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

X. The Angel of the Mountain

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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.

5. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 164-208

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Eleven-Fourteen

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Realizing the futility of trying to outrun the state troopers, Wolgast decides to surrender. Doyle agrees, so they turn back to the small town of Randall, Oklahoma, where they find a deputy sheriff eating breakfast at a diner. He takes them to the sheriff's office, where they're locked up while the sheriff calls the state troopers. But before the troopers can get there, Richards arrives, shoots everyone else in the sheriff's office, takes Wolgast, Doyle and Amy to the waiting helicopter, and, when the troopers arrive, uses a rocket to blast the remaining piece of evidence, the Tahoe, to bits.

Thirty-four days later, Wolgast is alone in a closely guarded room at the compound, having been there, separated from Amy and Doyle, since they arrived. Sykes appears, looking disheveled and worn, to ask Wolgast's help. They think Amy is dying and that Wolgast may be able to communicate with her. He is taken down to the subterranean observation room where he sees Amy on a hospital bed, connected to tubes. He's introduced to Fortes, who also looks exhausted. Fortes tells him that Amy is in a coma and they want Wolgast to try to talk to her. He refuses to wear the hazmat suit into the airlocked chamber: "It's not going to help if she wakes up and sees me in a space suit." Sykes authorizes the breach of protocol.

Grey has continued his routine as a sweeper, but like everyone else he is showing signs of stress. He notices Paulson in the commissary, looking "like shit, his skin stretched so tight over his face you could see the edges of his bones." Davis, too, on the security level, looks bad. Grey asks himself, "What is everyone so afraid of?"

Carter has become Number Twelve. He has lain there feeling sick as the virus takes effect: "something was happening to him, but it wasn't happening fast enough for the men in the suits." He also begins hearing voices, and realizes that there are twelve others like him. Finally, he breaks the restraints that hold him and attacks the tech, Pujol. "Anthony fell on him swiftly, from above. A scream and then the man was silent in wet pieces on the floor. The beautiful warmth of blood! He drank and drank."

Richards watches the video of the attack on Pujol, and observes that Carter had been taking the same form of the virus that they had been giving Amy. They had brought Carter under control by shining lights on him. Richards decides that Project NOAH is ready to become Operation Jumpstart: they will move the "sticks" to White Sands where the military will prepare for their use as weapons: "Just imagine what one of these things could do, say, in the mountain caves of northern Pakistan, or the eastern deserts of Iran, or the shot-up buildings of the Chechen Free Zone." Richards thinks it's "the stupidest idea he'd ever heard of in his life," and Sykes agrees, but he's following the orders from Special Weapons. Lear, Sykes says, doesn't know about it: "He still thinks he's trying to save the world."

Richards had killed the nuns, except for Lacey, who was still at large, and is preparing himself for liquidating the sweeps, techs and the soldiers. He spends his time watching the monitors, looking at Wolgast, who has sat by Amy day after day, and subject Number One, Giles Babcock, who stares at the camera as if waiting for the day when he can kill Richards. Then a call comes from the front gate that a black woman with an accent is there, looking for Wolgast.

Wolgast has been talking to Amy, and he tells her the story of the death of his daughter, Eva, who died of a heart defect three weeks short of her first birthday. When he tells Amy that when he found her "It was like she'd come back to me" and asks her to come back, she opens her eyes.

Lacey, who has made her way to the compound, sometimes riding, sometimes walking, and unerringly finding places to stay, is now running through the woods with the guards firing at her. She manages to escape and clamber on board a truck carrying a cargo of explosives.

Richards goes to the room where Doyle is being kept and orders him out. As they're walking across the parking lot, Doyle asks if Lacey is here yet. Astonished, Richards asks how he knows. Doyle says, "I could hear her coming."

Grey, on L4, hears Zero telling him "It's time." He enters the chamber, "and as Zero's bite found the soft place on his neck where the blood moved, he knew at last what the tenth rabbit was. The tenth rabbit was him."

While Richards is distracted by the sound of the alarm, Doyle escapes. Richards runs to the monitors and discovers that all of the chambers holding subjects were empty. They had all been released by the sweeps. On the monitors he sees Davis, dead, and watches as Paulson blows his brains out on camera. He tries to seal off the level, but there is an explosion in the elevator shaft and the lights go out.

