The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,168

themselves and retired to the barracks, a cramped, foul-smelling room of bunk beds and soiled mattresses stuffed with musty straw. By the time Peter lay down, Finn and Rey were already snoring away. Peter wasn’t accustomed to going to bed so early, but he’d been up for twenty-four hours straight and felt himself quickly drifting off.

He awoke disoriented, his mind still swimming in the current of anxious dreams. His internal clock told him it was half-night or later. All the men were still asleep, but Alicia’s bunk was empty. He made his way down the dim hall to the control room, where he found her sitting at the long table, turning the pages of a book by the light of the panel. The clock read 02:33.

She lifted her eyes to meet his. “Don’t know how you slept, with all that snoring.”

He took a chair across from her. “I didn’t, not really. What are you reading?”

She closed the book and rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “Damned if I know. I found it in the storage room. There’s boxes and boxes of them.” She slid it across the table to him. “Go ahead and look if you want.”

Where the Wild Things Are, the title read. A thin volume, containing mostly pictures. Peter turned the brittle, dusty-smelling pages one by one. A little boy in some kind of animal costume, with ears and a tail, brandishing a fork as he chased a small white dog; the boy’s banishment to his room, and the room being enveloped by a forest, magically growing; a moonlit night descending, and a journey across the sea to an island of monsters, unimaginable beings of grasping claws and gnashing teeth and huge yellow eyes. The Wild Things.

“That whole business about the boy looking them in the eyes and telling them to be still,” Alicia said. She yawned into her hand. “I don’t see how that would do any good at all.”

Peter closed the book and put it aside. He had no idea what to make of any of it, but that was the way of most things from the Time Before. How did people live? What did they eat, wear, think? Did they walk in the dark, as if this were nothing? If there were no virals, what made them afraid?

“I think it’s all made up.” He shrugged. “Just a story. I think he’s dreaming.”

Alicia lifted her eyebrows, her expression saying, Who knows? Who can say what the world used to be?

“I was actually hoping you’d wake up,” she announced then, rising from her chair. She lifted a lantern from the floor. “I’ve got something to show you.”

She led him back through the barracks and into one of the storage rooms. The walls were lined with metal shelving, stacked with supplies: greasy tools, coils of wire and solder, plastic jugs of water and alcohol. Alicia placed the lantern on the floor and stepped to one of the shelves and began to move its contents onto the floor.

“Well? Don’t just stand there.”

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? And keep your voice down—I don’t want to wake the others.”

When they’d cleared everything away, Alicia instructed him to stand at one end of the shelf, positioning herself on the opposite side. Peter realized that the back of the shelf was a sheet of plywood, concealing the wall behind it. They pulled the shelf away.

A hatch.

Alicia stepped forward and turned the ring and swung it open. A narrow, tubelike space, with a flight of metal stairs rising in a spiral. Metal crates were stacked against the wall. The stairs vanished in the gloom, some unknowable distance over Peter’s head. The air was stale and choked with dust.

“When did you find it?” he asked, amazed.

“Last season. I got bored one night and started poking around. I figure it’s some kind of escape route left by the Builders. The stairs go straight to a crawl space on the roof.”

Peter gestured toward the crates with his lantern. “What’s in those?”

“That,” she said, smiling mischievously, “is the best part.”

Together they dragged one of the crates out onto the floor of the storeroom. A metal locker, a meter long and half as deep, with the words U.S. MARINE CORPS printed on the side. Alicia knelt to undo the hasps and lifted the lid to reveal six sleek black objects, cradled in foam. It took Peter a few seconds to understand what he was seeing.

“Holy shit, Lish.”

She passed him a weapon. A long-bore