Текст книги "The 5th Wave"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

55

“CASSIE?” HE SAYS, grabbing my arms to keep me from falling straight back onto my butt. “What are you doing out here?” He glances over my shoulder into the barn.

“I thought I heard a noise.” Dumb! Now he might decide to investigate. But it’s the first thing that pops into my head. Blurting out first thoughts is something I really should work on—if I live past the next five minutes. My heart is pounding so hard, I can feel my ears ringing.

“You thought you…? Cassie, you shouldn’t come out here at night.”

I nod and force myself to look into his eyes. Evan Walker is a noticer. “I know, it was stupid. But you’d been gone a long time.”

“I was stalking some deer.” He’s a big, Evan-shaped shadow in front of me, a shadow with a high-powered rifle against the backdrop of a million suns.

I bet you were. “Let’s go inside, okay? I’m freezing to death.”

He doesn’t move. He’s looking into the barn.

“I checked it out,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Rats.”

“Rats?”

“Yeah. Rats.”

“You heard rats? In the barn? From inside the house?”

“No. How could I hear rats from there?” An exasperated roll of the eyes would be good right about now. Not the nervous laugh that escapes instead. “I came out on the porch for some fresh air.”

“And you heard them from the porch?”

“They were very big rats.” Flirty smile! I whip out what I hope passes for one of those, then I hook my arm through his and pull him toward the house. It’s like trying to move a concrete pole. If he goes inside the barn and sees the exposed rifle, it’s over. Why the hell didn’t I cover up the rifle?

“Evan, it’s nothing. I got spooked, that’s all.”

“Okay.”

He shoves the barn door closed, and we head back to the farmhouse, his arm draped protectively over my shoulders. He lets the arm fall when we reach the door.

Now, Cassie. Quick side step to the right, Luger from your waistband, proper two-handed grip, knees slightly bent, squeeze, don’t pull. Now.

We step inside the warm kitchen. The opportunity passes.

“So I take it you didn’t bag any deer,” I say casually.

“No.” He leans the rifle against the wall, shrugs out of his coat. His cheeks are bright red from the cold.

“Maybe you shot at something else,” I say. “Maybe that’s what I heard.”

He shakes his head. “I didn’t shoot at anything.” He blows on his hands. I follow him into the great room, where he bends in front of the fireplace to warm his hands. I’m standing behind the sofa a few feet away.

My second chance to take him down. Hitting him from this close would not be a challenge. Or it wouldn’t be if his head resembled an empty can of creamed corn, the only kind of target I was used to.

I pull the gun from my waistband.

Finding my rifle in his barn didn’t leave me with many options. It was like being under that car on the highway: hide or face. Doing nothing about it, pretending everything was fine between us, accomplished nothing. Shooting him in the back of the head would accomplish something—it would kill him—but after the Crucifix Soldier, it had become one of my priorities never to kill another innocent person. Better to show my hand now while that hand holds a gun.

“There’s something I should tell you,” I say. My voice is shaking. “I lied about the rats.”

“You found the rifle.” Not a question.

He turns. With his back to the fire, his face is in shadow; I can’t read his expression, but his tone is casual. “I found it a couple of days ago off the highway—remembered you said you dropped one when you ran—then I saw those initials and I figured it had to be yours.”

For a minute I don’t say anything. His explanation makes perfect sense. I just didn’t expect him to jump right into it like that.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I finally ask.

He shrugs. “I was going to. Guess I forgot. What are you doing with that gun, Cassie?”

Oh, I was thinking about blowing your head off, that’s all. Thought you might be a Silencer or maybe a traitor to your species or something along those lines. Ha-ha!

I follow his eyes to the weapon in my hand, and suddenly I feel like bursting into tears.

“We have to trust each other,” I whisper. “Don’t we?”

“Yes,” he says, moving toward me now. “We do.”

“But how…how do you make yourself trust someone?” I say. He’s beside me now. He doesn’t reach for the gun. He’s reaching for me with his eyes. And I want him to catch me before I fall too far away from the Evan-I-thought-I-knew, who saved me to save himself from falling. He’s all I’ve got now. He’s my itty-bitty bush growing out of the cliff that I cling to. Help me, Evan. Don’t let me fall. Don’t let me lose the part of me that makes me human.

“You can’t make yourself believe anything,” he answers softly. “But you can let yourself believe. You can allow yourself to trust.”

