The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (66 page)

Tifty’s logic felt too convenient, a way to justify his crimes; on the other hand, Peter could not deny the meaning of the picture.

“Colonel Apgar said you were an officer. A scout sniper.”

Tifty’s face lit with a quick smile; there was a story there. “I should have known Gunnar would have something to do with this. What did he tell you?”

“That you made captain before you busted out. He called you the best S2 there ever was.”

“Did he? Well, he’s being kind, but only a little.”

“Why did you resign?”

Tifty shrugged carelessly. “Many reasons. You could say that military life didn’t suit me on the whole. Your presence here makes me think it may not suit you particularly well, either. My guess would be you’ve gone off the reservation, Lieutenant. How many days are you AWOL?”

Peter felt caught. “Just a couple.”

“AWOL is AWOL. Believe me, I know all about that. But in answer to your question, I left the Expeditionary because of the woman in the field. More specifically, because I told Command where she came from, and they refused to do anything about it.”

Peter was dumbstruck. “You
know
where she comes from?”

“Of course I know. So does Command. Why do you think Gunnar sent you here? Fifteen years ago, I was part of a squad of three sent north to locate the source of a radio signal somewhere in Iowa. Very faint, just little scratches of noise, but enough to catch it with an RDF. We didn’t know why, the Exped wasn’t in the business of chasing down every random squeak, but it was all very hush-hush, very top-down. Our orders were to scout it out and report back, nothing more. What we found was a city at least two, maybe three times the size of Kerrville. But it had no walls, no lights. By any reckoning, it shouldn’t have existed at all. And you know what we saw? Trucks like the one I saw in the field just before the attack. Like the one you saw three days ago.”

“So what did Command say?”

“They ordered us never to tell anyone.”

“Why would they do that?” Though, of course, they had told Peter exactly the same thing.

“Who knows? But my guess would be the order came from the Civilian Authority, not the military. They were scared. Whoever those people were, they had a weapon we couldn’t match.”

“The virals.”

The man nodded evenly. “Stick your fingers in your ears and hope they never came back. Maybe not wrong, but it wasn’t anything I could sit with. That was the day I resigned my commission.”

“Did you ever go back?”

“To Iowa? Why would I do that?”

Peter felt a mounting urgency. “Vorhees’s daughter could be there. Sara, too. You saw those trucks.”

“I’m sorry. Sara. Do I know this person?”

“She’s Hollis’s wife. Or would have been. She was lost at Roswell.”

A look of regret eased across the man’s face. “Of course. My mistake. I believe I knew that, though I don’t think he ever mentioned her name. Nevertheless, this changes nothing, Lieutenant.”

“But they could still be alive.”

“I don’t think it’s likely. A lot of time has passed. Either way, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Not then and not now. You’d need an army. Which the CA more or less guaranteed we didn’t have. And in the leadership’s defense, these people, whoever they are, never returned. At least until now, if what you’re saying is true.”

Something was missing, Peter thought, a detail lurking at the edge of his awareness. “Who else was with you?”

“On the scouting party? The officer in charge was Nate Crukshank. The third man was a young lieutenant named Lucius Greer.”

The information passed through Peter like a current.

“Take me there. Show me where it is.”

“And what would we do when we got there?”

“Find our people. Get them out somehow.”

“Are you listening, Lieutenant? These aren’t just survivors. They’re in league with the virals. More than that—the woman can control them. Both of us have seen it happen.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should. All you’ll accomplish is getting yourself killed. Or taken. My guess is, that would be a good deal worse.”

“Then just tell me how to find it. I’ll go on my own.”

Tifty rose from behind his desk, returned to the table in the corner, and poured himself another glass of water. He drank it slowly, sip by sip. As the silence lengthened, Peter got the distinct impression that the man’s mind had taken him elsewhere. He wondered if the meeting was over.

“Tell me something, Mr. Jaxon. Do you have children?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Indulge me.”

Peter shook his head. “No.”

“No family at all?”

“I have a nephew.”

“And where is he now?”