Wolgast hears the commotion and the explosion, and when the emergency lights go on he makes his way to Amy's bed and disconnects her IVs. He is trying to decide what to do when the airlock opens and a long-haired, bearded, disheveled man appears. He talks about what has happened -- "the way they swooped down from the trees. Like the bats." But Wolgast doesn't understand what he's talking about. He introduces himself as Jonas Lear, but Wolgast has never heard the name. As Lear leads them, Wolgast sees Fortes's body and then others. Finally they encounter Grey, covered in blood, who collapses after saying, "I said to myself, Grey, you are having the worst dream in the world." Lear urges Wolgast to leave Grey behind, and leads Wolgast, carrying Amy, to a ventilation shaft with a ladder that goes to the surface. But when they enter, Lear closes the door, staying behind.

Richards makes his way through the turmoil to Sykes's office, where he finds the colonel wounded and vomiting blood. At Sykes's request, Richards shoots him.

Lacey has jumped from the truck and hidden in the woods, where she watches one of the "sticks" jump from an upper window and land in the trees a hundred yards away. Then others appear, and "one by one the demons fell upon the soldiers and they died." She leaves the woods, and when a soldier orders her to halt, a "demon" lands on him. She runs toward the building.

Wolgast is daunted by the task of carrying Amy up the ladder, holding her in one arm as he uses the other to climb, but he starts the attempt.

Richards exits the building and sees the truck carrying the explosives.

Doyle has been hiding in a first-floor office when Lacey appears. She tells him she knows where Wolgast and Amy are. He tells her that he heard her, "All these weeks." She tells him, "It wasn't me you heard, Agent Doyle."

Wolgast reaches the top of the ladder, but now faces the problem of getting Amy and himself into the duct next to the ladder. He manages to wake her enough to help him swing her into the opening, but he loses his balance and begins to fall, managing to save himself by grabbing the ridge of metal at the opening with his fingertips. He hoists himself into the opening and they scoot along the duct until they reach a grate. It is bolted from the outside, and Wolgast is about to lose hope when he hears Doyle say, "Chief?"

Richards makes it to the truck and finds a grenade launcher, which he loads and carries outside, calling, "Here kitty, kitty!"

Doyle finds a penknife and opens the grate. Wolgast is surprised to see Lacey there. Doyle tells him, "Trust me, I don't get it either." At the front entrance, they see more dead soldiers. Doyle goes outside where he finds a silver Lexus with the keys in it, as well as a gun. He gives the keys to Wolgast, who realizes that Doyle and Lacey will stay behind, if necessary, to let him and Amy escape. They leave the building, with Doyle leading, running toward the car.

Richards, carrying the RPG, encounters Carter, but misses because Carter is already leaping into the air. The grenade explodes into the building as Richards "experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half."

The exploding grenade knocks Wolgast down and deafens him in one ear. He also loses his grip on Amy, but when he finds her she is unhurt. He puts Amy in the back seat of the Lexus and starts the car just as Carter lands on the hood. He backs up quickly and dislodges Carter, who leaps into the air and disappears. The passenger door opens and Lacey gets in, holding a gun, which she drops on the floor. Doyle is running toward the car, yelling, "Just go!" There is a thump on the roof of the car that Wolgast knows is Carter, so he hits the brakes, sending Carter onto the hood. Doyle fires at Carter, but the bullets have no effect except that Carter notices Doyle and sails through the air. "Wolgast turned in time to see the creature that had once been Anthony Carter fall upon his partner, taking him in like a giant mouth."

They speed away, but Lacey tells him to stop: She is bleeding and "They will follow the blood." She tells him to take care of Amy and gets out of the car. He watches in the mirror as she waves her arms to attract the "demons" and they descend on her.

[It's clear that Cronin knows the conventions (not to say the clichés) of the thriller: The scene in which Richards walks into the sheriff's office and methodically shoots everyone appears in dozens of movies and TV dramas. So do the self-sacrificing good guys (Doyle, Lacey, possibly Lear). The various explosions -- the torpedoed Tahoe, the blasted elevator shaft, the RPG destroying the building and knocking Wolgast off course -- seem like instructions to the screenwriters for the inevitable movie. (Ridley Scott has the rights.) Even Wolgast hanging by his fingertips in the ventilation shaft -- and for that matter, the escape by ventilation shaft -- evokes a sense of déjà vu. (Has anyone in that predicament ever really been able to hoist themselves up to safety?) This is not to denigrate Cronin's skill in using them, however. Just a wish to see something new.]

4. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 92-163

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Six-Ten

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[I'm going to try to keep these summaries shorter -- to stick to the plot and not get too involved in the details that give the story texture.] 

