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.

12. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 541-611

VIII. The Haven

_____

They ride for hours. Michael wakens from his fitful sleep in the jouncing van to remember that Sara has been lost, carried off by a viral. It was Amy who, with surprising strength, had pulled him on board the van. A man and a woman, enter the compartment where they have been kept to tell them to hand over their weapons. Through the window they can see a large building in the distance.

Michael faints when they reach their destination, but remembers the man introducing himself as Olson Hand and then somehow turning into Theo. He awakes in an infirmary, having dreamed of the fat woman breathing smoke. Peter appears, accompanied by the woman, who is named Billie, and tells him that he has suffered from heatstroke and has been out for four days. He also tells Michael that they are in a place called the Haven, where there are almost three hundred other people and no virals. But Michael notices that there is something false about Peter's cheerfulness.

Alicia then appears, accompanied by a blue-eyed man whom she introduces as Jude Cripp. And Peter informs him that Sara has been rescued and is with them. Hollis and Billie had driven back to Las Vegas and found her in a room at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Sara tells Michael that she doesn't remember anything from the time she was carried off by the viral to when she awakened in the truck. Sara and Hollis join the others at Michael's bedside, but Michael is still struck by "the way everyone was acting, as if they had no worries in the world."

Jude explains that they send regular patrols to Las Vegas for supplies, and that they were in their shelter in the ruins of a casino when they heard the explosion and found them when they went to check on it. But Michael is puzzled: "I remember it distinctly. The hotel blew up after we got out. You were already there." Hollis, however, insists that Michael is wrong; he also tell Michael that he was the one who pulled him into the truck, not Amy. Michael can't shake his skepticism: "Who would leave the safety of a fortified shelter at night and drive toward  a burning building? And why was everyone going along with it?"

They leave him to get some rest, but Sara comes back in to give him a kiss and slips a piece of paper in his hand. It says, "Tell them nothing."

The others have been aware from the start that there's something fishy about the story they've been told about the Haven, especially the fact that there are no virals nearby. The Haven has a large herd of cattle, and there's no way virals wouldn't attack it. And they claim to have no ammunition other than the flamethrowers on the vans. Olson tells them that it was settled by refugees from Las Vegas who made their way to what had been the Desert Wells State Penitentiary and the low-security Conservation Camp for juvenile offenders.

Peter and the others have been "quarantined" in some outlying buildings of the Conservation Camp. On Peter's maps, they find the prison, which is next to Nellis Air Force Test Range and the Yucca Mountain National Repository. Hollis had been able to examine more of the surroundings when he went to Las Vegas with Billie and a man named Gus. He had seen only two gates, and there were guard towers at the main one. They had also crossed railroad tracks heading north-south; in the north there was a range of mountains. Peter had already realized that they would have to steal a vehicle to escape.

On the third night they were taken to a reception to meet the residents of the Haven. Peter found the people "childlike," with "a look of wide-eyed innocence, almost of obedience." He talks to Olson and his daughter, Mira, about Amy. Olson has never heard of anyone who can't speak, but he asks if she's "otherwise ... all right?" When Peter is puzzled, Olson explains that "a woman who can bear a child is a great prize. Nothing is more important, with so few of us left. And I see that one of your females is pregnant." Peter thinks "your females" is an odd way of putting it, and he notices that many of the women who are gathered around Mausami are pregnant, too.

In addition to his sense that the women were being treated like livestock, Peter is bothered by something else at the reception: There are no boys and no older children. No one asks him anything about the Colony. When he gets together with the others afterward, they confirm his impressions. They decide they need to find a vehicle and some weapons and ammunition. Sara thinks it will take Michael several days longer to recover, and that he's not really suffering from heatstroke. Alicia is concerned because Jude seems to have taken a serious interest in her, and she doesn't know how much longer she can "hold him off." She also hesitantly brings up something else: On a visit to the dairy barns with Jude, she thinks she spotted a former member of the Colony named Liza Chou. They also remark on the absence of boys and older children, and realize that the small group of children who have been playing outside their residences are the same ones every day. And Sara, Alicia, Hollis and Caleb discover that they've all been having the same dream: the one about the fat woman. Only Peter has been spared.

