The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel (84 page)

“Get her in place,” he said.

The guards yanked her from the van. Guilder didn’t feel the need to look at her as they dragged her away. He signaled to Suresh to have the semi moved into position. The truck pulled forward and glided up the ramp toward the end zone.

Guilder had given extensive thought to the matter of presentation. Some pageantry was called for. He’d struggled with what to do until he’d come upon an appropriately crowd-whipping analogue: the orchestrated arrival on the field of play of a major sports franchise. Suresh would function as stage manager, coordinating the various visual and auditory elements that would lift the evening’s demonstration to the level of spectacle. Together they’d gone through the items on the checklist: sound, lighting, display. They’d done a dry run that afternoon. A few problems
had emerged, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with, and Suresh had assured him that everything would come off without a hitch.

They made their way up the ramp; Suresh, limping, did his best to keep up. HR personnel lined both sides of the idling semi; the staff had already been seated in the lower boxes. The noise of the crowd seemed to flow toward Guilder like a wave, immersing him in its energy. The plows had swept the field of snow, leaving behind a muddy landscape; in the center, the platform and armature awaited. A nifty device: it was Suresh who’d come up with the idea. The insurgency had nearly blown him up; who wouldn’t be a little mad? As a physician he also seemed to know better than anyone interesting ways to kill people. Suspending her high in the air would give everyone a chance to see her insides unraveling; she’d feel more that way, too, and feel it longer.

While Guilder reviewed his notes, Suresh fitted him with his microphone, running the cable down his back to the transmitter, which he clipped to Guilder’s improvised belt of neckties. “Flick this here,” Suresh said, drawing his attention to the toggle switch, “and you’re on.”

Suresh backed away. He drew down his earphones, adjusted his microphone, and began the countdown:

“Sound booth.”

(Check.)

“Lights.”

(Check.)

“Fire teams.”

(Check.)

And so on. Guilder, listening vaguely, shook out his robed arms like a boxer preparing to step into the ring. He had always wondered about this gesture, which seemed like empty showmanship. Now he understood the sense of it.

“Good to go when you are,” Suresh said.

So: the moment at last. What a shock the crowd was in for. Guilder slid his glasses onto his face and took a last, long breath.

“All right, everyone,” he said. “Let’s look alive. It’s game time.”

He stepped forward, into the light.

64

“Dani, wake up.”

The voice was familiar. The voice belonged to someone she knew. It drifted toward her from high above, saying this curious, half-remembered name.

“Dani, you have to open your eyes. I need you to try.”

Sara sensed her mind emerging, her body taking shape around her. She felt suddenly cold. Her throat was tight and dry, sweet-tasting. She was supposed to open her eyes—that’s what the voice was telling her—but her lids felt like they weighed a thousand pounds apiece.

“I’m going to give you something.”

Was the voice Lila’s? Sara felt a prick in her arm. Nothing. Then:

Oh!

She bolted upright, violently curling forward at the waist, her heart thudding against her rib cage. Air rushed to her lungs, expelled by a dry cough that screeched across the parched lining of her throat.

Lila pressed a cup to her lips, bracing the back of Sara’s head with her palm. “Drink.”

Sara tasted water, cold water. The images around her began to coalesce. Her heart was still racing like a bird’s. Bits of pain, real and remembered, jabbed at her extremities. Her head felt like it was only vaguely related to the rest of her.

“You’re all right,” said Lila. “Don’t worry. I’m a doctor.”

Lila was a doctor?

“We need to be quick. I know it won’t be easy, but can you stand?”

Sara didn’t think she could, but Lila made her try. She swung her legs to the side of the gurney, Lila helping her by the elbow. Below the hem of Sara’s gown, white bandages encircled her upper thighs. More bandages dressed her lower arms. All of this had happened without her being aware of it.

“What did they do to me?”

“It’s the marrow they take. They start with the hips. That’s the pain you feel.”

Sara eased her feet to the floor. Only then did it occur to her that Lila’s presence was an aberration—that she was freeing her.

“Why do you have a gun, Lila?”

