The Twelve (The Passage 2)

"Jackie," Sara said quietly, "wake up."

The old woman was curled in a fetal position with the blanket drawn to her chin. Her rheumy eyes stared dully at the wash of gray descending from the high windows of the lodge. Sara had listened to her coughing all night.

"The light," Jackie said. "It looks like winter."

Sara felt her forehead. No trace of fever; if anything, the woman felt cold. It was hard to say how old Jackie was. She'd been born in the flats, but her parents had come from somewhere else. Jackie wasn't one to speak of the past, but Sara knew she had outlived three children and a husband, the last sent to the feedlot for the crime of coming to the aid of a friend who was being sticked by a col.

The room was rapidly emptying out. "Jackie, please." Sara shook her by the shoulder. "I know you're tired, but we've really got to go."

The woman's eyes drew Sara into focus. She trembled with a dry cough.

"I'm sorry, hon," she said, when the spasm had passed. "I don't mean to be uncooperative."

"I just don't want to miss breakfast. You need to eat."

"There you go, looking out for me like you always do. Help an old lady down, will you?"

Sara gave Jackie a shoulder for balance and eased her to the floor. Her body was practically weightless, a form of sticks and air. Another cough hacked through her chest, a sound like pebbles being shaken in a sack. She slowly drew herself erect.

"There now." Jackie took a moment to swallow. Her face was flushed; beads of dampness had risen on her forehead. "All better."

Sara pulled the blanket off her bunk and draped it over the woman's shoulders. "It's going to be a cold one. Stay by me, okay?"

Her lips stretched into a toothless smile. "Where else would I go, hon?"

Sara retained only fleeting images of her capture. A sense of certain death, everything over and done, and then a huge force, merciless in its energy, seizing her bodily. A glimpse of the ground dropping away as the viral hurled her into the air-why hadn't it just killed her?-and then another massive jolt as she was snatched once more, plucked from the air by the second viral, and then the third, and so on, each aerial vault catapulting her farther away from the walls and lights of the garrison and into the enveloping blackness, her person passed from airborne hand to airborne hand like a ball in a children's game, all of it beyond the boundaries of her comprehension, and then the final brain-battering impact as she was slammed into the truck. The awful coming to consciousness, like climbing a ladder from hell into hell. Days without water, without food. The endless bone-banging hours and whispered, unanswerable questions. Where were they going? What was happening to them? Nearly all the captives were women, part of the civilian corps stationed at Roswell, though a handful of soldiers were among them. The cries of the injured and frightened. The smothering darkness.

Sara's mind had not returned to full awareness until their arrival. It was as if time had stretched for the duration of their journey only to snap back into shape when the door opened onto a disorienting splash of daylight. Revealing ... what? Half of the truck's human cargo had perished-a few dead at the outset and filling the compartment with a stink of gray decay, others from injuries sustained in their capture, the rest from some combination of hunger and thirst and suffocating hopelessness. Sara was lying on the floor, as they all were, both the living and the dead, inertly limbed and thick-tongued, her back propped against the wall, her eyes clenched against the unaccustomed brightness. An inversion of her physical proportions seemed to have occurred, such that most of her mass had lodged in her head. Over her lifetime, she had seen a lot of people die; lying among them was a first. The boundary separating her from them seemed a membrane as permeable as gauze. Through stinging slits, she watched as a half dozen expressionless men in ragged khaki and heavy, floor-banging boots boarded the compartment and commenced a perfunctory toting away of the deceased. She gathered that the unstructured weight of a dead body was something these men were accustomed to, its purposeless association of parts warranting no more consideration than any other awkward object a person might be forced to carry. Body after body, unceremoniously hauled away. When they came for her, Sara lifted a hand in protest; she might have said something like "Please" or "Wait" or "You can't do this." But these meager efforts were instantly silenced by a hot slap across her cheek, followed, for good measure, by the thrust of a boot that would have caught her midsection had Sara not protectively folded around herself.