In the infirmary, Michael is brought some food by Mira, who begins to flirt with him, then kisses him. She tells him, "If I have a baby, I won't have to go to the ring." But then Billie and a group of men enter and order Mira to go home. "'He's not for the ring!' Mira cried. 'Poppa said!'" Then Billie puts a pinch of powder into a cup of water and orders Michael to drink it. "You won't like the taste, but you'll feel better fast. And no more fat lady." Michael gives in and drinks the mixture. Billie says that Peter told them Michael was an engineer who can fix anything, and after thinking about the warning to "tell them nothing," he admits that it's true. They give him his clothes and leave with him.

Mausami awakens to find Amy sitting on the next bunk. She wants to feel the baby moving inside Mausami. And then Amy communicates to Mausami: "He's here.... He's in the dream. With Babcock. With the Many.... Theo. Theo is here."

Babcock remembers growing up in Desert Wells, and the abuse he suffered from his mother who not only beat him but also burned him with her cigarettes when he made too much noise and disturbed her as she sat smoking in the kitchen and watching her soap operas. So he stabbed her to death and was sent to prison for her murder. Then Wolgast took him to the facility, where he became "one of Twelve, the Babcock-Morrison-Chávez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Lambright-Martinez-Reinhardt-Carter -- one of Twelve and also the Other, the Zero." And after he escaped, he infected every tenth victim with the virus, making them part of "His great and fearful company. The Many. The We of Babcock." He eats when they eat and sleeps when they sleep.

He hears the voice of Fanning say, "Brothers, we're dying." They have begun to deplete the world of people and animals. So he commands the Many to bring the remaining people to him at Desert Wells. He makes the people dream about his mother.

And those that did not bend their wills to his, that did not take up the knife when the time had come in the dark place of dreaming where Babcock's mind met theirs, they were made to die so the others could see and know and refuse no longer.

So he has built "the City of Babcock, first in all the world." But now he feels Amy's presence -- "Not the Zero or the Twelve but Another." She makes the virals, his Many, remember who they once were, which makes them want to die. "He knew that through her, all that they had done could be undone, all that they had made could be unmade."

Peter has discovered that Michael is missing from the infirmary, and Sara, Hollis and Caleb go in search of him. Peter and Alicia go to ask Olson what happened to Michael, but he's evasive. Peter sends Caleb to fetch Mausami and Amy so they can make an escape plan, but Caleb reports that they're missing, too. Alicia undoes the bandages that Sara had used to bind up her leg, wounded when the hotel exploded, and reveals that she has concealed a knife underneath them. She has only pretended to need her crutches.

Michael has been taken to a huge shed outside the fence around the Haven, where he finds them working on a diesel locomotive. Billie and a mechanic named Gus tell him they've been working on the engine for four years, but can't find a way to get current from the batteries to the pump. They want him to fix it in three hours.

Theo has been fighting sleep for days, trying not to dream about Babcock's mother. A man is outside his cell urging him to give in to the dream and, while in it, to kill the woman. He tells Theo that no one has ever held out this long without killing her. Theo isn't sure whether the voice is real or not, and whether he's asleep or awake. Then the voice begins taunting him by talking about Alicia, making sexual references. Then he mentions Babcock: "He's you. He's me. He's everyone, at least in these parts. I like to think he's kind of like our local god. Not like the old gods. A new god. A dream of god we all dream together. Say it with me, Theo. I. Am. Babcock." Theo resists: "I am Theo Jaxon.... I am not in the kitchen with the knife."

Finally, he can't resist and falls asleep, but in the dream he sees Amy as a little girl, sitting at the kitchen table with her stuffed rabbit called Peter. Then she becomes a beautiful woman and the scene shifts to the library where the virals are coming up the stairs. Then she becomes "an old woman, wizened and toothless, her hair gone ghostly white." She urges him, "Don't kill her, Theo." He wakes up and tells the man outside that he won't do it. The man angrily goes away, saying, "You won't like this next part very much, I don't expect." And he says, "We're going to have them, Theo. Maus and Alicia and the rest. One way or another, we're going to have them all."

