The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,342

like charred meat. Everyone thinks the sound we heard that night was the screams of virals, caught in the fire.

Day 39

The first dead virals. They were beneath a bridge, three of them huddled together. Peter thinks we haven’t seen any before because they’d driven all the game up into the higher elevations. When the wind changed, they got trapped by the fire.

Maybe it was just the way they looked, all burned up and their faces pressed to the ground, but I found myself feeling sorry for them. If I didn’t know they were virals I would have sworn they were human, and I know it could just as easily have been us lying dead there. I asked Amy do you think they were afraid and she said yes, she thought that they had been.

We’re going to stay an extra day in the next town we come to, to rest and scavenge supplies. (Amy was right about the cans. As long as the seams are tight and it feels heavy in your hand, they’re OK.)

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Day 48

Moving east again, the mountains behind us. Hollis thinks we’ve seen the last game for a while. We are crossing a dry, open tableland, stitched by deep gullies. There are bones everywhere you look—not just small game but deer and antelope and sheep, and something that resembles a cow only larger, with a huge knobby skull (Michael says they’re buffalo). At half-day we stopped to rest by an outcrop of boulders and saw, scraped into the rocks, “Darren loves Lexie 4Ever” and “Green River SHS ’16, PIRATES KICK ASS!!!” The first part everybody understood but nobody knew what to make of the rest. It made me feel a little sad, I can’t quite say why, maybe it was just that the words had been there so long with no one to read them. I wonder if Lexie loved Darren back?

We got off the highway and are sheltering near the town of Emery. Nothing really left here, just foundations and a few sheds with rusted farm equipment, full of mice. There’s no pump we can find, but Peter says there’s a river near here and tomorrow we’ll go look for it.

Stars everywhere. A beautiful night.

Day 49

I have decided to marry Hollis Wilson.

Day 52

Going south now from Crescent Junction, on Highway 191. At least we think it’s 191. We actually walked straight past the turnoff at least five clicks and had to double back. There’s not much of a road to follow, which was why we missed it in the first place. I asked Peter why we had to get off the 70 and he said we’re too far north for where we’re going. Sooner or later we’ll have to head south, so it might as well be now.

Hollis and I have decided not to tell anyone about what’s happened. It’s funny how when I made up my mind about him I realized I had been thinking it for a long time without knowing it. I wish all the time I could kiss him again but everyone’s around or else we’re on watch. I still feel kind of guilty about the other night. Also, he really needs a bath. (So do I.)

No towns at all. Peter doesn’t think we’ll hit one till Moab. We are spending the night in a shallow cave, really just a recess with an overhang, though it’s better than nothing. The rocks here are all a kind of orange-pink color, very lovely and strange.

Day 53

Today was the day we found the farmstead.

At first we thought it was just a ruin, like all the others we’ve seen. But as we got closer, we saw it was in much better shape—a cluster of woodframe houses, with barns and outbuildings and paddocks for animals. Two of the houses are empty, but one of them, the largest, looks like someone was actually living here not so long ago. The table in the kitchen was actually set with places and cups; there are curtains in the windows, clothing folded in the drawers. Furniture and pots and pans and books on the shelves. In the barn we found an old car, covered in dust, the shelves lined with jugs of lantern fuel, empty jars for canning, tools. There’s what looks like a graveyard, too, four plots marked with circles of stones. Michael said we should dig one up to see who’s down there. But nobody took this suggestion seriously.

We found the wellhead but the pump was rusted tight; it