The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,353

all his men, a squad of fifteen, he’d painted his face with streaks of mud and charcoal, giving the whites of his eyes a startling vividness. They looked like wolves, like creatures of the forest; they looked like the forest itself. A long-range patrol unit; they had been in the woods for weeks.

Greer paused on the path and shouldered his rifle. A black pistol was holstered at his waist. He took a long drink from his canteen and waved it toward the hillside. They were close now; Peter could feel it in the quickening step of Greer’s men. A hot meal, a cot to sleep on, a roof over their heads.

“Just over the next ridge,” Greer said.

In the intervening hours they had formed something that felt, to Peter, like the beginnings of a friendship. After the initial confusion of their capture, a situation compounded by the fact that neither group would agree to say who they were until the other blinked first, it was Michael who had broken the stalemate, lifting his vomit-smeared face from the dirt where the net had disgorged them to proclaim, “Oh, fuck. I surrender. We’re from California, all right? Somebody, please just shoot me so the ground will stop spinning.”

As Greer capped his canteen, Alicia caught up to them on the path. From the start she had been unusually silent. She’d voiced no objection to Greer’s order that they travel unarmed, a fact that now struck Peter as completely out of character. But probably she was just in shock, as they all were. For the duration of the march to camp she had kept protectively to Amy’s side. Perhaps, Peter thought, she was simply embarrassed that she’d led them straight into the soldiers’ trap. As for Amy, the girl seemed to have absorbed this new turn of events as she absorbed everything, with a neutral, watchful countenance.

“What’s it like?” he asked Greer.

The major shrugged. “Just like you’d think. It’s like a big latrine. It beats being out in the rain, though.”

As they crested the hill, nestled in a bowl-like valley below them, the garrison leapt into view: a cluster of canvas tents and vehicles ringed by a fence of timbers, fifteen meters tall at least and each honed at the top to a sharp point. Among the vehicles Peter saw at least half a dozen Humvees, two large tankers, and a number of smaller trucks, pickups and five-tons with heavy, mud-choked tires. At the perimeter, a dozen large floodlights stood on tall poles; at the far end of the compound horses were grazing in a paddock. More soldiers were moving among the buildings, and along a catwalk at the top of the wall. At the center of the compound, standing over all, a large flag flapped in the wind, blocks of red, white, and blue with a single white star. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than half a square kilometer, and yet, standing on the ridge, Peter felt as if he were gazing into an entire city, the heart of a world he’d always believed in but never actually imagined.

“They’ve got lights,” said Michael. More men from Greer’s unit moved past them, headed down the hill.

“Hell, son,” said the one named Muncey—a corporal, bald as the rest of them, with a wide, snaggle-toothed smile. Most of Greer’s men bore themselves with a soldierly silence, speaking only when spoken to, but not Muncey, who chattered like a bird. His job, fittingly, was to operate the radio, which he carried on his back, a mechanism with a generator run by a hand crank, which stuck from the bottom like a tail.

“Inside that fence?” Muncey said with a grin. “That dirt is Texas. If we ain’t got it, you don’t need it.”

They weren’t regular army, Greer had explained. At least not the U.S. Army. There was no U.S. Army anymore. Then whose army are you? Peter had asked.

That was when Greer had told them about Texas.

By the time they reached the base of the hill, a crowd of men had gathered. Despite the cold, and now the rain, a pattering drizzle, some were bare-chested, exposing their narrow waists, the densely ribboned muscles of their shoulders and chests. All were smooth-shaven, their heads, too. Everyone was armed; rifles and pistols, even a few crossbows.

“Folks’ll stare,” Greer said quietly. “You better get used to it.”

“How many … strags do you usually bring in?” Peter asked. The term, Greer had explained, was short for stragglers.

Greer frowned. They were moving