Текст книги "The 5th Wave"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“Lie all the way back, Sam.”

Firm fingers pressing on his belly.

“Any pain when I do this?”

She has him stand up, bend over, reach for his toes, while she runs her hands up and down along his spine.

“Okay, sport, hop back on the table.”

He jumps back quickly onto the crinkly paper, sensing the visit is almost over. There won’t be a shot. Maybe they’ll prick his finger, and that’s no fun, but at least there won’t be a shot.

“Hold out your hand for me.”

Dr. Pam places a tiny gray tube no larger than a grain of rice into his palm.

“Know what this is? It’s called a microchip. Did you ever have a pet, a dog or a cat, Sammy?”

No. His father is allergic. He always wanted a dog, though.

“Well, some owners put a device very much like this one into their pets in case they run away or get lost. This one’s a little different, though. It puts out a signal that we can track.”

It goes just underneath the skin, the doctor explains, and no matter where Sammy is, they’ll be able to find him. Just in case something happens. It’s very safe here at Camp Haven, but just a few months ago everyone thought the world was safe from an alien attack, so now we have to be careful, we have to take every precaution…

He stops listening after the words underneath the skin. They’re going to inject that gray tube into him? Fear begins to gnaw anew around the edges of his heart.

“It won’t hurt,” the doctor says, sensing the nibbling fear. “We give you a little shot to numb you first, and then you’ll have just a small sore spot for a day or two.”

The doctor is very kind. He can see that she understands how much he hates shots and she really doesn’t want to do it. She has to do it. She shows him the needle used for the shot to numb him. It’s very tiny, hardly wider than a human hair. Like a mosquito bite, the doctor says. That isn’t so bad. He’s been bitten by mosquitoes lots of times. And Dr. Pam promises he won’t feel the gray tube go in. He won’t feel anything at all after the numbing shot.

He lies on his tummy, tucking his face into the crook of his elbow. The room is cold, and the swipe of the alcohol at the base of his neck makes him shudder violently. The nurse tells him to relax. “The more you tense up, the sorer you’ll be,” she tells him. He tries to think of something nice, something that will take his mind off what’s about to happen. He sees Cassie’s face in his mind’s eye, and he’s surprised. He expected to see his mother’s face.

Cassie is smiling. He smiles back at her, into the crook of his arm. A mosquito that must be the size of a bird bites down hard on the back of his neck. He doesn’t move, but whimpers softly against his skin. In less than a minute, it’s over.

Number forty-nine has been tagged.

40

AFTER THE DOCTOR bandages the insertion point, she makes a note in his chart, hands the chart to the nurse, and tells Sammy there’s just one more test.

He follows the doctor into the next room. It’s much smaller than the examination room, hardly larger than a closet. In the middle of the room is a chair that reminds Sammy of the one at his dentist’s, narrow and high-backed, thin armrests on either side.

The doctor tells him to have a seat. “Lean all the way back, head back, too, that’s right. Stay relaxed.”

Whirrr. The back of the chair lowers, the front rises, bringing up his legs until he is almost fully reclined. The doctor’s face comes into view. Smiling.

“Okay, Sam, you’ve been very patient with us, and this is the last test, I promise. It doesn’t last long and it doesn’t hurt, but sometimes it can be a little, well, intense. It’s a test of the implant we just put in. To make sure it’s working okay. It takes a few minutes to run, and you have to keep very, very still. That can be hard to do, can’t it? You can’t wiggle or squirm or even scratch your nose, or it will ruin the test. Think you can do that?”

Sammy nods. He is returning the doctor’s warm smile. “I’ve played freeze tag before,” he assures her. “I’m really good at it.”

“Good! But just in case, I’m going to put these straps around your wrists and ankles, not very tight, but just in case your nose does start to itch. The straps will remind you to keep still. Would that be okay?”

Sammy nods. When he’s strapped in, she says, “Okay, I’m going to step over to the computer now. The computer is going to send a signal to calibrate the transponder, and the transponder is going to send a signal back. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds, but it may feel longer—maybe a lot longer. Different people react in different ways. Ready to give it a try?”

“Okay.”

