The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (8 page)

Danny climbed aboard and wedged the key into the ignition; as the big Caterpillar diesel roared to life, a warm surge filled his belly. He checked his watch: 6:52. When the big hand hit the twelve, he put the bus in gear and pulled away.

It seemed odd at first, driving through empty streets with no one around, but by the time Danny was approaching his first stop—the May-fields’, Robert and Shelly—he’d settled into the rhythms of the morning. It was easy to imagine that today was just an ordinary day. He brought the bus to a halt. Well, Robert and Shelly were sometimes late. He’d honk the horn and they’d come dashing out the door, their mother calling after them to be good, have fun, and sending them off with a wave. The house was a bungalow not much bigger than the one Danny lived in with Momma but nicer, painted the color of a pumpkin and sitting behind a wide front porch with a swing. In spring there were always baskets of flowers hanging off the rails. The baskets were still there, but the flowers had all wilted. The lawn needed mowing, too. Danny craned his neck to look up through the windshield. A window on the second floor looked like it had been ripped from its frame. The blind was still hanging in the space where the window used to be, lolling out of it like a tongue. He honked the horn and waited a minute. But still nobody came.

Seven-oh-eight. He had other stops to make. He pulled away from the corner and guided the bus around a Prius lying on its side. He came to other things in the road. An overturned police car, smashed flat. An ambulance. A dead cat. A lot of the houses had X’s spray-painted on their doors, with numbers and letters in the spaces. By the time he arrived at his second stop, a townhouse complex called Castle Oaks, he was already running twelve minutes late.
Brittany-Maybeth-Joey-Darla/Denise
. He gave the horn a long honk, then another. But there wasn’t any point. Danny was just going through the motions now. Castle Oaks was a smoking ruin. The entire complex had burned to the ground.

More stops: all were the same. He guided the bus west into Cherry Creek. The houses were bigger here, set back from the road behind wide,
sloped lawns. Big leafy trees draped curtains of dappled shade over the street. There was a quiet feeling here, more peaceful. The houses looked like they always did, and there were no bodies that Danny could see. But still there were no children.

By now his bus would have had twenty-five kids in it. The silence was unnerving. The noise in the bus always built along the route, each stop adding a little more with every kid who got on, the way music rose in a movie, approaching the final scene. The final scene was the bump. A speed bump on Lindler Avenue.
Do the bump, Danny!
they’d all cry out.
Do the bump!
And though he wasn’t supposed to, he’d give the bus a little extra gas, jolting them from their seats, and for that one moment he’d feel himself to be a part of them. He’d never been a kid like they were, just a kid going to school. But when the bus went over the bump, he was.

Danny was thinking about this, missing the children, even Billy Nice and his stupid jokes and har-har-har, when up ahead he saw a boy. It was Timothy. He was waiting with his older sister at the end of their driveway. Danny would have known the boy anywhere, on account of the cowlick—two spikes of hair that stuck up from the back of his head like antennae on a bug. Timothy was one of the youngest kids, second grade or maybe third, and small; sometimes the housekeeper waited with him, a plump brown woman in a smock, but usually it was the boy’s older sister, who Danny guessed was in high school. She was a funny girl to look at, not funny ha-ha but funny strange, with hair streaked the color of the Pepto that Momma gave him when his stomach got nervous from eating too fast and heavy black eyeliner that made her look like one of those paintings in a scary movie, the kind with eyes that moved. She had about ten studs in each ear; most days she was wearing a dog collar. A dog collar! Like she was a dog! The odd thing was that Danny thought she was sort of pretty, if not for all the weird stuff. He didn’t know any girls her age, or any age, really, and he liked the way she waited with her brother, holding his hand but letting it go as the bus approached so the other kids wouldn’t see.

He drew up to the end of the driveway and pulled the lever to open the door. “Hey,” he said, because that was all he could think of. “Hey, good morning.”

It seemed like their turn to talk, but they didn’t say anything. Danny let his eyes quickly graze their faces; their expressions were nothing he could read. None of the trains on Thomas ever looked like these two did. The Thomas trains were happy or sad or cross, but this was something else, like the blank screen on the TV when the cable wasn’t working. The girl’s eyes were puffy and red, her hair kind of smooshed-looking. Timothy
had a runny nose he kept rubbing with the back of his wrist. Their clothing was all wrinkled and stained.

“We heard you honking,” the girl said. Her voice was hoarse and shaky, like she hadn’t used it in a while. “We were hiding in the cellar. We ran out of food two days ago.”

Danny shrugged. “I had Lucky Charms. But just with water. They’re no good that way.”

“Is there anybody else left?” the girl asked.

“Left where?”

“Left alive.”

Danny didn’t know how to answer that. The question seemed too big. Maybe there wasn’t; he’d seen a lot of bodies. But he didn’t want to say so, not with Timothy there.

He glanced at the boy, who so far had said nothing, just kept nervously rubbing his nose with his wrist. “Hey, Timbo. You got allergies? I have those sometimes.”

“Our parents are in Telluride,” the boy stated. He was looking at his sneakers. “Consuela was with us. But she left.”

Danny didn’t know who Consuela was. It was hard when people didn’t answer your question but instead answered some other question you hadn’t even thought of.

“Okay,” said Danny.

“She’s in the backyard.”

“How can she be in the backyard if she left?”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Because she’s
dead
.”

For a couple of seconds, nobody said anything. Danny wondered why they hadn’t gotten on the bus yet, if maybe he’d have to ask them.

“Everybody’s supposed to go to Mile High,” the girl said. “We heard it on the radio.”

“What’s at Mile High?”

“The Army. They said it’s safe there.”

From what Danny had seen, the Army was pretty much dead, too. But Mile High would give them someplace to go. He hadn’t really thought of that before. Where was he going?