Sara propositions the men guarding them, one of whom follows her while the other leaves. When Sara and the guard reach where Hollis is hiding, he knocks the guard out with a chair leg and Caleb ties him up. Hollis checks the guard's gun and finds three rounds in it, then gives it to Alicia.  They head toward the prison and break into the garage behind it, but are discovered by Olson Hand and six other men. There is a standoff in which Alicia points the pistol at Olson while the others raise their rifles. When Peter asks where the missing members of his group are, Olson is puzzled. He doesn't know about Amy and Musami, but he says Michael is with them. Finally he says, "You don't know about Babcock."

Michael figures out what's wrong with the ignition for the locomotive. Meanwhile, the others have formed an alliance with Olson, who has explained what's going on: The residents of the Haven sacrifice four head of cattle and two humans to Babcock every new moon, which is tonight. They do this in exchange for Babcock keeping the virals under his control away from the Haven. The blocked streets in Las Vegas were designed to trap any humans who might wander into the city, as they had done, and the Haven regularly sends out patrols to seek for them. Sometimes, as had happened with Sara, people were captured by the virals and left for the patrol to find. The dream of the fat lady is a memory of Babcock's, and if you kill her in the dream, "you belong to him. You belong to the ring."

Alicia is infuriated by Olson's excuse: "It was a our only way to survive. For most, the ring seems a small price to pay." But Olson tells her that in addition to Mira, he had once had a son. When he was chosen for the sacrifice, his mother protested and Jude, who is in charge of selecting the people for the sacrifice, sent her into the ring with their son. Now, with the help of Peter and his group, Olson and the other men with him hope to make a stand against Babcock.

Peter is convinced that Amy and Mausami are the ones to be sent into the ring tonight, but Olson says Jude wouldn't send a pregnant woman. When Peter asks how many supporters Olsen has, he admits that there are only him, the six other men with him, and four who will be in the balconies during the sacrifice. "Babcock is stronger than any viral you've ever seen, and the crowd won't be on our side. Killing him won't be easy," he warns. This kind of attack on Babcock has only been tried once before, and it was unsuccessful. They must kill Babcock or he'll call the many and pursue them, even if they get the train to run.

Babcock is ready for the sacrifice, sending the message to Jude that it's time. Jude is "his Best and Special, ... who dreamed the dream better than all others." Now Jude is leading the crowd in a kind of hymn before the sacrifice, when Babcock senses the presence of Amy, "The one who carried the seed of forever but was not of his blood, was not of the Twelve or the Zero."

Peter makes his way through a ventilation shaft but falls onto the catwalk above the arena, losing his handgun in the fall. He is shocked to see that one of the men waiting to be sacrificed is his brother, Theo. Babcock, who is feasting on the cattle, is "not like any viral Peter knew. It was the largest he had ever seen, that anyone had ever seen. Then Jude is there, aiming a shotgun at him, but Hollis shoots Jude just in time.

Mausami and Amy are also in the building, but they get separated in the crowd. Mausami is amazed and thrilled to see Theo there, too. Then she recognizes the other sacrificial victim as Finn Darrell, who had been taken from the power station. At the same moment, she is recognized by Liza Chou, whom she had spotted earlier. There is a wall of flame between her and Theo, but she spots the man who controls the pump feeding fuel to the flames, kills him and shuts off the fire. She feels a bullet enter her leg as she looks up at Babcock, who "stood at least three meters, maybe more." Then Amy rushes into the ring and stands between Theo and Babcock.

Hollis, Alicia, Caleb and Sara appear. Alicia has the RPG, but because Amy is between her and Babcock she can't get a clean shot. Babcock remains mesmerized by Amy until Mausami runs into the ring and attracts his attention. He leaps into the air, and Alicia fires the grenade. The catwalk collapses under Peter, Alicia and Hollis. Sara and Caleb run up to them, and Amy, helping Mausami, who is bleeding from the gunshot wound, joins them. Peter and Caleb together help Theo get to his feet and run to the exit, which is crowded with people. Outside, Olson is directing everyone to the train, which is arriving. There are three open boxcars in addition to the engine. Michael reaches down from the engine to help Mausami get on board. Amy is behind her. Peter and Theo manage to catch up and get on as well.