I nod, looking up into his eyes. So chocolaty warm. So melty and sad. Damn it, why does he have to be so damn beautiful? And why do I have to be so damn aware of it? And how is my trusting him any different from Sammy’s taking the soldier’s hand before climbing onto that bus? The weird thing is his eyes remind me of Sammy’s—filled with a longing to know if everything will be all right. The Others answered that question with an unequivocal no. So what does that make me if I give Evan the same answer? “I want to. Really, really bad.”

I don’t know how it happened, but my gun is now in his hand. He takes my hand and leads me around to the sofa. Sets the gun on top of Love’s Desperate Desire, sits close to me, but not too close, and rests his elbows on his knees. He rubs his large hands together as if they’re still cold. They’re not; I had just held one.

“I don’t want to leave here,” he confesses. “For a lot of reasons that seemed very good until I found you.” He claps his hands together softly in frustration; it isn’t coming out right. “I know you didn’t ask to be my reason for going on with…with everything. But from the moment I found you…” He turns and grabs my hands in his, and suddenly I’m a little scared. His grip is hard, his eyes swim with tears. It’s like I’m holding him back from tumbling over the edge of a cliff.

“I had it all wrong,” he says. “Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn’t. To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.”

56

THE WORLD IS SCREAMING.

Just the icy wind racing through the open hatch of the Black Hawk, but that’s what it sounds like. At the height of the plague, when people were dying by the hundreds every day, the panicky residents of Tent City would sometimes toss an unconscious person into the fire by mistake, and you didn’t just hear their screams as they were burned alive, you felt them like a punch to your heart.

Some things you can never leave behind. They don’t belong to the past. They belong to you.

The world is screaming. The world is being burned alive.

Through the chopper windows, you can see the fires dotting the dark landscape, amber blotches against the inky backdrop, multiplying as you near the outskirts of the city. These aren’t funeral pyres. Lightning from summer storms started them, and the autumn winds carried the smoldering embers to new feeding grounds, because there was so much to eat, the pantry was stuffed. The world will burn for years. It will burn until I’m my father’s age—if I live that long.

We’re skimming ten feet above treetop level, the rotors muffled by some kind of stealth technology, approaching downtown Dayton from the north. A light snow is falling; it shimmers around the fires below like golden halos, shedding light, illuminating nothing.

I turn from the window and see Ringer across the aisle, staring at me. She holds up two fingers. I nod. Two minutes to the drop. I pull the headband down to position the lens of the eyepiece over my left eye and adjust the strap.

Ringer is pointing at Teacup, who’s in the chair next to me. Her eyepiece keeps slipping. I tighten the strap; she gives me a thumbs-up, and something sour rises in my throat. Seven years old. Dear Jesus. I lean over and shout in her ear, “You stay right next to me, understand?”

Teacup smiles, shakes her head, points at Ringer. I’m staying with her! I laugh. Teacup’s no dummy.

Over the river now, the Black Hawk skimming only a few feet above the water. Ringer is checking her weapon for the thousandth time. Beside her, Flintstone is tapping his foot nervously, staring forward, looking at nothing.

There’s Dumbo inventorying his med kit, and Oompa bending his head in an attempt to keep us from seeing him stuff one last candy bar into his mouth.

Finally, Poundcake with his head down, hands folded in his lap. Reznik named him Poundcake because he said he was soft and sweet. He doesn’t strike me as either, especially on the firing range. Ringer’s a better marksman overall, but I’ve seen Poundcake take out six targets in six seconds.

Yeah, Zombie. Targets. Plywood cutouts of human beings. When it comes down to the real deal, how will his aim be then? Or any of ours?

Unbelievable. We’re the vanguard. Seven kids who just six months ago were, well, just kids; we’re the counterpunch to attacks that left seven billion dead.

There’s Ringer, staring at me again. As the chopper begins to descend, she unbuckles her harness and steps across the aisle. Places her hands on my shoulders and shouts in my face, “Remember the circle! We’re not going to die!”

We dive into the drop zone fast and steep. The chopper doesn’t land; it hovers a few inches above the frozen turf while the squad hops out. From the open hatchway, I look over and see Teacup struggling with her harness. Then she’s loose and jumps out ahead of me. I’m the last to go. In the cockpit, the pilot looks over his shoulder, gives me a thumbs-up. I return the signal.

The Black Hawk rockets into the night sky, turning hard north, its black hull blending quickly into the dark clouds until they swallow it, and it’s gone.

