The Twelve (The Passage 2)

"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?

A few minutes passed before the truck drew up to an immense rectangular building, like an airplane hangar. Several other vehicles were present, including a large flatbed. Men milled about in torchlight, conspicuously armed with pistols and rifles, some smoking corn silk. From inside the building came a buzz of voices.

"Now you'll see what we're really all about," said Tifty.

The building's interior was a single cavernous space, lit by torches. A huge American flag, tattered with age, hung from the rafters. At the center was the cage, a domed structure approximately fifty feet in diameter with a hooked chain descending to the floor from its apex. Surrounding it were bleachers packed with men, all talking loudly, urgently waving Austins at a figure moving up and down the rows. At Tifty's entrance a cheer shot up from the crowd, accompanied by a thunder of pounding feet. He did nothing to acknowledge this, escorting the three of them to an empty region on the lower tier of the bleachers, just a few feet from the crisscrossing bars of the cage.

"Five minutes till the betting closes!" a voice rang out. "Five minutes!"

Hollis took a place beside them. "Is this what I think it is?" Peter said.

He nodded tersely. "Pretty much."

"They're actually betting on the outcome?"

"Some are. With dopeys, mostly it's just how many minutes it will take."

"And you've actually done this."

Hollis looked at him strangely. "Why wouldn't I?"

The conversation was cut short as a second, louder cheer erupted. Peter looked up to see a metal crate being toted into the room on a forklift. A figure entered from the other side, walking with a manful swagger: Dunk. He was wearing heavy pads and carrying a pike; a sweeper's mask rode on top of his head, leaving his tattooed face exposed. He raised his right fist and pumped it in the air, summoning a frenzied stamping from the bleachers. The forklift operator dropped the box in the middle of the cage and backed away while a second man hooked the latch to the chain. As he moved clear, Dunk stepped inside. The door was locked behind him.

A hush fell. Tifty, seated beside Peter, got to his feet, holding a megaphone. He cleared his throat and directed his voice over the crowd. "All please rise for the national anthem."

Everyone clambered to their feet, placed their right hands over their hearts, and began to sing:

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed, at the twilight's last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,

O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

Peter, standing too, struggled to recall the words. It was a song from long ago-from the Time Before. Teacher had taught them in the Sanctuary. But the melody had been tricky and the words had made no sense his boyhood self could discern, and he'd never gotten the hang of it. He glanced at Michael, whose eyebrows lifted in shared surprise.

The last screeching note extinguished itself in another detonation of cheers. From the aural chaos emerged a repeated refrain, the beat established by thundering feet: Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk ... Tifty let it run its course, then raised a hand for silence. He faced the cage again.

"Dunk Withers, do you stand ready?"

"Ready!"

"Then ... start the clock!"

Pandemonium. Dunk drew his mask down, a horn sounded, the chain was pulled. For a moment nothing happened; then the dopey popped free of the crate and skittered up the cage with a quick, insectile movement, like a roach scurrying up a wall. It could have been looking for a way out or a vantage point for attack; Peter couldn't tell. The crowd had its opinion. Instantly the cheers turned to boos and catcalls. At the top of the cage, the dopey grasped one of the bars with its feet and unfurled its body so that the top of its head was pointed toward the floor, arms held away from its sides. Dunk stood below it, shouting unhearable taunts and waving the pike, daring it to drop. Meat! the crowd chanted, clapping in syncopation. Meat! Meat! Meat!

The dopey seemed disoriented, almost dazed. Its bland gaze darted about the room randomly, as if the racket and commotion had short-circuited its instincts. Its features had a blurry appearance, as if its human characteristics had been dissolved by strong acid. For five more seconds it hung there, then ten.

Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!

"Enough already." Tifty rose to his feet, taking up the megaphone. "Throw in the meat!"

From without the bars huge, blood-saturated chunks were lobbed into the cage, landing with smeary splats. This was all it took. The creature released the steel bar and dove for the nearest hunk. The upper section of a cow's leg: the dopey scooped it off the floor and shoved its jaws into the fatty folds, not so much drinking the fluids it contained as inhaling them. Two seconds and it was drained; the creature flung the desiccated remains away.

It swiveled toward Dunk. Now the man meant something. The dopey lowered itself to a crouch, balanced on its prehensile toes and massive splayed hands. The telltale c*ck of the head, the moment of regard.

It charged.

As the viral leapt toward him, arms extended, claws aiming for his throat, Dunk dropped to the floor and came up swinging the pike. The crowd went wild. Peter felt it too, the raw excitement of the contest surging in his veins. Dodging the pike, the dopey scampered back up the wall of the cage. No dazed retreat this time: its intentions were clear. When they came, they came from above. Twenty feet up, the dopey pushed itself backward off the bars, tucking its body into a headfirst aerial roll, twisting like a corkscrew as it descended in a rush of movement, and alighted on its feet ten feet from Dunk. The same engagement reversed: Dunk lunged; the dopey dropped. The pike speared the empty air above its head. As Dunk fell forward, carried by his own momentum, the dopey shot from its crouch and rammed headlong into his padded midsection, blasting him across the cage.

Dunk wound up propped upright against the bars, obviously shaken. The pike lay on the floor to his left; the mask had been torn away. Peter saw him reaching for the weapon, but the gesture was weak, his hand scrabbling with fogged inaccuracy. His chest was heaving like a bellows, a trickle of blood running from his nose to his upper lip. Why hadn't the dopey taken him yet?

Because it was a trap. The dopey seemed to suspect as much; as it contemplated the fallen warrior, Peter could sense the creature's interior conflict. The drive to kill versus an inchoate tactical suspicion that not all was as it appeared-a vestige, perhaps, of the human capacity for reason. Which would win out? The crowd was chanting Dunk's name, trying to rouse him from his stupor. That or goad the dopey into action. Any death would do. Just by going into the cage, Dunk had already secured the most important victory: to be human. To deny the virals' dominion over himself, over his fellows, over the world. The rest would fall as it fell.