The questions were uncomfortably probing. And yet Tifty’s tone was so disarming, the answers seemed to spring forth of their own accord. “He’s with the sisters. His parents were killed at Roswell.”

“Are you close? Do you matter to him?”

“Where are you going with this?”

Tifty ignored the question. He placed his empty glass on the table and returned to his desk.

“I suspect he admires you a great deal. The great Peter Jaxon. Don’t be so modest—I know just who you are, and more than the official account. This girl of yours, Amy, and this business with the Twelve. And don’t blame Hollis. He’s not my source.”

“Who then?”

Tifty grinned. “Perhaps another time. Our subject at hand is your nephew. What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Caleb.”

“Are you a father to Caleb, is what I’m asking. Despite your gallivanting around the territories, trying to rid the world of the great viral menace, would you say that’s true?”

Suddenly Peter had the sense of having been perfectly maneuvered. It reminded him of playing chess with the boy: one minute he was drifting in the current of the game; the next he was boxed in, the end had come.

“It’s a simple question, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t know.”

Tifty regarded him another moment, then said, with a note of finality, “Thank you for your honesty. My advice to you would be to forget about all of this and go home and raise your boy. For his sake, as much as your own, I’m willing to give you a pass and let you and your friends go free, with the warning that speaking of our whereabouts will not, how shall I put this, bring happy things your way.”

Checkmate. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

“Consider it the greatest favor anybody’s ever done you. Go home, Mr. Jaxon. Live your life. You can thank me later.”

Peter’s mind scrambled for something to say that might convince the man otherwise. He gestured toward the drawing on the desk. “Those girls. You said you loved them.”

“I did. I do. That’s why I’m not going to help you. Call me sentimental, but I won’t have your death on my conscience.”

“Your
conscience
?”

“I do have one, yes.”

“You surprise me, you know that?” Peter said.

“Really? How do I surprise you?”

“I never thought Tifty Lamont would be a coward.”

If Peter had expected to get a rise, he saw none. Tifty rocked back in his chair, placed the tips of his fingers together, and looked at him coolly over the tops of his spectacles. “And you were thinking maybe that if you pissed me off, I’d tell you what you want to know?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Then you mistake me for somebody who cares what others think. Nice try, Lieutenant.”

“You said one of them was never found. I don’t see how you can sit here if she could still be alive.”

Tifty sighed indulgently. “Perhaps you didn’t get the news, but this isn’t a what-if world, Mr. Jaxon. Too many what-ifs are just a way to keep yourself up at night, and there’s not enough decent sleep to go around. Don’t get me wrong, I admire your optimism. Well, maybe not admire—that might be too strong a word. But I do understand it. There was a time when I wasn’t so very different. But those days are passed. What I have is this picture. I look at it every day. For now, that’s what I have to content myself with.”

Peter picked up the drawing again. The woman’s shining smile, the lift of her hair on an unseen breeze, the little girls, wide-eyed, hopeful like all children, waiting for their lives to unfold. He had no doubt that this picture was the center of Tifty’s life. Looking at it, Peter sensed the presence of a complex debt, allegiances, promises made. This picture: it wasn’t just a memorial; it was the man’s way of punishing himself. Tifty wished he’d died with them, in the field. How strange, to find himself feeling sorry for Tifty Lamont.

Peter returned the picture to its place on Tifty’s desk. “You said the trade was only part of what you do. You never told me what else.”

“I didn’t, did I?” Tifty removed his glasses and rose. “Fair enough. Come with me.”

Tifty manipulated another keypad and the heavy door swung open, revealing a spacious room with large metal cages stacked against the walls. The air was rank with a distinctly animal scent, of blood and raw meat, and the high-noted aroma of alcohol. The light glowed a cool, violety blue—“viral blue,” Tifty explained, with a wavelength of four hundred nanometers, at the very edge of the visible spectrum. Just enough, he told Peter, to keep them calm. The builders of the facility had understood their subjects well.

Michael and Lore had joined them. They passed through the room of cages and ascended a short flight of stairs. What awaited them was obvious; it was just a question of how it would be revealed.

