The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,303

terrible joke had been played on them. They had been rescued from the virals only to be cooked to death in the back of a truck. Michael had begun to drift in and out of a state that felt like sleep but not exactly. He was hot, so hot. At some point he realized they were descending, though this detail seemed trivial, as if it pertained to some other person.

Gradually the fact seeped into Michael’s awareness that the vehicle had stopped. He had been lost in a vision of water, cool water. It was pouring over and through him, and his sister was there, and Elton too, smiling that off-kilter smile of his. Everyone was there, Peter and Mausami and Alicia and even his parents, they all were swimming in it together, its healing blueness, and for a moment Michael willed his mind to return to it, this beautiful dream of water.

“My God,” a voice said.

Michael opened his eyes to a harsh white light and smell, unmistakable, of animal dung. He rolled his face toward the door and saw a pair of figures—he knew he had seen them before but could not say when—and standing between them, brilliantly backlit so that he seemed almost to hover, a tall man with steel-gray hair, wearing what appeared to be an orange jumpsuit. “My God, my God,” the man was saying. “Seven of them. It’s beyond belief.” He turned to the others. “Don’t just stand there. We need stretchers. Hurry.”

The pair jogged away. The thought reached Michael’s brain that something was very wrong. Everything seemed to be happening at the far end of a tunnel. He could not have said where he was or why, although he also sensed that this knowledge had abandoned him only recently, a feeling like déjà vu in reverse. It was a kind of joke but the joke wasn’t funny, not at all. Some large, dry object was in his mouth, fat as a fist, and he realized this was his own tongue, choking him. He heard Peter’s voice, a labored croak: “Who … are … you?”

“My name is Olson. Olson Hand.” A smile lit up his wind-chapped face, only it wasn’t the silver-haired man anymore, it was Theo—it was Theo’s face at the far end of the tunnel—and that was the last thing Michael saw before the tunnel collapsed and all thought left him.

He did not come to so much as slowly surface, ascending through layers of darkness over a period of time that felt both short and long, an hour turned into a day, a day turned into a year. Darkness yielding to a widening whiteness above him, and the gradual reassembly of consciousness, distinct from his surroundings. His eyes were open, blinking. No other part of him seemed capable of movement, just his eyes, the damp plink of his lids. He heard the sound of voices, moving over him like the songs of distant birds, calling to one another across a vast expanse of sky. He thought: Cold. He was cold. Wonderfully, amazingly cold.

He slept, and when he opened his eyes again, some unknown interval of time having passed, he knew that he was in a bed, that the bed was in a room, and that he wasn’t alone. Lifting his head was out of the question; his bones felt as heavy as iron. He was in some kind of infirmary, white walls and white ceiling, angled beams of white light falling upon the white sheet that covered his body and beneath which, it seemed, he was naked. The air was cool and moist. From a place somewhere above and behind came the rhythmic throb of machinery and the drip of water falling into a metal pan.

“Michael? Michael, can you hear me?”

Seated next to his cot was a woman—he thought it was a woman—with dark hair short as a man’s, and a smooth brow and cheeks and a small, thin-lipped mouth. She was gazing at him with what appeared to be intense concern. Michael felt as if he’d seen her before, but his sense of recognition stopped there. Her slender form was draped in a loose-fitting orange costume that seemed, like everything else about her, vaguely familiar. Behind her was some kind of screen, obscuring his view.

“How do you feel?”

He tried to speak but the words seemed to die in his throat. The woman lifted a plastic cup from the table by his bed and held the straw to his lips: water, crisp and cold,