Lacey, who has overslept, decides to skip Mass and take Amy to the zoo. Sister Claire, a novitiate who joined the order after a bad marriage, agrees to cover for her. At the zoo, Amy asks to see the polar bears, but she seems to have a strange rapport with the creatures, all four of whom gather in front of her at the window that separates them from the crowd, causing water to splash over the barrier and threatening to break the glass. To Lacey, a sorrowful Amy says that the polar bears know "What I am."

At the convent, Sister Arnette has returned to find Lacey and Amy gone, and Sister Claire confesses that they went to the zoo. Arnette is concerned because she knows the real story about Lacey, whose family had been killed in the civil war. Lacey had been found by UN workers after being assaulted and left for dead. In Arnette's view Lacey "might just as well have been dead, if God hadn't protected her by washing her mind of these events." As Arnette is about to call the police, Wolgast and Doyle arrive, claiming "that Amy is a federal witness" and that they are there to "place her under protection." But while they are talking, the police call to tell Arnette that there is a disturbance at the zoo and it seems to center on a black nun with a little girl.

At the zoo all the animals seem to have gone mad, terrifying the crowds. Lacey feels the presence of a "dark man" who was coming for Amy, and the thought links in her mind with her ordeal in Sierra Leone. She picks up Amy and runs for the exit, but in the parking lot she freezes when she hears a gunshot. Claire and Arnette arrive in the van the nuns drive, followed by Wolgast and Doyle in a black sedan. Arnette grabs Amy and hands her to the FBI men, who drive away with her as Lacey collapses, filled with visions of her night in the field in Sierra Leone as well as an apocalyptic vision of the future.

Carter is on his way to the facility in Colorado, riding in a van with two soldiers, Paulson and Davis. After what seems like initial kindness, Paulson begins to mock Carter as "retarded," although Davis tries to make him stop. Paulson also says that Carter must have raped Rachel Wood, which makes Carter feel sick.

Wolgast and Doyle are making their way out of Memphis with Amy. Wolgast is increasingly upset with what they're doing, now that he's seen Amy. Realizing that there were witnesses to Amy's abduction, he checks in with Sykes and trades their sedan for a Chevy Tahoe. 

Richards meets Carter, still in the custody of Paulson and Davis, at the compound. Sensing what has gone on between Carter and the soldiers, and eager to gain Carter's trust, he draws his gun and threatens to shoot Paulson, making Carter feel better even after Richards admits he wouldn't really have shot the soldier.

Wolgast and Doyle are in Oklahoma after making a stop to pick up cash that Sykes had delivered to them. Wolgast declined the new car that was provided as well, choosing to keep the Tahoe. He also declined the bag of weapons and bulletproof vests that were in the trunk of the car. Amy has remained quiet, but Wolgast senses that she's only pretending to sleep. When Amy declares that she needs to go to the bathroom, she insists that Wolgast, not Doyle, accompany her. Now that she's beginning to open up a little, Wolgast tries to reassure her that she shouldn't be afraid. She says she isn't: "You are."

In a small town called Homer, they find a carnival taking place. Wolgast suggests that they take a break there and take Amy on some rides. Doyle reluctantly agrees, but points out that two men in suits with a little girl would attract suspicion, so they change into jeans and sport shirts and go separate ways, Amy staying with Wolgast. She wants to go on the Octopus, and when the ride ends wants to go again.

Wolgast looked down at Amy's face; still that neutral, appraising gaze, yet he detected, behind the darkness of her eyes, a warm light of happiness. A new feeling opened inside him; no one had ever given her such a present.

After riding the Octopus three more times and eating a hot dog, funnel cake and milk, Amy wants to go on the carousel. Wolgast is so taken with playing Amy's father that he thinks, "Lila, this was what I wanted. Did you know? It's all I ever wanted." He sees Doyle flirting with a woman and suddenly makes a plan to escape from everything, to run away with Amy. He tries it, but Doyle catches up with them. Wolgast realizes that Doyle has anticipated this attempt, and when Wolgast starts to plead with his partner, Doyle says, "not menacing, merely stating the facts. 'Don't even say the words. We're partners, Brad. It's time to go.'" But neither of them see that they're being watched by an off-duty state trooper who has seen a report about two men kidnapping a girl at the Memphis zoo.

