The Passage (Passage Trilogy Series #1)

The Passage (Passage Trilogy Series #1)

by Justin Cronin
The Passage (Passage Trilogy Series #1)

The Passage (Passage Trilogy Series #1)

by Justin Cronin

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Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This thrilling novel kicks off what Stephen King calls “a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.”

NOW A FOX TV SERIES!

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST HORROR BOOKS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Esquire • U.S. News & World Report • NPR/On Point • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • BookPage • Library Journal 

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.” 

An epic and gripping tale of catastrophe and survival, The Passage is the story of Amy—abandoned by her mother at the age of six, pursued and then imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind a government experiment of apocalyptic proportions. But Special Agent Brad Wolgast, the lawman sent to track her down, is disarmed by the curiously quiet girl and risks everything to save her. As the experiment goes nightmarishly wrong, Wolgast secures her escape—but he can’t stop society’s collapse. And as Amy walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair, she is filled with the mysterious and terrifying knowledge that only she has the power to save the ruined world.

Look for the entire Passage trilogy:
THE PASSAGE | THE TWELVE | THE CITY OF MIRRORS

Praise for The Passage

“[A] blockbuster.”The New York Times Book Review

“Mythic storytelling.”San Francisco Chronicle

“Magnificent . . . Cronin has taken his literary gifts, and he has weaponized them. . . . The Passage can stand proudly next to Stephen King’s apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand, but a closer match would be Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: a story about human beings trying to generate new hope in a world from which all hope has long since been burnt.”Time

“The type of big, engrossing read that will have you leaving the lights on late into the night.”The Dallas Morning News

“Addictive.”Men’s Journal

“Cronin’s unguessable plot and appealing characters will seize your heart and mind.”Parade

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345504975
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 05/17/2011
Series: Passage Trilogy Series , #1
Pages: 800
Sales rank: 29,119
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Justin Cronin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Passage, The Twelve, The City of Mirrors, Mary and O’Neil (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and The Summer Guest. Other honors for his writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers’ Award. A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

The Passage


By Justin Cronin

Ballantine Books

Copyright © 2010 Justin Cronin All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780345504968

Wolgast had been to the Compound only once, the previous summer, to meet with Colonel Sykes.  Not a job interview, exactly; it had been made clear to Wolgast that the assignment was his if he wanted it.  A pair of soldiers drove him in a van with blacked out windows, but Wolgast could tell they were taking him west from Denver, into the mountains.   The drive took six hours, and by the time they pulled into the Compound, he’d actually managed to fall asleep.  He stepped from the van into the bright sunshine of a summer afternoon.  He stretched and looked around.   From the topography, he’d have guessed he was somewhere around Telluride.  It could have been further north.  The air felt thin and clean in his lungs; he felt the dull throb of a high-altitude headache at the top of his skull. 

He was met in the parking lot by a civilian, a compact man dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt rolled at the sleeves, a pair of old-fashioned aviators perched on his wide, faintly bulbous nose.  This was Richards.  

“Hope the ride wasn’t too bad,” Richards said as they shook hands.   Up close Wolgast saw that Richards’ cheeks were pockmarked with old acne scars.  “We’re pretty high up here.  If you’renot used to it, you’ll want to take it easy.”

Richards escorted Wolgast across the parking area to a building he called the Chalet, which was exactly what it sounded like: a large Tudor structure, three stories tall, with the exposed timbers of an old-fashioned sportsman’s lodge.  The mountains had once been full of these places, Wolgast knew, hulking relics from an era before time-share condos and modern resorts.  The building faced an open lawn, and beyond, at a hundred yards or so, a cluster of more workaday structures: cinderblock barracks, a half-dozen military inflatables, a low-slung building that resembled a roadside motel.  Military vehicles, Humvees and smaller jeeps and five ton trucks, were moving up and down the drive; in the center of the lawn, a group of men with broad chests and trim haircuts, naked to the waist, were sunning themselves on lawn chairs.  

Stepping into the Chalet, Wolgast had the disorienting sensation of peeking behind a movie set; the place had been gutted to the studs, its original architecture replaced by the neutral textures of a modern office building: gray carpeting, institutional lighting, acoustic tile drop ceilings.  He might have been in a dentist’s office, or the high-rise off the freeway where he met his accountant once a year to do his taxes.  They stopped at the front desk, where Richards asked him to turn over his handheld and his weapon, which he passed to the guard, a kid in cammos, who tagged them. There was an elevator, but Richards walked past it and led Wolgast down a narrow hallway to a heavy metal door that opened on a flight of stairs.  They ascended to the second floor, and made their way down another non-descript hallway to Sykes’ office. 