“And this,” said Tifty, opening a panel to reveal two buttons, one green, one red, “is the observation deck.”

They were standing on a long balcony with a series of catwalks jutting over a metal shelf. Tifty pushed the green button. With a clatter of gears and chain, the shelf began to withdraw into the far wall, revealing a surface of hardened glass.

“Go on,” Tifty urged. “Look for yourselves.”

Peter and the others stepped onto the catwalk. Instantly one of the virals hurled itself upward against the glass, crashing into it with a thump before bouncing off and rolling back to the corner of its cell.

“Fuck … 
me
,” Lore gasped.

Tifty joined them on the catwalk. “This facility was built with one purpose in mind: studying the virals. More accurately, how to kill them.”

The three of them were staring at the containers below. Peter counted nineteen of the creatures in all; the twentieth container was empty. Most appeared to be dopeys, barely reacting to their presence, but the one who
had leapt at them was different—a full-blown female drac. She eyed them hungrily as they moved along the catwalks, her body tense and her clawed hands flexing.

“How do you get them?” Michael asked.

“We trap them.”

“With what, spinners?”

“Spinners are for amateurs. The gyrations immobilize them, but such devices are no good, really, unless you want to crisp them on-site. To take them alive, we use the same baited traps the builders of this facility used. A tungsten alloy, incredibly strong.”

Peter tore his gaze away from the drac. “So what have you learned?”

“Not as much as I’d like. The chest, the roof of the mouth. There’s a third soft spot at the base of the skull, though it’s very small. They bleed to death if you dismember them, but it’s not easy cutting through the skin. Heat and cold don’t seem to have much effect. We’ve tried a variety of poisons, but they’re too smart for that. Their sense of smell is incredibly acute, and they won’t eat anything we’ve laced no matter how hungry they get. One thing we do know is that they’ll drown. Their bodies are too dense to keep them afloat, and they can’t hold their breath very long. The longest any of them lasted was seventy-six seconds.”

“What if you starve them?” Michael asked.

“We tried that. It slows them down, and they enter a kind of sleep state.”

“And?”

“As far as we can tell, they can stay that way indefinitely. Eventually we stopped trying.”

Suddenly Peter understood what he was seeing. The work of the trade was really just a cover. The man’s true purpose was right here, in this room.

“Tifty, you are full of shit.”

Everybody turned. Tifty crossed his arms over his chest and gave Peter a hard look.

“You have something on your mind, Lieutenant?”

“You always meant to go back to Iowa. You just couldn’t figure out how.”

Tifty’s expression didn’t change. His face looked suddenly older, worn down by life. “That’s an interesting theory.”

“Is it?”

For five seconds the two men stared at each other. No one else said anything. Just when the silence had gone on too long, Michael broke the tension.

“I think she likes you, Peter.”

Fifteen feet below, the big drac was looking up at him, her head rolling lazily on her gimballed neck. She uncocked her jaw like someone yawning and drew back her lips to display her glinting teeth.
These are for you
.

Tifty stepped forward. “Our latest addition,” he said. “We’re all very proud of this one—we’ve been tracking her for weeks. It’s not often we get a full-blown drac anymore. We call her Sheila.”

“What are you going to do to her?” Michael asked.

“We haven’t decided. More or less the usual, I suppose. A little of this, a little of that. She’s too mean for the cage, though.”

Peter recalled Hollis’s punishment. “What’s the cage?”

Tifty’s face lit with a smile. “Ah,” he said.

Midnight. During the intervening hours, the three of them had been confined to a small, unused room, with one of Tifty’s men outside. Peter had finally managed to fall asleep when a buzzer sounded and the door opened.

“Come with me,” said Tifty.

“Where are we going?” Lore asked.

“Outside, of course.”

Why “of course”? thought Peter. But this seemed to be Tifty’s way. The man had a taste for drama. “Where’s Hollis?” Peter asked.

“Not to worry, he’ll be joining us.”

A cloudy, starless night. A truck was waiting for them, parked at the steps. They climbed into the bed while Tifty got into the cab with the driver. They weren’t guarded, but unarmed, in the dark, where would they go?