15. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 735-766

XI. The New Thing; Postscript: Roswell Road

_____

Winter sets in and the group is snowed in an abandoned hotel. After 112 days on the mountain, the spring thaw begins and they make their way off the mountain on a Sno-Cat that Michael and Greer have found and refurbished. With them is Alicia, who broke her restraints and seized Peter's hand just as he was about to stab her. The virus has given her something like superpowers: she is able to leap through the air like a viral, and although her eyes are more sensitive to light and have turned orange, she is able to withstand the sun.

The New Thing. That's what they were calling her. Neither one nor the other, but somehow both. She couldn't feel the virals, as Amy could; couldn't hear the question, the great sadness of the world. In every respect she seemed herself, the same Alicia she had always been, save one: When she chose to, she could do the most astounding things. 

After the Sno-Cat dies, they take to cross-country skis. Along the way, they see no virals, but they're aware that although Babcock's Many have died off, there must be others sired by the remaining eleven. Michael compares them to bees: "'These Twelve original subjects,' he went on, gesturing over the files, 'they're like the queens, each with a different variant of the virus. Carriers of that variant are part of a collective mind, linked to the original host.'" He posits that there must be "eleven more big hives" like Babcock's somewhere. And Peter thinks, "They always go home." He has the files that tell him where each of the subjects came from.

They reach the site of the garrison and switch to the Humvee that was left there. They arrive at Theo and Mausami's house three days after they were attacked, and find them all alive, Theo incapacitated by a broken leg. But neither Theo nor Mausami knows how they survived: The viral had been killed by a gun, but neither of them had fired it. When Peter and Alicia go to the barn and find the viral's body, they identify it as Galen Strauss.

They settle in at the farmstead while Theo's leg heals and the weather grows warmer. One day Peter comes to the decision that he will let himself be injected with the virus, on the assumption that he would gain superpowers like Alicia's. The others agree, although Sara is reluctant -- she thinks the virus is evil -- and Amy is kept unaware of the plan. But when they go to inject him, they find the vials missing from the box: Amy has taken them, and they find her dropping the last vial into the fire. She agrees with Sara that the virus is evil, and says, "it would have made you like me. And I couldn't let that happen."

They decide to separate: Sara, Hollis, Theo, Mausami and the baby will take the Humvee to Roswell. Peter, Amy, Michael, Alicia and Greer will go on foot to the site of the colony in California. They plan to reunite eventually in Kerrville.

When Peter's group reach the power station for the colony, they find it abandoned and filled with spent rifle cartridges. The guns had been taken and the place shot up, but there are no bodies and no blood. They find the power still on, but when Michael checks he realizes that no current has been drawn from the batteries for 323 days. The conclusion is that the lights have been off at the colony. And when they reach it, they find it empty except for two bodies: Gloria Patal has hanged herself, and Auntie has died, apparently peacefully. They bury Auntie and that night they turn the lights on.

Just before dawn, Amy goes outside the walls, where Wolgast comes to her and she bids him farewell as the sun rises.

Sara's journal recounts their trip to Roswell. She is pregnant. Virals begin to appear and try to break into the places where they shelter at night, eventually destroying the Humvee. They set out on foot, except for Theo, who is still unable to walk that far, and are rescued by a patrol and taken to the Roswell garrison.

The journal ends with Sara sensing the baby inside her and feeling happy. Then she hears shots and goes outside to see what's happening. There is a note that the the journal was "Recovered at Roswell Site ("Roswell Massacre").

[Yeah, I don't know for sure what the business with Wolgast is at the end. His ghost? Has he been turned by the virals yet somehow held onto his humanity? Is he the one who killed Galen Strauss and saved Theo and Mausami and the baby? And if not, who did? I only hope Cronin remembers to tell us in the next book.]

14. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 677-733

X. The Angel of the Mountain

_____

Peter and Amy are on their way again, riding on Greer's horse. But when they reach a bridge across a river, all that's left of it is the beams, too narrow for the horse to walk across. So they send the horse away, after Amy silently communicates to it that that's what they want to do, and negotiate the narrow beams across the river.

Finally they reach the ruins of the compound, where first Amy and then Peter hears someone singing. They follow the sound to a small log house in a clearing in the forest, where they find Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto.

