The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,327

of pyre smoke on the day they’d burned the body of Zander Phillips, standing in the sunshine outside the power station, and the name stitched over the pocket. Armando.

Theo.

The man in the ring was Theo.

His brother wasn’t alone. There was someone else beside him, a man on his knees. He was stripped to the waist, slumped forward on the ground so that his face was obscured. And as Peter’s vision widened he realized that what he was seeing on the floor of the ring was the cattle, or what had once been the cattle—they were strewn in pieces everywhere, as if they had been situated at the heart of an explosion—and crouched at the center of this heaping mass of blood and flesh and bone, its face bent to bury itself in the remains, its body twitching with a darting motion as it drank, was a viral—but not like any viral Peter knew. It was the largest he had ever seen, that anyone had ever seen, its curled bulk so immense that it was like some new being entirely.

“Peter! You’re in time to watch the show!”

He had come to rest on his back, useless as a turtle. Jude, standing above him, wearing a look that Peter had no name for, a dark pleasure beyond words, was aiming a shotgun at his head. Peter felt the shudder of footsteps coming toward them—more orange-suited men racing down the catwalks from every direction.

Jude was standing directly below the vent.

“Go ahead,” Peter said.

Jude smiled. “How noble.”

“Not you,” Peter said, and flicked his eyes upward. “Hollis.”

Jude lifted his face in time for the bullet from Hollis’s rifle to strike him just above the right ear. A misty bloom of pink: Peter felt the air dampen with it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the shotgun released from Jude’s hands, clattering to the catwalk. A large-butted pistol was tucked at his waist; Peter saw Jude’s hand grope for it, blindly searching. Then something released inside him, blood began to pour from his eyes, a pitiful weeping of blood, and he dropped to his knees, flopping forward, his face frozen in an expression of eternal wonderment, as if to say: I can’t believe I’m dead.

It was Mausami who killed the operator manning the fuel pump.

She and Amy had entered from the main tunnel just before the crowd arrived and had hidden under the stairs that connected the floor of the courtyard to the balconies. For many minutes they had waited, huddled together, emerging only when they heard the sound of the cattle being driven in, the wild cheers exploding above. The air was broiling, choked with smoke and fumes.

There was something terrible behind the flames.

As the viral tore into the cattle, the crowd seemed to detonate, everyone pumping their fists, chanting and stomping their feet, like a single being caught in some great and terrible ecstasy. Some were holding children on their shoulders so they could see. The cattle were screaming now, bucking and tearing around the ring, racing toward the flames and backing away in confusion, a mad dance between two poles of death. While Mausami watched, the viral sprang forward and snatched one by its hind legs, lifting upward with a deep cracking sound, twisting until the legs came free, then flinging them through the air to slap against the cages in a spray of blood. The creature left that one where it was—its front legs twitching at the dirt, struggling to pull its ruined body forward—and seized another by the horns, applying the same twisting motion to break its neck, then shoved its face into the stilled flesh at the base of the animal’s throat, the viral’s whole torso seeming to inflate as it drank, the steer’s body contracting with each of the viral’s muscular inhalations, shriveling before Mausami’s eyes as the blood was pulled from its body.

She did not see the rest; she’d turned her face away.

“Bring them to me!” a voice was calling. “Bring me one and then another! Bring them that we should live … ”

“ … in this way and no other!”

That was when she saw Theo.

In that instant, Mausami experienced a collision of joy and terror so violent it was as if she were stepping from her own body. Her breath seized up inside her; she felt dizzy and sick. Two men in jumpsuits were pushing Theo forward, driving him through a gap in the flames. His eyes had an empty, almost bovine look; he seemed to have no