Michael and Billie are at the controls, and Billie hands Peter a first-aid kit so he can bandage Mausami's leg. Caleb and Hollis had been seen helping a woman on the train, but no one knows where Sara and Alicia are. Billie, learning that Babcock isn't dead, knows that the Many will soon be attacking, so she and Gus get on top of the train, followed by Peter, who sees the approaching virals as a "pulsing green light" at the rear of the train. "Peter understood what he was seeing -- that it was not just ten or twenty virals but an army of hundreds. The Many. The Many of Babcock." Billie and Gus fire into the crowd, but the movement of the train causes Peter to lose his grip on his shotgun as Billie and Gus disappear. He falls from the roof but manages to grip a ledge as they enter a tunnel in the mountain. Caleb and Hollis pull him into the boxcar.

The car is nearly empty, but Olson Hand is in it. Enraged, Peter attacks Olson, realizing that they had been used as bait. Olson admits that when Theo had been brought to the prison, Jude knew that others might follow, which is why they were waiting for them in Las Vegas. When they leave the tunnel, Peter sees Sara driving the Humvee alongside the train, with Alicia on top firing at the pursuing virals. Olson pushes Mira forward and tells Peter to get her to the engine. Sara maneuvers the Humvee closer to the train and yells for them to jump onto it. But Peter can't persuade Mira to make the leap and the Humvee has to dodge debris between it and the train, so Peter decides that they should go forward by way of the roof.

Hollis gives Caleb a boost up, then Peter, who pulls Mira up. Caleb goes ahead and makes it to the engine, but Peter is unable to get Mira to move forward. A viral grabs her leg and pulls her away, so Peter heads forward to the engine. He looks out and sees the Humvee, with Hollis and Olson now aboard it, racing toward them. Meanwhile the virals are swarming over the boxcars. Sara gets close enough for Hollis and Olson to get on the train, then Alicia makes the leap. Finally, as a viral makes a leap for the Humvee, Sara gets close enough for Alicia to pull her on board. And when she does, Amy blows the coupler that links the engine to the boxcars, which jackknife and derail.

Half a day later, they reach the end of the line in the town of Caliente. They take stock of what supplies they have left and try to decide what to do now. Peter of course wants to go on, but Hollis raises the possibility of going back to the colony and warning them. "Whatever was happening with the virals -- and obviously something was happening -- it appeared that they wanted people alive." And the pregnant Mausami will not be able to walk all the way to Colorado. Moreover, "Babcock, whatever he was, was still out there, as were the Many." Finally, they put it to a vote, and agree that they should keep going forward.

That afternoon, as they're packing up their supplies, Caleb finds a panel beneath the train that Michael says is a crawl pace. Caleb opens it and Jude emerges, carrying a pistol. Everyone reaches for a weapon, but Jude shoots Caleb just as Peter and Hollis open fire on him. Enraged, Alicia takes a gun, approaches Olson, and hits him in the face with it, then aims it at his head. Olson makes no effort to defend himself, but says of Jude, "He was familiar.... It means ... you can be one of them without being one of them." The next morning, Olson has gone.

They bury Caleb and get ready to leave. Michael, discouraged, worries about what chance they have against "Forty million smokes." But then Amy speaks for the first time: "He's wrong," she says. After they get over the shock of hearing her speak, she explains that there aren't forty million. There are twelve.

[The pell-mell action of this section is full of implausibilities, especially the leaps from Humvee to train and the ability of the group to manage to wind up together after being separated first in the crowd at the ring and then on the train. And I'm still not clear about the disappearance-reappearance of Mausami and Amy. The shooting of Caleb also seems gratuitous, though of all the company he is the one who had been given the least narrative attention. Once again, Cronin's action scenes play out more as scenarios than as literature.]

10. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 441-493

VI. The Night of Blades and Stars

_____

[It should be obvious by now that the ten-pages-a-day pace a which this blog supposedly moves is a sham. I estimate we cover an average of thirty pages a day, and when the book is a page-turner like this one, the average gets higher. The truth is, I've read well ahead of the fifty-two pages covered in this post, having had a day with no other distractions, but summarizing several hundred pages in one post is hard to do. So I'm going to post only on what I think are normally readable chunks of the book from here on to the end. The good thing is that, having read so far ahead, I think I have a better sense of what's significant in the episodes I'm summarizing.] 

