Camp Vorhees, west Texas

Western Headquarters of the Expeditionary

Though Lieutenant Peter Jaxon was a decorated military officer, a veteran of three separate campaigns and a man about whom stories were told, he sometimes felt as if his life had stopped.

He waited for orders; he waited for chow; he waited for the latrine. He waited for the weather to break, and when it didn’t, he waited some more. Orders, weapons, supplies, news—all were things he waited for. For days and weeks and sometimes even months he waited, as if his time on earth had been consecrated to the very act of waiting, as if he were a man-sized waiting machine.

He was waiting now.

Something important was happening in the command tent; he had no doubt in his mind. All morning Apgar and the others had been sealed away. Peter had begun to fear the worst. For months they’d all heard the rumors: if the task force didn’t kill one soon, the hunt would be abandoned.

Five years since his ride up the mountain with Amy. Five years hunting the Twelve. Five years with nothing to show for it.

Houston, home of Anthony Carter, subject Number Twelve, would have been the logical place to start, if the place hadn’t been an impenetrable swamp. So, too, New Orleans, home of Number Five, Thaddeus Turrell. Tulsa, Oklahoma, seat of Rupert Sosa, had yielded nothing but disaster; the city was a vast ruin, dracs everywhere, and they’d lost sixteen men before making their escape.

There were others. Jefferson City, Missouri. Oglala, South Dakota. Everett, Washington. Bloomington, Minnesota. Orlando, Florida. Black Creek, Kentucky. Niagara Falls, New York. All distant and unreachable, many miles and years away. Tacked to the inside of the lid of his locker Peter kept a map, each of these cities circled in ink. The seats of the Twelve. To kill one of the Twelve was to kill his descendants, to free their minds for the journey into death. Or so Peter believed. That was what Lacey had taught him when she’d exploded the bomb that killed Babcock, subject Number One; what Amy had showed him, stepping from Lacey’s cabin into the snowy field, where the Many had lain in the sun to die.

You are Smith, you are Tate, you are Dupree, you are Erie Ramos Ward Cho Singh Atkinson Johnson Montefusco Cohen Murrey Nguyen Elberson Lazaro Torres …

They had been a group of ten then. Now they were six. Peter’s brother was gone, and Maus, and Sara, too. Of the five that had made the trip to Roswell Garrison, only Hollis and Caleb had escaped—“Baby Caleb,” though he was hardly a baby anymore, now in the orphanage in Kerrville, being raised by the sisters. When the virals had broken through the Roswell Garrison’s perimeter, Hollis had run with Caleb to one of the hardboxes. Theo and Maus were already dead. No one knew what became of Sara; she had vanished into the melee. Hollis had looked for her body in the aftermath but found nothing. The only explanation was that she’d been taken up.

The years had scattered the others like the wind. Michael was at the refinery in Freeport, an oiler first class. Greer, who had joined them in Colorado, was in the stockade, sentenced to six years for deserting his command. And who knew where Hollis was. The man they’d known and loved like a brother had broken under the weight of Sara’s death, his grief casting him into the dark underbelly of the city, the world of the trade. Peter had heard he’d risen through the ranks to become one of Tifty’s top lieutenants. Of the original group, only Peter and Alicia had joined the hunt.

And Amy. What of Amy?

Peter thought of her often. She looked very much as she always had—like a girl of fourteen, not the 103 she actually was—but much had changed since their first meeting. The Girl from Nowhere, who spoke only in riddles when she spoke at all, was no more. In her place was a person much more present, more human. She spoke often of her past, not just her lonely years of wandering but her earliest memories of the Time Before: of her mother, and Lacey, and a camp in the mountains and the man who had saved her. Brad Wolgast. Not her real father, Amy said, she had never known who that was, but a father nonetheless. Whenever she spoke of him, a weight of grief entered her eyes. Peter knew without asking that he had died to protect her, and that this was a debt she could never repay, though she might spend her life—that infinite, unknowable span—trying to do just that.

She was with Caleb now, among the sisters, having taken up the gray frock of the Order. Peter didn’t think Amy shared their beliefs—the sisters were a dour lot, professing a philosophical and physical chastity to reflect their conviction that these were the last days of humanity—but it was a more than adequate disguise, one Amy could easily pass off. Based on what had happened at the Colony, they’d all agreed that Amy’s true identity, and the power she carried, was nothing anybody outside the leadership should know.

Peter walked to the mess, where he passed an empty hour. His platoon, twenty-four men, had just returned from a reconnaissance sweep to Lubbock to scout up salvageables; luck had been on their side, and they’d completed their mission without incident. The biggest prize had been a junkyard of old tires. In a day or two they’d return with a truck to take as many as they could carry for transport back to the vulcanizing plant in Kerrville.