“Good! Close your eyes. Keep them closed until I say you can open them. Take big, deep breaths. Here we go. Keep those eyes closed now. Counting down from three…two…one…”

A blinding white fireball explodes inside Sammy Sullivan’s head. His body stiffens; his legs strain against the restraints; his tiny fingers lock on to the chair arms. He hears the doctor’s soothing voice on the other side of the blinding light, saying, “It’s all right, Sammy. Don’t be afraid. Just a few more seconds, I promise…”

He sees his crib. And there’s Bear lying next to him in the crib, and then there’s the mobile of stars and planets spinning lazily over his bed. He sees his mother, leaning over him, holding a spoonful of medicine and telling him he has to take it. There’s Cassie in the backyard, and it’s summer and he’s toddling around in a pair of Pull-Ups, and Cassie is spraying water from the hose high into the air so a rainbow springs up out of nothing. She whips the hose back and forth, laughing as he chases it, the fleeting, uncatchable colors, shimmering splinters of the golden light. “Catch the rainbow, Sammy! Catch the rainbow!”

The images and memories pour out of him, like water rushing down a drain. In no more than ninety seconds, the entirety of Sammy’s life roars out of him and into the mainframe, an avalanche of touch and smell and taste and sound, before fading into the white nothingness. His mind is laid bare in the blinding white, all that he has experienced, all that he remembers, and even those things that he can’t remember; everything that makes up the personality of Sammy Sullivan is pulled and sorted and transmitted by the device at the base of his neck into Dr. Pam’s computer.

Number forty-nine has been mapped.

41

DR. PAM UNDOES the straps and helps him out of the chair. Sammy’s knees give out. She holds on to his arms to keep him from falling. His stomach heaves, and he vomits on the white floor. Everywhere he looks, black blobs jiggle and bounce. The big, unsmiling nurse takes him back to the examination room, puts him on the table, tells him everything is fine, asks if she can bring him anything.

“I want my bear!” he screams. “I want my daddy and my Cassie and I want to go home!”

Dr. Pam appears beside him. Her kind eyes glow with understanding. She knows what he’s feeling. She tells him how brave he is, how brave and lucky and smart to have come this far. He passed the final test with flying colors. He’s perfectly healthy and perfectly safe. The worst is over.

“That’s what my daddy said every time something bad happened, and every time it just got worse,” Sammy says, choking back tears.

They bring him a white jumpsuit to put on. It reminds him of a fighter pilot’s outfit, zippered in the front, the material slick to the touch. The suit is too big for him. The sleeves keep falling over his hands.

“Do you know why you’re so important to us, Sammy?” Dr. Pam asks. “Because you’re the future. Without you and all those other children, we won’t stand a chance against them. That’s why we searched for you and brought you here and why we’re doing all this. You know some of the things they’ve done to us, and they’re terrible. Terrible, awful things, but that isn’t the worst part, that isn’t everything they’ve done.”

“What else have they done?” Sammy whispers.

“Do you really want to know? I can show you, but only if you want to know.”

In the white room, he had just relived his mother’s death, smelled her coppery blood, watched his father wash it from his hands. But those weren’t the worst things the Others had done, the doctor said. Did he really want to know?

“I want to know,” he says.

The doctor holds up the small silver disk the nurse had used to take his temperature, the same device Parker had pressed against his and Megan’s foreheads on the bus.

“This isn’t a thermometer, Sammy,” Dr. Pam says. “It does detect something, but it isn’t your temperature. It tells us who you are. Or maybe I should say what you are. Tell me something, Sam. Have you seen one of them yet? Have you seen an alien?”

He shakes his head no. Shivering inside the white suit. Curled up on the little examination table. Sick to his stomach, head pounding, weak from hunger and exhaustion. Something in him wants her to stop. He nearly shouts out, Stop! I don’t want to know! But he bites his lip. He doesn’t want to know; he has to know.

“I’m very sorry to say you have seen one,” Dr. Pam says in a soft, sad voice. “We all have. We’ve been waiting for them to come since the Arrival, but the truth is they’ve been here, right under our noses, for a very long time.”

He is shaking his head over and over. Dr. Pam is wrong. He’s never seen one. For hours he listened to Daddy speculating about what they might look like. Heard his father say they might never know what they look like. There had been no messages from them, no landers, no signs of their existence except the grayish-green mothership in high orbit and the unmanned drones. How could Dr. Pam be saying he had seen one?

She holds out her hand. “If you want to see, I can show you.”

42

BEN PARISH IS DEAD.

I don’t miss him. Ben was a wuss, a crybaby, a thumb-sucker.

Not Zombie.

