The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,105

called back to them. “Where’s her backpack?”

Fortes and Sykes exchanged another private look. “Wait here,” Sykes said.

He returned a few minutes later with Amy’s knapsack. The Powerpuff Girls: Wolgast had never really looked at it, not closely. Three of them, their images made of a rubbery plastic glued onto the rough canvas of the pack, fists raised and flying. Wolgast unzipped it; some of Amy’s things were missing, such as her hairbrush, but Peter was still inside.

He fixed his gaze on Fortes. “How will I know if it’s not … inert?”

“Oh, you’ll know,” Fortes said.

They sealed the door behind him. Wolgast felt the pressure drop. Above the second door, the light switched from red to green. Wolgast turned the handle and stepped inside.

A second room, longer than the first, with a fat drain in the floor and a sunflower-head shower, activated by a metal chain. The light in here was different; it had a bluish cast, like autumn twilight. A sign on the wall bore the instructions Sykes had indicated: a long list of steps that ended in nakedness, standing above the drain, rinsing the mouth and eyes and then clearing the throat and spitting. A camera peered down at him from a corner of the ceiling.

He paused at the second door. The light above it was red. A keypad was affixed to the wall. How would he go through? Then the light switched from red to green, as the first had done—Sykes, from outside, overriding the system.

He paused before opening the door. It looked heavy, made of gleaming steel. Like a bank vault, or something on a submarine. He couldn’t say exactly why he’d insisted on not wearing the biosuit, a decision that now seemed rash. For Amy, as he’d said? Or to tease out some information, however meager, from Sykes? Either way, the decision had felt right to him.

He turned the handle, felt his ears pop as the pressure dropped again. He drew in a lungful of air, holding it in his chest, and stepped through.

Grey had no idea what was happening. Days and days of this: he’d report for his shift, ride the elevator down to L4—nothing had happened after that first night; Davis had covered for him—change in the locker room and do his work, cleaning the halls and bathrooms, then step into Containment, and step out six hours later.

All perfectly normal, except that those six hours were a blank, like an empty drawer in his brain. He’d obviously done the things he was supposed to, filed his reports and backed up the drives, moved the rabbit cages in and out, even exchanged a few words with Pujol or the other techs who came in. And yet he couldn’t remember any of it. He’d slide his card to enter the observation room and the next thing he knew his shift was over and he was coming out the other side.

Except for little things: fleeting things, small but bright somehow, little bits of recorded data that seemed to catch the light like confetti as they fluttered down through his mind throughout the day. They weren’t pictures, nothing as clear and straightforward as that, and nothing he could hold on to. But he’d be sitting in the commissary, or back in his room, or crossing the yard to the Chalet, and a taste would bubble from the back of his throat, and a queer juicy feeling in his teeth. Sometimes it struck him so hard it actually made him freeze in his tracks. And when this happened, he’d think of funny things, unrelated, a lot of which had to do with Brownbear. Like the taste in his mouth would push a button that would start him up thinking about his old dog, who, truth be told, he hadn’t really thought about much at all until recently, not for years and years, until that night he’d had that dream in Containment and tossed all over the floor.

Brownbear and his reeking breath. Brownbear dragging something dead, a possum or raccoon, up the front steps. That time he got into a nest of bunnies under the trailer, tiny little balls of peach-colored skin, not even covered with fur yet, and crunched them one by one, their little skulls popping between his molars, like a kid sitting in the movies with a box of Whoppers.

Funny thing: he couldn’t say for sure Brownbear had actually done that.

He wondered if he was sick. The sign over the sentry station on L3 made him nervous,