The Twelve

The Twelve is a horror novel by the American writer Justin Cronin, published in 2012 and the second book of The Passage trilogy.

The first novel ended with the world emptied and a small group of survivors beginning to travel, and this one does two things with that inheritance. It moves back to the days when the country was falling, following a group of ordinary people through the collapse: a school-bus driver who takes his bus out one more time, a sniper on a high floor of a Denver apartment block, a janitor who wakes up younger than he was, and a federal functionary dying of cancer while the machinery around him stops working. Then it returns to the present of the story and follows the offensive against the hives, in which the survivors have to be prepared to be hunted by something faster and older than they are. Cronin writes both halves of the book at the same pace, so the collapse and the counterattack comment on one another, and the members of the Twelve are given histories rather than just appetites. The trilogy concludes with The City of Mirrors.