The air in the little park by the river has been blasted clear of snow by the rotors. After the chopper leaves, the snow returns, spinning angrily around us. The sudden quiet that follows the screaming wind is deafening. Straight ahead a huge human shadow looms: the statue of a Korean War veteran. To the statue’s left is the bridge. Across the bridge and ten blocks southwest is the old courthouse where several infesteds have amassed a small arsenal of automatic weapons and grenade launchers, as well as FIM-92 Stinger missiles, according to the Wonderland profile of one infested captured in Operation Li’l Bo Peep. It’s the Stingers that brought us here. Our air capability has been devastated by the attacks; it’s imperative we protect the few resources we have left.

Our mission is twofold: Destroy or capture all enemy ordnance and terminate all infested personnel.

Terminate with extreme prejudice.

Ringer’s on the point; she has the best eyes. We follow her past the stern-faced statue onto the bridge; Flint, Dumbo, Oompa, Poundcake, and Teacup, with me covering our rear. Weaving through the stalled cars that seem to pop through a white curtain, covered in three seasons’ worth of debris. Some have had their windows smashed, decorated with graffiti, looted for any valuables, but what’s valuable anymore? Teacup scurrying along in front of me on baby feet—she’s valuable. There’s my big takeaway from the Arrival. By killing us, they showed us the idiocy of stuff. The guy who owned this BMW? He’s in the same place as the woman who owned that Kia.

We pull up just shy of Patterson Boulevard, at the southern end of the bridge. Hunker down beside the smashed front bumper of an SUV and survey the road ahead. The snow cuts down our visibility to about half a block. This might take a while. I look at my watch. Four hours till pickup back at the park.

A tanker truck has stalled out in the middle of the intersection twenty yards away, blocking our view of the left-hand side of the street. I can’t see it, but I know from the mission briefing there’s a four-story building on that side, a prime sentry point if they wanted to keep an eye on the bridge. I motion for Ringer to keep to the right as we leave the bridge, putting the truck between us and the building.

She pulls up sharply at the truck’s front bumper and drops to the ground. The squad follows her lead, and I belly-scoot forward to join her.

“What do you see?” I whisper.

“Three of them, two o’clock.”

I squint through my eyepiece toward the building on the other side of the street. Through the cottony fuzz of the snow, I see three green blobs of light bobbing along the sidewalk, growing larger as they approach the intersection. My first thought is, Holy crap, these lenses actually work. My second thought: Holy crap, Teds, and they’re coming straight at us.

“Patrol?” I ask Ringer.

She shrugs. “Probably marked the chopper and they’re coming to check it out.” She’s lying on her belly, holding them in her sights, waiting for the order to fire. The green blobs grow larger; they’ve reached the opposite corner. I can barely make out their bodies beneath the green beacons on top of their shoulders. It’s a weird, jarring effect, as if their heads are engulfed in a spinning, iridescent green fire.

Not yet. If they start to cross, give the order.

Beside me, Ringer takes a deep breath, holds it, waits for my order patiently, like she could wait for a thousand years. Snow settles on her shoulders, clings to her dark hair. The tip of her nose is bright red. The moment drags out. What if there’s more than three? If we announce our presence, it could bring a hundred of them down on us from a dozen different hiding places. Engage or wait? I chew on my bottom lip, working through the options.

“I’ve got them,” she says, misreading my hesitation.

Across the street, the green blobs of light are stationary, clustered together as if locked in conversation. I can’t tell if they’re even facing this way, but I’m sure they don’t know we’re here. If they did, they’d rush us, open fire, take cover, do something. We have the element of surprise. And we have Ringer. Even if she misses with the first shot, the follow-ups won’t. It’s an easy call, really.

So what’s stopping me from making it?

Ringer must be wondering the same thing, because she glances over at me and whispers, “Zombie? What’s the call?”

There’s my orders: Terminate all infested personnel. There’s my gut instinct: Don’t rush. Don’t force the issue. Let it play out. And there’s me, squeezed in the middle.

A heartbeat before our ears register the high-powered rifle’s report, the pavement two feet in front of us disintegrates in a spray of dirty snow and pulverized concrete. That resolves my dilemma fast. The words fly out as if snatched from my lungs by the icy wind: “Take them.”

Ringer’s bullet smashes into one of the bobbing green lights, and the light winks out. One light takes off to our right. Ringer swings the barrel toward my face. I duck as she fires again, and the second light winks out. The third seems to shrink as he tears up the street, heading back the way he came.

I jump to my feet. Can’t let him get away to sound the alarm. Ringer grabs my wrist and yanks hard to bring me back down.

