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“To have hope.”
“Yes. To have hope when there seems to be none. You must always remember that, too.”
The view from the balcony, which ran the length of the west side of the building, was a sweeping 180 degrees, looking toward Interstate 25 and Mile High field.
Remington bolt-action 700P, .338 caliber—a
In school, he had learned that you couldn’t catch a fly with your hand because time was different to a fly: in a fly’s brain, a second was an hour, and an hour was a year. That’s what the infected were like. Like beings outside of time.
He still had the young person’s predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was.
“No, he’s not a friend of mine. I’m just saying
“Have you noticed there aren’t any people?”
“I won’t have you talk this way.”
“We have to get out of here.”
“Goddamnit, there’s no water. Why is there no fucking water?”
“Don’t you understand? I can’t lose her again! I can’t!”
“We can’t stay.” He took another cautious step, as if approaching a wary animal. “It’s not safe here.”
“Why do you have to do this? Why?”
“That’s the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You’re just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.”
Don’t make me think about the world. “If that’s what you want.”
Let us out! Is somebody out there? Please! “Hello!” Kittridge called. “Can you hear me?” Who’s out there? Help us, please! Hurry, we’re cooking to death!
hiring men like this. Human disposables—although that was, Guilder supposed, the point; like the original twelve test
“Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain …”
Watch the clock. Know the location of the nearest hardbox. When in doubt, run. Words
Why should this be so? And what had become of the map itself that in Vorhees’s memory it should be there one day and gone the next?
That stupid map. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have the heart to tear it down, but it surprised me that you did. Never seen you cry like that in your life. I guessed you’d figured out it was all bullshit. Coffee and the rest of them. That it would come to nothing.
Don’t you know who it was you saw in there, boy? Huh? Don’t you? I’ll tell you who that was. That was Niles Coffee himself.
will never let any harm come to you, Tifty had told her, not just that night but many times, many nights. Not you or the girls or Vor. Whatever else is true, that’s my solemn promise, my vow before God. I’ll be the ground beneath your feet. Always know I’m there. And Dee did; she knew. If she allowed herself to admit it, it was only because Tifty had agreed to accompany them that the idea of today, of a summer picnic in the field, had come about at all.
CAMP VORHEES, WEST TEXAS Western Headquarters of the Expeditionary
directing everyone’s
Though only a boy, he’d sensed that hell was just a story the sisters had concocted to keep the children in line, not unlike the fables they read the children to teach simple moral lessons.
God, okay, Dodd was good with that, it made a kind of sense. Heaven was a pleasant idea he was happy to go along with, since believing in it cost him nothing. But that was as far as he was willing to go. Hell: it was pure nonsense.
in September. Greer had already finished his breakfast of watery porridge and completed his morning calisthenics: five hundred push-ups and sit-ups, followed by an equivalent number of squats and thrusts. Suspended from the pipe that ran along the ceiling of his cell, he did a hundred chin-ups in sets of twenty, front and back, as God ordained. When this was done, he sat on the edge of his cot, stilling his mind to commence his invisible journey.
‘He was … familiar,’ ” Peter quoted. “I never understood what Olson meant. It didn’t really make sense. And you were pointing a gun at his head.” “So I was. And believe me, there are days when I wish I’d gone ahead and pulled the trigger. But I don’t think it was gibberish. I looked up the word at the library back in Kerrville. The dictionary said the definition was archaic, so I had to look that up too, which basically just means old. It said that a familiar is a kind of helper demon, like a witch’s cat. A sort of assistant. Maybe that’s what Olson was talking about.”
Ignacio was Martínez’s
“Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way to know until you know. I’ve never asked you what you believe, Peter, and I’m not going to. Every man gets to decide that for himself. And don’t get me wrong—I’m a soldier, too, or at least I was. The world needs its warriors, and the day will come when very little else is going to matter. You’ll be there for the fight, my friend, I have no doubt. But there’s more to this world than meets the eye. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that much.” “I wish I had your confidence.” The major shrugged this away. “Oh, you’re just trying to work things out, same
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The greatest faith is the willingness to ask in the first place, all evidence to the contrary. Faith not just in God, but in all of us.
on the shoulder. “Peter Jaxon, as I live and breathe.”
I send you home, my brothers and sisters, I release you from the prison of your existence. You have departed the earth to unlock the truth of what lies beyond this life. May your strength pass into me that I may face the days ahead. Godspeed to you.
He also possessed the glossily sleek appearance of a twenty-five-year-old—a far cry from the wiry septuagenarian of Guilder’s first acquaintance.
“We have a theory about that. The evidence points to an organization that’s classically cellular. Clusters of just a few individuals operating within a loose operational framework.”
That it’s the idea of Sergio, not Sergio per se, that we’re up against. If you follow me.”
(At least he hadn’t resorted to having his picture painted—though, come to think of it, why not?) He peered over the rail. Fifty feet below were the tiny figures of the uniformed security detail; members of the leadership, in their dark suits and ties, scuttling briskly to and fro with their officious briefcases and clipboards; even a couple of attendants, flowing diaphanously across the polished stone floor in their nunnish costumes, like a pair of paper boats.
We could never defeat them if we engaged them directly. Our theater of operations is psychological. Rattle the leadership.
“There are two kinds of hatred. One gives you strength, the other takes it away.
It was true; she hated them. She hated them for their leering eyes, their easy, laughing cruelty. She hated them for their watery gruel and icy showers; she hated the lies they made her shout; she hated their battering batons and the smiles on their smug faces. She hated them with her bones and blood, each cell of her body; her nerves fired with hatred, her lungs breathed hatred in and out, her heart pumped an elixir of pure hatred through her veins. She was alive because she hated them, and she hated them, most of all, for taking her daughter away.
Interstate 10 would lead them straight to Houston,
“Then you mistake me for somebody who cares what others think. Nice try, Lieutenant.”
Suddenly Peter understood what he was seeing. The work of the trade was really just a cover. The man’s true purpose was right here, in this room. “Tifty, you are full of shit.”
The drive to kill versus an inchoate tactical suspicion that not all was as it appeared—a vestige, perhaps, of the human capacity for reason. Which would win out? The crowd was chanting Dunk’s name, trying to rouse him from his stupor. That or goad the dopey into action. Any death would do. Just by going into the cage, Dunk had already secured the most important victory: to be human. To deny the virals’ dominion over himself, over his fellows, over the world. The rest would fall as it fell. Blood won.
“The asking ain’t mine to do. Telling, neither. This here’s just about what is.” Carter hitched up in his chair, removed a handkerchief from his back pocket, and held it out to her. “You go on and cry if you want to, Miss Amy.
To have a child was to receive the gift of true immortality—not time stopped, as it had stopped in Amy, but time continuing and everlasting.
Do your damnedest, my friends. I’m the one who must be kept in chains. Do you think this fact, in and of itself, is not a kind of victory?
using a compass and maps and sometimes a sextant, a device Peter had never seen before. Michael showed him how it worked. By measuring the sun’s angle to the horizon, and taking into account the time and date, it was possible to compute their location without any other points of reference.
