The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,49

Grey. I am here.

The scene started changing then. Grey felt movement all around him, like the earth was stretching; something was different about the snow, the snow had started moving, and when he lifted his face to look, it wasn’t snow he saw anymore but rabbits: thousands and thousands of fluffy white rabbits, all the rabbits in the world, bunched so closely together that a person could walk across the yard and never touch the ground; the yard was full of rabbits. And they turned their soft faces toward him, pointed their little black eyes at him, because they knew him, knew what he had done, not to Roy but to the other ones, the boys with their knapsacks walking home from school, the stragglers, the ones who were alone; and that was when Grey knew that it wasn’t his daddy anymore, lying in the blood. It was Zero, and Zero was everywhere, Zero was inside him, ripping and tearing, emptying him out like the rabbits, and he opened his mouth to scream but no sound came.

Grey Grey Grey Grey Grey Grey Grey.

In his office on L2, Richards was sitting at his terminal, his mind deep inside a game of free cell. Hand number 36,592, he had to admit, was squarely kicking his ass. He’d played it a dozen times already, coming close but never quite figuring out how to build his columns, how to clear out all the aces when he needed to, to free up the red eights. In that sense it reminded him a little of game 14,712, which was all about the red eights, too. It had taken him most of a day to crack that one.

But every game was winnable. That was the beauty of free cell. The cards were dealt, and if you looked at them right, if you made the right moves, one after the other, sooner or later the game was yours. One victorious click of the mouse and all the cards sailed up the columns. Richards never got tired of it, which was good, because he still had 91,048 games to go, counting this one. There was a twelve-year-old kid in Washington State who claimed to have won every hand, in order—including 64,523, the death’s head of free cell—in just under four years. That was eighty-eight games a day, every day, including Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July, so assuming the kid took a day off every now and again, to do kid things or even just come down with a good case of the flu, the real number was probably more like a hundred. Richards didn’t see how that was possible. Didn’t he ever go to school? Didn’t he have homework? When did the little bastard sleep?

Richards’s office, like all the underground spaces of the compound, was little more than a fluorescent box, everything pumped in and filtered. Even the light felt recycled. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning, but Richards got by on less than four hours of sleep a night, he had for years, so he paid this no mind. On the wall above his station, three dozen time-stamped monitors displayed every nook of the compound, from the guards freezing their asses off at the front gate to the vacant mess hall with its empty tables and dozing drink dispensers, to the subject containment areas, two floors below him, with their glowing, infectious cargo, and, farther down, through another fifty feet of rock, to the nuclear cells that powered it all and would keep the lights on, the juice flowing, for a hundred years, give or take a decade. He liked having everything where he could see it at a glance, where he could read it like the cards. Sometime between five and six A.M. they’d be taking a delivery, and he figured he might as well just stay up all night for that. Subject processing took a couple of hours at the most; he could grab a few winks at his desk afterward if he had to.

Then, on the computer screen, he saw the answer. It was right there, under the six: the black queen he needed to move the jack and free up the two and so on. A couple of clicks and it was over. The cards shot up the screen like a pianist’s fingers flying over the keys.

Do you want to play again?

You’re goddamn right he would.

Because the game was the world’s natural state. Because the game was war,