The routine of the colony has been unbroken for 92 years, eight months and 26 days until the Night of Blades and Stars, which "was, in fact, three separate nights, with a pair of days between." It begins with odd behavior by Jimmy Molyneau, who goes to Auntie's house (an unusual occurrence in itself), asks for a cup of tea and when he leaves makes sure she knows who he is, "In case anybody asks." He is "trying to decide whether or not to go to the Lighthouse, kill whomever he found there, and turn the lights off." Soo Ramirez is also behaving oddly. She has been indulging herself in reading a boxful of romance novels that she came across. Tonight she has brought one with her to the Wall.

Throughout the colony, people are having bad dreams, and wondering "Why did they feel like memories, and not just memories -- someone else's memories?" Little Jane Ramirez dreams of being eaten by a bear. Gloria Patal dreams of being covered by a massive swarm of bees and being afraid to move for fear of being stung by them. Others are not sleeping: Sara Fisher is watching over Amy, who does seem to be dreaming because of the way her eyes are moving behind her lids. Galen Strauss is standing watch on the Wall and brooding about Mausami and Theo while worrying about having to ride down to the power station in the morning. He decides to go try to talk to Soo and Dana Jaxon, who are also on Watch, to see if they can persuade Jimmy to send someone else. Peter and Alicia are playing cards while keeping an eye on the lockup. Sam Chou is on Watch and deciding not to have Caleb put outside the walls.

Michael Fisher is awake, trying to rig up an antenna to get a clearer signal from the transmitter removed from Amy. He has decided to hang a wire from the catwalk around the interior of the wall, which means he has to climb up there and do so without being caught by the Watch and the runners. He succeeds because Jimmy has killed Dana and Soo, so their posts are unattended. Then a runner cries out that the virals are "everywhere" and the lights go out.

A meeting the next morning is chaired by Walter Fisher and Ian Patal. Ian reports the facts about what had happened: The lights had failed because of a power surge and had been out for three minutes. Dana, Soo and Jimmy had died then, but because the Wall wasn't fully staffed, a pod had made it into the compound. Before they were repelled, three more Watchers had been killed and another, Sunny Greenberg, is missing. Old Chou is also missing. Sanjay Patal is ill and Walter Fisher is Head of Household. But the crowd is uncontrollable, and when Sam Chou points out all the disturbances since Amy arrived, they begin calling for both Caleb and Amy to be put outside.

Alicia runs to the front, jumps on a table and says, "All of you. This is my fault. It's not the girl they want, it's me. I was the one who torched the library. That's what started this. It was a nest, and I led them all right back here." The crowd attacks Alicia, but is held back by Peter and by members of the Watch. Ian declares martial law and an immediate curfew. Peter realizes that "by drawing the fury of the crowd down upon herself, she had deflected it away from the girl and bought them some time. Ian arrests Alicia for treason and she is taken away by Galen and Hollis Wilson.

Mausami is in the Sanctuary but has heard the news. Convincing herself that Theo is still alive, she decides that she is going to find him and tell him about their baby.

When the lights go out Michael runs to the Lighthouse and discovers that the main breaker is open. He closes it and restores power, then reports it to Ian, blaming it on a power surge but unconvinced that was the cause and unable to find any evidence that it was. Then he returns to work on his antenna. When he calls up the information on the chip that was removed from Amy, he runs to get Peter. They discover that the transmitter has been reporting Amy's vital signs "every hour-and-a-half for a little more than ninety-three years. Ninety-three years, four months, and twenty-one days, to be exact. Amy ... is a hundred years old." Michael also pinpoints the location of the USAMRIID facility as Telluride, Colorado, the center of the CQZ: "The Central Quarantine Zone. It's where the epidemic began. The first virals all came out of Colorado." Amy, Michael asserts, isn't a viral, but because of her slow aging and swift healing, he believes, "The Army did something to her." And, he adds, "Maybe she's the cure." He takes down a logbook from the time when radio was still permitted, eighty years ago, and points out that someone had picked up a signal from the same coordinates in Colorado and the notation: "If you found her, bring her here." And the signal is still transmitting:

"Because somebody's there, Peter. Don't you get it?" He smiled victoriously. "Ninety-three years. That's year zero, the start of the outbreak. That's what I'm telling you. Ninety-three years ago, in the spring of year zero, in Telluride, Colorado, somebody put a nuclear-powered transmitter inside a six-year-old-girl's neck. Who's still alive and sitting in quarantine, like she walked straight out of the Time Before. And for ninety-three years, whoever did this has been asking for her back."