Meanwhile, Sara is tending to the wounded on the convoy and thinking about settling down in Kerrville with Hollis. The convoy halts when one of the trucks breaks down. Then one of the wounded soldiers wakes up and tells Sara about his bad dream of a fat woman. And Alicia returns from scouting ahead and tells Greer that they've spotted tracks: "The Many. And they're headed straight for that mountain."

Theo and Mausami have discovered that the farm had belonged to a family named Conroy, and they give the family's name to a starving dog they find in the barn. They bathe and feed the dog who settles in with them, but Theo suddenly realizes that the barn had been latched. How did Conroy find his way into it. So he goes outside to check and finds human footprints in the barn and an opened can that someone has eaten from.

When Lacey had left Amy and Wolgast, the viral who had attacked her was Carter -- who didn't so much attack as feed, communicating to her his sadness and the whole story of the death of Rachel Wood. She realized, "He was not like the others," and she gave him her blessing. She was rescued by Jonas Lear, who helped her heal and lived with her in the cottage they built from the ruins of the Chalet, the central building of the facility. Because he had given her the form of the virus that had been given to Amy, she didn't age; but he did, and she had lived on in the cottage for fifty-four years after his death until Amy and Peter showed up.

Lacey gives Amy her old Powerpuff Girls knapsack, with the remnants of what had been in it, including the stuffed rabbit. Amy shares her memories of Wolgast, and Lacey tells her that she had stayed behind, "So someone would be here when you came back." Jonas Lear had set up the beacon to call for her return. Amy tells them of the voices she hears from the virals: "They're so sad. They have such terrible dreams. I hear them all the time.... They're dying and can't stop. Why can't they stop, Lacey?" Lacey replies, "I think that they are waiting for you, to show them the way." Then Lacey brings out the file folders on the men used in the experiments.

Alicia is leading a party that consists of Michael, Sara, Hollis, and Greer, who relinquished his command of the convoy. Along the way they find the body of the horse Peter and Amy had sent back at the bridge.

Peter reads through the files and discovers that all of the subjects of the experiment, except Amy, had been criminals sentenced to death. When he reaches Babcock's file, he learns that Babcock had originally been from Desert Wells, and thinks, "They always go home." Lacey comes to him after he has read the files and tells him the story of Noah from the Bible. Peter is Noah, she suggests, the one who will see to it that the world is reborn, and when he asks, "if I'm supposed to be Noah, then who's Amy?" "'The ship, Peter,' said Lacey. 'Amy is the ship.'"

As he's thinking about this, Lacey looks startled, and Amy comes into the room. They have sensed that Babcock is on the way. And Lacey tells Peter it's time for him to see "The passage." They follow her to the south side of the mountain and down its side to a dark tunnel. Lacey opens a doorway and they are in a brightly lit hallway -- "Level Five," she says Lear called it. They go to what looks like an infirmary, where Lacey opens a cabinet and takes out a small metal box that contains "two rows of tiny glass vials, containing a shimmering green liquid. He counted eleven; a twelfth compartment was empty." It's the virus that Amy and Lacey were given -- Lacey's is the missing twelfth vial. Peter puts the box in his backpack, along with a handful of syringes.

Alicia returns to the group and tells them she has found tracks. They move forward through the forest, but then Michael hears a sound above him. A gun goes off and Michael is knocked off his horse. He sees a viral crouching a few meters away from him and hears gunshots and people calling his name, but he concentrates on killing the viral with his knife, which he plunges into its chest. Then Peter and Amy appear, and Amy administers the coup de grace with Michael's rifle, telling it "I'm sorry" as she does. Michael, Peter and Amy hear more gunfire and run toward it.

Lacey has tricked Peter and Amy into going ahead as she sets the timer on a small nuclear bomb, then closes the door, locking them out. She communicates to Amy, "You will know how to set them free, to make their final passage." Then she waits for Peter and Amy to leave and opens the door again, waiting for Babcock.

Peter, Amy and Michael reach Lacey's cottage; Sara, Alicia, Hollis and Greer are there already. They barricade themselves inside, but the virals quickly attack the cottage, breaking through the barricade, and one of them bites Alicia before Hollis can kill it.

Lacey, concerned that Babcock hasn't taken the bait and that the virals are passing her by, goes to the mouth of the tunnel and summons Babcock. She runs back into the tunnel, thinking of how her mother had told her to run when the soldiers attacked. Babcock follows her and the bomb goes off.