Grey is hearing a voice that keeps saying: "I was called Fanning." He has slept through his morning shift and is not due to work again until 10 p.m. He has dinner at the commissary and is finishing his meal when Paulson comes up to his table and starts to bully him, wanting Grey to tell him about Level Four. Grey insists that he's just a janitor, but Paulson persists. He asks if Grey dreams, and says, "Well, I sure as hell dream. All goddamn night long. One after the other. I am dreaming some crazy shit.... I dream about you." Then he tells Grey that Jack and Sam are dead. "We're all dead."

Carter has been sedated and had something put in the back of his neck, and now remembers someone pushing the button L4 in the elevator. He is afraid that he is being executed after all. He remembers Wolgast telling him, "I can give you all the time in the world, Anthony. An ocean of time." And he recalls how Rachel Wood had stopped at the traffic light where he was begging with his sign, rolled down the window and fumbled with her purse trying to find some money to give him. The light changed and people began to honk while she continued to look through her purse. A man got out of one of the backed-up cars, carrying a gun, accusing Carter of carjacking. Panicked, Rachel opened the passenger door and let Carter in. In the car, she told him that what attracted her about his sign was the words "God bless you," because she didn't feel blessed.

He went to work for her and for her friends, but after an initial period of feeling that she had done something good for someone else, her depression worsened. One December day, Carter found her daughter Haley, a kindergartner, locked outside on the patio. "Daddy's in Mexico, the girl stated, and shivered in the cold. With his girlfriend. Her mama wouldn't get out of bed." He tried the doors and gave the girl his sweater, then found  a tiny toad in the garden and brought it to show the girl just as Rachel came out of the house and screamed at him to get away from Haley, then shoved him. He tripped over the pool skimmer and, instinctively reaching out for something to grab onto, pulled her into the pool with him. He was unable to swim, and she kept pulling him down until she drowned and released him. He decided, "It was a secret she had given him, the final secret of who she was, and he was meant to keep it."

He becomes aware that there is a figure in the doorway and decides, "All right. I'm ready. Let them come."

Richards meets with Sykes to discuss the "situation":  Amy's mother is a suspect in the shooting of the son of a federal circuit court judge after the gun she left at the scene led police to the motel whose manager ID'd Amy from the photographs taken of her at the convent. Wolgast and Doyle had been identified from the surveillance video at the Mississippi checkpoint, and an Amber Alert had been issued. "Just like that, the whole world was looking for two federal agents and a little girl named Amy Bellafonte." Sykes has ordered a helicopter to intercept Wolgast and Doyle, and as Richards boards it, Sykes warns him, "'She's a kid! ... Do this right!' Whatever that meant, Richards thought."

In the Tahoe, Doyle tells Wolgast, "Richards thought you might have problems with this." Wolgast warns Doyle to be careful of Richards: "Private security contractor. He's little more than a mercenary." When they stop for gas, Doyle reaches over and takes the keys and removes the clip from the gun Wolgast keeps in the glove box. Three state police cruisers race past on the highway, and Wolgast and Doyle realize that they're being looked for.

Sister Arnette is unable to sleep after all the events of the day, including Lacey's unwillingness to identify Wolgast, when shown his photograph, as Amy's abductor: "Do you see? He loves her." Arnette was forced to tell the detective and the other nuns about what had happened to Lacey in Sierra Leone, and Sister Claire called it post-traumatic stress disorder. Arnette dozes off and then wakes in a panic: "Some dark force had come loose in the world, and it was sweeping toward them, coming for them all." She runs to Lacey's room and finds it locked. Her pounding on the door wakes the other nuns, and when Claire pulls her away from the door they see that Arnette's palms are bleeding. Claire rationally points out that Arnette has dug her fingernails into her palms. When they get the door open, they find that Lacey has gone.

Grey is still unsettled by the encounter with Paulson when he reports for duty. And then Richards gets on the elevator with him and tells him he's been docked twelve hundred dollars -- the pay for two shifts -- for failing to show up that morning. Grey notices the signs warning that anyone with symptoms including vomiting, fever, disorientation and seizures should report them immediately. After checking in with Davis, who is working security, he goes to L4, where he meets two other sweeps, Jude and Ignacio, and sees that his duties are to mop, empty trash and watch Zero to see if he is eating. A tech named Pujol comes to see about Zero, and Grey tells him that he's still not eating. He asks Pujol why, when the subjects are given ten rabbits, they only eat nine of them. Pujol suggests they're saving it for later. Grey wants to ask why they are fed rabbits, and how Zero can stick to the ceiling, but doesn't.