Sara is brought to the Lighthouse because she knows the most about Amy. Although Sara thinks the idea of going all the way to Colorado is crazy, they begin to plan their escape, now that the lives of Caleb, Alicia and Amy are all threatened. Michael adds to the urgency by pointing out the problem of the failing batteries.


Sanjay is hearing Babcock's voice louder than ever. "The girl was there with Babcock and the Many -- what Many? he wondered." And Babcock begins to command, "Bring them to me, Sanjay. Bring me one and then another. Bring them to me that you should live in this way and no other." He dreams again of the woman, smoking, in her kitchen on the telephone. The voice commands, "Do it. Kill her. Kill her and be free." But when in his dream Sanjay attempts to stab the woman, some force stays his hand. 

Peter goes to see Auntie, who is "weirdly cheerful." She reaches under her bed and pulls out a shoe box full of maps that he recognizes as having belonged to his father. His mother had brought them to her, Auntie tells him. "Give them to him when he's ready, she said." He protests that she must have meant Theo, but she insists that his mother meant them for him. And he realizes that on her deathbed his mother had known who he was, that instead of "Take care of your brother, Theo," she had said, "Take care of your brother Theo." She had recognized Peter as the stronger one. Then Michael arrives with Dale Levine, who says that if they want to get Alicia and Caleb out, they had better do it "at first light," and he'll help them at the gate, because "They're going to get the guns."

Sara takes charge of getting Amy ready, now convinced of the necessity because her brother, Michael, was never wrong about things, and she wonders "what would become of her brother on that day" when he's wrong. In the lockup, Alicia has overpowered the guard, Galen Strauss. Peter and Michael show up and explain the plan to her and Caleb: They will get Sara and Amy from the Infirmary, then get horses from the stables. At sunrise, Dale will call an alarm about virals and in the confusion they will slip out the gate. But at the Infirmary they hear a scream and rush in to find Sara covered in blood and Amy crouched against the wall. They had been attacked by Milo Darrell and Sam Chou, the leaders of the mob that wanted to lynch Caleb. Ben Chou had been guarding Sara and Amy, and now Milo, Sam, Ben and Jacob Curtis are all lying there dead.

Now willing to risk going out through the gate now, Alicia takes charge of a change in plans. She sends Caleb and Peter to the Storehouse for supplies they need and they agree to rendezvous with the others. In the Storehouse, they discover that Old Chou and Walter Fisher have apparently hanged themselves. Peter tells Caleb to go ahead, and runs to Auntie's to retrieve the maps. When he joins the others at the cutout, where Alicia knows of the secret exit that the Colonel used, Mausami appears, carrying a crossbow and wearing a backpack. She asks Peter if he believes his brother is dead, and when he says no, she replies, "Neither do I." Alicia leads the way, and as Amy enters the tunnel she telepathically asks Peter where they are going. "'I don't really know,' he told her. 'But if we don't leave now, I think we'll all die here.'"

9. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 357-440

V. Girl From Nowhere

_____

Peter, Alicia and Caleb have made it back to the colony, where Peter awaits the duty of the Mercy: i.e., killing the transformed Theo. All three of them are surprised not only to have made it home, but that the horses were spared for them. But Peter has not yet told the others about Amy.

He is questioned by Sanjay Patal, the head of Household, about some of the details of the story, and realizes that because they haven't told anyone about the guns, "their story was full of holes -- what they were doing on the roof of the power station, how they'd rescued Caleb, Zander's death, their presence in the library." Sanjay is inclined to blame everything on Alicia, whom he calls "reckless." Sanjay informs him that Peter's cousin Dana will be taking Theo's place on household, though Peter had assumed that he would be his brother's replacement, and Soo Ramirez, the head of the Watch, tells Peter to take a few days off. Peter realizes that he is "being handled."