“Damn it, Ringer, what are you do—”

“It’s a trap.” She points at the six-inch scar in the concrete. “Didn’t you hear it? It didn’t come from them. It came from over there.” She jerks her head toward the building on the opposite side of the street. “From our left. And judging by the angle, from high up, maybe the roof.”

I shake my head. A fourth infested on the roof? How did he know we were here—and why didn’t he warn the others? We’re hidden behind the truck, which means he must have spotted us on the bridge—spotted us and held his fire until we were blocked from view and there was no way he could hit us. It didn’t make sense.

And Ringer goes, like she’s read my mind, “I guess this is what they meant by ‘the fog of war.’”

I nod. Things are getting way too complicated way too fast.

“How’d he see us cross?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Night vision, has to be.”

“Then we’re screwed.” Pinned down. Beside several thousands of gallons of gasoline. “He’ll take out the truck.”

Ringer shrugs. “Not with a bullet, he won’t. That only works in the movies, Zombie.” She looks at me. Waiting for my call.

Along with the rest of the squad. I glance behind me. Their eyes look back at me, big and bug-eyed in the snowy dark. Teacup is either freezing to death or shaking with complete terror. Flint is scowling, and the only one to speak up and let me know what the rest are thinking: “Trapped. We abort now, right?”

Tempting, but suicidal. If the sniper on the roof doesn’t take us down on the retreat, the reinforcements that must be coming will.

Retreating is not an option. Advancing is not an option. Staying put is not an option. There are no options.

Run = die. Stay = die.

“Speaking of night vision,” Ringer growls, “they might have thought of that before dropping us on a night mission. We’re totally blind out here.”

I stare at her. Totally blind. Bless you, Ringer. I order the squad to close ranks around me and whisper, “Next block, right-hand side, attached to the back side of the office building, there’s a parking garage.” Or at least there should be, according to the map. “Get up to the third floor. Buddy system: Flint with Ringer, Poundcake with Oompa, Dumbo with Teacup.”

“What about you?” Ringer asks. “Where’s your buddy?”

“I don’t need a buddy,” I answer. “I’m a freaking zombie.”

Here comes the smile. Wait for it.

57

I POINT OUT the embankment leading down to the water’s edge. “All the way down to that walking trail,” I say to Ringer. “And don’t wait for me.” She shakes her head, frowning. I lean in, keeping my expression as serious as I can. “I thought I had you with the zombie remark. One of these days, I’m going to get a smile out of you, Private.”

Very much not smiling. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“You have something against smiling?”

“It was the first thing to go.” Then the snow and the dark swallow her. The rest of the squad follows. I can hear Teacup whimpering beneath her breath as Dumbo leads her off, going, “Run hard when it goes, Cup, okay?”

I squat beside the truck’s fuel tank and grab hold of the metal cap, praying one of those counterintuitive prayers that this bad boy is topped off—or better, half-full, since fumes will give us the biggest bang for the buck. I don’t dare ignite the cargo, but the few gallons of diesel contained beneath it should set it off. I hope.

The cap is frozen. I beat on it with the butt of my rifle, wrap both hands around it, and give it everything I’ve got. It pops loose with a very pungent, very satisfying hiss. I’ll have ten seconds. Should I count? Naw, screw it. I pull the pin on the grenade, drop it in the hole, and take off down the hill. The snow whips fitfully in my wake. My toe catches on something and I tumble the rest of the way, landing on my back at the bottom, hitting my head on the asphalt of the paved walking trail. I see snow spinning around my head and I can smell the river, and then I hear a soft wuh-wuumph and the tanker jumps about two feet into the air, followed by a gorgeous blossoming fireball that reflects off the falling snow, a mini universe of tiny suns shimmering, and now I’m up and chugging up the hill, my team nowhere in sight, and I can feel the heat against my left cheek as I come even with the truck, which is still in one piece, the tank intact. Dropping the grenade inside the fuel tank didn’t ignite the cargo. Do I throw another? Do I keep running? Blinded by the explosion, the sniper would rip off his night vision goggles. He won’t be blind for long.

I’m through the intersection and onto the curb when the gasoline ignites. The blast throws me forward, over the body of the first Ted dropped by Ringer, right into the glass doors of the office building. I hear something crack and hope it’s the doors and not some important part of me. Huge jagged shards of metal rain down, pieces of the tank torn apart by the blast hurled a hundred yards in every direction at bullet speeds. I hear someone screaming as I fold my arms over my head and curl myself into the tiniest ball possible. The heat is incredible. It’s like I’ve been swallowed by the sun.