Zombie is everything Ben wasn’t. Zombie is hardcore. Zombie is badass. Zombie is stone-cold.

Zombie was born on the morning I left the convalescent ward. Traded in my flimsy gown for a blue jumpsuit. Assigned a bunk in Barracks 10. Whipped back into shape by three squares a day and brutal physical training, but most of all by Reznik, the regiment’s senior drill instructor, the man who smashed Ben Parish into a million pieces, then reconstructed him into the merciless zombie killing machine that he is today.

Don’t get me wrong: Reznik is a cruel, unfeeling, sadistic bastard, and I fall asleep every night fantasizing about ways to kill him. From day one he’s made it his mission to make my life as miserable as possible, and he’s pretty much succeeded. I’ve been slapped, punched, pushed, kicked, and spat on. I’ve been ridiculed, mocked, and screamed at until my ears rang. Forced to stand for hours in the freezing rain, scrub the entire barracks floor with a toothbrush, disassemble and reassemble my rifle until my fingers bled, run until my legs turned to jelly…you get the idea.

I didn’t get it, though. Not at first. Was he training me to be a soldier or trying to kill me? I was pretty sure it was the latter. Then I realized it was both: He really was training me to be a soldier—by trying to kill me.

I’ll give you just one example. One’s enough.

Morning calisthenics in the yard, every squad in the regiment, over three hundred troops, and Reznik picks this time to publicly humiliate me. Looming over me, his legs spread wide, hands on knees, his fleshy, pockmarked face close to mine as I dipped into push-up number seventy-nine.

“Private Zombie, did your mother have any children that lived?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“I bet when you were born she took one look at you and tried to shove you back in!”

Jamming the heel of his black boot into my ass to force me down. My squad is doing knuckle push-ups on the asphalt trail that rings the yard, because the ground is frozen solid and asphalt absorbs blood; you don’t slip around as much. He wants to make me fail before I reach one hundred. I push against his heel: No way I’m starting over. Not in front of the entire regiment. I can feel my fellow recruits watching me. Waiting for my inevitable collapse. Waiting for Reznik to win. Reznik always wins.

“Private Zombie, do you think I’m mean?”

“Sir! No, sir!”

My muscles burn. My knuckles are scraped raw. I’ve gained back some of the weight, but have I gotten back the heart?

Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Almost there.

“Do you hate my guts?”

“Sir! No, sir!”

Ninety-three. Ninety-four. Someone from another squad whispers, “Who is that guy?” And someone else, a girl’s voice, says, “His name is Zombie.”

“Are you a killer, Private Zombie?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Do you eat alien brains for breakfast?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

Ninety-five. Ninety-six. The yard is funeral-quiet. I’m not the only recruit who loathes Reznik. One of these days, somebody’s going to beat him at his own game, that’s the prayer, that’s what’s on my shoulders as I fight to one hundred.

“Bullshit! I hear you’re a coward. I hear you run from a fight.”

“Sir! No, sir!”

Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Two more and I’ve won. I hear the same girl—she must be standing close by—whisper, “Come on.”

On the ninety-ninth push-up, Reznik shoves me down with his heel. I fall hard on my chest, roll my cheek against the asphalt, and there’s his puffy face and tiny pale eyes an inch from mine.

Ninety-nine; one short. The bastard.

“Private Zombie, you are a disgrace to the species. I’ve hacked up lugies tougher than you. You make me think the enemy was right about the human race. You should be ground up for slop and passed out a hog’s shithole! Well, what are you waiting for, you stinking bag of regurgitated puke, an effing invitation?”

My head rolls to one side. An invitation would be nice, thank you, sir. I see a girl around my age standing with her squad, her arms folded across her chest, shaking her head at me. Poor Zombie. She isn’t smiling. Dark eyes, dark hair, skin so fair it seems to be glowing in the early-morning light. I have the feeling I know her from somewhere, though this is the first time I remember seeing her. There are hundreds of kids being trained for war and hundreds more arriving every day, handed blue jumpsuits, assigned to squads, packed into the barracks ringing the yard. But she has the kind of face you remember.

“Get up, you maggot! Get up and give me a hundred more. One hundred more, or by God I will rip out your eyeballs and hang them from my rearview like a pair of fuzzy dice!”

I’m totally spent. I don’t think I’ve got enough left for even one more.

Reznik doesn’t give a crap about what I think. That’s the other thing it took me a while to understand: They not only don’t care what I think—they don’t want me to think.

