The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,118

of the Chalet, in a small, cramped room of desks and file cabinets. Doyle had been waiting there since the shooting had started, hidden beneath a desk. Waiting for Lacey.

He stood.

“Do you know where they are?”

Lacey paused. There were scratches on her face and neck, and bits of leaves caught in her hair.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I … heard you,” Doyle said. “All these weeks.” Something huge was breaking open inside him. His throat choked with tears. “I don’t know how I did that.”

She took his hands in hers. “It wasn’t me you heard, Agent Doyle.”

At least Wolgast couldn’t look down. He was sweating hard now, his palms and fingers slick on the rungs as he pulled them farther up. His arms were trembling with exertion; the crooks of his elbows, where he held each rung when he traded hands, felt bruised to the bone. There was a moment, he knew, when the body simply reached its limits, an invisible line that, once crossed, could not be uncrossed. He pushed the thought aside and climbed.

Amy’s arms, crossed behind his neck, held firm. Together they ascended, rung by rung by rung.

The fan was closer now. Wolgast could feel a thin breeze, cool and smelling of night, spilling over his face. He craned his neck to scan the sides of the tube for an opening.

He saw it, ten feet above him: beside the ladder, an open duct.

He’d have to push Amy in first. Somehow he’d have to manage his own weight on the ladder and hers as well, while he swung her out from the ladder and into the duct; then he’d climb in himself.

They reached the opening. The fan was higher than he’d thought, another thirty feet above their heads at least. He guessed they were somewhere on the first floor of the Chalet. Maybe he was supposed to go higher, find another exit. But his strength was nearly gone.

He positioned his right knee to take Amy’s weight and reached his left hand out. A featureless wall of cool metal met his fingertips, smooth as glass, but then he found the edge. He drew his hand back. Three more rungs should do it. He took a deep breath and ascended, positioning the two of them just above the duct.

“Amy,” he rasped. His mouth and throat were dry as bone. “Wake up. Do your best to wake up, honey.”

He felt her breathing change against his neck as she tried to rouse.

“Amy, I’m going to need you to let go when I say. I’ll hold you. There’s an opening in the wall. I need you to try to get your feet into it.”

The girl gave no reply. He hoped she had heard him. He tried to imagine how this was going to work, exactly—how he was going to get her inside the duct and then himself—and couldn’t. But he was out of options. If he waited any longer, he’d have no strength for any of it.

Now.

He pushed with his knee, lifting Amy up. Her arms released his neck and with his free hand he took her by the wrist, suspending her over the tube like a pendulum, and then he saw the way: he released his other hand, let her weight pull him away and to his left, toward the hole, and then her feet were inside it, she was sliding into the tube.

He began to fall. He’d been falling all along. But as he felt his feet lose contact with the ladder, his hands madly scrabbling at the wall, his fingers found the lip of the duct, a thin metal ridge that bit into his skin.

“Whoa!” he cried, his voice ricocheting down the length of the shaft. He seemed to be clinging to the side of the shaft by will alone; his feet were dangling in space. “Whoa now!”

How he did it he couldn’t have explained. Adrenaline. Amy. That he didn’t want to die, not yet. He pulled with all his might, his elbows bending slowly, drawing himself inexorably upward—first his head and then his chest and then his waist and finally the rest of him, sliding into the duct.

For a moment he lay still, gulping air into his lungs. He lifted his face then and saw a light ahead—some kind of opening in the floor. He twisted himself around and held Amy as he’d done before, scooting along on his backside, clutching her by the waist. The light grew stronger as they moved toward it. They came to a slatted grate.

It was sealed,