The senior officers had been in the tent for hours. What could they be talking about?

His mind drifted back to the Colony. Odd that he wouldn’t think about it for weeks or even months at a time, and then, without warning, the memories would sail into his mind. The events that had precipitated his departure now seemed as if they had happened to somebody else—not Lieutenant Peter Jaxon of the Expeditionary or even Peter Jaxon, Full Watch, but a kind of boy-man, his imagination circumscribed by the tiny patch of ground that defined his entire life. How much energy had he devoted to nurturing his own feelings of inadequacy, manifested in his petty rivalry with his brother, Theo? He thought with wistful pride of what his father, the great Demitrius Jaxon, Head of the Household, Captain of the Long Rides, would have said to him now. You’ve done well. You’ve taken the fight to them. I’m proud to call you son. Yet Peter would have given it all back for just one more hour in Theo’s company.

And whenever he looked at Caleb, it was his brother he saw.

He was joined at the table by Satch Dodd. A junior officer like Peter, Satch had been a toddler when his family had been killed in the Massacre of the Field. As far as Peter was aware, Satch never said anything about this, though the story was well known.

“Any idea what it’s all about?” Satch asked. He had a round, boyish face that made him appear completely earnest at all times.

Peter shook his head.

“Good haul up in Lubbock.”

“Just tires.”

Both their minds were elsewhere; they were simply filling time. “Tires are tires. We can’t do much without them.”

Satch’s squad would be departing in the morning to do a hundred-mile sweep toward Midland. It was bad duty: the area was a cesspool of oil, bubbling up from old wells that had never been capped.

“I’ll tell you something I heard,” Satch said. “The Civilian Authority is looking into whether or not some of those old wells can still be operated, for when the tanks go dry. We may find ourselves garrisoning down there before too long.”

Peter was startled; he’d never considered this possibility. “I thought there was enough oil in Freeport to last forever.”

“There’s forever and forever. In theory, yeah, there’s plenty of slick down there. But sooner or later everything runs out.” Satch squinted at him. “Don’t you have a friend who’s an oiler? One of your crew from California, wasn’t it?”

“Michael.”

Satch shook his head. “Walking all the way from California. That’s still the craziest story I ever heard.” He placed his palms on the table and rose. “If you hear anything from upstairs, let me know. If I had to bet, they’ll be sending all of us down to Midland to wade in the slick before too long.”

He left Peter alone. Satch’s words had done nothing to cheer him; far from it. A half dozen enlisted clomped into the mess, talking among themselves with the rough-edged, profanity-laced familiarity of men looking for chow. Peter wouldn’t have minded a little company to take his mind off his worries, but as they moved from the line in search of a table, none glanced in his direction; the tarnished silver bar on his collar and the poor spirits he was radiating were evidently enough to ward them away.

What could the senior officers be talking about?

To abandon the hunt: Peter couldn’t imagine it. For five years he had thought of little else. He’d signed on with the Expeditionary right after Roswell; a lot of men had. For every person who’d perished that night, there was a friend, or brother, or son who had taken his place. The ones motivated solely by a need for revenge tended to wash out early or get themselves killed—you had to have a better reason—and Peter had no illusions about himself. Payback was a factor. But the roots of his desire went deeper. All his life, since the days of the Long Rides, he’d longed to be part of something, a cause larger than himself. He’d felt it the moment he’d taken the oath that bound him to his fellows; his purpose, his fate, his person—all were now wedded to theirs. He’d wondered if he’d be somehow less himself, his identity subsumed into the collective, but the opposite had proved true. It was nothing he could speak of, not with Theo and the others gone, but joining the Expeditionary had made him feel alive in a way he never had before. Watching the soldiers eat—laughing and joking and shoveling beans into their mouths as if it were the last meal of their lives—he recalled those early days with envy.

Because somewhere along the way, the feeling had left him. As campaigns were waged and men died and territory was taken and lost, none of it seeming to amount to anything, it had slowly slipped away. His bond to his men remained, a force as abiding as gravity, and he would have sacrificed himself for any one of them without a flicker of hesitation, as, he believed, they would have done for him. But something was missing; he didn’t quite know what it was. He knew what Alicia would have told him. You’re just tired. This is a long slog. It happens to everyone, be patient. Not wrong, but not the whole story, either.

Finally Peter could stand it no longer. He exited the tent and marched across the compound. All he needed was some pretext for knocking; with any luck, they’d let him inside, and he could glean some sense of what they were up to.

He needn’t have bothered. As he made his approach, the door swung open: Major Henneman, the colonel’s adjutant. Trim, a bristle of blond hair, slightly crooked teeth he showed only when he smiled, which was never.