His face is so close to mine, I can smell his breath. It smells like spearmint.

“What is it, sweetheart? Are you tired? Do you want nappy-time?”

Do I have at least one push-up left in me? If I can do just one more, I won’t be a total loser. I press my forehead against the asphalt and close my eyes. There is a place I go, a space I found inside me after Commander Vosch showed me the final battlefield, a center of complete stillness that isn’t touched by fatigue or hopelessness or anger or anything brought on by the coming of the Big Green Eye in the Sky. In that place, I have no name. I’m not Ben or Zombie—I just am. Whole, untouchable, unbroken. The last living person in the universe who contains all human potential—including the potential to give the biggest asshole on Earth just one more.

And I do.

43

NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING special about me.

Reznik is an equal-opportunity sadist. He treats the six other recruits of Squad 53 with the same savage indecency. Flintstone, who’s my age, with his big head and bushy unibrow; Tank, the skinny, quick-tempered farm boy; Dumbo, the twelve-year-old with the big ears and quick smile that disappeared quickly during the first week of basic; Poundcake, the eight-year-old who never talks, but who’s our best shot by far; Oompa, the chubby kid with the crooked teeth who’s last in every drill but first in chow line; and finally the youngest, Teacup, the meanest seven-year-old you’ll ever meet, the most gung ho of all of us, who worships the ground Reznik walks on, no matter how much she’s screamed at or kicked around.

I don’t know their real names. We don’t talk about who we were before or how we came to the camp or what happened to our families. None of that matters. Like Ben Parish, those guys—the pre-Flintstone, pre-Tank, pre-Dumbo, etc.—they’re dead. Tagged, bagged, and told we are the last, best hope for humanity, we are the new wine poured into old skins. We bonded through hatred—hatred of the infesteds and their alien masters, sure, but also our fierce, uncompromising, unadulterated hatred of Sergeant Reznik, our rage made all the more intense by the fact that we could never express it.

Then the kid named Nugget was assigned to Barracks 10, and one of us, like an idiot, couldn’t hold it inside any longer, and all the bottled-up fury exploded free.

I’ll give you one guess who that idiot was.

I couldn’t believe it when that kid showed up at roll call. Five years old tops, lost in his white jumpsuit, shivering in the cold morning air of the yard, looking like he was going to be sick, obviously scared out of his mind. And here comes Reznik with his hat pulled low over his beady eyes and his boots shined to a mirror finish and his voice perpetually hoarse from screaming, shoving his pasty, pockmarked grill down into the poor kid’s face. I don’t know how the little squirt kept from soiling himself.

Reznik always starts out slow and soft and builds to a big finish, the better to lull you into thinking he might be an actual human being.

“Well, what do we have here? What have they sent us from central casting—is this a hobbit? Are you a magical creature from a storybook realm come to enchant me with your dark magic?”

Reznik was just getting warmed up, and already the kid was fighting back tears. Fresh off the bus after going through God-knows-what on the outside, and here’s this crazy middle-aged man pouncing on him. I wondered how he was processing Reznik—or any of this craziness they call Camp Haven. I’m still trying to deal, and I’m a lot older than five.

“Oh, this is cute. This is so precious, I think I might cry! Dear God, I’ve dunked chicken nuggets bigger than you in my little plastic cup of spicy barbecue sauce!”

Ratcheting up the volume as he brought his face closer to the kid’s. And the kid holding up surprisingly well, flinching, eyes darting back and forth, but not moving an inch when I knew he must be thinking about taking off across the yard, just running until he couldn’t run anymore.

“What’s your story, Private Nugget? Have you lost your mommy? Do you want to go home? I know! Let’s close our eyes and make a wish and maybe Mommy will come and take us all home! Wouldn’t that be nice, Private Nugget?”

And the kid nodded eagerly, like Reznik had asked the question he’d been waiting to hear. Finally, somebody got to the point! Lifting up his big teddy-bear eyes into the drill sergeant’s beady ones…it was enough to break your heart. It was enough to make you scream.

But you don’t scream. You stand perfectly still, eyes forward, hands at your sides, chest out, heart breaking, watching it out of the corner of your eye while something comes loose inside you, uncoiling like a rattlesnake striking. Something you’ve been holding in for a long time as the pressure built. You don’t know when it’s going to blow, you can’t predict it, and when it happens there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

“Leave him alone.”