The glass behind me shatters—from a high-caliber bullet, not the explosion. Half a block from the garage—go, Zombie. And I’m going hard until I come across Oompa crumpled on the sidewalk, Poundcake kneeling beside him, tugging on his shoulder, his face twisted in a soundless cry. It was Oompa I heard screaming after the tanker blew, and it takes me only a half second to see why: A piece of metal the size of a Frisbee juts out of his lower back.

I push Poundcake toward the garage—“Go!”—and heave Oompa’s round little body over my shoulder. I hear the report of the rifle this time, two beats after the shooter across the street fires, and a chunk of concrete breaks free of the wall behind me.

The first level of the garage is separated from the sidewalk by a waist-high concrete wall. I ease Oompa over the wall, then hop over and duck down. Ka-thunk: A fist-size chunk of the wall blows back toward me. Kneeling beside Oompa, I look up to see Poundcake hoofing it toward the stairwell. Now, as long as there isn’t another sniper’s nest in this building, and as long as the infested who got away hasn’t taken refuge here, too…

A quick check of Oompa’s injury isn’t encouraging. The sooner I can get him upstairs to Dumbo, the better.

“Private Oompa,” I breathe in his ear. “You do not have permission to die, understood?”

He nods, sucking in the freezing air, blowing it out again, warm from the center of his body. But he’s as white as the snow billowing in the golden light. I throw him back onto my shoulder and trot to the stairs, keeping as low as I can without losing my balance.

I take the stairs two at a time till I reach the third level, where I find the unit crouched behind the first line of cars, several feet back from the wall that faces the sniper’s building. Dumbo is kneeling beside Teacup, working on her leg. Her fatigues are ripped, and I can see an ugly red gash where a bullet tore across her calf. Dumbo slaps a dressing over the wound, hands her off to Ringer, then rushes over to Oompa. Flintstone is shaking his head at me.

“Told you we should abort,” Flint says. His eyes glitter with malice. “Now look.”

I ignore him. Turn to Dumbo. “Well?”

“It’s not good, Sarge.”

“Then make it good.” I look over at Teacup, who’s buried her head into Ringer’s chest, whimpering softly.

“It’s superficial,” Ringer tells me. “She can move.”

I nod. Oompa down. Teacup shot. Flint ready to mutiny. A sniper across the street and a hundred or so of his best friends on their way to the party. I’ve got to come up with something brilliant and come up with it quickly. “He knows where we are, which means we can’t camp here long. See if you can take him.”

She nods, but she can’t peel Teacup off her. I hold out my hands wet with Oompa’s blood: Give her to me. Delivered, Teacup squirms against my shirt. She doesn’t want me. I jerk my head toward the street and turn to Poundcake, “Cake, go with Ringer. Take the SOB out.”

Ringer and Poundcake duck between two cars and disappear. I stroke Teacup’s bare head—somewhere along the way she lost her cap—and watch Dumbo gingerly pull on the fragment in Oompa’s back. Oompa howls in agony, his fingers clawing at the ground. Unsure, Dumbo looks up at me. I nod. It’s gotta come out. “Quick, Dumbo. Slow makes it worse.” So he yanks.

Oompa folds in on himself, and the echoes of his screams rocket around the garage. Dumbo tosses the jagged piece of metal to one side and shines his light on the gaping wound.

Grimacing, he rolls Oompa onto his back. His shirtfront is soaked. Dumbo rips the shirt open, exposing the exit wound: The shrapnel had entered through his back and slammed through to the other side.

Flint turns away, crawls a couple feet, and his back arches as he vomits. Teacup gets very still watching all this. She’s going into shock. Teacup, the one who screamed the loudest during mock charges in the yard. Teacup, the bloodthirstiest, the one who sang the loudest in P&D. I’m losing her.

And I’m losing Oompa. As Dumbo presses wadding against the wound in Oompa’s gut, trying to stem the flow, his eyes seek out mine.

“What are your orders, Private?” I ask him.

“I—I am not to—to…”

Dumbo tosses the blood-soaked dressing away and presses a fresh patch against Oompa’s stomach. Looking into my face. Doesn’t have to say anything. Not to me. Not to Oompa.

I ease Teacup from my lap and kneel beside Oompa. His breath smells like blood and chocolate.

“It’s because I’m fat,” he chokes out. He starts to cry.

“Stow that shit,” I tell him sternly.

He whispers something. I bring my ear close to his mouth. “My name is Kenny.” Like it’s a terrible secret he’s been afraid to share.

His eyes roll toward the ceiling. Then he’s gone.