“Jaxon. I was just going to look for you. Come inside.”

Peter stepped into the shade of the tent, pausing in the doorway to let his eyes adjust. Seated around the broad table were all the senior staff—Majors Lewis and Hooper, Captains Rich, Perez, and Childs, and Colonel Apgar, the officer in charge of the task force—plus one more.

“Hi, Peter.”

Alicia.

* * *

“There are two entrances I could find, here and here.”

Alicia was directing everyone’s attention to a map spread over the table: U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, SOUTHERN NEW MEXICO. Beside it was displayed a second map, smaller and faded with age: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, CARLSBAD CAVERNS.

“The main opening to the cave is about three hundred yards wide. There’s no way we can seal it even with our largest ED, and the terrain is too rugged to haul a flusher up there anyway.”

“So what are you proposing?” Apgar asked.

“We box him in.” She pointed to the map again. “I scouted another entrance, about a quarter mile away. It’s an old elevator shaft. Martínez has to be somewhere between these two entrances. We set off a package of H2 at the base of the main entrance, inside the tunnel that leads toward the shaft. This should drive him toward the bottom of the elevator, where we position a single man to meet him on the way out.”

“A single man,” Apgar repeated. “Meaning you.”

Alicia nodded.

The colonel leaned back in his chair. Everyone waited.

“Don’t get me wrong, Lieutenant. I know what you’re capable of. We all do. But if this thing is anything like the one you saw in Nevada, it sounds to me like a one-way trip.”

“Anybody else will just slow me down.”

He frowned skeptically. “And you’re positive Martínez is down there.”

“It all makes sense, sir. Babcock used a cave, too. And El Paso is just a hundred miles from Carlsbad. It’s his home turf.”

Apgar thought a moment. “I agree, the pattern fits, but how can you be so sure?”

Alicia hesitated. “I can’t really explain it, Colonel. I just know.”

Peter was seated at the far end of the table. “Permission to speak, sir.”

Apgar rolled his eyes. “Fine, Jaxon, go ahead and say what we all know you’re going to say.”

“I’m the only other person here who’s seen one of the Twelve. I trust Lieutenant Donadio. If she says Martínez is down there, he’s down there.”

“We’re all aware of your history, Lieutenant. That doesn’t change the fact that we’re just playing a hunch here. I don’t see risking anyone unless we know for sure.”

“So maybe there’s another way. All of the original test subjects were chipped, like Amy. We can use the signal to locate him.”

“I already thought of that. Just one problem. Radio waves can’t pass through rock. How do you propose to get a signal from a thousand feet underground?”

“We don’t get it from the surface. We get it from the cave.”

Peter drew their attention to the diagram again. “We do like Alicia says, positioning an H2 pack inside the tunnel that leads from the base of the main entrance into the other chambers. The Twelve are big, but in tight quarters that ought to be enough to get Martínez’s attention. The package is wired back to the base of the main entrance, where it’s connected to the surface by a radio detonator, so we can blow it at a safe distance. Call that Blue Squad.”

Apgar nodded. “I’m with you so far.”

“Okay, but we don’t send a single man down the elevator shaft to meet Martínez on the way out. We send two, with a radio direction finder. Call that Red Squad. The first thing Red Squad does is plant a second pack of H2 near the base of the shaft. We put it on a short timer, say fifteen seconds. Man one proceeds into the cave, using the RDF to locate Martínez, but man two holds his position at the elevator. The trick will be keeping lines of sight to maintain radio contact with the surface, so that’s man two’s job. He’s the go-between. Basically we use a daisy-chain system. Man one is connected by radio to man two, who’s connected to whoever’s positioned at the top of the shaft, call him man three, who’s connected to Blue Squad. That way we can coordinate all the elements of the operation. No guesswork.”

Apgar nodded. “Fair enough, but I’m already seeing the problems, Lieutenant. It’s a maze down there. What if men one and two lose contact? The whole thing collapses.”

“It’s a risk, but there’s no reason they should, so long as the first man doesn’t go any farther than these three junctures.” Peter showed them on the map. “It won’t give us a whole view of the cave, but we should be able to survey most of it.”

“Go on.”

“So. We set the two packages, man one goes looking for Martínez, man two waits to hear. After that it’s just a question of the timing. Once man one locates Martínez, he radios back to man two, who contacts the surface. Blue Squad blows the hole. Martínez is pissed. Man one beats it back to the shaft, drawing him toward the elevator. Man two sets the timer. Up they go, the second package blows, Martínez is history.” He clapped his hands. “Simple.”