Reznik whipped around. No one made a sound, but you could hear the inward gasp. On the other side of the line, Flintstone’s eyes were wide; he couldn’t believe what I just did. I couldn’t, either.

“Who said that? Which one of you scum-sucking maggots just signed his own death warrant?”

Striding down the line, face red with fury, hands clinched into fists, knuckles bone white.

“Nobody, huh? Well, I’m going to fall on my knees and cover my head, because the Lord God his holy self has spoken to me from on high!”

He stopped in front of Tank, who was sweating through his jumpsuit though it was about forty degrees outside. “Was it you, puckerhole? I will tear your arms off!” He brought his fist back to punch Tank in the groin.

Cue the idiot.

“Sir, I said it, sir!” I shouted.

Reznik’s about-face was slow this time. His journey over to me took a thousand years. In the distance, a crow’s harsh call, but that was the only sound I heard.

He stopped just inside my range of vision, not directly in front of me, and that wasn’t good. I couldn’t turn toward him. I had to keep my eyes forward. Worst of all, I couldn’t see his hands; I wouldn’t know when—or where—the blow would land, which meant I wouldn’t know when to brace for it.

“So Private Zombie is giving the orders now,” Reznik said, so softly I could barely hear him. “Private Zombie is Squad Fifty-three’s very own catcher in the fucking rye. Private Zombie, I think I have a crush on you. You make me weak in the knees. You make me hate my own mother for giving birth to a male child, so now it’s impossible for me to have your babies.”

Where was it going to land? My knees? My crotch? Probably the stomach; Reznik has a soft spot for stomachs.

Nope. It was a chop to my Adam’s apple with the side of his hand. I staggered backward, fighting to stay upright, fighting to keep my hands at my sides, not going to give him the satisfaction, not going to give him an excuse to hit me again. The yard and the barracks were ringing, then jiggled and melted a little as my eyes filled with tears—of pain, sure, but of something else, too.

“Sir, he’s just a little kid, sir,” I choked out.

“Private Zombie, you have two seconds, exactly two seconds, to seal that sewer pipe posing as a mouth, or I will incinerate your ass with the rest of the infested alien sons of bitches!”

He took a deep breath, revving up for the next verbal barrage. Having completely lost my mind, I opened my mouth and let the words come out. I’ll be honest: Part of me was filled with relief and something that felt a hell of a lot like joy. I had kept the hate inside for too long.

“Then the senior drill instructor should do it, sir! The private really doesn’t care, sir! Just—just leave the kid alone.”

Total silence. Even the crow stopped fussing. The rest of the squad had stopped breathing. I knew what they were thinking. We’d all heard the story about the lippy recruit and the “accident” on the obstacle course that put him in the hospital for three weeks. And the other story about the quiet ten-year-old who they found in the showers strung up with an extension cord. Suicide, the doctor said. A lot of people weren’t so sure.

Reznik didn’t move. “Private Zombie, who is your squad leader?”

“Sir, the private’s squad leader is Private Flintstone, sir!”

“Private Flintstone, front and center!” Reznik barked. Flint took one step forward and snapped off a salute. His unibrow jiggled with tension. “Private Flintstone, you’re fired. Private Zombie is now squad leader. Private Zombie is ignorant and ugly, but he is not soft.” I could feel Reznik’s eyes boring into my face. “Private Zombie, what happened to your baby sister?”

I blinked. Twice. Trying not to show anything. My voice cracked a little when I answered, though. “Sir, the private’s sister is dead, sir!”

“Because you ran like a chickenshit!”

“Sir, the private ran like a chickenshit, sir!”

“But you’re not running now, are you, Private Zombie? Are you?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

He stepped back. Something flashed across his face. An expression I’d never seen before. It couldn’t be, of course, but it looked a lot like respect.

“Private Nugget, front and center!”

The newbie didn’t move until Poundcake gave him a poke in the back. He was crying. He didn’t want to, he was trying to choke it back, but dear Jesus, what little kid wouldn’t be crying by that point? Your old life barfs you out and this is where you land?

“Private Nugget, Private Zombie is your squad leader, and you will bunk with him. You will learn from him. He will teach you how to walk. He will teach you how to talk. He will teach you how to think. He will be the big brother you never had. Do you read me, Private Nugget?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” The tiny voice shrill and squeaky, but he got the rules down, and quickly.

And that’s how it began.