The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,329

them, protecting Theo like a shield. Faced with the creature’s immense, bloated form, she seemed tiny, like a child.

And in that instant, which felt suspended—the whole world brought to a halt while the viral regarded the small figure before him—Mausami thought: that girl wants to say something. That girl is going to open her mouth and speak.

Twenty meters overhead, Hollis had dropped through the vent with his rifle, followed by Alicia, holding the RPG. She swung it toward the floor, pointing its barrel at the place where Amy and Babcock stood.

“I don’t have a shot!”

Caleb and Sara dropped through behind them. Peter snatched Jude’s shotgun from the floor of the catwalk and fired in the direction of the two men racing down the catwalk toward them. One man uttered a strangled cry and fell away, tumbling headfirst to the floor below.

“Shoot the viral!” he called to Alicia.

Hollis fired and the second man dropped, face-down, onto the catwalk.

“She’s too close!” Alicia said.

“Amy,” Peter yelled, “get out of there!”

The girl stood her ground. How long could she hold him that way? And where was Olson? The last of the fires had gone out; people were streaming down the stairs, an avalanche of orange jumpsuits. Theo, on his hands and knees, was backing away from the viral, but his heart was nowhere in this; he had accepted his fate, he had no strength to resist. Caleb and Sara had made it across the catwalk to the stairs now, descending into the melee on the balconies. Peter heard women screaming, children crying, a voice that sounded like Olson’s, rising over the din: “The tunnel! Everyone run to the tunnel!”

Mausami lurched into the ring.

“Over here!” She stumbled, catching herself with her hands as she fell to the floor. Her pants were soaked in blood. On all fours, she tried to rise. She was waving, screaming: “Look over here!”

Maus, Peter thought, keep back.

Too late. The spell was broken.

The viral rocked its face toward the ceiling and drew down into a crouch, its body gathering energy like a coiled spring, and then it was flying, lofting through the air. It rose toward them with a pitiless inevitability, arcing over their heads and seizing one of the ceiling struts, body rotating like child swinging on a tree limb—an oddly exhilarating, even joyful image—and landed on the catwalk with a shuddering clang.

I am Babcock.

We are Babcock.

“Lish—”

Peter felt the RPG sailing past his face, the scald of hot gas on his cheek; he knew what was going to happen before it did.

The grenade exploded. A punch of noise and heat and Peter was shoved backward into Alicia, the two of them tumbling onto the catwalk, but the catwalk wasn’t there. The catwalk was falling. Something caught and held and they banged down hard, and for a hopeful moment everything stopped. But then the structure lurched again, and with a pop of rivets and a groan of bending metal the end of the catwalk broke away from the ceiling, tilting toward the floor like the head of a hammer, falling.

Leon in the alley, face-down in the dirt. Goddamn, he thought. Where did that girl go?

Some kind of gag was in his mouth; his wrists were bound behind him. He tried to wriggle his feet, but they were tied, too. It was the big one, Hollis; Leon remembered now. Hollis had risen out of the shadows, swinging something, and the next thing Leon knew he was all alone in the dark and couldn’t move.

His nose was thick with snot and blood. Probably the son of a bitch had broken it. That was all he needed, a broken nose. He thought he’d cracked a couple of teeth, too, but with the gag in his mouth, his tongue stuffed behind it, he had no way to check.

It was so goddamn dark out here he couldn’t see two feet in front of his face. The reek of garbage was coming from somewhere. People were always putting it in the alleys instead of taking it to the dump. How many times had he heard Jude tell people, Take your fucking garbage to the dump. What are we, pigs? A joke, sort of, since they weren’t pigs but what was the difference, really? Jude was always making jokes like that, to watch people squirm. For a while they’d kept pigs—Babcock liked pork almost as much as he liked the cattle—but some kind of sickness had wiped them out one winter. Or maybe they’d just seen what was