Apgar considered this. “Not a lot of margin for error there. I know Donadio’s fast, but fifteen seconds won’t be much to get clear of the blast. I don’t know if we can winch anybody up that quickly.”

“We won’t have to. The shaft itself will offer enough protection. Fifty feet should do it.”

“Just to be clear, you’re talking about using man one as a decoy.”

“Correct, sir.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before.”

“Not me. Sister Lacey.”

“Your mystic nun.”

“Lacey was a lot more than that, Colonel.”

Apgar placed the tips of his fingers together, glanced at the map, then raised his eyes to Peter’s face. “Man one is Donadio, obviously. Any idea who this other suicidal character might be?”

“Yes, sir. I’d like to volunteer.”

“And why am I not surprised?” Apgar turned to the others. “Anybody else want to chime in here? Hooper? Lewis?”

Both men were agreed.

“Donadio?”

She glanced at Peter —Are you sure about this?—and then gave a tight nod. “I’m good with it, Colonel.”

A brief pause, followed by a sigh of surrender. “All right, Lieutenants, this is your show. Henneman, you think two squads should do it?”

“I believe so, Colonel.”

“Brief Lieutenant Dodd and put a detail together to outfit the portables. And let’s see about that RDF. I’d like to move on this within forty-eight hours.” Apgar looked at Peter again. “Last chance to change your mind, Lieutenant.”

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so.” He lifted his eyes to the room. “All right, everybody. Let’s show Command what we’re made of and kill this bastard.”

Two nights later, they made camp at the base of the mountain. A pair of portables, twenty-four men sleeping on racks; they awoke at dawn to prepare their ascent. The ground around the portables was littered with tracks in the dust, the nighttime visitors, drawn by the scent of two dozen dozing men, a grand feast denied by walls of steel. The mountain was too steep for vehicles, the path winding. Anything they brought they would have to hump on their backs. Without the portables to protect them on the mountaintop, there would be no second chance. In the bright light of morning, the terms of their mission were starkly defined. Find Martínez and kill him, or die in the dark.

Henneman was the senior officer—an irregularity. Rarely did he go outside the walls of the garrison. But he had made his way, over the years, to this position of relative safety by doing just the opposite. Tulsa, New Orleans, Kearney, Roswell—Henneman had ascended through the ranks on a ladder of battle and blood. No one doubted his capabilities, and his presence meant something. Peter would lead one squad, Dodd the other. Alicia was Alicia: the scout sniper, the odd man, the one who didn’t quite fit and seemed, by and large, to answer to no one. Everyone knew what she could do, yet her status was a source of unease among the men. No one ever said anything that Peter was aware of—if they spoke of their concerns, it wasn’t to him—yet their discomfort was evident in the way they kept their distance, the cautious glances they gave her, as if they could not quite bring themselves to meet her eye. She was a bridge between the human and the viral, situated somewhere between: where did she fall?

They set out just after dawn. Now it was a race against the hours. They would need to set the charges and have everybody in position before sunset. The cool desert night had yielded to a scorching sun, its thrumming rays hitting their backs, then their shoulders, then the tops of their heads. There was no time to rest; rations were passed down the lines as they climbed, Alicia leading the way, occasionally doubling back to confer with Henneman. By the time they reached the mouth of the cave, it was late afternoon.

“Jesus, you weren’t kidding,” Henneman said.

They were standing at the cave’s mouth. The western sun lit the interior, though its rays traveled only so deeply; beyond lay a maw of blackness. The amphitheater with its curved stone benches, the spaces between them littered with dry leaves and other debris, was inexplicable; if an audience sat here, what did they watch? Metal banisters framed a curving trail that switchbacked down into the cave. They had three usable hours of daylight left.

They reviewed the plan a final time. Dodd’s squad would set the charges at the base of the cave. According to Alicia’s map, the switchbacks ended two hundred feet belowground, where a narrow tunnel descended another three hundred feet to the first of several large chambers. The charges would be laid inside this tunnel, wired to a radio detonator with a clear line of sight to the cave’s mouth. The explosion would shoot a compression wave through the tunnel, its destructive force magnified exponentially by its trip through the narrow space—in theory, sending whatever was down there running toward the elevator shaft. Once the charges were in place and Dodd’s men had returned to the surface, Peter and Alicia would commence their descent. The elevator car was resting at the bottom, seven hundred feet below the surface, held in place by its counterweights, which were lodged at the top. A winch would lower Peter and Alicia by rope to the base of the shaft and pull them back up when they made their escape.

Dodd and his team set out. Fifteen minutes later, he radioed from the bottom. They’d made it to the mouth of the tunnel.

“Creepy as hell down here,” Dodd said. “You’ve got to see this for yourself.”