In the Lighthouse, Michael Fisher has isolated a signal at 1,432 megahertz that comes every ninety minutes and transmits for 242 seconds. It is not only regular in its occurrence, but it seems to be getting stronger. And one night as he's listening it, Sanjay appears at the door. Michael panics because of the forbidden radio, but he soon realizes that Sanjay is sleepwalking, which is not unusual in the colony. He tries to get Sanjay out of the Lighthouse without awakening him, but Sanjay is confused, lifting his right hand and looking at it, and then saying, "Bab ... cock?" Sanjay's wife, Gloria, appears and leads him away as he says, "This is my hand, isn't it?"

Michael goes out for a walk, and at the Stone, where the names of the dead are carved, he finds Mausami. He realizes that she is there because of Theo and comforts her. But they are interrupted by Mausami's husband, Galen, who is angry because Mausami has left the Sanctuary, where the pregnant women are expected to stay. He also turns his anger on Michael, but Mausami, after thanking Michael for his kindness, defuses the situation and returns to the Sanctuary.

Sara Fisher is in the Infirmary watching Gabe Curtis die of cancer. His wife, Mar, enters, and asks, "Sara, do you ... have something." Sara makes a mixture of digitalis, angel's trumpet and hemlock, and gives it to Gabe as a tea.

Peter goes to see Auntie, who gives him a cup of her bitter tea. She has been writing in her journals, which are completely handmade -- even the paper and the ink. "Someday someone will want to know what happened here, in this place," she tells him. When he tells her that he doesn't think Theo will be coming back, she isn't so certain. He also tells her that he saw the stars, which delights her. He asks if his father had ever said anything about a Walker, and she says, "I believe he did," and then tells him, "She comin'.... You know who, boy. You known it since the day God dreamed you up."

When he leaves Auntie, he hears shouts from the Main Gate. The Colonel has been spotted outside the walls, running toward a pod of three virals, who leap on him. Then Amy appears. The Watch mistake her for a viral and release a volley of arrows, one of which enters her shoulder. Alicia runs up, yelling for the Watch to cease fire. She grabs onto the rope used to descend the outside of the wall, descends and runs to Amy, picks her up and carries her to the gate. It's forbidden to open the gate at night for any reason, but Caleb appears and opens it for Alicia to carry Amy inside. Before they can close it again, three virals are there, but only one makes it inside. That one heads for the Sanctuary.

Hollis Wilson finds the viral in the Big Room of the Sanctuary where the children sleep. There he finds the viral standing over the crib where his brother's child, Dora, is lying. Hollis fires his crossbow, killing the viral, whom he recognizes as his brother, Arlo.

Caleb awakens Sara and tells her that they need a nurse for someone who has been shot. In the Infirmary she finds Amy, with an arrow through her shoulder, and Alicia. Caleb helps Sara remove the arrow. Peter appears and recognizes Amy. Sara stitches up the entry wound, doubting that it will save the life of the girl, whom she takes to be about fourteen. But when she checks the exit wound she finds that the bleeding has slowed and the wound appears smaller. Amy's pulse is strong and steady, and when Sara checks her pupils they're responsive. But looking into Amy's eyes Sara is overcome: "A sensation like falling, as if the earth had opened under her feet -- worse than dying, worse than death.... Sara thought the word: Alone! That's what she was, what they all were."

Then Sanjay, Soo Ramirez, Jimmy Molyneau and Ben Chou enter and arrest Caleb, for the murder of April Darrell, the Teacher who lived with the Littles in the Sanctuary -- the consequence of Caleb's opening the gate and letting in the viral Arlo, who killed Teacher when she made an attempt to kill him: She had been found holding a knife. Amy is placed under quarantine, with only Sara allowed to be with her in the Infirmary.