Sykes rose from behind his desk as they entered: a tall, well-built man in uniform, his chest spangled with the various bars and little bits of color that Wolgast had never understood.  His office was neat as a pin, its arrangement of objects, right down to the framed photos on his desk, giving the impression of having been placed for maximum efficiency.   Resting in the center of the desk was a single manila folder, fat with folded paper.  Wolgast knew it was almost certainly his personnel file, or some version of it.  

They shook hands and Sykes offered him coffee, which Wolgast accepted.  He wasn’t drowsy but the caffeine, he knew, would help the headache.  

“Sorry about the bullshit with the van,” Sykes said, and waved him to a chair.  “That’s just how we do things.”

A soldier brought in the coffee, a plastic carafe and two china cups on a tray.  Richards remained standing behind Sykes’ desk, his back to the broad windows that looked out on the woodlands that ringed the Compound.  Sykes explained what he wanted Wolgast to do.  It was all quite straight forward, he said, and by now Wolgast knew the basics.  The Army needed between ten and twenty death-row inmates to serve in the third-stage trials of an experimental drug therapy, codenamed Project Noah.   In exchange for their consent, these men would have their sentences commuted to life without parole.  It would be Wolgast’s job to obtain the signatures of these men, nothing more.  Everything had been legally vetted, but because the project was a matter of national security, all of these men would be declared legally dead.  Thereafter, they would spend the rest of their lives in the care of the federal penal system, a white-collar prison camp, under assumed identities.  The men would be chosen based upon a number of factors, but all would be men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five with no living first-degree relatives.  Wolgast would report directly to Sykes; he’d have no other contact, though he’d remain, technically, in the employment of the Bureau.  

“Do I have to pick them?”  Wolgast asked.

Sykes shook his head.  “That’s our job.  You’ll get your orders from me.  All you have to do is get their consent.  Once they’re signed on, the Army will take it from there.  They’ll be moved to the nearest federal lock-up, then we’ll transport them here.”

Wolgast thought a moment.   “Colonel, I have to ask--“

“What we’re doing?”  He seemed, at that moment, to permit himself an almost human-looking smile.

Wolgast nodded.  “I understand I can’t be very specific.  But I’m going to be asking them to sign over their whole lives.  I have to tell them something.”

Sykes exchanged a look with Richards, who shrugged.  “I’ll leave you now,” Richards said, and nodded at Wolgast.  “Agent.” 

When Richards had left, Sykes leaned back in his chair.  “I’m not a biochemist, agent.  You’ll have to be satisfied with the layman’s version.  Here’s the background, at least the part I can tell you. About ten years ago, the CDC got a call from a doctor in La Paz.  He had four patients, all Americans, who had come down with what looked like Hantavirus – high fever, vomiting, muscle pain, headache, hypoxemia.  The four of them had been part of an eco-tour, deep in the jungle.  They claimed that they were part of a group of fourteen but had gotten separated from the others and had been wandering in the jungle for weeks.  It was sheer luck that they’d stumbled onto a remote trading post run by a bunch of Franciscan friars, who arranged their transport to La Paz.  Now, Hanta isn’t the common cold, but it’s not exactly rare, either, so none of this would have been more than a blip on the CDC’s radar if not for one thing.  All of them were terminal cancer patients.  The tour was organized by an organization called ‘Last Wish.’  You’ve heard of them?”

Wolgast nodded.  “I thought they just took people skydiving, things like that.”

 “That’s what I thought, too.  But apparently not.  Of the four, one had an inoperable brain tumor, two had acute lymphocytic leukemia, and the fourth had ovarian cancer.  And every single one of them became well.  Not just the Hanta, or whatever it was.  No cancer.  Not a trace.”

Wolgast felt lost.   “I don’t get it.”

Sykes sipped his coffee.  “Well, neither did anyone at the CDC.   But something had happened, some interaction between their immune systems and something, most likely viral, that they’d been exposed to in the jungle.  Something they ate?  The water they drank?   No one could figure it out.  They couldn’t even say exactly where they’d been.”  He leaned forward over his desk.  “Do you know what the thymus gland is?”