“I’m April,” the girl said.

She looked like an April. It was funny how some names were like that. They just seemed to fit.

“I’m Danny,” he said.

“I know,” said April. “Just please, Danny? Get us the hell out of here.”

7

The color wasn’t right, Lila decided. No, it wasn’t right at all.

The shade was called “buttercream.” On the sample from the store it was a soft, faded yellow, like old linen. But now, as Lila stood back to inspect her work, dripping roller in hand—honestly, she was making such a mess; why couldn’t David do these things?—it looked more like: well, what? A lemon. An
electrified
lemon. Maybe in a kitchen it would have been all right, a bright, sunny kitchen with windows looking out to a garden. But not in a nursery. My God, she thought, a color like that, the baby wouldn’t sleep a wink.

How depressing. All her hard work wasted. Hauling the ladder up the stairs from the basement, laying the drop cloths, lowering herself onto her hands and knees to tape off the baseboards, only to find she’d have to go back to the store and start over. She’d planned to have the room done by lunch, leaving enough time for the paint to dry before she hung the wallpaper border, a repeating pattern of scenes from Beatrix Potter. David thought the border was silly—“sentimental” was the word he’d used—but Lila didn’t care. She’d loved the stories of Peter Rabbit when she was a girl, crawling onto her father’s lap or snuggling down in bed to hear, for the hundredth time, the tale of Peter’s escape from Mr. McGregor’s garden. The yard of their house in Wellesley had been bordered by a hedgerow, and for years—long after she should have stopped believing in such things—she’d patiently searched it for a rabbit in a little blue jacket.

But now Peter Rabbit would have to wait. A wave of exhaustion enfolded her; she needed to get off her feet. The fumes were making her dizzy, too. Something seemed to be wrong with the AC, although with the baby, she always felt a little overheated. She hoped David would get home soon. Things were crazy at the hospital. He’d called her once to let her know he’d be late, but she hadn’t heard from him since.

She made her way downstairs to the kitchen. The place was an awful mess. Dishes piled in the sink, counters stained, the floor beneath her bare feet tacky with grime. Lila stopped in the doorway, feeling puzzled. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d let things go, and what had happened to Yolanda? How long since she’d been here? Tuesdays and Fridays were the housekeeper’s regular days. What was today? To look at
this kitchen, thought Lila, you’d think Yolanda hadn’t been to the house in weeks. Okay, the woman’s English was not the best, and sometimes she did strange things, like confusing the teaspoons with the tablespoons—how David grumbled about that—or depositing the bills, unread, straight into the recycling bin. Annoying things like that. But Yolanda wasn’t one to miss even a day of work. One winter morning she’d shown up with a cough so bad that Lila could hear it from upstairs; she’d practically had to pry the mop from the woman’s hands, saying,
Por favor, Yolanda, let me help you, I’m a doctor. Soy médico
. (Of course it was bronchitis; Lila had listened to the woman’s chest right there in the kitchen and written the prescription for amoxicillin herself, knowing full well that Yolanda probably didn’t even
have
a doctor, let alone insurance.) So, okay, she sometimes threw the mail away and mixed up the silverware and put the socks in the underwear drawer, but she was a hard worker, tireless really, a cheerful and punctual presence they depended on, what with their crazy schedules. And now not even a call.

Which was another thing. The phone didn’t seem to be working, on top of which there was no mail. Or newspaper. But David had told her not to go outside under any circumstances, so Lila hadn’t checked. Maybe the newspaper was sitting in the driveway.

She fetched a glass from the cabinet and turned on the faucet. A groan from below, a burp of air, and … nothing. The water, too! Then she remembered; the water had been out a while. Now she’d have to call a plumber on top of everything else. Or would have, if the phones were working. Wasn’t it just like David to be away when everything went to hell in a handbasket. That had been one of Lila’s father’s favorite expressions, hell in a handbasket. A curious turn of phrase, now that Lila thought about it. What exactly was a handbasket, and how was it different from a regular basket? There were lots of phrases like that, even just simple words that could suddenly look strange, as if you’d never seen them before. Diaper. Misled. Plumber. Married.

Had that really been her idea, to marry David? Because she didn’t remember thinking,
I will marry David
. Which a person
should
think, probably, before they went ahead and did it. Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn’t remember what you’d done to make it all happen. She wouldn’t have said that she loved David, exactly. She
liked
him. She
admired
him. (And who could fail to admire David Centre? Chief of cardiology at Denver General, founder of the Colorado Institute of Electrophysiology, a man who ran marathons, sat on boards, held season tickets to both the Nuggets and the opera, who daily hauled his patients from the very brink of death?)
But did these feelings add up to love? And if not, should you actually marry such a man because you were carrying his child—nothing planned, it had simply happened—and because, in a moment of characteristically David nobility, he had announced that he intended to “do the right thing”? What
was
the right thing? And why did David sometimes seem not like David but someone
resembling
David,
based on
David, a man-sized, David-like object? When Lila had told her father the news of their engagement, she’d seen it in his face: he knew. He was sitting at his desk in his study, surrounded by the books he loved, stroking glue onto the bowsprit of a model ship. In just the tiniest lift of his generous eyebrows, the truth was written. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat, pausing to screw the top onto the little jar of glue. “I can see how, under the circumstances, you might want to. He’s a good man. You can do it here if you like.”

Which he was, and which they had, flying off to Boston on the front edge of a spring blizzard, everything rushed and jammed into place, just a handful of relatives and friends able to make it at the last second to stand awkwardly in the living room while vows were exchanged (it had taken all of about two minutes) before making their excuses. Even the caterer had left early. It wasn’t the fact that Lila was pregnant that made it all so awkward. It was, she knew, that someone was missing.