Peter, Alicia, Hollis and Soo are called as witnesses in the inquest. Because of Soo's presence at the events, there are only five members of the Household sitting in judgment: Sanjay, Old Chou, Jimmy Molyneau, Walter Fisher, and Dana Jaxon, Peter's cousin. When Peter testifies, he chooses to stand in an act of defiance. He tries to shift the blame away from Caleb, saying that he would have opened the gate himself if he had got there first. But he lies and says that he has never seen Amy before. Sanjay tells him to take more days off before returning to the Watch, and informs him that Jimmy has replaced Soo as First Captain, that Hollis is "off the Wall for the time being," and that Alicia has been ordered off the Watch and assigned to Heavy Duty. Then Peter reminds them that someone needs to check on the power station because of what happened to Arlo.

Peter finds Alicia in tears outside the Colonel's hut, and tells her about how Amy saved him at the mall. They go to see Caleb in the lockup and find an angry mob eager to lynch him. Peter realizes that the mob is made up of people with children in the Sanctuary. The lockup is guarded by a single Watcher, Dale Levine, but Alicia takes his crossbow and threatens the apparent leaders of the mob, Sam Chou and Milo Darrell. The mob cools off and departs. Alicia sends Dale for more Watchers and takes the key to the lockup. They talk to Caleb, and Alicia gives him a knife and tells him if he gets free to head for the cutout -- the place where the power line enters the compound.

Sanjay is suffering from bad dreams and from "The feeling that was like a whole other person, a separate soul that dwelled within his own." He has a dream of a fat woman, breathing smoke and talking on a telephone, and there is a voice inside him that says, "I am Babcock. We are Babcock. Babcock. Babcock. Babcock." He has been hearing the voice since he was a Little in the Sanctuary. Sanjay knows about the guns at the power station. His brother, Raj, had been on the Long Rides on which the guns were discovered. Though it was supposed to be a secret, Raj had told his wife, who told Sanjay's wife, Gloria. Sanjay visits Amy in the infirmary and has "the distinct feeling of being observed," an experience that he discovers is shared by Jimmy Molyneau, who asks, "Did you see her eyes?" when in fact Amy's eyes remain closed. Jimmy in particular seems profoundly affected by the visit.

Peter and Alicia sneak past the guards outside the Infirmary and enter through an old delivery chute. They find Sara with Amy, who is awake and sitting up. Sara says she is completely healed. Peter asks Amy if she followed him there, and she indicates that she did. He explains to Sara what had happened at the mall. Then Michael arrives, having followed Peter and Alicia. He explains about the signal he has been receiving and that the bandwidth on which it occurs was assigned to the military. It seems to be coming from Amy. Sara examines Amy and discovers the subcutaneous transmitter that had been implanted in the back of her neck. She removes it and gives it to Michael.

Sanjay has taken to his bed in a kind of stupor. When his wife tells him that Jimmy was there asking about whom they should send to the power station, he says to send Galen. "'It would be good for him, don't you think?' he heard a voice saying, for one part of him was still in the room while the other part, the dreaming part, was not. 'Tell him to send Galen.'"

While Michael works on the transmitter, Alicia and Peter play cards in an abandoned trailer near the lockup so they can keep an eye on things. After things remain quiet, Peter returns to the Infirmary where he finds Amy alone. He thanks her for saving him, and she communicates to him, "You're welcome. How strange it was speaking this way -- strange because it wasn't so strange. He had never heard the sound of the girl's voice, and yet he did not feel this as a lack. There was something calming about it, as if she had put aside the noise of words." Sara returns and removes the dressing from the wound, which is completely healed, so she also removes the stitches. She then removes the bandage from Peter's elbow, which he cut escaping from the mall. She leaves to go see about Caleb in the lockup. Amy gets up, pumps some water, and washes the area on Peter's arm that had been bandaged. And then she communicates something that startles Peter: "She misses you she misses you she misses you." Peter runs from the Infirmary, his eyes filling with tears.

Mausami is sitting by herself, trying to knit,  in the Big Room, which has been vacated so it can be thoroughly disinfected. She thinks about Galen and the fact that she doesn't love him, wondering why he doesn't know that the baby she carries isn't his: It was conceived one night at the power station when she made love with Theo. Now Galen arrives to tell her that Jimmy is sending him to secure the power station. The tension between them is evident: He moves his hand to his belt where his knife is, and she discovers that she has been clutching one of the knitting needles in her fist.

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

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

_____

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.]

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

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

_____

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.]