"Shut. The f**k. Up."

She did. She shut the f**k up. The man who had struck her was a col Sara would come to know as Sod. Among the citizens of the flatland, all the cols had nicknames. Sod was Sod because he liked raping people. A lot of them did, it was like a game to them, but Sod distinguished himself by the breadth of his appetites. Women, men, children, livestock. Sod would have raped the wind if it had a hole in it.

Sara's turn in the shed would come: brief, brutal, over. In the near term, the pain of his blows had the counterintuitive effect of restoring her senses. Strategies began to form; priorities stepped into line. On balance, staying alive seemed desirable, and the shutting-the-fuck-up seemed the best way to accomplish this. Be quiet, she told herself. Blend in. See what you can see without seeming to. If they want to kill you, they'll do it anyway.

Don't mention the baby.

The clubs came out, poking and prodding as they were marched into the sunshine. They were someplace green. Its lushness mocked her, the cruelest of jokes. The truck had parked in a kind of holding area, a wired compound of stubby concrete buildings with glinting metal roofs; adjacent to this, at a distance of several hundred yards, was a massive, tiered structure, unlike anything Sara had ever seen. It looked like an enormous bathtub. Tall banks of lights lifted from its curving walls, ascending hundreds of feet into the air. While Sara watched, a gleaming silver semitruck, identical to the one they'd just disembarked, drew up to the building's base. Men were jogging alongside, carrying rifles. They wore bulky pads; caged masks were drawn down over their faces. As the truck approached the wall, it seemed to sink into the earth-a ramp, Sara realized, taking it belowground. A gate opened, and it was gone.

"Eyes down. No talking. Two lines, women to the left, men to the right."

Inside one of the huts, they were told to strip and deposit their clothes in a pile. Now they stood na**d, twenty-three women in identically reflexive postures of self-protection, one arm held horizontally to shield their br**sts, the other extended downward over their ge**tals. Three of the uniformed men looked on, rocking on their heels, alternating frank leers with laughing faces of disgust. There were gutters in the floor, drains. Slants of light descended from a series of long, barred windows at the roofline. Twenty-three na**d women wordlessly staring at the floor, most of them in tears: to speak would be to violate some implied contract to go on living. Whatever was headed their way seemed to be taking its time getting there.

Then, the hose.

The water blasted them like a jet of ice. Water as weapon; water as battering fist. Everyone was yelling, women were tumbling, bodies were sliding on the floor. The hose's operator enjoyed himself spectacularly, whooping like a rider on a galloping horse. He picked off one and then another. He swept them in a line. He zigzagged his pummeling probe from their faces to their br**sts and farther down. The water hit you and then it stopped and then it hit you again. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide; all you could do was endure.

It stopped.

"Everybody on your feet."

They were led outside again in their shivering na**dness. Water was streaming down their faces, running in rivulets from their hair. Their skin puckered with its evaporation. A single wooden chair had been placed in the middle of the compound. One of the guards stood beside it, languidly sharpening a razor on a leather strop. Four more approached, each bearing a large plastic tub.

"Get dressed."

Clothing was tossed their way-loose pants with drawstring waists, long-sleeved tunics that hung to the hips, all made of scratchy wool with a harsh chemical smell-followed by a random assortment of shoes: sneakers, plastic sandals, boots with the soles split away. Sara found her feet swimming in a pair of leather lace-ups.

"You, step forward."

The man with the razor was pointing at Sara. The other women parted around her. There was something disloyal about this, though Sara hardly blamed them; she might have done the same. Doom weighing in her chest, she approached the chair and sat. She was facing the other women now. Whatever was about to happen, Sara would see it first in their eyes. The man swept her hair into his fist and yanked it taught. A single slice and it was gone. He began to chop indiscriminately at the remains, hewing close to her scalp. There was no pattern to his efforts; he might just as well have been slashing his way through a forest. Sara's hair fell to her feet in golden ribbons.

