The Twelve by Justin Cronin
On the field, Guilder was … dissolving.
He felt this first in the backs of his hands—an abrupt constriction of the skin, as if he were being shrink-wrapped. He held them up to his face. In numb incomprehension—the pain had yet to arrive—he watched as the flesh of his hands puckered and began to split open in long, bloodless seams. The sensation spread, dancing over the surface of his body. His fingertips found his face. It felt like touching a skull. His hair was falling out, his teeth. His back bent inward, drawing him into an old man’s stoop. He fell to his knees in the mud. He felt his bones collapsing, crumbling to dust.
“Grey, what did you do?”
A shadow fell.
Guilder lifted his face. The virals filled his darkening vision with a final image of their magnificence. My brothers, he thought, what is happening to me? Help me, my brothers, I am dying. But he saw no kinship in their eyes.
Betrayer.
Betrayer.
Betrayer betrayer betrayer …
Other things were occurring—gunshots, voices yelling, figures running in the dark. But Guilder’s consciousness of these events was instantly subsumed into the larger awareness, cold and final, of what was about to happen to him.
Shawna, he thought, Shawna, all I wanted was a little company. All I wanted was not to die alone.
And then they were upon him.
The conclusive unfolding of events, which accounted for just thirty-seven seconds in the lives of the participants, occurred in overlapping frames of simultaneous movement collapsing toward the center. Illuminated only by firelight—the barrels at the periphery continued to burn—and the virals’ phosphorescent glow, the scene possessed a whiff of hell. The virals, finished with Guilder, his body scattered in desiccated pieces that were more dust than corpse, had assembled in a loose line. They appeared to be regarding Amy with a look of caution. Perhaps they did not know yet what she portended; perhaps they were afraid of her. Peter, his weapon reloaded, was firing in bursts into their massive figures, though without visible effect; the bullets skimmed pointlessly off their armored bodies in bright sparks; they didn’t so much as glance in his direction. From the other side of the field, Alicia was moving forward with her pistol raised, just as Nina and Tifty were racing downfield to flank them. The plan was now moot; they had only their instincts. Standing erect on the platform, Amy raised her arms. From each wrist hung a long length of chain. She jerked them into the air and began to rotate them at her wrists, swinging them in wide, accelerating arcs. Spinners, Peter realized. Amy was making spinners, to disorient the virals. Faster and faster the chains whirred in the air above her head, a hypnotic blur of movement. The creatures froze, entranced. With an avian dart, Amy’s head tipped to the side; her gaze compacted, calculating the angle of attack. Peter knew what was about to happen.
Amy Harper Bellafonte, fully weaponized. Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, airborne.
As she shot forward, she let the chains fly, snapping them from her body like a pair of whips. Simultaneously she tucked her head to her chest, aligning her posture in midflight so that she would meet the closest among them feetfirst, chest-high, her physical person transformed at the moment of impact into a battering ram with twenty-foot iron wings. She was a fraction of their size, but momentum was on her side; she sailed through the first one, blasting him backward; by the time she landed, the chains had found their targets, wrapping two others around their necks. With a hard yank she drew the left one toward her, buried her face beneath his jaw, and shook him like a dog with a rag in its mouth.
He howled.
And, with a jet of blood and a bony cracking sound, died.
She unfurled him from the chain with a snap of her wrist, rotating the body away like a top. Her attention turned to the second viral, but the balance had shifted: the element of surprise was gone; the hypnotic effect of the spinners had worn away. The creature launched toward her, their bodies meeting in an uncontrolled collision that sent them both tumbling end over end away from the platform. Amy wrenched the chain free but seemed disoriented; she crouched on her hands and knees in the dirt. A kind of whole-body rippling moved through the remaining virals, their shared consciousness reassembling, achieving focus. One more wink of time and they would fall on her like a pack of animals.
Which they might have, if not for the small one.
Peter’s mind had yet to parse them as anything more than a collective; he was forced to do so now. One of the virals was different. In bulk and stature he appeared no larger than a man. In the instant before the others leapt upon Amy, he beat them to the punch; with a compact aerial bound he alighted between her and her attackers, turning to face them, claws raised, his body in a posture of challenge. His chest expanded in a massive intake of breath; his lips pulled back, exposing his teeth.
The blast of sound that followed was completely out of proportion with the size of the body that produced it. It was a howl of purest rage. It was a roar that could have felled a forest, flattened a mountain, knocked a planet off its axis. Peter literally felt himself pushed back by it; his eardrums popped with pain. The small viral had bought Amy only a second, but it was enough. As she rose to her feet, the others shot forward.
Chaos.
Suddenly it was impossible to tell what was happening or where to shoot, the images of battle too quick for human eyes to compute. Peter realized he had expended the last of his rounds, but the gun was useless anyway. He glimpsed Alicia advancing from the far side of the field, still firing her pistol.
Where were Tifty and Nina?
He looked downfield. Nina was racing toward the platform, the bomb clutched to her chest. Tifty was behind her. She waved her free arm over her head, yelling at the top of her lungs: “You bastards! Look over here! Hey!”
