The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,140

eyes, every muscle in her face taut with fear. He began to count again, running the flashlight’s beam over her face. No glass, no trace of visible injury: her eyes were clear.

“Three!”

She closed her eyes again, shaking and fiercely weeping.

He dressed Amy’s skin with burn cream from the first aid kit, wrapped her eyes with a bandage, and carried her upstairs to bed. “Your eyes are going to be fine,” he assured her, though he didn’t know if this was so. “I think it’s just temporary, from looking at the flash.” For a while he sat with her, until her breathing quieted and he knew she was asleep. They should try to get away, he thought, to put some distance between themselves and the blast, but where would they go? First the fires and then the rain, and the road off the mountain had all but washed away. They could try it on foot, but how far could he hope to get, barely able to walk himself, leading a blind girl through the woods? The best he could hope for was that the blast was small, or farther away than he thought it was, or that the wind would push the radiation in the other direction.

In the first aid kit he found a small sewing needle and a ball of black thread. It was just an hour before dawn when he descended the stairs to the kitchen. At the table, by lamplight, he removed the knotted rag and his blood-soaked pants. The cut was deep but remarkably clean, the skin like torn butcher’s paper over a blood-red slab of steak. He’d sewed on buttons, once hemmed a pair of his pants. How hard could it be? From the cabinet over the sink he retrieved the bottle of Scotch he’d found at Milton’s, all those months ago. He poured himself a glass. He sat and took the Scotch, quickly, tipping his face back to drink without tasting, poured a second, and drank that, too. Then he rose, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, taking his time, and dried them on a rag. He sat once more, wadded the rag, and put it in his mouth; he took the bottle of Scotch in one hand and the threaded needle in the other. He wished he had more light. He drew a long breath and held it. Then he poured Scotch over the cut.

This, it turned out, was the worst part. After that, sewing the wound closed was almost nothing.

He awoke to find he’d slept with his head on the table; the room was ice-cold, and the air held a strange chemical smell, like burning tires. Outside a gray snow was falling. On his bandaged leg, throbbing with pain, Wolgast hobbled from the lodge onto the porch. Not snow, he realized: ashes. He descended the steps. Ashes fell onto his face, into his hair. Strangely, he felt no fear, not for himself or even for Amy. It was a wonder. He tipped his face upward, receiving them. The ashes were full of people, he knew. A raining ash of souls.

· · ·

He could have moved them to the basement, but there seemed no point. The radiation would be everywhere, in the air they breathed, in the food they ate, in the water that ran from the lake to the pump in the kitchen. They kept to the second floor, where at least the boarded-up windows offered some protection. Three days later, the day he removed Amy’s bandages—she could see after all, just as he’d promised—Wolgast began to vomit and couldn’t stop. He wretched long after the only thing left to come up was a thin black mucus, like roofing tar. The leg was infected, or else the radiation had done something to it. Green pus ran from the wound, soaking the bandages. It gave off a foul smell, a smell that was in his mouth too, in his eyes and nose. It seemed to be in every part of him.

“I’ll be fine,” he told Amy, who was, after everything that had happened, the same. Her scalded skin had peeled away, exposing, beneath it, a new layer, white as moonlit milk. “Just a few days off my feet and I’ll be right as rain.”

He took to his cot under the eaves in the room next to Amy’s. He felt the days passing around him, through him. He was dying, he knew. The fast-dividing cells of his body—the lining of his throat and stomach,