Amy is the first to stand up after the explosion shakes Lacey's cottage, and she leads Peter and the others outside, where the dazed virals, freed from Babcock's control, are standing. She walks among them, communicating their old names to them, as the sun rises and begins to kill them. Peter joins her, and she tells him to go inside and save Alicia. He gives Sara one of the vials and a syringe, and when she protests that she doesn't know what it is, he tells her, "It's Amy."

The injection doesn't have much immediate effect, and they begin to worry about the lack of supplies and the oncoming winter, as well as the effects of the radiation from the bomb. When it seems that the Amy virus is not working and that she is about to turn, Peter orders the others out of the room. He has promised Alicia that he'll be the one to kill her in such a case, and he crouches over her with the knife aimed at her breastbone.

Mausami goes into labor. It's prolonged and difficult, but she finally gives birth to a boy they name Caleb. Exhausted, they all fall asleep, except when Conroy awakens Theo to be let outside. But when Theo wakes up again, Conroy has vanished. Theo goes to look for him and finds the dog dead. Then he hears Mausami scream and races back to the house to find it empty. He hears her scream again and finds her in the barn, in the back seat of the old Volvo that was stored there, clutching the baby. The creature attacks him, knocking the shotgun he is carrying out of his grip and flinging him against the car. He lets the viral attack him, not wanting to see what it would do with Mausami and the baby.

13. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 613-675

IX. The Last Expeditionary

_____

Sara writes in her journal to report that the newly talkative Amy has explained that she had asked Babcock not to kill Theo in the ring: "He's full of bad dreams. I thought it would be best to use my please and thank you." She also explains that she had been told how to blow the coupler between the engine and the boxcars by Gus, who had telepathically communicated to her after he fell from the train but before he died.

They reach another town where they find a store called Outdoor World that's full of the kind of supplies they need. They continue north on Highway 15, making by Peter's estimate about 25 kilometers a day. They encounter a forest fire and take shelter, and a few days later find the bodies of virals who had been trapped in the fire.

In an entry ten days later, Sara reports that she has decided to marry Hollis, but they decide not to tell the others yet. They come upon a farmstead that seems undisturbed and is well-stocked with supplies. There are four graves nearby. Peter estimates it has been abandoned for ten to twenty years. He wants to move on before the winter sets in, but Theo and Mausami decide to stay there. They make better time without them. Amy has a bad dream about a man who "keeps on dying and can't stop," but she falls asleep again without telling them who the man again.

They reach Colorado, where Amy begins to take the lead. One day in a forest they come across a strange smell and see up in the trees "dozens of long strands of small, white objects, bunched like fruit." Suddenly, they spring the trap and a net gathers them all up. A group of soldiers appears out of the forest and takes them to their garrison. Major Greer, a man of about forty, tells them that they're not prisoners but "under protection." The garrison is surrounded by a high timber fence and contains a number of military vehicles. What turns out to be the flag of Texas flies over it. 

Greer explains that what was hanging in the trees over the net, the source of the bad smell, was garlic, which the "dracs," as they call the virals, love. As they pass into the garrison, Peter notices that the soldiers were all looking at the women in their party.  Everyone snaps to attention when the general appears and gives the order, "You are not to look at these women. You are not to speak to them, or come near them, or approach them, or in any way think you have anything to do with them, or they with you." He leads them, along with Greer, into his tent, where there is a map of their expeditions from central Texas. One route goes through Oklahoma and into Kansas, and the other through New Mexico and then north just across the border into Colorado, where they are now.

He introduces himself as "Brigadier General Curtis Voorhees, Second Expeditionary Forces, Army of the Republic of Texas" and tells them that as long as they stay they're under his authority. In six days they will be leaving to join up with the battalion at Roswell, New Mexico, and suggests that they join them. From there, they will be sent to Kerrville, Texas. He also explains that they are "a volunteer force. To join the Expeditionary is to do so for life, by blood oath, and each of these men is sworn to die." The problem with having women in the garrison is, "A man will happily die for his friends, but a woman -- a woman makes him want to live." When Peter tells the general that they intend to continue their way, Alicia interrupts him.