The one that took note—did it grasp her intentions? Did it know the meaning of what she held? It did not so much launch as lob itself toward her, dropping in a four-limbed spread like a spider on silk. Tifty saw it first. As he raised his weapon he tried to push Nina aside, but the effort came too late; as with all things falling, the leisureliness of the viral’s plunge was an illusion. It crashed into the two of them, Tifty taking the brunt. Peter expected the bomb to go off, but that didn’t happen. The viral seized Nina by the arm and flung her away, casting her spiraling over the dirt; then it turned toward Tifty. As Tifty raised his weapon, the creature engulfed him.
A scream. A gunshot.
It wasn’t a decision. There were no pros and cons. Peter dropped his gun and made for the bomb where it lay in the dirt, running for all he was worth.
The only two people who saw it all were Lore and Greer. And even then, it was Greer alone, the man of faith, whose prayers had afforded him a deeper comprehension of the scene, who was able to make sense of it.
Viewed from the control room, the battle on the field played out with a flattened quality, rendered more decipherable by distance. At one end lay Eustace, unconscious or dead, and between him and the platform, the body of Tifty Lamont; Nina was gone, hurled into the darkness; Alicia, on the opposite side, was the only one still firing. At the center stood the platform; Amy, having wrenched herself free from the melee, had vaulted to the top of the armature. Her tunic was in shreds, stained with the dark wetness of blood; one clawed hand clutched her side, as if to stanch a wound. Even at this distance, Greer could discern the harsh labor of her breathing. Her transformation was complete, yet one human vestige remained: her hair. Black and wild, it tumbled freely around her face. In another moment her attackers would strike in overwhelming force, yet her posture did not communicate retreat. There was something invincible about her, almost royal.
Then he saw Peter, racing downfield. Where was he going? The semi?
No.
Greer blasted from the room and down the stairs. He would part the crowd with his body, his fists, his blade if he had to. Amy, Amy, I am coming.
Alicia would not be denied. She had consecrated her existence to this holy fact.
Louise, I will avenge you. You have not been forgotten. Louise, you, too, are my sister in blood.
“Show yourself, you son of a bitch!”
Her bullets skimmed and flashed. She dropped her empty magazine, rammed another home, and resumed firing. Through gritted teeth she advanced, murmuring her dark prayer. He would know her, feel her; it could not be otherwise. It was a thing of destiny, that she should be the one to kill him, to wipe him from the face of the earth. He was Julio Martínez, Esq., Tenth of Twelve. He was Sod of the bench and the grunting exhalations. He was all the men in all the years of history who had violated a woman in this manner, and she would drive her blade deep into the dark heart of him and feel him die.
One of the virals swiveled toward her. Of course, Alicia thought; she would have recognized him anywhere. His physique was identical to the others’, and yet there was something distinctive about him, an air of haughtiness that only she would be able to detect. He regarded her through soulless eyes lidded with bored languor; he appeared, almost, to smile. Alicia had never seen an expression on a viral’s face before; now she did. I know you, his bland, arrogant face seemed to say. Don’t I know you? Don’t tell me, let me guess. I’m certain I know you from someplace.
You’re damn right you know me, she thought, and drew the bayonet from her belt.
They launched toward each other simultaneously—Alicia with the blade raised above her head, Martínez with his great taloned hands reaching forward like a prow of knives. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object: their trajectories intersected in a headlong, grappling collision, Martínez’s vastly greater mass passing both through and under her, sending her pinwheeling over his head. In her moment of uncontrolled flight, Alicia acknowledged but did not yet feel the lacerations on her arms and face where his claws had torn into her flesh. She hit the dirt and rolled once, twice, three times, each rotation defusing her momentum, and sprang to her feet again. She was winded, stumbling, her head chiming with the impact. Somehow she had maintained her grip on the bayonet; to lose it was to accept defeat, unthinkable.
Martínez, twenty feet away, had dropped to a froglike squat, his hands splayed like paddles on the dirt. The smile had morphed into something else, more playful, full of rich enjoyment. He seemed about to laugh. Goddamn your laughing face, Alicia thought, raising her bayonet once more.
A shape was falling toward them.
The bomb, the bomb, where was the bomb?
Then Peter saw it, lying just a few yards from Tifty’s body. He skidded in the dirt and scooped it to his chest. The plunger was intact, the wires still connected. How would it feel? Like nothing, he thought. It would feel like nothing.
Something blasted him from behind, hard as a wall. For a moment everything left him: breath, thought, gravity. The bomb went spiraling away. The ground unfurling beneath him and a flash of mental blackness; then Peter found himself face-up in the mud.
The viral loomed above him; their faces were mere inches apart. The sight seemed to cross the wires of Peter’s senses, as if he were tasting nightfall, or listening to lightning. As the creature tipped its head, Peter did the one, last thing he could think of, believing it would be the final gesture of his life: he cocked his head in concert, willed his mind into absolute focus, and looked the viral dead in the eye.
I am Wolgast.
Then Peter saw: he was holding the bomb.
Help me.
Alicia, sister. Alicia, he is yours.
