The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (53 page)

Sara set to work. The day that loomed ahead would pass in a kind of trance. It was a skill she’d acquired as the years had passed, employing the hypnotic rhythms of work to drain her mind of thought. Not to think: that was the goal. To occupy a purely biological state, her senses absorbing only the most immediate physical data: the whir of the grinder’s paddles, the stink of fermenting corn, the nubbin of cold emptiness in her belly where the measly bowl of watery gruel that passed for breakfast had long since been absorbed. For these twelve hours, she was flatlander no. 94801, nothing less or more. The real Sara, the one who thought and felt and remembered—Sara Fisher, First Nurse, citizen of the Colony, daughter of Joe and Kate Fisher and sister of Michael; beloved of Hollis, friend to many, mother of one—was hidden away in a folded slip of paper, tucked like a talisman in her pocket.

She did her best to keep an eye on Jackie. The woman had her worried; a cough like hers was nothing good. In the flatlands a person didn’t really have friends, not in the way that Sara had known friendship. There were faces you knew and people you trusted more than others, but that was the extent of it. You didn’t talk about yourself, because you weren’t really anybody, or your hopes, since you had none. But with Jackie she had allowed her defenses to drop. They had formed a mutual pact, an unstated pledge to watch out for each other.

At noon they were given a fifteen-minute break, just enough time to race to the latrine—a wooden platform suspended above a ditch, with holes to squat over—and gobble another bowl of gruel. There was no place to sit, so you ate standing up or on the ground, using your fingers
for a spoon, then got in a second line for water, which was dispensed with a ladle that all the women shared. All the while they were watched by the cols, who stood to the side, twirling their sticks. Their official title was Human Resources Officers, but nobody ever called them that in the flatland. The word was short for “collaborators.” Nearly all were men but there were some women, often the cruelest of the lot. One female col, whom they called Whistler for the deep cleft in her upper lip, a congenital deformity that gave her voice a distinctive, reedlike sound, seemed to take special delight in inventing new and subtle ways to inflict discomfort. It was her habit to single out one person, most often a woman, as if she were performing an experiment. Whistler set her sights on you and the next thing you knew you would be pulled out of the latrine line for a pat-down just when it was your turn, or assigned some impossible and pointless job, or switched to a different crew just as your break was coming. The only thing you could do was take it, gritting your teeth through the misery of your aching bladder or empty stomach or exhausted limbs, knowing that soon Whistler’s attention would pass to another, though this only made things worse and seemed to be the point of the entire exercise; you found yourself wishing for the suffering to befall somebody else, and thus you became complicit, part of the system, a cog in a wheel of torment that never stopped turning.

She looked for Jackie at the break, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. Sara moved quickly through grinding stations, searching for her friend. The foreman’s whistle would blow at any moment, summoning them back to work. She had nearly given up when she turned a corner to find Jackie sitting on the ground, her face damp with sweat, her kerchief balled to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I just couldn’t stop coughing.”

The cloth was stained with blood. Sara knew what was happening; she’d seen it before, the effects of years of dust in the lungs. One minute a person was fine, the next they were drowning in it.

“We have to get you out of here.”

She pulled the woman to her feet just as the whistle blew. One hand wrapped around Jackie’s waist, Sara steered her toward the exit. Her goal was to get outside before anyone noticed; what would happen after that, Sara had no idea. Vale was the col in charge. Not the best, but not the worst, either. More than once, Sara had caught him watching her in a way that made it seem like he had something in mind for her, something personal, though he had never acted on it. Perhaps now would be the time. A shuddering nausea passed through her at the thought, yet she knew she was capable of it. She would do what she had to.

They had nearly reached the exit when a figure stepped into their path. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Not Vale: Sod. Backlit by the open door, he loomed before them. Sara’s stomach dropped.

“She just needs some air. The dust—”

“Is that right, old woman? The dust bothering you?” With the butt of his stick he tapped the woman’s chest, igniting a strangled cough. “Get back to work.”

“It’s all right, Sara,” Jackie wheezed, freeing herself from Sara’s arm. “I’ll be fine.”

“Jackie—”

“I mean it.” She looked at Sara, her eyes saying,
Don’t
. “She’s just a busybody, that’s all. Thinking she knows what’s best for me.”

Sod eyes flicked the length of Sara’s body. “Yeah, I heard that about you. Think you’re some kind of doctor, do you?”

“I never said that.”

“Sure you didn’t.” With his free hand Sod cupped his crotch, rocking his hips forward. “Hey, Doctor, I’ve got a pain right here. What do you say you get a closer look at it?”

The moment caught and held; Sara thought of Eustace, in the truck. The blood on his face, his shattered hands and teeth. His broken smile of triumph. Standing before Sod, she willed herself to say the words, to utter the curse that would unleash him upon her. It was all so simple, so stark. She could see the scene unfolding in her mind. Just two words, and the flare of anger in Sod’s eyes, and then the crash of the stick. These were the terms of her life, a thousand humiliations enacted daily. They had taken everything from her. To accept the worst—no, to embrace it—that was the only resistance.

“Sara,
please
.” Jackie was staring at her.
Not like this. Not for me
.

Sara swallowed. Everyone was looking at her.

“Okay,” she said.

She turned and walked away. The space around her had grown strangely quiet. All she could hear was her heart.

“Don’t worry, Fisher,” Sod called after her with a leering laugh. “I’ll know where to find you. It’ll be as good as the last time, I promise.”

It was later, as Sara lay in her cot, that she permitted herself to consider the full measure of these events. Something had changed within her. She was on the verge, a figure standing at the precipice, waiting to jump. Five long years: it could have been a thousand. The past was disappearing
inside her, rinsed away by the wash of time, the bitter cold of her heart, the sameness of days. She had plunged down inside herself for too long. Winter was coming. Winter light.