They would, soon enough. Dodd’s squad had three hundred feet of cable to connect the detonator to the package. A five-minute silence ensued; then Dodd’s voice returned. The bomb and the cable were laid; his team had begun their ascent. Peter and Alicia were waiting at the top of the elevator shaft, which was located a quarter mile away, in a structure that once had housed the park’s offices. The winch was in place. The time was 1700 hours; they were cutting it close.

Dodd’s voice on the radio: “Blue Squad, good to go.”

Alicia and Peter clipped into their harnesses; Henneman wished them good luck. They balanced at the edge of the shaft and pushed off, dropping into the blackness like coins into a well. Portable fluorescents clipped to their vests bathed the walls in a yellowish glow. Peter’s mind was clear, his senses acute. There was a kind of fear that deepened awareness, bringing focus to the mind; his was that kind. The temperature dropped swiftly, prickling the hair on his arms. A hundred feet, two hundred, three, their downward passage swift, their weight suspended by the harnesses, as if they were descending in two cupped hands. The elevator’s cables—a thick trunk of twined steel and two smaller lines wrapped in plastic—flowed past. A dark shape emerged below: the top of the elevator. The cables were bolted to a plate on the roof. They landed with a soft thunk.

“Red Squad down.”

Alicia pried loose the hatch, and they dropped inside. The doors of the car stood open. A feeling of immeasurable space beyond, as if they were standing at the entrance to a cathedral. The air was damp and cold with a strong earthen smell, vaguely ureic. They scanned the space with the lights of their rifles, their beams volleying into the immense blackness. All around were strange, organic-looking forms, as if the walls were made of crumpled flesh.

“Flyers, get a load of this place,” Alicia said.

Alicia had removed her glasses; she was in her element now, a zone of permanent night. By the glow of the fluorescents, she knelt and removed two objects from her rucksack. The first was the explosives pack—eight sticks of HEP wired to a mechanical timer. She gingerly placed this on the floor of the cave. The second was the radio direction finder, a small, boxy object with a directional antenna and a meter to register the strength of an incoming signal at 1432 megahertz. She flicked the power switch and stepped from the car, holding the RDF before her to sweep the space beyond. It began to issue a faint but regular beeping. The needle nudged to life.

“Gotcha.”

Peter radioed the surface: the target was present. He’d had no cause to doubt Alicia’s claim, yet suddenly the situation had acquired a more potent reality. Somewhere in these caverns, Julio Martínez, Tenth of Twelve, lay in wait.

“Tell Dodd to stand ready and wait for my signal,” Peter told Henneman.

“Acknowledged. All eyes, Lieutenants.”

The moment had come. A final look passed between Peter and Alicia, freighted with meaning. Once again, here they were, the two of them poised at the precipice. There was no need to acknowledge this with words; all had been said. Neither could exist without the other, yet the distance between them could never be crossed. They were who they were, which was soldiers at war. The bond transcended all others but one, the one thing they could not have. Alicia was wearing, as ever, her trademark bandoliers, but she’d given up the cross for an M4 rifle with the fat tube of a grenade launcher fixed under the barrel. Martínez would receive no mercy from her, no final benediction.

“See you soon.”

She faded into the darkness.

At the mouth of the cave, Satch Dodd’s squad had formed a firing line along the lowest tier of the amphitheater. The sky had begun a discernible darkening, an enrichment of its colors as day spilled toward night. Dodd was clutching the detonator. Its signal, transmitted to the receiver at the base of the cave, would close a simple electric circuit, sending a jolt of current down the wire to the bomb.

Even at this distance, it would make a hell of a boom.

Though it was nothing he could let his men see, the journey to the bottom of the cave had rattled him. Dodd had never experienced any place like it in his life—an unearthly world of alien shapes, strange colors, and distorted dimensions, pockets of darkness everywhere he looked, spiraling down into nothingness. The trip down the tunnel had felt like crawling into his own grave. In the orphanage, Dodd had learned about hell, a realm of everlasting gloom where the souls of the wicked writhed forever in agony. Although the idea had initially terrified him, something about it had struck him, even then, as faintly unbelievable. Though only a boy, he’d sensed that hell was just a story the sisters had concocted to keep the children in line, not unlike the fables they read the children to teach simple moral lessons. Dodd’s status as the youngest survivor of the Massacre of the Field had always afforded him a slightly elevated rank among the children, as if this experience had somehow made him wise. This, of course, was completely misplaced—having never really known his parents, he did not feel the loss of them, and he remembered nothing of that day—but under the spell of his playmates’ admiration for the imaginary mantle of his grief, Dodd came to see himself as a boy with special powers of perception, especially where the sisters’ mystical proclamations were concerned. God, okay, Dodd was good with that, it made a kind of sense. Heaven was a pleasant idea he was happy to go along with, since believing in it cost him nothing. But that was as far as he was willing to go. Hell: it was pure nonsense.

