The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,13

are. I’m not one bit sorry to be here; I don’t feel afraid at all. If push comes to shove, I may press on alone.

Paul, whatever happens, whatever I decide, I want you to know that you have been a great friend to me. More than a friend: a brother. How strange to write that sentence, sitting on a riverbank in the jungles of Bolivia, four thousand miles away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known and loved. I feel as if I’ve entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

From: [email protected]

Date: Tuesday, February 21 5:31 a.m.

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re: don’t be dumb, get the hell out, please

Paul,

We radioed for the evac last night. Pickup in ten hours, which is the nick of time as far as everyone’s concerned. I don’t see how we can survive another night here. Those of us who are still healthy have decided we can use the day to press on to the site. We were going to draw straws, but it turned out everyone wanted to go. We leave within the hour, at first light. Maybe something can still be salvaged from this disaster. One bit of good news: Tim seems to have turned a corner during the last few hours. His fever’s way down, and though he’s still unresponsive, the bleeding has stopped and his skin looks better. With the others, though, I’d say it’s still touch and go.

I know that science is your god, Paul, but would it be too much to ask for you to pray for us? All of us.

From: [email protected]

Date: Tuesday, February 21 11:16 p.m.

To: [email protected]

Subject:

Now I know why the soldiers are here.

THREE

Situated on four thousand acres of soggy East Texas piney woodland and short-grass prairie, looking more or less like a corporate office park or large public high school, the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a.k.a. Terrell, meant one thing: if you were a man convicted of capital murder in the state of Texas, this was where you came to die.

On that morning in March, Anthony Lloyd Carter, inmate number 999642, sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murder of a Houston mother of two named Rachel Wood whose lawn he had mowed every week for forty dollars and a glass of iced tea, had been a resident of the Administrative Segregation Block of Terrell Unit for one thousand three hundred and thirty-two days—less than many, more than some, not that in Carter’s sense of things this made a lick of difference. It wasn’t like you got a prize for being there the longest. He ate alone, exercised alone, showered alone, and a week was the same as a day or a month to him. The only different thing that was going to happen would come on the day the warden and the chaplain appeared at his cell and he’d take the ride to the room with the needle, and that day wasn’t so far off. He was allowed to read, but that wasn’t easy for him, it never had been, and he had long since stopped fussing with it. His cell was a concrete box six feet by ten with one window and a steel door with a slot wide enough to slip his hands through but that was all, and most of the time he just lay there on his cot, his mind so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it. Half the time he couldn’t have said for sure if he was awake or still sleeping.

That day began the same as every other, at 3:00 A.M., when they turned on the lights and shoved the breakfast trays through the slots. Usually it was cold cereal or powdered eggs or pancakes; the good breakfasts were when they put peanut butter on the pancakes, and this was one of the good ones. The fork was plastic and broke half the time, so Carter sat on his bunk and ate the pancakes folded up, like tacos. The other men on H-Wing complained about the food, how nasty it was, but Carter didn’t think it was so bad on the whole. He’d had worse, and there were days in his life when he’d had nothing at all, so pancakes with peanut butter were a welcome sight in the morning, even if it wasn’t morning in the sense of being light out.

There were visiting days, of course, but Carter hadn’t had a