The Passage

In August, Wolgast smells fires. He and Amy have settled into a routine of chores, books, and board games. The next day, they leave, but flames block them within two miles. They spend that night on a boat in the lake as the fires close in. The camp is still there in the morning.

When Wolgast returns to the store, Carl and Martha are dead, spooning in the hospital bed. Wolgast cries for the first time. He takes supplies and Carl’s gun. A sheet of newspaper describes the destruction of Chicago. Millions are dead. California has seceded from the country.

So far, the outbreak is contained to America, but other countries are growing fearful and destabilized. President Hughes denies California’s secession. Wolgast thinks of the acronym OBE: “Overcome by Events” (233), which is what has happened to the world.

It snows in October and Wolgast shows Amy how to make snow angels, which leads to a discussion about what angels are. He tells her he doesn’t know if he believes in them. Amy says she feels that his mother is dead. In fact, she can feel everyone. She often sleepwalks to the front window while dreaming.

Wolgast hears an engine on a March night. A man greets them from the porch. After arming himself, Wolgast opens the door and sees that the man is wounded. He says he’s been with six others at a hunting camp since the fall of Seattle. His name is Bob Saunders and he’s been bitten. Wolgast realizes that Bob wants him to kill him.

In the woods, Bob undresses and shows Wolgast where to shoot, before turning away from him. Wolgast shoots him as he starts to twitch with the change. He burns the body with gas, soaks the ashes with bleach, and buries them. At home, he shows Amy a distant ridge and tells her to go there if anything happens to him.

Months later, he dreams about Lila. She is pregnant and they are playing Monopoly. She tells him everyone is dead. He wakes to see Amy touching the window just as the light of a nuclear explosion fills the sky and the window shatters. The light burns Amy’s eyes.

In the morning, ashes made from people are falling like snow. Amy can see three days later, but Wolgast is still nauseous. His leg, cut by glass, is infected. He worries that he’s dying of radiation. He wakes alone. In the woods, he kneels as he hears bodies move in the trees above him. He repeats Amy’s name, hoping it will help him die in peace.

Part 3 contains an excerpt read at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period. In first-person narrative, it recounts the chaos of the final days. Ida, the narrator, describes being forced to board a train with other children at age eight. She must leave her parents behind, which she hopes is for the best: Now she won’t get sick and hurt them if she becomes a “jump” (250).

After a long, hot trip, the children arrive at a desert compound, where she sees her cousin Terrence, whose father built the train. He compares the compound to Noah’s Ark. When Ida writes of all the deaths to come, the suicides disturb her most. In whatever time she was writing, people call her Auntie. As she adds passages to her books, she will continue her own passage as the Colony’s record-keeper and quasi-seer. She writes that she hasn’t seen stars since that First Night, a confusing, ominous detail that will make sense soon.