Now, standing at the mouth of the cave, detonator in hand, Dodd wasn’t so sure.

The waiting was never easy. Once the shooting started a feeling of clarity always took over. You’d die or you wouldn’t, you’d kill or be killed—it was one or the other and nothing in between. You knew where you stood, and for those violent, heart-pumping minutes, Dodd felt himself lifted on a wave of adrenaline that eradicated virtually everything about him that was even vaguely personal. It could be said that in the chaos of combat, the man known as Satch Dodd ceased to exist, even to himself; and when the dust cleared, and he found himself still standing, he experienced a rush of raw existence, as if he’d been shot from a cannon back into the world.

It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained—they all swirled together in the mind like a soup. While half of Dodd’s attention was intently focused on the situation at hand—the detonator in his grip and the presence of his men around him and the walkie clipped to his shoulder, through which Henneman’s command to blow the hole would come—the other half was ricocheting through the chambers of his private self. Only when Henneman gave the signal to explode the bomb would this feeling, a kind of whole-body psychological nausea, abate, igniting his power to act.

The major’s voice crackled through the radio: “Blue Squad, all eyes. Donadio’s going in.”

Something tensed inside him; he felt himself returning to the moment. “Acknowledged.”

It couldn’t happen soon enough.

Seven hundred feet below, in the lightless caverns left behind when sulfide-rich waters had leached upward into the fissured limestone deposits of an ancient reef, Alicia Donadio was advancing on the signal. That this signal emanated from the chip implanted in the neck of Julio Martínez, one of twelve death row inmates infected with the CV virus created by Project NOAH at the dawn of the present age, she had no doubt.

Louise, she thought, Louise.

The moment they’d touched down in the cave, this name had taken ahold of her mind. Which was strange: according to the records they had salvaged from the NOAH compound, Martínez had been sentenced to death for killing a policeman, not the rape and murder of a woman. Perhaps her death had gone unrecorded, or else had never been connected to him. The shooting of the policeman was present also, a flash of violence like a white-hot spark, but within each of the Twelve lay a singular story—the one story that was the true essence, the core of who they were. For Martínez, that story was Louise.

According to her map, two tunnels led from the elevator to individual caves, marked with names suggesting their grandeur. King’s Palace. Hall of Giants. Queen’s Chamber. And, simply, the Big Room. To maintain a line of sight with Peter, and thus stay in communication with the surface, Alicia could go no farther than the junctures at the far end of each passageway. Beyond that, she would be on her own.

King’s Palace, she thought. Somehow, that sounded like him.

“Going left.”

As she proceeded down the passageway, the meter of the RDF leapt, the beeping accelerating in kind. She’d guessed right. The walls pressed around her, shards of some bright substance embedded in their surface glinting under the raking beam of her rifle. There were virals here, a great horde, like buried treasure, Martínez presiding. Alicia could see it all plainly now; the images deepened with every step, taking hold of her mind. Louise, the tightening cord encircling her neck; the precise demarcation of color above and below, her neck milky white, the skin of her face rosy and swollen with blood; the look of astonished terror in her eyes, and the cold finality of death’s approach. It was all as clear as if Alicia had lived it herself, but then something shifted. Now Alicia was experiencing this event in two directions simultaneously. She was looking at Louise while also looking from her. How was this possible? When had she acquired this attunement to the unseen world? Through Louise’s eyes she saw Martínez’s face. A well-groomed man of precise features, silver hair swept back from his forehead to form a delicate widow’s peak. A human face, though not precisely: there was nothing you could call a person behind his eyes, only a soulless vacancy. The pleasure he was taking was an animal’s. Louise was nothing to him. She was an organization of warm surfaces created only for his desire and dispatch. Her name was written plainly on her blouse, and yet his mind could not connect this name to the human person he was strangling in the midst of raping, because the only thing real to him was himself. She felt Louise’s terror, and her pain, and then the dark moment when the woman understood that death was imminent, her life at its end; that she would die without any acknowledgment from the universe that she had existed in the first place, and the last thing she would feel as she departed the world would be Martínez, raping her.

Alicia had reached the juncture, a place called the Boneyard. A strong smell of urine tanged in her nostrils, coating the membranes of her mouth and throat. In the moist air, her breath puffed before her in an icy cloud. The beep of the RDF, steadily accelerating, had become a continuous stream of sound.

She knew then what she intended to do. She had intended it all along. The plan was a cover, an elaborate ruse to conceal her purpose.