Alicia, standing at attention, says, "General Voorhees. Colonel Niles Coffee of the First Expeditionary sends his regards." And she introduces herself as the Colonel's "adopted daughter.... Private Alicia Donadio, First Expeditionary. Baptized and sworn." To Peter she explains that when the Colonel arrived at the colony and claimed her in the Sanctuary, she had promised not to reveal his identity or her allegiance. The general calls Greer into the tent and tells him who she is. "Sworn is sworn. The men will have to learn to live with it. Take her to the barber" -- all the members of the force have their heads shaven. Alicia reassures Peter than he can continue his mission without her.

It rains for five days, during which Peter tells Voorhees and Greer all about Amy, the signal they were following, the colony, Theo and Mausami, and the Haven. Peter urges them to send an expedition to the colony, mentioning the bunker at Twentynine Palms, but Voorhees says it would be next spring before they could do it. He also says it reminds him of a community, Homer, Oklahoma, that the Third Battalion came across where there were twelve hundred people who had never even heard of the virals. They were offered transport to Kerrville but refused. And when the Third Battalion returned later, the community had vanished. But there were no bodies left behind. "Everything neat as a pin, dinner dishes sitting on the table."

What interests Voorhees the most is that Peter's group managed to make it all the way from California to Colorado. "Thirty years ago, when Kerrville sent out the First Expeditionary, you couldn't walk a hundred meters without tripping on a drac." Peter asks if this means the virals are dying off, but all the general will say is that "something's different. Something's changed.... The cities are still crawling, with all the empty buildings, but there's plenty of open countryside where you could go for days without seeing one."

Texas seceded because the federal government was trying to bomb the virals into extinction. Most of the cities are gone, and Houston is a petrochemical swamp. The Gulf of Mexico is "a chemical slick" from all the oil platforms. California's secession led to an all-out war, in which the federal government forgot about Texas because of its inability to fight on two fronts. And the NATO alliance tried to control the spread of the virus by bombing the coasts and mining the borders. No one seems to know about the rest of the world. Some think that the virus never made it to the other continents, but others think that the desire for American resources, including the gold at Fort Knox and the stockpile of military ordnance and nuclear weapons was too strong to resist. "Chances are, they took the virus back with them."

Discouraged, Peter talks to Hollis and Michael in the mess tent, still undecided whether they should go with the soldiers or continue their journey. Michael has made friends with some members of the motor pool and tells them that it's "movie night." The mess hall is rearranged and a projector and screen are set up. Sara and Amy also sneak in to watch. The movie is Dracula, which explains why the soldiers call the virals "dracs." Peter has never seen a movie and is caught up in the story. When he learns that Dracula "must sleep each night in his native soil," Peter wonders if that's why the ones who are "taken up" seem always to return home, and whether the story "wasn't a made-up tale at all but an account of something that had actually happened."

But the movie is interrupted by the return of Blue Squad, which had gone on patrol outside. Alicia, who was among them, reports that they discovered a "hornet's nest" of virals in an abandoned copper mine. As the camp prepares for an assault on the nest, Peter goes to Greer and volunteers to go with them. Greer turns him down, but tells him that when he saw Amy he remembered being a sick child in an orphanage, and that once he had a fever dream in which Amy was there with him. And that if they don't succeed in this mission, Red Squad has orders to take them all to Roswell, but won't stop them if they decide to leave.

Three days later two of the squads appear, led by Greer. Alicia isn't among them. Greer tells Peter that it was a disaster. Then two more squads, but still no Alicia. "Everyone told the same story: the bomb exploding, the ground tearing open beneath them, the virals pouring forth, everyone scattering, lost in the dark." Voorhees is not among them either. Finally Alicia appears with a Corporal Muncey, whose hands are bound. He has been bitten and infected, and asks that Alicia be the one to kill him.

They have lost forty-six men, including Voorhees, and Greer, now in charge, promotes Alicia to lieutenant.
They prepare for departure. Peter tells Hollis that he should join the convoy with Sara, whom Greer has allowed out of seclusion so she can nurse the wounded, and that Sara probably won't go without Michael, who has become an important part of the motor pool. He and Amy will go on with their mission. Peter also tells Greer of his plans and bids goodbye to Alicia. Greer gives them his horse and a duffel bag full of weapons.

[This is an odd aside, perhaps, but this bunch of soldiers from Texas, the buckle of the Bible Belt, reminds me of something that I've wondered about all along: the absence of religious belief in the post-viral world. Greer uses "Jesus" as an epithet, but otherwise there's no evidence that religion, or even the texts and doctrines on which religion is based, has survived in any formal way. Intentional omission?]