The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,268

thinking this thing is a kind of body monitor, designed to transmit data to a mainframe. My guess is she was a patient of some kind.”

“A patient? Like in an infirmary?” Peter frowned. “No one could do this.”

“No one could now. And here’s where it gets more interesting. All told, there are five hundred forty-five thousand four hundred and six groups on the chip. The transmitter was set to cycle every ninety minutes. The rest was just arithmetic. Sixteen cycles a day times three hundred sixty-five days in a year.”

Peter felt like he was trying to take a sip of water from a blasting hose. “I’m sorry, Michael. You’ve lost me.”

Michael turned to face him. “I’m telling you that this thing in her neck has been taking her temperature every hour-and-a-half for a little more than ninety-three years. Ninety-three years, four months, and twenty-one days, to be exact. Amy NLN is a hundred years old.”

By the time his mind was able to bring Michael’s face back into focus, Peter realized he had collapsed into a chair.

“That’s impossible.”

Michael shrugged. “Okay, it’s impossible. But there’s no other way I can figure it. And remember the first partition? That word, USAMRIID? I recognized it right away. It stands for United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. There’s tons of stuff with USAMRIID all over it in the shed. Documents about the epidemic, lots of technical material.” He turned in his chair and directed Peter’s attention to the top of the screen. “See this here? This long string of numbers in the first line? That’s the mainframe’s digital signature.”

“The what?”

“Think of it as an address, the name of the system this little transmitter is looking for. You might think it was just gibberish, but if you look closely the numbers actually tell you more. This thing had to have some kind of onboard locator system, probably linked to a satellite. Old military stuff. So what you’re seeing are actually coordinates on a grid, and not anything fancy. It’s just longitude and latitude. Thirty-seven degrees, fifty-six minutes north by one hundred seven degrees, forty-nine minutes west. So, we go to the map—”

Michael cleared the screen again, tapping briskly at the keys. A new image sprang into view. It took Peter a moment to understand what he was seeing, that it was a map of the North American continent.

“We type in the coordinates, like so … ”

A grid of black lines appeared over the map, breaking it into squares. With a flourish, Michael lifted his fingers from the keyboard and slapped Enter. A bright yellow dot appeared.

“ … and there we have it. Southwestern Colorado. A town called Telluride.”

The name meant nothing to Peter. “So?”

“Colorado, Peter. The heart of the CQZ.”

“What’s the CQZ?”

Michael sighed impatiently. “You really need to brush up on your history. The Central Quarantine Zone. It’s where the epidemic began. The first virals all came out of Colorado.”

Peter felt like he was being dragged from a runaway horse. “Please, just slow down. Are you telling me she comes from there?”

Michael nodded. “Basically, yeah. The transmitter was short-range, so she had to be within a few clicks when they put it in. The real question is why.”

“Flyers. You’re asking like I know?”

His friend paused, searching Peter’s face for a long moment. “Let me ask you something. Have you ever really thought about what the virals are? Not just what they do, Peter. What they are.”

“A being without a soul?”

Michael nodded. “Right, that’s what everybody says. But what if there’s more to it? This girl, Amy, she’s not a viral. We’d all be dead if she were. But you’ve seen the way she heals, and she survived out there. You said it yourself, she protected you. And how do you explain the fact that she’s almost a hundred years old but doesn’t look a day over, what, fourteen? The Army did something to her. I don’t know how they did it, but they did. This transmitter was broadcasting on a military frequency. Maybe she was infected and they did something to her that made her normal again.” He paused once more, his eyes fixed on Peter’s face. “Maybe she’s the cure.”

“That’s … a big leap.”

“I’m not so sure.” Michael lifted in his chair to remove a book from the shelf above his terminal. “So I went back through the old logbook to see if we had ever picked up a signal from those coordinates. Just a hunch. And sure enough, we did. Eighty