The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,114

not twenty feet square, so how could it be that Amy should seem so far away from him in the dark? He heard no more gunfire, no sounds at all from outside. Only the soft notes of Amy’s breathing, summoning him.

Wolgast had reached the foot of her bed and was feeling his way along its metal rails when the emergency lights came on, two beams that shot from the corners of the ceiling over the door. Barely enough to see by, but enough. The room was the same; whatever was happening outside, it had yet to reach them. He sat by Amy’s bed and felt her forehead. Still warm, but her fever was down, her skin a little damp. With the power out, her IV pump had stopped. He wondered what to do, and decided to disconnect her. Perhaps this was wrong, but he didn’t think so. He had watched Fortes and the others change the drip enough times to know the ritual. He adjusted the clamp, sealing off the flow of liquid, and withdrew the long needle from the rubber stopper at the top of the tube buried in the skin of her hand. With the IV disconnected there was no reason to leave the port in place; he removed this also, pulling it gently away. The wound didn’t bleed, but to be sure, he covered it with gauze and tape from the supply cart. Then he waited.

The minutes passed. Amy shifted restlessly on the bed, as if she were dreaming. Wolgast had the curious intuition that somehow, if he could see her dreams, he’d know what was happening outside. But part of him wondered if any of it mattered now. They were well belowground, sealed away. They might as well have been locked in a tomb.

Wolgast had all but resigned himslf to their abandonment when he heard, behind him, a hiss of equalizing pressure. His hopes soared; someone had come after all. The door swung open to reveal a solitary figure, backlit, his face draped in shadow, wearing only street clothes. As the man stepped under the beams of the emergency lights, Wolgast saw somebody entirely new to him. The stranger had long hair, wild and unkempt, shot with streaks of gray, and a coarse beard that climbed halfway up his cheeks; his lab coat was rumpled and stained. He approached Amy’s bedside with the preoccupied air of an accident victim, or the bystander to some terrible calamity. He’d done nothing so far even to acknowledge Wolgast’s presence.

“She knows,” he mumured, gazing at Amy. “How does she know?”

“Who the hell are you? What’s going on out there?”

Still the man ignored him. An otherworldly feeling seemed to radiate off his entire person, an almost fatalistic calm. “It’s strange,” he said after a moment. He sighed deeply and touched his beard, sweeping his eyes over the barren room. “All of this. Is this … what I wanted? I wanted there to be one, you see. Once I saw, once I knew what they were planning, how it would all end, I wanted there to be at least one.”

“What are you talking about? Where’s Sykes?”

At last the stranger seemed to take notice of him. He regarded Wolgast closely, his face tightening with a sudden frown. “Sykes? Oh, he’s dead. I rather think they’re all dead, don’t you?”

“What do you mean dead?”

“Dead, gone, in pieces probably. The lucky ones, anyway.” He gave his head a slow shake of wonder. “You should have seen it, the way they swooped down from the trees. Like the bats. We really should have seen that coming.”

Wolfgast felt completely lost. “Please. I don’t know … what you’re talking about.”

The stranger shrugged. “Well, you will. Soon enough, I’m sorry to say.” He looked at Wolgast again. “My manners. You’ll have to excuse me, Agent Wolgast. It’s been a while for me. I’m Jonas Lear.” He gave a rueful smile. “You could say I’m the person in charge around here. Or not. Under the circumstances, I rather think nobody’s in charge anymore.”

Lear. Wolgast searched his memory, but the name meant nothing. “I heard an explosion—”

“Quite right,” Lear interrupted. “That would have been the elevator. Now, my guess would be it was one of the soldiers. But I was locked in the freezer, so I didn’t see that part.” He sighed heavily and cast his eyes around the room once more. “Not a moment of great heroism, was it, Agent Wolgast, locking myself in the freezer? You know, I really