The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,186

rag. “Nothing to be sorry about. You’re about the best thing that ever comes in here, as far as I’m concerned. Pretty girl like you, you watch me all you want.”

She laughed—out of embarrassment or disbelief, she didn’t know. “You’ve never seen me, Elton. How can you possibly know what I look like?”

Elton shrugged, his useless eyes rolling upward behind their drooping lids—as if, in the darkness of his mind, her image was there for him to see. “Your voice. How you speak to me, how you speak to Michael. How you look after him like you do. Pretty is as pretty does, I always say.”

She heard herself sigh. “I don’t feel like it.”

“Trust old Elton,” he said, and gave a quiet laugh. “Somebody’s going to love you.”

There was always something about being around Elton that made her feel better. He was a shameless flirt, for starters, but that wasn’t the real reason. He simply seemed happier than anyone she knew. It was true what Michael said about him: his blindness wasn’t something missing; it was simply something different.

“I just came back from the Infirmary.”

“Well, there you are,” he said, nodding along. “Always looking after folks. How’s Gabe doing?”

“Not so good. He looks really terrible, Elton. And Mar’s taking it hard. I wish there was more I could do for him.”

“Some things you can, and some things you can’t. It’s Gabe’s time now. You’ve done all you could.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It never is.” Elton turned to search the counter with his hands, locating the earphones, which he held out to her. “Now, since you’ve brought me a present, I’ve got one for you. A little something to cheer you up.”

“Elton, I wouldn’t have a clue what I was hearing. It’s all static to me.”

A cagey smile was on his face. “Just do like I say. Close your eyes, too.”

The phones were warm against her ears. She sensed Elton moving his hands over the panel, his fingers gliding here and there. Then she heard it: music. But not like any music she knew. It reached her first as a distant, hollow sound, like a breath of wind, and then, rising behind it, high birdlike notes that seemed to dance inside her head. The sound built and built, seeming to come from all directions, and she knew what she was hearing, that it was a storm. She could picture it in her mind, a great storm of music sweeping down. She had never heard anything so beautiful in her life. When the last notes died away, she pulled the headphones from her ears.

“I don’t get it,” she said, astounded. “This came through the radio?”

Elton chuckled. “Now, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

He did something to the panel again. A small drawer opened, ejecting a silver disc: a CD. She’d never paid much attention to them; Michael told her they were just noise. She took the disc in her hand, holding it by the edges. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting.

“I just thought you should hear what you look like,” said Elton.

TWENTY-TWO

“The thing I don’t understand,” Theo was saying, “is why the three of you aren’t dead.”

The group was sitting at the long table in the control room, all except Finn and Rey, who had returned to the barracks to sleep. Peter’s daze of adrenaline had worn off, and the pain in his ankle, which did not seem to be broken, had settled to a low throb; someone had chipped a piece of ice off one of the condensers, and Peter was holding this, wrapped in a sodden rag, to the injured joint. The fact that he had just killed Zander Phillips, a man he had known, had yet to produce in him any emotion he could actually name. The information was simply too strange to process. But the station key had still been around Zander’s neck, so there could be no doubt who it was. There had been no choice, of course; Zander had been fully turned. Strictly speaking, the viral who had tried to force its way through the hatch hadn’t been Zander Phillips anymore. And yet Peter could not suppress the feeling that at the last instant before he’d squeezed the trigger, he’d detected a glimmer of recognition in the viral’s eyes—a look, even, of relief.

In the aftermath of the attack, Theo had questioned Caleb carefully. The boy’s story didn’t quite add up, but it was also clear that he was suffering from exhaustion and