The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,163

swinging in the sun. Without turning, she held up an open hand, then dropped her palm so that it was parallel to the ground. A thin, birdlike whistle from between her teeth. Clear. Forward.

“Let’s go,” Theo said.

Peter felt a quickening in his chest as his senses, dulled by the monotony of the long ride down the mountain, revived, bringing him into a heightened awareness of his surroundings, as if he were viewing the scene from several angles at once. They rode forward at an even pace, their bows at the ready. No one spoke except Finn, who had climbed down from the cart and was leading the jenny by hand, murmuring calming words to her. The course they followed was little more than a sand track, rutted from years of use by the carts. Peter felt, like a tingling at his extremities, each bit of sound and movement from the landscape: the soft howl of wind through a broken window; a bit of flapping canvas caught on a tipping utility pole; the creak of a metal sign, its words long since scoured away, tossing to and fro above the fuel pumps of an old garage. They passed a pile of rusted cars, half-buried and twisted in a heap; a block of houses, piled with dunes that reached nearly to their eaves; a cavernous metal shed, bleached and pitted, from which issued the cooing of pigeons and, as they moved downwind, the fetid cloud of their droppings.

“All eyes, everyone,” Theo repeated. “Let’s get through here.”

They moved in silence into the center of town. The buildings here were more substantial, three or four stories, though many had collapsed, carving open spaces between them and filling the street with mounds of undifferentiated debris. Cars and trucks were parked at haphazard angles along the roadway, some with their doors standing open—the moment of their drivers’ flight frozen in time—but in others, sealed away beneath the blasting desert sun, were the dried-out corpses known as slims: raggy masses of bones folded over the dashboards or pressed against the windows, their shriveled forms virtually unrecognizable as human beings except for a tuft of stiffened hair still tied with a ribbon, or the glinting metal of a watch on a skinless hand that still, after nearly a hundred years, clutched the steering wheel of a pickup truck sunk to the tops of its wheel wells. All of it unmoving and silent as the grave, all just as it had been since the Time Before.

“Gives me the creeps, cuz,” Arlo murmured. “I always tell myself not to look, and I always do anyway.”

As they approached the highway overpass, Alicia pulled up sharply. She turned, one hand raised, and rode briskly back to them.

“Three dozers underneath. They’re hanging in the rafters on the back side, over the culvert.”

Theo absorbed this news without expression. Unlike the viral they’d seen on the mountain road, there was no question of taking on a whole pod, certainly not this late in the day.

“We’ll have to go around. The cart can’t make it without a ramp. Lish? Agreed?”

“No argument. We close up and go.”

They turned east, tracing the course of the highway at a distance of a hundred meters. The sun stood four hands; they were cutting it close now. It would be slow going over open ground with the cart. The next entrance ramp was two kilometers away.

“I hate to admit it,” Theo said quietly to Peter, “but Lish had a point. When we get back, we should put together a hunting party and clear out that pod.”

“If they’re still there.”

Theo was frowning pensively. “Oh, they’ll be there. A single smoke bagging squirrels is one thing. This is something else. They know we use this road.”

What the smokes knew and didn’t know was always a question. Were they creatures of pure instinct, or were they capable of thought? Could they plan and strategize? And if the latter was true, didn’t it follow that they were still, in some sense, people? The people they had been, before they were taken up? A great deal was simply not understood. Why, for instance, some of them would approach the Wall, while others would not; why a handful, such as the one they had seen on the road, would hazard the daylight to hunt; if their attacks, when they came, were simply random occurrences or triggered by something else; the distinctive manner in which they moved, always in groups of three, the actions of their bodies coordinated