She wanted to kill Martínez herself. She wanted to feel him die.

At the elevator, Peter became aware that something wasn’t as it should be just a few seconds before Alicia stepped from his line of sight. There was no rational explanation for this knowledge; it simply came to him out of the stillness, a feeling deep in his bones.

“Lish, come in.”

No answer.

“Lish, can you read me?”

A hiss of static, then: “Stay there.”

There was something unsettling in her voice. A feeling of resignation, as if she were severing a rope that held her over an abyss. Before he could respond, her voice returned: “I mean it, Peter.”

Then she was gone.

He radioed the surface. “Something’s wrong, I’ve lost her.”

“Hold your position, Jaxon.”

Had she said the left tunnel? Yes, the left.

“I’m going after her,” he told Henneman.

“Negative. Stand pat—”

But Peter failed to hear the rest of Henneman’s message. He was already moving away.

At the same time, Lieutenant Dodd had commenced a mad dash down the switchback into the cave. He was unaware that the chain of radio transmission had been broken and that neither Peter nor, by extension, Alicia knew that the bomb at the base of the main entrance had disarmed itself—the first mishap in a cascade of events that would never be fully reassembled to the satisfaction of Command. Somehow—a short in the line, a mechanical defect, a whim of fate—the receiver at the base of the cave had lost contact with the surface. A first-class, A1 screwup if ever there was one, and now Dodd was racing into the mouth of hell.

His first descent had taken fifteen minutes; moving at what counted as a dead sprint down the treacherous, hairpinning pathway, he made it to the bottom in fewer than five. At the edge of his vision he perceived a scuttle overhead, accompanied by a high-pitched squeaking, but in his haste he failed to process this; if Hennemen’s order to blow the package came before he’d made it back out, his team would fire it anyway, killing him in the blast. The only thing on his mind was reaching the bottom, repairing the detonator, and getting back out.

There it was. The receiver. Dodd had left it on a smooth, tablelike boulder situated at the tunnel’s mouth; now it lay on the ground, tipped onto its side. What force had knocked it away? Dodd dropped to his knees, his breath heaving in his chest. Rivers of perspiration spilled down his face. A ghastly stink was in the air. He gently took the device in his hand. The receiver had two switches, one to arm the detonator, another to close the circuit and fire the bomb. Why wasn’t it working? But then he understood that the antenna had come loose, knocked askew in the fall. He withdrew a screwdriver from his pack.

The ceiling began to move.

Alicia noticed the bones first. The bones and the smell, an overpowering stench—rank, biological, like the bottled gas of a grave. She took a step forward. As her boot touched down she felt, then heard, a crunch of bone. The skeleton of something small. The tininess of the skull, its mocking grin of teeth: a kind of rodent? Her field of view widened. The floor was carpeted with the brittle remains, in many places piled knee- or even waist-high, like drifts of snow.

Where are you? she thought. Show yourself, you bastard. I’ve got a message from Louise.

Martínez was close, very close. She was practically on top of him. For the first time in many years Alicia knew the taste of fear, but more than that: she knew hatred. A pure force, binding and suffusing every part of her. All her life seemed called to this moment. Martínez was the great misery of the world. It was not glory she sought or even justice. It was vengeance; not killing but the act of killing. To say, This is from Louise. To feel his life leaving him under her hand.

Come to me. Come to me.

From out of the gloom a shape appeared, a flash of white skin in the beam of her rifle. Alicia froze. What the hell …? She took a step forward, then another.

It was a man.

Ruined and sagging, old beyond old, his figure emaciated, a sketch of bones; his skin was bleached of all color, almost translucent. He was huddled in nakedness on the floor of the cave. As the light of her rifle passed over his face, he did not flinch; his eyes were like stones, inert with blindness. A bat was writhing in his hands. Its long, kitelike wings, the sheerest membranes stretched over the attenuated fans of fingered bone, fluttered helplessly. The man brought the bat to his face and, with a shocking energy, enveloped its dainty head in his mouth. A final, muffled squeal and a tremor of the creature’s wings and then a snapping sound; the man twisted the body away and spat its head to the floor. He pressed the body to his lips and began vigorously to suck, his body rocking with the rhythm of his inhalations, a faint coo, almost childlike, pulsing from his throat.

Alicia’s voice sounded clumsily huge in the cavernous space. “Who the hell are you?”

The man pointed his blind, rigid face toward the source of the sound. Blood slicked his lips and chin. Alicia noticed for the first time a bluish image crawling up the side of his neck: the figure of a snake.

“Answer me.”

A faint puff, more air than speech: “Ig… Ig…”

“Ig? Is that your name? Ig?”

“…nacio.” His brow crumpled. “Ignacio?”