Then, after Pujol has gone, Grey starts to doze off and is wakened by a voice "in his head, almost like something he was reading: the words were someone else's, but the voice was his own." It calls his name and says "Look at me." Grey looks at the image of Zero on the monitor. "I was called Fanning," it says, and then asks Grey to take him home. Grey's head is filled with visions of a city, then of a college campus and the young women on it. The voice also tantalizes him with images of the boy Grey molested and then of a girl alone and afraid on the college campus.

Grey vomits, then makes a panicked attempt to clean it up. He takes the elevator to L3, where Davis is reading a porno magazine. Davis panics when Grey tells him he isn't feeling well: The level would have to be quarantined and both of them would be stuck there. So Davis lets Grey take the elevator.

[Cronin takes a turn deeper into the paranormal -- as if swarms of man-eating bats and viruses that turn people into vampires weren't paranormal enough -- with Amy's effect on the zoo animals, the psychic connection with Wolgast, and the ability of Zero/Fanning to invade people's dreams. He handles it well, I think, because the groundwork he has laid for his novel in conventional psychology and physiology now enables him to skew off in another direction. And he has hinted at where he's going: Carter's reference on p. 48 to The X-Files, for example.  

One of the more impressive things about Cronin's narrative is his ability to juggle so many points of view and to individualize his characters. He empathizes with his characters, so that he's able to keep even the minutiae of their inner lives consistent. For example, when Paulson and Davis release Carter from his shackles, "Carter couldn't remember when he'd gone anywhere without somebody's hand on him someplace." This is consistent with an observation about Carter some eighty pages earlier, when he's in prison: "Part of you got used to people's hands being on you this way, and part of you didn't."

Cronin is also good at weaving connections between his characters. When Lacey is being raped in the field in Sierra Leone, "she had sent her mind away from her body, up and up through the branches to heaven, where God was, and the girl in the field was someone else." This echoes Jeanette's ability to see the prostitute, the Jeanette "who stood on the highway in her stretch top and skirt" as "a made-up person, like a woman in a story she wasn't sure she wanted to know the end of." And since the night in the field, Lacey has been hearing voices -- "Lacey Antoinette Kudoto. Listen. Look." -- that are eerily (and probably significantly) similar to the voice of Zero/Fanning in Grey's head.] 

3. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 55-92

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Four-Five

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Lacey Antoinette Kudoto, the nun with whom Jeanette left Amy, believes that she hears the voice of God and that it's telling her something about Amy. Jeanette has left a note in Amy's backpack: "I'm sorry. Her name is Amy. She's six years old." Amy "had a way of neither looking nor speaking, of being alone with herself even in the presence of another person, that Lacey had never encountered. ... When the girl did this, it was as if she, Lacey, were the one who vanished." She tries to get the child to open up to her by playing a game of telling secrets: Lacey's is that once as a child she ran away from home but came back before anyone knew she was gone. But the only secret Lacey can elicit from Amy is, "I don't think she's coming back."

Lacey calls the police to report the abandoned child, but they suggest that since the weekend is coming up she keep Amy with her. They'll report the incident, put out a description of Jeanette, and enter Amy in the database of missing children. They can call Child Protection if she wants, but Lacey decides she'll do it herself. She is alone at the convent, having stayed there because she was getting over a cold, while the other sisters worked at the Community Pantry. When they return, Lacey lies about Amy, telling them that she was watching the girl for a friend who has gone to visit a sick relative in Arkansas. Sister Arnette, who seems to be in charge of things, disapproves but agrees that Amy can stay in their spare room until Monday. The other nuns are more welcoming, and go to buy food, clothes and toys for the girl.

When she gets ready for bed, Amy asks if she has to sleep in the bathroom, which puzzles Lacey. That night, Lacey dreams that she is a girl again in Sierra Leone and that she is hiding from "men who sounded like soldiers but weren't dressed like soldiers, who swept the ground before them with the barrels of their rifles." Just as one of the men is about to discover her, she wakes up in terror. She is startled to find Amy standing in the doorway. The girl says nothing, but Lacey takes her into her bed. "Her body was giving off waves of heat -- not a fever, but nothing ordinary, either. She was glowing like a coal." Amy tells her that she wants to stay, but Lacey realizes that she is going to have to tell Sister Arnette the truth: "by lying about Amy, she had wrapped their fates together.

Then Amy says, "I won't tell anyone. Don't let them take me away." But when Lacey asks who, Amy is silent. Lacey spends the rest of the night wide awake.