She had somehow gotten Jackie through the day. Now the old woman slept above her, the straps of her bunk sagging with her restive turning. Jackie’s death, when it came, would come badly, in long agonal hours, a strangling from within, before the final stilling. Would her fate be Sara’s own? To stumble blindly through the years, a being without purpose or connection, a hollow shell of nothing?

Sara had not returned the makeshift envelope to its hiding place under the mattress. Seized by a sudden loneliness, she withdrew it from beneath the lump of rags that served as her pillow. It had been given to her by the midwife’s assistant in the birthing ward—the same woman who had told her that the baby, arriving early in a gush of blood, had not survived. It was a girl, the woman had told her. I’m sorry. Then she’d slipped the envelope into Sara’s hand and vanished. Through the haze of grief and pain Sara had ached to hold her daughter, but this hadn’t happened; the child had been taken away. She’d never seen the woman again.

Carefully she unfolded the pocket of brittle paper with the tips of her fingers. Inside lay a coiled lock of hair—a baby curl. The room was sunk in darkness, and yet its pale golden color was vivid to her eyes. She brought it to her face, inhaling deeply, trying to capture its scent. Sara could never have another, the damage was too great; Kate was the only one. That was what she’d named her, Kate. How she wished she’d told Hollis. She had wanted to save her news, to choose the perfect moment to give him the present of the two of them conjoined. How foolish she’d been. She thought: I know you’re better off, my darling. Wherever you are now, I hope it is a place of light and sky and love. If only I could have held you, just one time, to tell you how much I loved you.

37

This Sergio thing: it had simply gone on too long.

Not that there hadn’t been uprisings before. The year 31, wasn’t it? And again in 68? Not to mention the hundred little brushfires of defiance put down over the years. And wasn’t it true that the problem inevitably boiled down to a single individual, a lone renegade, who simply
failed to get the
point
? That when this man was taken care of (it was always a man), the flames of resistance, deprived of their essential oxygen, would extinguish of their own accord?

And yet this Sergio: he didn’t feel like the others. Standing in the window at the base of the cupola, his gaze directed over the grimy stain of the flatland and the colorless, winter fields beyond, Director Horace Guilder took stock. The man’s methods were different, for starters, not merely in quantity but in kind. People blowing themselves up! Strapping sticks of dynamite to their chests, or pipe bombs crammed with shards of glass and broken screws, and actually mustering the will to blow themselves and everyone around them to a bloody mist! It was beyond madness, a full-blown psychosis that could only mean that this Sergio, whoever he was, held a deeper psychological sway over his followers than any who had come before. The flatlanders had safety, they had food to warm their bellies, they slept in beds at night without fear of the virals. They were allowed to live their lives, in other words, and this was the thanks he got? Couldn’t they see that everything he’d done, he’d done for them? That he had built a home for mankind so that it might, against the prevailing winds of history, continue?

True, there was a certain … unfairness to things. An uneven distribution of resources, one could say, a partitioning of management from labor, of haves from have-nots, us from them. An unpleasant reliance on the human capacity for pulling the ladder up behind oneself, and the time-tested tools—icy showers, endless lines to stand in, the excessive use of proper nouns, loudspeakers blaring a constant stream of inanities, etc.—of broad social compliance. “One People! One Homeland! One Director!” The words made him wince, but a certain amount of stage-managed demagoguery went with the territory. Nothing really new, in other words, all of it warranted under the terms of the present age. But sometimes, such as now, on this icy Iowa morning, the first arctic front of the season bearing down on them like a runaway train of asshammering cold, Guilder had a hard time maintaining his enthusiasm.

His expansive suite of offices, which also functioned as his living quarters, had served, at various times in its two-hundred-year history, as the office of the Iowa territorial governor, the headquarters of the state historical museum, and a storage room. Its last old-world occupant had been the provost of Midwest State University, a man named August Frye (so read the man’s stationery), who, from its generous windows, had no doubt passed many happy hours soaking in the heartwarming sight of cheerful corn-fed undergraduates flirting like maniacs as they strolled their way to class upon its well-kept Iowa lawns. On the day Guilder had
assumed residency, he’d been surprised to discover that Provost August Frye had decorated the place with a nautical theme: ships in bottles, maps with serpents, overwrought oil paintings of lighthouses and oceanscapes, an anchor. A strikingly incongruous choice, given that Midwest State (go Bearcats!) was hard aground in about the most landlocked place on earth. After nearly a hundred years, what Guilder wouldn’t have given for a smidgen of scenery.

Hence the major problem with immortality, apart from the peculiar diet: everything began to bore you.

At such moments, the only thing that cheered him was taking stock of his accomplishments. Which were not inconsiderable; they had constructed a city literally from nothing. What excitement he’d felt in the early days. The ceaseless ring of hammers. The trucks returning from their journeys across an unmanned continent, bursting with the abandoned treasures of the old world. The hundreds of tactical decisions made daily, and the buzzing energy of the staff—men handpicked from among the survivors for their expertise. They had, in short, built a veritable brain trust from the human leavings of catastrophe. Chemists. Engineers. City planners. Ag scientists. Even an astronomer (who had come in surprisingly handy) and an art historian, who had advised Guilder (who, to be perfectly honest, couldn’t tell Monet’s water lilies from dogs playing poker) on the proper preservation and display of a major haul of masterworks from the Art Institute of Chicago, which now decorated the walls of the Dome, including Guilder’s office. What fun they’d had! Granted, there was a certain frat-house mentality to the way they’d conducted themselves, minus the sexual shenanigans, of course. (The virus pretty much gutted that part of your brain like a trout; most of the staff couldn’t even bring themselves to look at a woman without making a face.) But in the main, decorum and professionalism had ruled the day.