Gone was the frail, uncertain woman Sara had come to know. Her face radiated urgency. “Come.”

Sara saw the first body when they stepped into the hall: a man in a lab coat lying face-down on the floor, his arms and legs splayed in the random arrangement of swift death. The top of his skull had been blasted off, its contents splashed over the wall. Two more lay nearby, one shot in the chest, the other through the throat—though the second man wasn’t dead. He was sitting upright against the wall, his hands encircling his neck, his chest moving in shallow jerks. It was Dr. Verlyn. Through the hole in his neck, his rapid breathing made a clicking sound. His lips wordlessly working, he looked at Sara with pleading eyes.

Lila was tugging her by the arm. “We need to hurry.”

She didn’t have to say it again. More bodies—the splashes of blood and startled postures and expressions of surprise in unseeing eyes—flowed past. It was a massacre. Was it possible that Lila had done this? They came to the end of the hall, where the heavy steel door stood open. A col lay beside it, shot in the head.

“Get her out of the building,” Lila commanded. “It’s the last thing I’ll ask of you. Do whatever you have to.”

Sara understood that she was speaking of Kate. “Lila, what are you doing?”

“What should have been done long ago.” A look of peace had come into her face; her eyes glowed with warmth. “It will all be over soon, Dani.”

Sara hesitated. “My name’s not Dani.”

“I thought perhaps it wasn’t. Tell me.”

“It’s Sara.”

Lila nodded slowly, as if agreeing that this was the right name for her to have. She took Sara’s hand.

“You will be a good mother to her, Sara,” she said, and squeezed. “I know it. Now run.”

A hush fell over the crowd as Guilder stepped onto the field, all seventy thousand faces swiveling to look at him. He stood still a moment, drinking in the stillness as his eyes traveled the grandstands. He would make a humble entrance, like a priest’s. Time seemed to stretch as he walked to the platform. Who knew it could take so long to cross fifty yards? The silence around him seemed to deepen with every step.

He arrived at the platform. He gazed out upon the crowd, first one
side of the field, then the other. His hand slipped to his waist and located the toggle.

“All rise for the singing of the anthem.”

Nothing happened. Had he hit the right button? He glanced toward Suresh, who was standing on the sidelines, making a frantic rolling motion with his hand.

“I
said
, please rise.”

Begrudgingly, the crowd took to its feet. “Homeland, our Homeland,” Guilder began to sing, “we pledge our lives to thee …”

Our labors do we offer, without recompense or fee. Homeland, our Homeland, a nation rises here. Safety, hope, security, from sea to shining sea …

With a sinking feeling, Guilder realized that almost nobody else was singing. He heard a few isolated voices here and there—HR personnel and, of course, the staff, manfully croaking the words from the fifty-yard line—but this only heightened the impression that the crowd, basically, was on strike.

Homeland, our Homeland, of peace and plenty fair. The light of heaven shines upon your beauty rich and rare. One mind! One soul! Your love is all we see. Let all combine with heart and hand: one Homeland, strong and free!

The song didn’t end so much as turn a corner and fall down. Not a good sign at all. The first of several beads of sweat shot from his armpit to slither unimpeded down the length of his torso. Maybe he should have found somebody who could actually sing to warm up the crowd. Still, Guilder had a few things planned to engage the people fully in the evening’s transformational festivities. He cleared his throat, glanced toward Suresh once more, received the man’s approving nod, and spoke.

“I stand before you today on the eve of a new era—”

“Murderer!”

A buzz of voices shivered through the crowd. The shout had come from behind him, somewhere in the upper decks. Guilder spun around, blindly searching the sea of faces.

“Killer!”

The voice was a woman’s. Guilder saw her standing at the railing. She waved a fist madly in the air.

“You butcher!”

“Somebody arrest that woman!” Guilder barked into his microphone, too loudly.

A general catcalling erupted. Objects went sailing through the air, lobbing
onto the field. The crowd was throwing the only thing it had. The crowd was throwing its shoes.

“Monster! Assassin! Torturer!”

Guilder was frozen. None of this was what he’d expected at all.

