The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,141

his hair, the gums that held his teeth—were being killed off first, because wasn’t that what radiation did? And now it had found the core of him, reaching into him like a great, lethal hand, black and bird-boned. He felt himself dissolving, like a pill in water, the process irrevocable. He should have tried to get them off the mountain, but that moment was long passed. At the periphery of his consciousness, he was aware of Amy’s presence, her movements in the room, her watchful, too-wise eyes upon him. She held cups of water to his broken lips; he did his best to drink, wanting the moisture but wanting, even more, to please her, to offer some assurance that he would become well. But nothing would stay down.

“I’m all right,” she told him, again and again, though perhaps he was dreaming this. Her voice was quiet, close to his ear. She stroked his forehead with a cloth. He felt her soft breath on his face in the darkened room. “I’m all right.”

She was a child. What would become of her, after he was gone? This girl who barely slept or ate, whose body knew nothing of illness or pain?

No, she wouldn’t die. That was the worst of it, the terrible thing they’d done. Time parted around her, like waves around a pier. It moved past her while Amy stayed the same. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years. However they had done it, Amy would not, could not die.

I’m sorry, he thought. I did my best and it wasn’t enough. I was too afraid from the start. If there was a plan, I couldn’t see it. Amy, Eva, Lila, Lacey. I was just a man. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Then one night he awoke and he was alone. He sensed this right away: a feeling in the air around him of departure, of absence and flight. Just lifting the blanket required all the strength he could muster; the feel of its weave in his hand was like sandpaper, like spikes of fire to the touch. He rose to a sitting position, a monumental effort. His body was an immense, dying thing his mind could scarcely contain. And yet it was still his—the same body he’d lived in all the days of his life. How strange it was to die, to feel it leaving him. Yet another part of him had always known. To die, his body told him. To die. That is why we live, to die.

“Amy,” he said, and heard his voice, the palest croak. A weak and useless sound, without form, speaking a name to no one in a dark room. “Amy.”

He managed his way down the stairs to the kitchen and lit the lamp. Under its flickering glow, everything appeared just as it had been, though somehow the place seemed changed—the same room where he and Amy had lived together a year, yet someplace completely new. He could not have said what hour it was, what day, what month. Amy was gone.

He stumbled from the lodge, down the porch, into the dark forest. A lidded eye of moon was hanging over the tree line, like a child’s toy suspended on a wire, a smiling moon face dangling above a baby’s crib. Its light spilled over a landscape of ashes, everything dying, the world’s living surface peeled away to reveal the rocky core of all. Like a stage set, Wolgast thought, a stage set for the end of all things, all memories of things. He moved through the broken white dust without direction, calling, calling her name.

He was in the trees now, in the woods, the lodge some nameless distance behind him. He doubted he could find his way back, but this didn’t matter. It was over; he was over. Even weeping was beyond his power. In the end, he thought, it came down to choosing a place. If you were lucky, that’s what you got to do.

He was above the river, under the moon, among the naked, leafless trees. He sank to his knees and sat with his back against one and closed his weary eyes. Something was moving above him in the branches, but he sensed this only vaguely. A rustling of bodies in the trees. Something someone had told him once, many lifetimes past, about moving in the trees at night. But to recall the meaning of these words required a force of will he no longer