end of the world.

Kittridge watched as the bus came to a stop. Three people emerged: a girl with a streak of pink in her hair, a knobby-kneed boy in a T-shirt and shorts, and a man in a funny-looking hat, whom Kittridge guessed was the driver. Hello! the girl called out. Is anybody here? A moment of conferral, then they advanced into the tangle of vehicles, the girl leading the way.

Probably it was time to say something, Kittridge thought. But alerting them to his presence could incur a host of obligations he’d vowed to avoid from the start. Other people weren’t part of the plan; the plan was to get gone. Travel light, stay alive as long as possible, take as many virals with him as he could when the end came. Last Stand in Denver making his bright, meteoric descent into the void.

But then Kittridge realized what was about to happen. The three of
them were headed straight for the stadium. Of course that’s where they’d go; Kittridge had done the same. These were
kids
, for God’s sake; plan or no plan, no way could he let them go in there.

Kittridge grabbed his rifle and hustled to head them off.

At the sound of Kittridge’s voice, the driver reacted so violently that Kittridge was momentarily frozen into inaction. Erupting with a yelp, the man lurched forward, stumbling over his feet while simultaneously burying his face in the crook of his elbow. The other two scurried away, the girl yanking the little boy protectively to her waist, swiveling toward Kittridge with a hammer held before her.

“Whoa, steady there,” Kittridge said. Pointing the rifle skyward, he raised his hands. “I’m one of the good guys.”

Kittridge saw that the girl was older than he’d first guessed, seventeen or so. The pink hair was ridiculous, and both her ears had so many studs in them they looked like they’d been riveted to her head, but the way she regarded him, coolly and without a hint of panic, told him she was more than she appeared. There was no doubt in his mind that she’d use the hammer on him, or try to, if he went another step. She had on a tight black T-shirt, jeans worn to threads at the knees, a pair of Chuck Taylors, and bracelets of leather and silver up and down both arms; a backpack, crime-scene yellow, hung from her shoulders. The boy was obviously her brother, their familial connection evident not only in the unmistakable arrangement of their features—the slightly too-small nose with its buttony tip, the high, sudden planes of the cheekbones, eyes of the same aquatic blue—but also in the way she had reacted, shielding him with a fierce protectiveness that struck Kittridge as distinctly parental.

The third member of their group, the driver, was harder to quantify. Something was definitely off about the guy. He was dressed in khakis and a white oxford shirt buttoned to the collar; his hair, a reddish-blond mop peeking from the sides of his peculiar cap, looked like it had been cut by pinking shears. But the real difference wasn’t any of these things. It was the way he held himself.

The boy was the first to speak. He had just about the worst cowlick Kittridge had ever laid eyes on. “Is that a real AK?” he said, pointing.

“Quiet, Tim.” Drawing him closer, the girl lifted the hammer, ready to swing. “Who the hell are you?”

Kittridge’s hands were still raised. For the moment, the notion that the hammer presented an actual threat was something he was willing to indulge. “My name’s Kittridge. And yes,” he said, speaking to the boy, “it’s a real AK. Just don’t go thinking I’ll let you touch it, young man.”

The boy’s face lit with excitement. “That’s
cool
.”

Kittridge lifted his chin toward the driver, who was now gazing intently at his shoes. “Is he okay?”

“He doesn’t like to be touched is all.” The girl was still studying Kittridge warily. “The Army said to come here. We heard it on the radio.”

“I expect they did. But it looks like they’ve flown the coop on us. Now, I don’t believe I caught your names.”

The girl hesitated. “I’m April. This is my brother, Tim. The other one is Danny.”

“Pleased to meet you, April.” He offered his most reassuring smile. “So do you think it would be all right with you if I put my hands down now? Seeing as we’ve all been properly introduced.”

“Where’d you get that rifle?”

“Outdoor World. I’m a salesman.”

“You sell guns?”

“Camping and fishing gear, mostly.” Kittridge replied. “But they give a nice discount. So what do you say? We’re all on the same team here, April.”

“What team’s that?”

He shrugged. “The human one, I’d say.”

The girl was weighing him with her eyes. A cautious one, this April. Kittridge reminded himself that she wasn’t just a girl; she was a survivor. Whatever else was true, she deserved to be taken seriously. A few seconds passed, then she lowered the hammer.

“What’s in the stadium?” Tim asked.

“Nothing you want to see.” Kittridge looked at the girl again. She seemed like an April, he decided. Funny how it sometimes worked that way. “How’d you all get by?”

“We were hiding in the wine cellar.”

“What about your folks?”

“We don’t know. They were in Telluride.”