The Passage

Grey. Look. Look at me.

The body had landed face-up. One eye was pointed up at Grey, but really at nothing; Grey could tell that right off. The other eye was gone. So was that whole side of his face, like something had turned it inside out. Grey knew what dead was. He’d seen animals-possums and coons and sometimes cats or even dogs-broken to pieces on the side of the road, and this was like that. This was over and out. The gun was still in his daddy’s hand, the finger curling through the little hole the way he’d showed Grey that day on the porch. See now, see how heavy it is? You never ever point a gun at anyone. There was blood everywhere too, mixed in with other stuff, like bits of meat and white pieces of something smashed, all over his daddy’s face and jacket and the seat of the truck and the inside of the door, and Grey smelled it, so strong it seemed to coat the insides of his mouth like a melting pill.

Grey, 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 wi

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, it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ? The last twenty years had been kind to him, a long run at the table with nothing but good news from the cards. Sarajevo, Albania, Chechnya. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad. The Philippines and Indonesia and Nicaragua and Peru.

Richards remembered the day-that glorious and terrible day-watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new mille

Which was why NOAH had made a certain sense, back when it all started. Richard had been with the project since the begi