From behind her came a sound of footsteps; as Alicia spun around, the beam of Peter’s rifle swept her face.

“I told you to wait.”

Peter’s face was a blank, transfixed by the image of the man huddled on the floor.

Alicia pointed her rifle to the man’s forehead. “Where is he? Where’s Martínez?”

Tears swelled from his sightless eyes. “He left us.” His voice was like a moan of pain. “Why did he leave us?”

“What do you mean, he left you?”

With a searching gesture, the man raised one hand to the barrel of Alicia’s rifle, wrapped it in his fist, and pulled the muzzle hard against his forehead.

“Please,” he said. “Kill me.”

They were bats. Bats by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. They exploded from the roof of the tunnel, a solid airborne mass, swarming Dodd’s senses with the heat and weight and sound and smell of them. They blasted into him like a wave, sealing him inside a vortex of pure animal frenzy. He waved his arms madly, trying to deflect them from his face and eyes; he felt but did not yet wholly experience the sting of their teeth, drilling into his flesh, like a series of distant pinpricks. They are going to tear you to pieces, his mind was telling him; that’s how this is going to end; your awful fate is that you’re going to die in this cave, torn to shreds by bats. Dodd screamed, and as he screamed his awareness of the pain became the thing itself, attaining its full dimensions, his mind and body instantly achieving a unity of pure annihilating agony, and as he pitched forward toward the detonator, with its glowing lights and switches, his physical person assuming in that elongated instant the properties of a hammer, falling, his one thought —oh, shit —was also his last.

The blast wave from the prematurely detonated first package, rocketing from the tunnel into the cave’s complex of halls and cavities with the energy of a runaway locomotive, reached the King’s Palace as a terrific bang, overlapped by a pop of pressure and a deep subterranean trembling. This was followed by a second lurch underfoot, like the deck of a boat tossed by a giant wave. It was an event in equal measures atmospheric, auditory, caloric, and seismic; it had the power to rouse the very core of the earth.

They were known as hangers: sleeping virals who, their metabolic processes suppressed, existed in a state of extended hibernation. In this condition they could endure for years or even decades, and preferred, for reasons unknown—perhaps an expression of their biological kinship to bats, a buried memory of their race—to dangle upside down, arms folded over their chests with a curious tidiness, like mummies in their sarcophagi. In the various chambers of Carlsbad Caverns (though not the King’s Palace; this was Ignacio’s alone) they awaited, a dozing storehouse of biological stalactites, a somnolent army of glowing icicles excited to consciousness by the bomb’s detonation. Like any species, they perceived this adjustment to their surroundings as a mortal threat; like virals, they instantly snapped to the scent of human blood in their midst.

Peter and Alicia began to run.

Alicia, had she been alone, might have stood her ground. Though she would have been swallowed by the horde, it was so embedded in her nature to turn and fight that this impossible task would have felt oddly satisfying: a thing of fate, and an honorable exit from the world. But Peter was with her; it was his blood, not hers, that the virals wanted. The creatures were funneling toward them, filling the underground channels of the cavern like the undammed waters of a flood. The distance to the elevator, roughly a hundred yards, possessed a feeling of miles. The virals roared behind them. Peter and Alicia hit the elevator at a sprint. There was no time to set the charge; their initial strategy was now moot. Alicia scooped the package from the floor of the elevator, seized Peter by the wrist, kneed him through the hatch, and launched herself behind him, touching down with a clang.

“Grab a cable!” she yelled.

A moment of incomprehension.

“Do it and hold on!”

Did he understand what she had in mind? It didn’t matter; Peter obeyed. Alicia dropped the package to the roof of the elevator, pointed her rifle downward at the cable plate, and pulled the trigger.

Freed from the mass of the elevator car, the counterbalancing weights plunged downward. A hard yank and then a massively accelerating force rocketed them skyward: Peter experienced their ascent in a blur, a sense of pure motion that focused on his hands, his only link to life. He would have lost his grip entirely if not for Alicia, who, below him, her grasp unassailable, acted as backstop, preventing him from slithering down the cable and plunging into the maw. In a confusion of arms and legs, they spun wildly, overwhelmed by a bombardment of physical data beyond Peter’s ability to compute; he did not see the virals leaping up the shaft behind them, ricocheting from wall to wall, each jolt of movement propelling them upward, narrowing the gap.

But Alicia did. Unlike Peter, whose senses were merely human, she possessed the same internal gyroscopes as their pursuers; her awareness of time and space and motion was capable of constant recalculation, enabling her not only to maintain her grip but also to point her rifle downward. It was the grenade launcher she intended; her target was the package on the elevator’s roof.

She fired.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14