Wolgast and Doyle are on the road in Louisiana, north of "the Federal Industrial District of New Orleans." The city has been destroyed by hurricane Vanessa, a Category 5 hurricane that happened a few years after Katrina, with "180-mile-per-hour winds, pushing a storm surge thirty feet tall." What used to be the city is now "a giant petrochemical refinery, ringed by flooded lowlands so polluted that the water of its fouled lagoons could melt the skin right off your hand." The workers at the refinery are housed in a vast, crime-filled slum of trailers known as the N.O. Housing District, "radiating outward for ten miles in all directions." Even airplanes are not allowed over the area; the skies are patrolled by fighter jets.

The Interstate highways now have checkpoints on them at various places, and Wolgast and Doyle have to go through one at the Mississippi border. They are patrolled by heavily armed guards wearing Kevlar vests, and there are long lines waiting to be cleared through. Wolgast shows a young guard their FBI ID's so they can be waved through quickly, but his eagerness to move on attracts the attention of another guard who points his weapon at them. The first guard cools him down, and they are sent ahead to a station to be cleared: "everybody was on a centralized system now, their movements tracked." The Homeland Security officer even knows that they had been booked on a flight to Denver, so he needs to check on that. Wolgast tells him, "We were redirected to Nashville to pick up a federal witness." When they return to their car, Doyle asks him why he said Nashville, when in fact they're going to Memphis. Wolgast explains that he knew this was the last checkpoint before Nashville, "so the system won't know we never went there." They can make their pickup in Memphis and, by using several unchecked detours, make their way through Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas on their way to Colorado, where Sykes can arrange their clearance further.

Their mission has been spelled out in the message from Sykes:

Caucasian female. Amy NLN. Zero footprint. 20323 Poplar Ave., Memphis, TN. Make pickup by Saturday noon latest. No contact. TUR. Sykes. 
TUR: travel under radar.

Lawrence Grey works as a "sweep" in the Colorado facility supervised by Sykes and Richards. Grey is puzzled by the behavior of Subject Zero, who hasn't eaten for six days and moves only when Grey isn't watching. He doesn't know what Zero is, other than that he is "sort of human," with two arms, two legs, a head with ears, eyes and mouth, and even "something like a johnson." But he also glows much brighter on the infrared scans than a normal human heat source would. His body is hairless, "smooth and shiny as glass," and it looks like his "skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope." His eyes are "the orange of highway cones" and he sheds his teeth, as many as half a dozen daily. They were as "long as the little swords you'd get in a fancy drink." Grey's job is to sweep them up every day and incinerate them. With those teeth, Zero could "unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat."

For Grey, Zero is somehow more unnerving than the other "glowsticks" (or "sticks"), as they're called. Grey had been working on Level 4 for six months and has come to know the differences among them: Number Six is shorter, Number Nine more active, "Number Seven liked to eat hanging upside down and made a goddamn mess," and "Number One was always chatting away, that weird sound they made, a wet clicking from deep in their throats that reminded Grey of nothing." Zero is creepier because he seems to pay more attention to the observers behind the glass. Grey has to put on a biohazard suit and enter the room occupied by Zero, who has been enclosed behind bars, to clean up or deliver the rabbits Zero eats.

Even now, a wall of glass two inches thick between them and Zero hanging so that all Grey could see was his big glowing backside and spreading, clawlike feet -- Grey could still feel Zero's mind moving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

Grey lives in a barracks along with other civilian workers. He is saving up his pay, which is comparable to what he made working on an oil rig, in an offshore account arranged for him. He pays no taxes. He plans to work at the facility for a couple of years longer and move someplace far away. He's forty-six and a smoker, and his father died just before turning sixty, so Grey figures he has only about ten years left to live. He's unable to leave the facility, which he figures from the license plates he's seen is in Colorado. The TV in the facility is censored: no news channels or even MTV or E!, and the commercials are blue-screened out.

He doesn't know how he has been selected for the job: He had been out of work for a year when he was called in for the interview. They knew about his record as a sex offender: Grey takes drugs, including Depo Provera, that amount to chemical castration. And they were pleased when he told them he had no family and no friends, and didn't even know his neighbors. He was flown to Cheyenne where he was met by Richards and put into a van with two other men, Jack and Sam -- they were told only first names were allowed. Along the way, Grey needed to urinate so badly that he finally persuaded Richards to stop and let him out, but he discovered that he would have been shot if he had used the occasion to escape.

