The Twelve (The Passage, #2)

by Justin Cronin

“True, he was sad. But that was what made him so brave, you see. Because he did the bravest thing of all. You know what that is?” “To have hope.” “Yes. To have hope when there seems to be none.

The nights were dark and still, no lights burning anywhere.

It was hard when people didn’t answer your question but instead answered some other question you hadn’t even thought of.

WHEN IN DOUBT, RUN.

It was the one place they hadn’t looked. They’d never checked the hardboxes.

Dodd screamed, and as he screamed his awareness of the pain became the thing itself, attaining its full dimensions, his mind and body instantly achieving a unity of pure annihilating agony, and as he pitched forward toward the detonator, with its glowing lights and switches, his physical person assuming in that elongated instant the properties of a hammer, falling, his one thought—oh, shit—was also his last.

Houston, what remained, was not a place for humankind; Greer wondered why anyone had ever thought it habitable to begin with.