Martínez never saw it coming. In the fraction of a second before he uncoiled his massive body, Amy landed behind him. With a snap of her wrists she jetted the chains forward to encircle his frame like a pair of lassos, pinning his arms to his sides. The smile melted into a look of surprise.
Now, said Amy.
With a mighty pull she drew Martínez upright, exposing the broad meat of his chest. As Martínez tumbled backward, Alicia landed, straddling his waist, driving his body to the ground. The bayonet was poised above her head, wrapped in her fists. And yet she did not make it fall.
“Say it!” she yelled over the roaring in her ears. “Say her name!”
His eyes sought to focus. Louise?
And with these words, and all that she was, Alicia brought it down and drove it home, killing him in the ancient manner.
* * *
The final seconds of the battle of the field were, to the crowds in the stands, an incomprehensible blur of movement. Not so to Lucius Greer. Greer understood, as no one else could, what was about to happen. The chains that Amy had employed to restrain Martínez were now pinning her to his corpse. Alicia was struggling to turn him over in order to release her. They were sitting ducks, and yet the remaining virals had yet to fall. Perhaps Martínez’s death had caused a break in their communal train of thought; perhaps the shock of seeing one of their own perish beneath a human hand had rendered them immobile; perhaps they merely wished to prolong the moment of victory, and thus extract the fullest measure of satisfaction from their final assault; perhaps it was something else.
It was something else.
As Greer charged across the field, another figure was rushing from his right. A glance was all he needed for his eyes to learn what his mind already knew. It was Peter. He was shouting, waving. But something was different. The virals sensed it, too. They snapped to attention, their noses darting, tasting the air.
“Look over here, you bastards!”
Peter was naked to the waist, his torso slick with blood—warm, fresh, living rivers of blood that coursed down his arms and chest from the long, curving wounds of the blade still clutched in his hand. His intentions were clear: he would draw the virals away from Amy and Alicia, down upon himself. He was the bait; what was the trap?
And Greer heard:
I am Wolgast.
I am Wolgast.
I am Wolgast.
Greer ran.
Alicia saw it, too.
Amy was still pinned to Martínez’s body. The chains that tethered her had wound upon themselves; every pull only drew them tighter. Howling in frustration, Alicia saw Peter racing toward the virals; saw their bodies swiveling, heads cocking, eyes blazing with animal attraction, the pleasure of the kill.
Peter, no, she thought. Not you. After everything, not you.
She never knew how Amy got loose. One moment she was there and the next she wasn’t. The empty shackles would be found just where Amy had left them, attached to chains still hopelessly lashed to Martínez’s body; in the ensuing days, as each of them puzzled over the meaning of this fact, opinions would differ. To some it meant one thing, to some it meant another. It was a mystery, as Amy was a mystery; and like any mystery, it said as much about the seer as the seen.
But this came later. In the split second that remained, all Alicia knew was that Amy was gone; she was soaring away. A streak of light, like a shooting star; then she was falling, down upon Peter.
“Amy—”
But that was all she said.
Because Wolgast loved her.
Because Amy was home.
Because he had saved her, and she him.
And Peter Jaxon, lieutenant of the Expeditionary, heard and saw and felt it all; he felt it all at last. In a single meeting of their eyes, Wolgast’s whole life had poured into his own. Its comprehensive sorrows. Its bitter losses and aching regrets. Its love for a forgotten girl, and its long sojourn through a hundred years of night. He saw faces, figures, pictures of the past. A baby in its crib, and a woman reaching to lift it into her arms, the two of them bathed in an almost holy light. He saw Amy as she had been, a tiny child, full of strange intensity, alone in the world, and the lights of a carousel and stars in a win
Come to me, he thought. Come to me.
He raced headlong. He cast himself into the hands of God. He sensed but did not see Greer streaming toward him, and Wolgast barreling from behind with the bomb clutched to his chest, aiming his body for the heart of the pod. And in the last instant, Peter heard the words:
Amy, run.
And: Father—
And: I love you.
And as Wolgast dove into their midst, one clawed thumb poised on the plunger; and as Amy likewise swooped down upon Peter to hurl him away, taking the brunt of the destruction in his stead; and as the last of the Twelve in their fury fell upon Wolgast—Wolgast the True, the Father of All, and the One Who Loved—a hole in space opened where he had stood, dark night burst to brightest day, and the heavens rent with thunder.
66
It came to feel as if there were two cities in the minutes that followed: the grandstands, where chaos reigned, and the field below, a zone of aftermath, of sudden calm. A beginning and an ending, standing adjacent but apart. Soon the two would merge, as the crowd, the violence of its uprising exhausted, absorbed the amazing fact of its liberty and began to disperse, going where it liked, including the field; they would find it one by one, drifting down, moving tentatively as their bodies tasted freedom. But in the near term, the combatants on the field were left to themselves, to take a final measure of the living and the lost.
It was Alicia whom Peter awakened to see. She was blackened, bruised, bloodied. Much of her hair had been burned away, tendrils of smoke still rising. Peter, she was saying. She hovered above him, tears streaming down her cheeks. Peter.