"Go stand with the others."

She returned to the group. When she touched her head, her fingers came away tacky with blood. She studied its texture with her fingertips. This is my blood, Sara thought. Because it is my blood, it means that I'm alive. The second woman was in the chair now. Sara thought her name was Caroline. She had met her briefly in the infirmary at the Roswell Garrison; like Sara, she was a nurse. A tall, impressively big-boned girl who radiated health, good cheer, competence. She wept into her hands as the barber hacked away.

One by one they were shorn. So much came down to hair, Sara realized. In their disfigured semibaldness, something private had been stolen, melding them into an indistinguishable collective, like animals in a herd. She was so light-headed with hunger she didn't see how she could continue standing. None of them had had a scrap to eat-no doubt to keep them compliant, so that when food was offered they would feel some gratitude to their captors.

When the cutting was done, they were told to march across the holding area to a second concrete building for something called "processing." They were marshaled into a line before a long table, where one of the guards, radiating the sense of being in charge, sat with a look of irritation on his face. As each was called forward, he reloaded a clipboard.

"Name?"

"Sara Fisher."

"Age?"

"Twenty-one."

He eyed her up and down. "Can you read?"

"I can read. Yes."

"Special skills?"

She hesitated. "I can ride."

"Ride?"

"Horses."

His eyes rolled a little. "Anything useful?"

"I don't know." She tried to think of something safe. "Sew?"

He yawned. His teeth were so bad, they appeared to wiggle in his mouth. He jotted something onto the clipboard and tore off the bottom half of the page. From a bin beneath the table he retrieved a ratty blanket, a metal plate, a battered cup and spoon. He passed these to her, the paper balanced on top. Sara quickly glanced at it: her name, a five-digit string of numbers, "Lodge 216," and, below that, "Biodiesel 3." The handwriting had the blockiness of a child's.

"Next!"

One of the guards took her by the arm and led her down a hallway of sealed doors. A tiny box of a room and another chair, though not like any chair Sara had seen before: a menacing contraption of cracked red leather and steel, its back reclined at a forty-five-degree angle, with straps at the chest, feet, and wrists. Lurking above it, like the legs of a spider descending on silken threads, was an armature of gleaming metal instruments. The guard shoved her toward it.

"Sit down."

He strapped her to the chair and departed. From without the room, the sound muffled by the thick walls, came a burst of ominously high-pitched sound. Was it screaming? Sara thought she might be ill. She would have been, if there had been anything in her stomach to come up. The last of her defenses were collapsing. She would beg. She would plead. She had no strength to resist.

The door opened behind her. A man stepped into her field of vision, dressed in a gray smock. He had a little round belly and clouded glasses perched at the tip of his nose and bushy eyebrows that curled like wings at the tips. Something about his face was kind, almost grandfatherly. Like the guard at the table, he was looking at a clipboard. He raised his eyes and smiled.

"Sara, is it?"

She nodded, tasting bile.

"I'm Dr. Verlyn." He glanced at the straps, frowning as he shook his head. "Those people are idiots. I bet you're famished. Let's see if we can get you out of here."

She experienced a flash of hope that he intended to release her, but as he drew a stool beside the chair, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, she realized he meant something else. He placed his hand beneath her chin to open her jaw. He peered inside her mouth, then held up two fingers before her face.

"Follow with your eyes, please."

Sara traced his fingers as they made a figure eight and pulled away. He took her pulse, then produced a stethoscope from the pocket of his smock and listened to her heart. He sat up straight and returned his attention to the clipboard, squinting through his glasses.

"Any health problems you're aware of? Parasites, infection, night sweats, difficulty urinating?"

Sara shook her head.

"How about menstruation?" He was checking off boxes. "Any problems there? Excessive bleeding, for example."

"No."

"It says here you're ..." He paused, flipped through pages. "Twenty-one. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Ever been pregnant?"

Something clenched inside her.

"It's a simple question."

She shook her head. "No."