The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,258

see a little sense? Maybe get Soo or Dana to say, Well, sure, I can go down to the station, I don’t see why Galen should be the one?

Just a couple of minutes, Galen thought and, taking up his cross, he began to make his way down the catwalk.

At the same time, hidden away in the old FEMA trailer, Peter and Alicia were playing hands of go-to. With just the light of the spots to see by, the game had an unfocused quality, but both had long since stopped caring who won, if they’d ever cared in the first place. Peter was trying to decide what he should tell Alicia about what had happened in the Infirmary, the voice he’d heard in his mind, but with each passing minute it became more difficult to imagine actually doing this, how he might explain himself. He’d heard words in his head. His mother missed him. I must be dreaming, he told himself, and when Alicia broke his train of thought with an impatient lift of her cards, he only shook his head. It’s nothing, he told her. Play your hand.

Also awake at that hour, half-plus-one on the log of the Watch, was Sam Chou. Sam longed for nothing so much as the comfort of his bed and his wife’s affectionate arms around him. But with Sandy bedding down in the Sanctuary—she had volunteered to take over for April until someone else could be found—he had suffered a disruption to these customary rhythms, leaving him staring at the ceiling. He was also troubled by a feeling that, as the day had moved into night, he had recognized as embarrassment. That funny business at the lockup: he couldn’t quite explain it. In the heat of the moment, he’d honestly believed that something had to be done. But in the intervening hours, and after a trip to the Sanctuary to visit with his children—who seemed none the worse for wear—Sam had discovered that his feelings about the whole Caleb situation had moderated substantially. Caleb was, after all, just a kid, and Sam could now see how putting the boy out would solve very little. He felt a little guilty about manipulating Belle the way he had—with Rey down at the station, the woman was probably out of her mind with worry—and though there was certainly no love lost between him and Alicia, who was too full of herself by half, Sam had to admit that under the circumstances, with that fool Milo egging him on, it was a good thing she’d been there. Who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t. When Sam had spoken to Milo later, following up on the day’s conversations, most of which had presupposed that if the Household didn’t do anything they would take it upon themselves to put the poor kid out, and suggested that maybe they should rethink the situation, see how things looked tomorrow after a good night’s rest, Milo had responded with a look of unconcealed relief. Okay, sure, said Milo Darrell. Maybe you’re right. Let’s see how we feel in the morning.

So Sam was feeling a little bad now about the whole thing, bad and a little confounded, because it wasn’t like him to get so angry. It wasn’t like him at all. For a second there, outside the lockup, he really had believed it: somebody had to pay. It didn’t seem to matter that it was just a defenseless kid who probably thought someone on the catwalk had told him to open the gate. And the most extraordinary thing, really, was that in all that time, Sam hadn’t given much or even any thought to the girl, the Walker, who was the reason the whole thing had happened in the first place. Watching the lights of the spots playing on the eaves above his face, Sam wondered why this should be. My God, he thought, after all these years, a Walker. And not just a Walker—a young girl. Sam wasn’t one of those people who believed the Army was still coming—you’d have to be pretty stupid to think so after all these years—but a girl like that, it meant something. It meant somebody was still alive out there. Maybe a whole lot of somebodies. And when Sam considered this, he found himself strangely … uncomfortable with the idea. He couldn’t say quite why that was, except that the notion of this girl, this Girl from Nowhere, felt like a piece that didn’t fit.