“Demon! Tyrant! Swine!”

“Devil! Satan! Fiend!”

If he didn’t do something fast, he’d lose them completely. He gave Suresh the signal; the switch was thrown. To an orchestrated explosion of colored light and smoke, the pickup carrying the woman in its bed bounded onto the field, the semi lumbering behind it. Simultaneously, the fire teams went racing around the edges of the field, igniting barrels of ethanol-soaked wood, making a flickering perimeter of flame. As the pickup halted at the platform, the semi turned in a wide circle and began to back up. The guards dropped the gate of the pickup, yanked the woman from the bed, and flung her to the muddy ground at the base of the platform.

“Get up.”

The crowd was in an uproar—booing, whistling, hurling shoes like missiles.

“I said, get up.”

Guilder kicked her hard, in the ribs. When she made no cry he kicked her again, then hauled her to her feet and shoved his face so close to hers that the tips of their noses practically touched.

“You have no idea what you’re about to face.”

“Actually, I do. You could say we’re of a very long acquaintance.”

He didn’t know what to make of this curious claim, but he didn’t care. He signaled to the guards to take her away. The woman offered no resistance as they dragged her to the base of the armature and pressed her to her knees. There were streaks of mud on her cheeks, her tunic, in her hair. Under the blazing lights she seemed meager, almost doll-like, and yet Guilder could still discern the defiance in her eyes, an absolute refusal to be cowed. He hoped the virals would take their time, maybe bat her around a bit. The guards unlocked her shackles, then reattached her wrists to the chains that hung from the armature.

They began to winch her up.

With every foot of her ascent, the roars of the crowd intensified. In protest? Anticipation? The pure emotional thrill of watching a person ripped apart? They hated him, Guilder understood that, but they were part of this thing now; their dark energy had joined to the night’s transformative power.

The woman came to a rest high in the air, her arms held from her sides, her body swaying.

“Last words?”

She thought a moment. “Goodbye?”

Guilder laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

“I meant that the other way around.”

Guilder had heard enough. He turned toward the rear of the semi. Two cols in heavy pads were posted by the doors. Suresh was watching him intently from the sidelines; Guilder caught his eye and nodded.

Hey, Lila, he thought, you delusional has-been, get a load of
this
.

And suddenly there was silence. A great freezing of all movement as the stadium was dipped in darkness.

A burst of blue.

The time to move had arrived. Greer and Lore burst from their hiding place and charged up the stairs. A single col was standing guard at the door to the control room. Greer got there first.

“What the fuck?” The guard noticed the knives. “Whoa,” he said.

Greer gripped him by the ears—conveniently oversized, jutting from the sides of his head like a pair of handles—and rammed his own forehead into the man’s skull. Down he went, felled like a tree.

They flew through the door. Again, just one man awaited, a redeye. Wearing chunky earphones with a microphone, he was seated before a panel of lights and switches. A wall of windows looked down on the field, bathed in blue. The earphones were a plus; their entry had gone unnoticed. The tacit understanding between Greer and Lore said that it was now her turn.

The redeye lifted his face. “Hey, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“True,” said Lore, who slipped behind him, placed her left hand on his forehead, and drew her knife across his throat, cutting it like paper.

The doors of the semi swung open.

They emerged in magnificence, like kings. Their movements were stately, deliberate; they showed no haste, only the pure self-possession of their kind. No one could mistake what they were. They towered. They occupied space with a glorious immensity of height and breadth. They had fed on the blood of generations, inflating their persons to colossi. Even Carter, with his modest dimensions, seemed, in the company of his
brethren, to partake of their magnificence. At the wondrous sight of them, the crowd made a collective inhalation of breath. Screams would follow, of this fact Guilder had no doubt, but in the moment of the eleven virals’ emergence, a deep, anticipatory quiet reigned. The mighty beings stepped forward in rich display. Their backs were erect, their powerful claws articulating like immense devices of pain. They had the aspect of giants. They were legend made flesh, the great bestriders of the earth. The guards raced for the sidelines, to live another day, though Guilder paid this no notice. His mind was full of glory.