Grey takes Guilder hostage and tries to escape with Lila in a helicopter. Danny and April escape in Danny’s bus, but Kittridge and Tim are killed. The government’s plan is to lure the virals into attacking the refugee camp, and then bomb it, killing virals and refugees alike.

Shortly afterwards, Kittridge’s party arrives at a nearby refugee camp. He takes Grey and Lila to a research center. A federal agent called Horace Guilder captures Grey (who he has been tracking by satellite). Grey helps Lila paint her house and the two become friends. She is Lila Kyle, the divorced wife of Brad Wolgast (one of the major characters of The Passage). When he leaves the room, he encounters a pregnant woman who does not realize what is happening. Grey wakes up in a hotel room, younger and fitter than he was, and unsure why. Readers of The Passage recognize that this complex is the site of “Project Noah,” the experiments on human subjects which caused the outbreak of the deadly virus. Meanwhile, Lawrence Grey is a janitor working at a secret government complex. They encounter an Army sniper, Kittridge, and together they join a group of survivors.

He picks up teenagers April and Tim Donadio, and they drive to a designated safe site, only to find it full of corpses. An autistic school-bus driver named Danny decides to drive his round for the last time, as society breaks down around him. The novel opens by briefly checking in on the surviving characters from The Passage before jumping back in time to the outbreak of the virus. The Passage trilogy has been adapted for television, premiering in January 2019. The Twelve follows the surviving characters from 2010’s The Passage, including protagonist Amy Bellafonte, as they attempt to destroy “The Twelve,” the first-infected victims of the virus, in order to neutralize the entire epidemic. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which the United States has been overrun by the victims of a highly contagious virus, who have a vampire-like thirst for human blood and sensitivity to light. The Twelve is a 2012 horror-fantasy novel by American author Justin Cronin, the second instalment in Cronin’s Passage trilogy.

The twelve justin cronin