The Twelve

viral head on a pike. He had killed a hundred virals singlehandedly, a thousand, ten thousand; the number always grew. He never set foot inside the city; he walked among them dressed as an ordinary man, a field hand, concealing his identity; he didn’t exist at all. It was said that his men took an oath—a blood oath—not to God but to one another, and that they shaved their heads as a mark of this promise, which was a promise to die. Far beyond the walls they traveled, and not just in Texas. Oklahoma City. Wichita, Kansas. Roswell, New Mexico. On the wall above his bunk, Boz kept a map of the old United States, blocks of faded color fitted together like the pieces of a puzzle; to mark each new place, he inserted one of their mother’s pins, connecting these pins with string to indicate the routes Coffee had traveled. At school, they asked Sister Peg, whose brother worked the Oil Road: What had she heard, what did she know? Was it true that the Expeditionary had found other survivors out there, whole towns and even cities full of people? To this the sister gave no answer, but in the flash of her eyes when they spoke his name, they saw the light of hope. That’s what Coffee was: wherever he came from, however he did it, Coffee was a reason to hope.

There would come a time, many years later, long after Boz was gone, and their mother as well, that Vorhees would wonder: why had he and his brother never spoken of these things with their parents? It would have been the natural thing to do; yet as he searched his memory he could not recall a single instance, just as he could not recall his mother or father saying one word about Boz’s map. 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? It was as if the stories of Coffee and the Expeditionary had been part of a secret world—a boyhood world, which, once passed, stayed passed. For a period of weeks these questions had so consumed him that one morning over breakfast he finally worked up the nerve to ask his father, who laughed. Are you kidding? Thad Vorhees was not an old man yet, but he seemed so: his hair and half his teeth gone, skin glazed with a permanent sour dampness, hands like nests of bone where they rested on the kitchen table. Are you serious? Now, you, you weren’t so bad, but Boz—the boy could not shut up about it. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, all day long. Don’t you remember? His eyes clouded with sudden grief. 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.

But it wasn’t nothing; it had never been, could never be, nothing. How could it be nothing, when they’d loved Boz like they did?

It was Tifty, of course—Tifty the liar, Tifty the teller of tales, Tifty who wanted so desperately to be needed by someone that any fool thing would leave his mouth—who professed to have seen Coffee with his own two eyes. Tifty, they all laughed, you are so full of shit. Tifty, you never saw Coffee or anybody else. Yet even in the midst of their mockery, the idea was staking its claim; from the start, the boy possessed that talent, to make you believe one thing while simultaneously knowing another. So stealthily had he inserted himself into their circle that none could say just how this had occurred; one day there was no Tifty, and the next there was. A day that began like any other: with chapel, and school, and three o’clock’s agonizingly slow approach; the sound of the bell and their sudden release, three hundred bodies streaming through the halls and down the stairs, into the afternoon; the walk from school to their quarters, faces winnowing as their classmates’ paths diverged, until it was just the four of them.

Though not exactly. As they made their way into the alley, its jumble of old shopping carts and sodden mattresses and broken chairs—people were always tossing their junk back there, no matter what the quartermaster said—they realized they were being followed. A boy, stick thin, with a gaunt face topped by a cap of red-blond hair that looked as if it had fallen from a great height onto his head. Though it was January, the air raw with dampness, he wore no coat, only a jersey and jeans and plastic flip-flops on his feet. The distance at which he trailed them, his hands buried in his pockets, was just close enough to encourage their curiosity without seeming to intrude. A probationary distance, as if he were saying: I might be someone interesting. You might want to give me a chance.

“So what do you think he wants?” Cruk said.

They had reached the end of the alleyway, where they had erected a small shelter from scraps of wood. A musty mattress, springs popping out, served as the floor. The boy had halted at a distance of thirty feet, shuffling his feet in the dust. Something about the way he held himself made it seem as if the parts of his body were only vaguely connected, as if he’d been pieced together from about four different boys.

“You following us?” Cruk called.

The boy gave no reply. He was looking down and away, like a dog trying not to make eye contact. From this angle, they could all see the mark on the left side of his face.

“You deaf? I asked you a question.”

“I ain’t following you.”

Cruk turned to the others. The oldest by a year, he was the unofficial leader. “Anybody know this kid?”

No one did. Cruk looked back at the boy again. “You. What’s your go-by?”

“Tifty.”

“Tifty? What kind of name is Tifty?”

His eyes were inspecting the tips of his sandals. “Just a name.”

“Your mother call you that?” Cruk said.

“Don’t got one.”

“She’s dead or she left you?”

The boy was fidgeting with something in his pocket. “Both, I guess. You ask it like that.” He squinted at them. “Are you like a club?”

“What makes you say that?”

The boy lifted his bony shoulders. “I’ve seen you is all.”

Cruk glanced at the others, then looked back at the boy. He huffed a weary sigh.

“Well, no point in you standing there like a dumbass. Come over so we can have a look at you.”

The boy made his way toward them. Vorhees thought there was something familiar about him, his hangdog look. Though maybe it was just the fact that any one of them could have been alone like he was. The mark on his face, they saw, was a large purple shiner.

“Hey, I know this kid,” Dee said. “You live in Assisted, don’t you? I saw you moving in with your daddy.”

Hill Country Assisted Living: a warren of apartments, families all crammed in. Everybody just called it Assisted.

“That right?” Cruk said. “You just move in?”

The boy nodded. “From over in H-town.”

“That’s who you’re with?” Cruk said. “Your daddy?”

“I got an aunt, too. Rose. She looks after me mostly.”

“What you got in your pocket there? I see you fooling with it.”

The boy withdrew his hand to show them: a foldaway knife, fat with gizmos. Cruk took it, the other three pressing their faces around. The usual blades, plus a saw, a screwdriver, a pair of scissors, and a corkscrew, even a magnifying glass, the lens clouded with age.

“Where’d you get this?” Cruk asked.

“My daddy gave it to me.”

Cruk frowned. “He on the trade?”

The boy shook his head. “Nuh-uh. He’s a hydro. Works on the dam.” He gestured at the knife. “You can have it if you want.”

“What I want your knife for?”

“Hell, he doesn’t want it, I’ll keep it,” Boz said. “Give it here.”

“Shut up, Boz.” Cruk eyed the boy slowly. “What you do to your face?”

“I just fell is all.”

His tone was not defensive. And yet all of them felt the hollowness of the lie.

“Fell into a fist is more like it. Your daddy do that or somebody else?”

The boy said nothing. Vorhees saw his jaw give a little twitch.

“Cruk, leave him be,” Dee said.

But Cruk’s eyes remained fixed on the boy. “I asked you a question.”