The Twelve (The Passage, #2)

by Justin Cronin

I shall build an ark to carry the spirits of the righteous.

But the Amy variant was different. It hadn’t come from Fanning, the Columbia biochemist who’d been infected on Lear’s misbegotten excursion to Bolivia; it had come from the group of tourists who’d started the whole thing—terminal cancer patients on a lark in the jungle with an ecotour group called Last Wish.

My guess would be NSA, or else one of Lear’s little pets finally got to him.

An old soul: Kittridge had heard the term but never quite understood what it meant.

The blood of Grey, the Unleasher of Night, Familiar of the One Called Zero.

But the greatest story of all was the great Niles Coffee: Colonel Coffee, founder of the Expeditionary, fearless men who crossed the world to fight and die. Coffee’s origins, like everything about him, were cloaked in myth.

Five years since his ride up the mountain with Amy. Five years hunting the Twelve.

Tifty’s top lieutenants.

Massacre of the Field

Trusting in God’s plan.”

Faith not just in God, but in all of us.

Amy thought a moment. “Each of us has one, Lucius.”

That part of the deal seemed to have expired, long ago.

That was what they called Grey, the Source, like he wasn’t even a person but a thing, which he supposed he was.

“You think he’s your friend? You think any of them are your friends? You’re their bitch, Guilder. I know what they are. I know what Zero is. I was there.”

They’re the freest things on earth. Without remorse. Without pity. Without love. Nothing can touch them, hurt them. Imagine what that would be like, Lawrence. The absolute freedom of it. Imagine how wonderful that would be.”

Alicia could discern a single entrance, a broad portal sealed by heavy metal doors. The cranes sat idle; the building’s construction seemed complete, and yet to all appearances it went unused.

Something was being fed down there.

By now she had learned to distinguish the prisoners from their keepers, but on this occasion a third class of individuals appeared.

A leadership caste, that was apparent; everything about the city implied one’s existence.

Sara was looking at her daughter.

The ferocity of her expression contained something else now: a profound melancholy.

He felt a kind of quiet shuddering within himself, not of fear but of longing; this was what she wanted.

He had felt her soul leaving her.

Carter the Sorrowful, the One Who Could Not, locked in the prison that he himself had made.

Was the hunger made me. But I never could set with it. Wolgast was the one give me the chance to make things right.”

She had made a home in the world. Now it would be gone.

“Ain’t right, I know it, but this here is ours to carry. Our one chance. Ain’t never come another.”

Amy had known that the life those vials had denied her was the only true human reality.

Each one connected to its pod, each pod connected to its member of the Twelve.

But suppose each one of the viral families is actually a single organism. Each of the Twelve is like a major organ—the heart, the brain. The rest are like the feathers on a bird, or the carapace of an insect. When it wears out, the organism sheds it, in order to grow a new one.”

When the human body goes into shock, it draws blood away from the periphery and redirects it to the major organs.

An act not of will but of surrender, to give away this life, this world.