 Lying in bed, Grey thinks about Jack and Sam, who had left the facility even though they had to stay a year or forfeit the money they made, so Grey volunteered for a double shift. He thinks about Zero, whose vital signs are monitored by a chip in his neck. His heart rate stays at a constant 120 beats per minute. [Normal human heart rate is 60-100.] He seems to Grey to be always awake, or like a cat: "A cat sleeping on a step wasn't really sleeping. A cat sleeping on a step was a coiled spring waiting for a mouse to totter along. What was Zero waiting for?"

Unnerved by his thoughts about Zero, Grey uses a relaxation technique the prison psychiatrist taught him to fall asleep. He dreams are based on memories of being caught in a sex act -- it's unclear whether it's masturbation or a homosexual act -- with his cousin Roy and being beaten with a belt by his stepfather, a man named Kurt, who seems to have sexually abused him. The six-year-old Grey had found his real father dead of a gunshot wound in his truck on a snowy morning. In Grey's dream, throughout which a voice is calling out to him, the snow turns to rabbits like the ones eaten by Zero. The rabbits "knew what he had done, not to Roy but to the other ones, the boys with their knapsacks walking home from school." And then Zero takes over the dream. Grey "opened his mouth to scream but no sound came."

Richards is awake, playing a computer game. He thinks about the escalation of terrorism since 9/11: "now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it." Richards had joined NOAH at its inception five years earlier, contacted by Cole, who called it "the new Manhattan Project" or even bigger. Cole was dead now, and only three people had survived the expedition, "not counting Fanning, who was already on his way to being ... well, what?" The site, and any other survivors, would have been obliterated by the missile that was fired at it. Fanning is "locked away" and Lear is at the facility in Colorado.

The secret that underlies the facility is a virus that promotes VSA -- Very Slow Aging -- by restoring "the thymus gland to its full and proper function." Lear had hypothesized in his early papers that it had extended human life and physical vigor "at select moments, throughout human history." Richards thought of it as "vampire stuff." The speculation was that the legend was based in fact, and that if it could be discovered and manipulated it could be used for good. The Bolivian excursion had been an encounter with the virus in its uncontrolled form and its only survivors were Lear, Fanning, a soldier and a grad student named Fortes. Lear had been brought into the excursion by Cole and "Special Weapons" -- though we don't know yet what that is: governmental, military, industrial or some combination of all of them. Now Lear spends all his time on L4. Richards speculates that what brought Lear into the project was the death of his wife: "how much of Project NOAH was really just one grieving man sitting in a basement, trying to undo his wife's death?"  

Now the project consisted of "eleven former death row inmates who glowed in the dark and scared the shit out of absolutely everybody."

The virus had turned their skin into a kind of protein-based exoskeleton, so hard it made Kevlar look like pancake batter. Only over the breastbone, a strike zone about three inches square, was this material thin enough to penetrate.

A technician who had been exposed to the "sticks" had died in agony of the virus they carried. Richards has contemplated pulling the plug on the whole thing, using what Cole had called "the Elizabeth Protocol." "Only cole would have actually named it for the guy's dead wife." Richards has also been forced to hunt down the escapees, Jack and Sam, and kill them.

Lear has now requested a young female subject for the project because the thymus gland in such a subject would be better able to fight off the "unpleasant side effects" of the virus. And Richards had found the right one in a convent in Memphis. He trusts Wolgast to handle the nuns.

As Richards, who speaks a dozen languages, is listening to the "clicks and grunts" of the test subjects and trying to figure out if it's a language, Sykes appears, unable to sleep. He adjusts a monitor and looks at Zero, who turns out to be (if we haven't already guessed) Fanning. Richards tells Sykes that Carter is due to arrive in about three hours. Sykes wonders why there has been such an apparent rush to get him here, and Richards says the order came from Special Weapons, probably urged by Lear. Sykes worries that the haste may attract notice -- the usual protocol for transfer involved thirty days and three prisons. "There's always someone who's interested," he observes, even when Richards assures him that "Carter is already nobody." Richards goes back to listening to Giles Babcock, who is the "Number One" that Grey observed was "always chatting away."

[Fiction is a game. Sometimes it's Let's Pretend and sometimes it's Hide and Seek. And often it's both. The test is how well the author plays the game of pretending his story is real and of hiding just enough of it to keep the reader searching for it. The risk is that readers will become so annoyed or burdened by the suspension of disbelief or so frustrated by the puzzles they're asked to solve, that they'll give up playing. Cronin so far has kept the plausibility high, with a nice dovetailing of the realities of 2010 with the potential realities (the annihilation of New Orleans by another hurricane -- he could not have foreseen the BP disaster -- and the escalation of the war on terror into Iran). 

