The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,208

duck. Looking at them, Peter felt a jab of guilt. Caleb’s huge, ridiculous sneakers: they were evidence—the only evidence, really—of the whole misbegotten episode at the mall. But somehow Peter also knew that Theo would have taken one look at Caleb’s sneakers and laughed. He would have gotten the joke before Peter had even realized it was a joke.

“Did you do Zander’s name?”

Caleb shrugged. “I’m pretty good with the chisel. Nobody else around to take care of it, I guess. He should have tried to make more friends.” The boy paused, glancing past Peter’s shoulder. For a second, his eyes seemed to be actually misting over. “It’s a good thing you shot him like you did. Zander really hated the virals. He thought the worst thing in the world would be to be taken up. I’m glad he didn’t have to be one of them for long.”

Peter decided it then. He wouldn’t write Theo’s name in the Stone, and no one else would either. Not until he was sure.

“Where are you bunking these days?” he asked Caleb.

“The barracks. Where else?”

Peter lifted one shoulder to indicate the knapsack. “Mind if I join you?”

“It’s your appetite.”

It was only later, after Peter had unpacked his belongings and lain down at last on the caved-in, too soft mattress that he realized what Caleb’s eyes had sought out, past Peter’s shoulder, on the Stone. Not Zander’s name but above it, a group of three: Richard and Marilyn Jones, and, beneath that, Nancy Jones, Caleb’s older sister. His father, a wrench, had been killed in a fall from the lights during the first frantic hours of Dark Night; his mother and sister had died in the Sanctuary, crushed by the collapsing roof. Caleb had been just a few weeks old.

That was when he realized why Alicia had taken him up to the roof of the power station. It had nothing to do with the stars. Caleb Jones was an orphan of Dark Night, as she was. No one to stand for him but her.

She’d taken Peter to the roof to wait for Caleb Jones.

TWENTY-FIVE

Michael Fisher, First Engineer of Light and Power, was sitting in the Lighthouse, listening to a ghost.

That’s what Michael was calling it, the ghost signal. Peeking from the haze of noise at the top of the audible spectrum—where nothing, as far as he could tell, should be. A fragment of a fragment, there and not there. The radio operator’s manual he’d found in the storage shed listed the frequency as unassigned.

“I could have told you that,” said Elton.

They’d heard it the third day after the supply party’s return. Michael still couldn’t believe Theo was gone. Alicia had assured him that it wasn’t his fault, the motherboard had nothing to do with Theo’s death, but still Michael felt responsible, part of a chain of events that had led to the loss of his friend. And the motherboard—the worst part was, Michael had practically forgotten all about it. The day after Theo and the others had departed for the station, Michael had successfully cannibalized an old battery flow control for what he needed. Not a Pion, but enough extra processing power to squeeze out any signal at the top end of the spectrum.

And even if he hadn’t, what was one more processor? Nothing for Theo to die for.

But this signal: 1,432 megahertz. Faint as a whisper, but it was saying something. It nagged at him, its meaning always seeming to dart away from his vision whenever he looked at it. It was digital, a repeating string, and it came and went mysteriously, or so it had appeared, until he’d realized—okay, Elton had realized—that it was coming every ninety minutes, whereupon it would transmit for exactly 242 seconds, then go silent again.

He should have figured that out on his own. There really was no excuse.

And it was growing stronger. Hour by hour, with each cycle, though more so at night. It was like the damn thing was moving straight up the mountain. He’d stopped looking for anything else; he just sat at the panel and counted off the minutes, waiting for the signal to return.

It wasn’t anything natural, not at ninety-minute cycles. It wasn’t a satellite. It wasn’t anything from the battery stack. It wasn’t a lot of things. Michael didn’t know what it was.

Elton was in a mood, too. The ain’t-it-great-to-be-blind Elton that Michael had gotten accustomed to after so many years in the Lighthouse—that Elton was nowhere to be found. In his place sat