Wolgast shook his head.

Sykes pointed at his chest, just above the breastbone.  “Little thing in here, between the sternum and the trachea, about the size of an acorn.  In most people, it’s atrophied completely by puberty, and you could go your whole life not knowing you had one, unless it was diseased.  Nobody really knows what it does, or at least they didn’t, until they ran scans on these four patients.  The thymus had somehow turned itself back on.  More than back on: it had enlarged to three times its usual size.  It looked like a malignancy but it wasn’t.  And their immune systems had gone into overdrive.  A hugely accelerated rate of cellular regeneration.  And there were other benefits.  Remember these were cancer patients, all over fifty.  It was like they were teenagers again.  Smell, hearing, vision, skin tone, lung volume, physical strength and endurance, even sexual function.  One of the men actually grew back a full head of hair.”

“A virus did this?’

Sykes nodded.  “Like I said, this is the layman’s version.  But I’ve got people downstairs who think that’s exactly what happened.  Some of them have degrees in subjects I can’t even spell.  They talk to me like I’m a child, and they’re not wrong.”

“What happened to them?  The four patients.”

Sykes leaned back in his chair, his face darkening a little.  “Well, this isn’t the happiest part of the story, I’m afraid.  They’re all dead.  The longest any of them survived was eighty-six days.  Cerebral aneurism, heart attack, stroke.  Their bodies just kind of blew a fuse.”  

“What about the others?”  

 “No one knows.  Disappeared without a trace, including the tour operator, who turned out to be a pretty shady character.  It’s likely he was actually working as a drug mule, using these tours as a cover.”  Sykes gave a shrug.  “I’ve probably said too much.  But I think this will help you put things in perspective.  We’re not talking about curing one disease, agent.  We’re talking about curing everything.   How long would a human being live if there were no cancer, no heart disease, no diabetes, no Alzheimer’s?  And we’ve reached the point where we need, absolutely require, human test subjects.  Not a nice term, but there really is no other.  And that’s where you come in.  I need you to get me these men.”

 “Why not the Marshalls?  Isn’t this more up their alley?”

Sykes shook his head dismissively.  “Glorified corrections officers, if you’ll excuse my saying so.   Believe me, we started there.  If I had a sofa I needed carried up the stairs, they’d be the first guys I’d call.  But for this, no.”

Sykes picked up the file off his desk and began to read.  “Bradford Joseph Wolgast, born Ashland, Oregon, September 29, 1974.  B.S. in Criminal Justice 1996, SUNY Buffalo, high honors, recruited by the Bureau but declines, accepts a graduate fellowship at Stony Brook for a PhD in Political Science but leaves after two years to join the Bureau.  After training at Langley sent to—”   He raised his eyebrows at Wolgast.  “—Dayton?” 

Wolgast shrugged.  “It wasn’t very exciting.”

“Well, we all do our time.  Two years in the sticks, a little of this, a little of that, mostly piddly shit but good ratings all around.  After 9/11 asks to transfer to counterterrorism, back to Langley for eighteen months, assigned to the Denver field office September ’04 as liaison to the Treasury, tracking funds moved through U.S. banks by Russian nationals, i.e. the Russian Mafia, though we don’t call them that.  On the personal side: No political affiliations, no memberships, doesn’t even subscribe to the newspaper.  Parents deceased.  Dates a little but no steady girlfriends.  Marries Lila Kyle, an orthopedic surgeon.   Divorced four years later.”  He closed the file and lifted his eyes to Wolgast.  “What we need, agent, is somebody who, to be perfectly candid, has a certain polish.  Good negotiation skills, not just with the prisoners but with the prison authorities.  Somebody who knows how to tread lightly, won’t leave a large impression.  What we’re doing here is perfectly legal—hell, it may be the most important piece of medical research in the history of mankind.  But it could be easily misunderstood.  I’m telling you as much as I am because I think it will help if you understand the stakes, how high they are.”   

Wolgast guessed Sykes was telling him maybe ten percent of the story – a persuasive ten percent, but even so.  “Is it safe?”

