The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,70

vests. Probably there’d be one in there for the girl, too; there was a company in Ohio that was making them for kids now, since that thing in Minneapolis. Wolgast had caught a segment about it on the Today show. They were actually making a Zylon snapsuit for infants. What a world, he thought.

Now, Little Rock six hours behind them, he was still glad he’d declined the bag. Whatever happened, happened; part of him wanted to be stopped. Outside Little Rock, he’d actually let the speedometer drift up to eighty, only dimly aware of what he was doing—that he was daring some state trooper or even a local cop sitting behind a billboard to call the whole thing off. But then Doyle had told him to slow down—Yo, chief, shouldn’t you ease off the pedal a bit?—and his mind had snapped back into focus. He’d actually been playing out the scene in his mind: the flashing lights and a single, tart bleep of the siren; pulling the truck over to the side and placing his open hands on the wheel, lifting his eyes to the rearview to watch the officer calling in the plate number on his radio. Two grown men and a minor in a vehicle with temporary Tennessee tags: it wouldn’t take long to put the whole thing together, to connect them to the nun and the zoo. Whenever he imagined the scene, he couldn’t see beyond that moment, the cop with one hand on his mike, the other resting on the butt of his weapon. What would Sykes do? Would he say he’d ever even heard of them? No, he and Doyle would go into the shredder, just like Anthony Carter.

As for the girl: he didn’t know.

They’d skirted the Oklahoma City limits to the northeast, dodging the Interstate 40 checkpoint and bisecting I-35 on an anonymous rural blacktop, far from any cameras. The Tahoe lacked a GPS, but Wolgast had one on his handheld. Guiding the steering wheel with one hand, nimbly thumbing away on the handheld’s tiny keys with the other, he let their route evolve as they went, a patchwork of county and state roads, some gravel or even just hard-packed dirt, to carry them gradually north and west. Now, all that lay between them and the Colorado border were a few small towns—towns with names like Virgil and Ricochet and Buckrack—half-abandoned oases in a sea of tallgrass prairie with little to show for themselves but a mini-mart, a couple of churches, a grain elevator and, between them, the miles of open plain. Flyover country: the word it made him think of was eternal. He guessed it looked much the same as it always had, the way it would go on looking just about forever. A man could disappear into a place like this without hardly trying, live his life without one soul to notice.

Maybe, Wolgast thought, when this was all over, he’d come back. He might need a place like that.

Amy was so quiet in the backseat it might have been possible to forget she was there at all, if not for the fact that everything about her being there was wrong. A six-year-old girl. Goddamn Sykes, Wolgast thought. Goddamn the Bureau, goddamn Doyle, and goddamn himself while he was at it. Lying across the wide backseat with her hair spilled over her cheek, Amy looked as if she were sleeping, but Wolgast didn’t think she was; she was pretending, watching him like a cat. Whatever had happened in her life so far, it had taught her how to wait. Whenever Wolgast had asked her if she needed to stop to use the bathroom or get something to eat—she hadn’t touched the crackers and milk, warm and spoiled by now—the lids of her eyes had lifted with a feline quickness at the sound of her name, meeting his gaze in the mirror for a single second that went through him like a three-foot icicle. Then she’d shut them again. He hadn’t heard her voice since the zoo, more than eight hours ago.

Lacey. That was the nun’s name. Who’d held on to Amy like death itself. When Wolgast thought about that awful human tug-of-war in the parking lot, everyone yelling and screaming, the memory twisted in his gut with an actual physical pain. Hey, Lila, guess what? I stole a kid today. So now we’ll each have one, how about that?

Doyle was rousing in the passenger seat. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, his