The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,364

of instruction manual. Peter wondered if it wasn’t a made-up tale at all but an account of something that had actually happened.

The girl, Mina, was taken up; Harker and Van Helsing pursued the vampire to his lair, a dank basement. Peter realized where the story was headed: they were going to perform the Mercy. They were going to hunt down Mina and kill her, and it was Harker, Mina’s husband, who would have to perform this terrible duty. Peter braced himself. The soldiers had finally grown quiet, their antics put aside as they were caught up, despite themselves, in the story’s final, grim unfolding.

He never got to see the end. A single soldier dashed into the tent.

“Lights up! Extraction at the gate!”

The movie was instantly forgotten; all the soldiers bolted from their chairs. Weapons were coming out, pistols, rifles, blades. In the rush to get to the door, someone tripped over the projector’s power cable, sinking the room into darkness. Everyone was pushing, shouting, calling out orders; Peter heard the pop of rifle fire from outside. As he followed the crowd from the tent, he saw a pair of flares rocketing over the walls toward the muddy field beyond the gate. Michael was running past him with Sancho; Peter seized him by the arm.

“What is it? What’s happening?”

Michael barely broke his stride. “It’s Blue Squad!” he said. “Come on!”

From the chaos of the mess hall had emerged a sudden orderliness; everyone knew what to do. The soldiers had broken into distinct groups, some quickly ascending the ladders to the catwalk at the tops of the pickets, others taking positions behind a barricade of sandbags just inside the gate. More men were swiveling the spotlights to aim them across the muddy field beyond the opening.

“Here they come!”

“Open it now!” Greer shouted from the base of the wall. “Open the goddamn gate!”

A deafening barrage of cover fire from the catwalk as half a dozen soldiers leapt into the space over the yard, holding the ropes that connected through a system of pulleys and blocks to the gate’s hinges. Peter was momentarily arrested by the coordinated grace of it all, the practiced beauty of their synchronized movements. As the soldiers descended, the gates began to part, revealing the light-bathed ground beyond the walls and a group of figures racing toward them. Alicia was leading the way. They hit the gate at a dead sprint, six of them, dropping and rolling in the dust as the men behind the sandbags opened fire, releasing a stream of rounds over their heads. If there were virals back there, Peter didn’t see any. It was all too fast, too loud, and then, just like that, it was over: the gates were sealed behind them.

Peter ran to where Alicia lay with the others. She was on all fours in the dirt, breathing hard; the paint was dripping down her face, her bald head shining like polished metal under the harsh glare of the spotlights.

As she rocked back onto her knees, their eyes met quickly. “Peter, get the hell out of here.”

From above, a few last halfhearted shots. The virals had scattered, retreating from the lights.

“I mean it,” she said fiercely. Every part of her seemed clenched. “Go.”

Others were crowding around. “Where’s Raimey?” Vorhees bellowed, moving through the men. “Where the hell’s Raimey?”

“He’s dead, sir.”

Vorhees turned to where Alicia was kneeling in the mud. When he saw Peter, his eyes flashed with anger. “Jaxon, you don’t belong here.”

“We found it, sir,” Alicia said. “Stumbled right into it. A regular hornet’s nest. There must be hundreds of them.”

Vorhees waved to Hollis and the others. “All of you, back to your quarters, now.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to Alicia. “Private Donadio, report.”

“The mine, General,” she said. “We found the mine.”

• • •

All that summer Vorhees’s men had been looking for it: the entrance shaft to an old copper mine, hidden somewhere in the hills. It was thought that this was one of the hot spots Vorhees had spoken of, a nest where the virals slept. Using old geological survey maps and tracking the creatures’ movements with the nets, they had narrowed their search to the southeast quadrant, an area of roughly twenty square kilometers above the river. Blue Squad’s mission had been one last attempt to locate it before the evac. It was sheer chance that they had; as Peter heard the story from Michael, Blue Squad had simply wandered into it, just before sundown—a soft depression