Sykes shrugged.  “There’s safe and then there’s safe.  I won’t lie to you.  There are risks.   But we’ll do everything we can to minimize them.  A bad outcome isn’t in anybody’s interest here.  And I remind you that these are death-row inmates.  Not the nicest men you’d ever care to meet, and they don’t exactly have a lot of options.  We’re giving them a chance to live out their lives, and maybe make a significant contribution to medical science at the same time.  It’s not a bad deal, not by a longshot.  Everybody’s on the side of the angels here.”

Wolgast took a last moment to think.  It was all a little hard to take in.  “I guess I don’t see why the military is involved.”

At this, Sykes stiffened; he seemed almost offended.  “Don’t you?  Think about it, agent.   Let’s say a soldier on the ground in Khorramabad or Groznyy takes a piece of shrapnel.  A roadside bomb, say, a bunch of C4 in a lead pipe full of deck screws.  Maybe it’s a piece of blackmarket Russian ordinance.  Believe me, I’ve seen firsthand what these things can do.  We have to dust him out of there, maybe en route he bleeds to death, but if he’s lucky he gets to the field hospital where a trauma surgeon, two medics and three nurses patch him up as best they can before evacuating him to Germany or Saud.  It’s painful, it’s awful, it’s his rotten luck, and he’s probably out of the war.  He’s a broken asset.  All the money we’ve spent on his training is a total loss.  And it gets worse.  He comes home depressed, angry, maybe missing a limb or something worse, with nothing good to say about anyone or anything.  Down at the corner tavern he tells his buddies, I lost my leg, I’m pissing into a bag for the rest of my life, and for what?”  Sykes leaned back in his chair, letting the story sink in.  “We’ve been at war for fifteen years, agent.  By the looks of things, we’ll be in it for fifteen more if we’re lucky.  I won’t kid you.  The single biggest challenge the military faces, has always faced, is keeping soldiers on the field.  So, let’s say the same GI takes the same piece of shrapnel, but within half-a-day his body’s healed itself and he’s back in his unit, fighting for god and country.  You think the military wouldn’t be interested in something like that?”

Wolgast felt chastened.  “I see your point.”

“Good, because you should.”  Sykes expression softened; the lecture was over.  “So maybe it’s the military who’s picking up the check.   I say let them, because frankly, what we’ve spent so far would make your eyes pop out.  I don’t know about you, but I’d like to live to see my great-great-great-grandchildren.  Hell, I’d like to hit a golf ball three-hundred yards on my hundredth birthday and then go home to make love to my wife until she walks funny for a week.  Who wouldn’t?”   He paused, looking at Wolgast searchingly.  “The side of the angels, agent.  Nothing more or less.  Do we have a deal?”

The shook, and Sykes walked him to the door.  Richards was waiting to take him back to the van.  “One last question,” Wolgast asked.  “Why Noah?   What’s it stand for?”

Standing at the door, Sykes glanced quickly at Richards.   In that moment, Wolgast felt the balance of power shifting in the room; Sykes might have been technically in charge, but in some way, Wolgast felt certain, he also reported to Richards, who was probably the link between the military and whoever was really running the show: USAMRID, Homeland, maybe NSA. 

Sykes turned back to Wolgast. “It doesn’t stand for anything.  Let’s put it this way.  You ever read the Bible?”  

“Some.”  Wolgast looked at the both of them.  “When I was a kid.  My mother was a Methodist.”

Sykes allowed himself a second, final smile.  “Go look it up.  The story of Noah and the ark.  See how long he lived. That’s all I’ll say.”

That night, back in his Denver apartment, Wolgast did as Sykes had said.  He didn’t own a Bible, probably hadn’t laid eyes on one since his wedding day.  But he found a concordance on line. 

And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died
.

It was then that he realized what the missing piece was, the thing Sykes hadn’t said.  It would be in his file, of course.  It was the reason, of all the federal agents they might have chosen, that they’d picked him.    

They’d chosen him because of Eva, because he’d had to watch his daughter die.

Continues...


Excerpted from The Passage by Justin Cronin Copyright © 2010 by Justin Cronin. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.


What People are Saying About This

Jennifer Egan

"Justin Cronin has written a wild, headlong, sweeping extravaganza of a novel. THE PASSAGE is the literary equivalent of a unicorn: a bonafide thriller that is sharply written, deeply humane, ablaze with big ideas, and absolutely impossible to put down."