Where he runs into trouble with his version of Hide and Seek, I think, is in his choice of narrative voice: a third-person narrator who assumes various points of view -- Jeanette's, Wolgast's, Carter's, Lacey's, Grey's, Richards's. Although he could tell us everything as a third-person narrator, he chooses not to. He chooses only to tell what the person whose point of view he has assumed for the moment is thinking, feeling, or seeing. And that leads to a certain coyness in the narrative voice. We are being played with when he withholds details such as the exact nature of Grey's sexual offenses, or what really happened when Rachel Wood drowned, or exactly what the expedition in Bolivia was all about, and so on. It's forgivable because we all know the conventions of the thriller demand that we not be told too much too soon, but I sense that Cronin is a better writer than the conventions allow him to be.]

1. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 1-17

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., One

_____

Nineteen-year-old Jeanette, who works at a diner known as the Box somewhere in Iowa, gives birth to a daughter she names Amy Harper Bellafonte, the result of a liaison with a traveling salesman named Bill Reynolds. Jeanette lives with her widowed father, but he dies when Amy is three. Her only other relative is a brother who is in the Navy, and he never answers her letters.

One day Bill Reynolds returns, telling her that he has left his wife and children. He moves in with Jeanette and Amy, but is unable or unwilling to find work. He starts beating her, so she throws him out. To earn extra money, she takes a night job cleaning the high school. She leaves Amy with a neighbor while she works, but when the woman has to go into the hospital, Jeanette is forced to leave her at home by herself. When she tells this to another woman she works with, the woman tattles and Jeanette is fired. Desperate, she hits the road with Amy in her old Kia, taking whatever work she can find.

Finally, the car dies in Memphis. She hitches a ride with a man in a Mercedes, who pays her fifty dollars for sex. She begins turning tricks at the motel where they live, shutting Amy, who is now six, in the bathroom while the johns are there. The motel owner sells her a gun for protection. She begins to think of herself as two people:

The other Jeanette, the one who stood on the highway in her stretch top and skirt, who cocked her hip and smiled and said, What you want, baby? There something I can help you with tonight? -- that Jeanette was a made-up person, like a woman in a story she wasn't sure she wanted to know the end of. 

One night she is picked up by a college boy who takes her back to his fraternity house. Unwilling to participate in the gang-bang she foresees, she struggles with him until she finds her purse, takes the gun out of it, and shoots him. She runs to the nearest major street where she catches a bus, then changes to another bus that takes her back to the motel.

She packs their things and catches a bus that takes them back along the route she has just traveled. She remembers a church, Our Lady of Sorrows, that she saw along the way. When they reach it, she finds the other sign she had remembered: Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. The door is answered by a black woman called Lacey, who says she is originally from Sierra Leone. Jeanette tells Lacey that Amy to school when her car broke down, and pretends to call AAA, actually dialing the recorded weather report. Lacey agrees to watch Amy while Jeanette goes to meet the repairman. So Jeanette hugs Amy goodbye "as long as she dared," and leaves her there.

[There are only few hints where the story might go from here. Even if we haven't read the jacket copy or the publicity or the reviews, we have to wonder about "5-1 B.V." in the section heading, and about the opening paragraph: "Before she became the Girl from Nowhere -- the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years -- she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte." 

It's a good beginning, I think, touchingly bleak, with a deft control of narrative voice and point of view. Without that opening paragraph, the novel might well seem to be about the adult, Jeanette, rather than the child. The point of view is Jeanette's, naive and desperate, though the voice is that of an unidentified narrator. They often intersect beautifully, as in this sentence: "He pulled up to a house with a big sign over the porch showing three shapes that looked almost like letters but not quite, and Jeanette knew what it was: a fraternity." We may quibble here that Jeanette, who has finished high school and is sophisticated enough to have read To Kill a Mockingbird, to remember that its author was Harper Lee and to name her daughter after the author, would probably know that the "three shapes" are Greek letters. But reducing them to shapes evokes the stunned detachment of Jeanette, whose habit of mind is to focus on the facts of the moment and to repress anything such as fears and feelings that might cause her to lose control. 

There is also little in this first chapter that evokes anything outside of the routine and familiar. Only one sentence, "The radio spoke all day of war," seems to hint at anything outside of Jeanette's consciousness. What war? we may ask. When is this taking place?]