Stephen King

"Every so often a novel-reader's novel comes along: an enthralling, entertaining story wedded to simple, supple prose, both informed by tremendous imagination. Summer is the perfect time for such books, and this year readers can enjoy the gift of Justin Cronin's The Passage. Read 15 pages, and you will find yourself captivated; read 30 and you will find yourself taken prisoner and reading late into the night. It had the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve.
"What else can I say? This: read this book and the ordinary world disappears."

From the Publisher

“Read this book and the ordinary world disappears.”—Stephen King

“[A] blockbuster . . . astutely plotted and imaginative.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Don’t wait to dive into The Passage. . . . Simmering in the background of this frightening thriller . . . is a heartfelt portrayal of the human capability to fight, endure and hope for a better world.”—USA Today
 
“Engrossing . . . By the third chapter, trash was piling up in our house because I was too scared to take out the garbage at night.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
 
“Mythic storytelling.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Interviews

THE PASSAGE has already been sold in 21 countries and will be made into a film with Ridley Scott as the director. So many different readers have fallen in love with the book. Why do you think that is? Is there a common theme in the book to which everyone can relate?

This is not an easy question to answer without sounding self-congratulatory. First of all, I think it's simply a good story, in the old-fashioned sense. Characters you care about. High stakes. Moments in which everything depends on what someone chooses to do or not do. A certain kind of economy, even as it's quite a long story - by which I mean, everything matters. That's the kind of book I hoped to write.

I do think, too, that the story taps into a great deal of our shared anxieties about the world we live in. These are fraught times, to put it mildly, and the dangers we face, internal and external, in ourselves and in others, seem like strange new monsters to wrestle with. But at the same time, THE PASSAGE is not an unremittingly bleak story. I think we're all wondering what will redeem us. It's a hopeful thing to think that it could be something as simple as love for a little girl.

You are a PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of literary fiction. Does THE PASSAGE represent a departure for you?

You write how you write. That said, the differences are there. I think of them mostly as a matter of scale. I've always said that I never want to write the same book twice, and I deliberately took up THE PASSAGE as a novel (and ultimately a trilogy) that would operate on a much broader canvas than anything I'd done before, with a very energetic plot. I wanted to take ordinary people and place them in circumstances of such dire emergency that they couldn't help but reveal their truest selves in the choices they make. I've heard it said that character is "what you are in the dark". Strip away the distractions of daily life, and what have you got? I wanted to put my characters to this kind of test.

The character Amy begins her life with a stuffed rabbit and there are points in the narrative that resonate with Richard Adams' Watership Down. Why is there so much rabbit imagery in THE PASSAGE?

The Watership Down reference is one I didn't recognize until you mentioned it, actually; I remember reading that novel, being completely occupied by it, in fact, for one whole summer. But I couldn't have said I remembered, consciously, any of its details. I'm pleased and a little amazed to discover how big an impression it made. Books go into you, and stay there, and make their presence known in ways you can't predict and often don't notice.

Agent Wolgast becomes a surrogate father to Amy. Is he modeled after you at all?

He is probably the character who is closest to me. I'd like to think I'd do the things he did under the same circumstances. I think I'd be very happy spending a year alone with my daughter on a mountaintop, playing board games and reading old books. One of my favorite moments in Shakespeare occurs in King Lear, when Lear is arrested with Cordelia and expresses his happiness that, after everything terrible thing that's happened, the two of them are going to jail together; at that moment, she is all he needs.

How close do you think we really are to the kind of near-future scenario you envision?

We've lived in this very dangerous neighborhood for sixty years. There's no question that we're capable of atrocity; the 20th century (and now the 21st, I fear) is a history of mass extinguishment. I take some small comfort in the fact that the most dangerous moment in human history -the Cuban Missile Crisis - was one we managed to survive. The parties didn't have the stomach for it. But would this always be true? People strap bombs to their chests and wander into crowded markets and blow everyone to bits. Half a country rises up to slaughter the other half over ancient tribal slights. We build something called a large collider, conceding that there is some statistical chance, however small, that it will annihilate the universe. (But there's so much to be learned! Careers are on the line! What will the investors say! Quickly, throw the switch!) Fanaticism, venality, arrogance, stupidity, plain old sloppiness. It's a scary world; I worry all the time.

What do you think motivates your characters the most -love, faith, the search for identity?

That's easy. What they do, they do for love. The rest will follow.

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