Текст книги "The 5th Wave"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

62

“THIS IS SERIOUSLY, seriously messed up,” Flintstone says to me. “Reznik was sniping us?”

We’re sitting against the concrete half wall of the garage, Ringer and Poundcake on the flanks, watching the street below. Dumbo is on one side of me, Flint on the other, Teacup between them, pressing her head against my chest.

“Reznik is a Ted,” I tell him for the third time. “Camp Haven is theirs. They’ve been using us to—”

“Stow it, Zombie! That’s the craziest, most paranoid load of crap I’ve ever heard!” Flintstone’s wide face is beet red. His unibrow jumps and twitches. “You wasted our drill instructor! Who was trying to waste us! On a mission to waste Teds! You guys can do what you want, but this is it for me. This is it.”

He pushes himself to his feet and shakes his fist at me. “I’m going back to the rendezvous point to wait for the evac. This is…” He searches for the right word, then settles for, “Bullshit.”

“Flint,” I say, keeping my voice low and steady. “Stand down.”

“Unbelievable. You’ve gone Dorothy. Dumbo, Cake, are you buying this? You can’t be buying this.”

I pull the silver device from my pocket. Flip it open. Shove it toward his face. “See that green dot right there? That’s you.” I scroll down to his number and highlight with a jab of my thumb. The green button flashes. “Know what happens when you hit the green button?”

It’s one of those things you lie awake at night for the rest of your life and wish you could take back.

Flintstone jumps forward and snatches the device from my hand. I might have gotten to him in time, but Teacup’s in my lap and it slows me down. All that happens before he hits the button is my shout of “No!”

Flintstone’s head snaps back violently as if someone has smacked him hard in the forehead. His mouth flies open, his eyes roll toward the ceiling.

Then he drops, straight down and loose-limbed, like a puppet whose strings have lost their tension.

Teacup is screaming. Ringer pulls her off me, and I kneel beside Flint. Though I do it anyway, I don’t have to check his pulse to know he’s dead. All I have to do is look at the display of the device clutched in his hand, at the red dot where the green one used to be.

“Guess you were right, Ringer,” I say over my shoulder.

I ease the control pad out of Flintstone’s lifeless hand. My own hand is shaking. Panic. Confusion. But mostly anger: I’m furious at Flint. I am seriously tempted to smash my fist into his big, fat face.

Behind me, Dumbo says, “What are we going to do now, Sarge?” He’s panicking, too.

“Right now you’re going to cut out Poundcake’s and Teacup’s implants.”

His voice goes up an octave. “Me?”

Mine goes down one. “You’re the medic, right? Ringer will do yours.”

“Okay, but then what are we going to do? We can’t go back. We can’t—where’re we supposed to go now?”

Ringer is looking at me. I’m getting better at reading her expressions. That slight downturn of her mouth means she’s bracing herself, like she already knows what I’m about to say. Who knows? She probably does.

“You’re not going back, Dumbo.”

“You mean we aren’t going back,” Ringer corrects me. “We, Zombie.”

I stand up. It seems to take me forever to get upright. I step over to her. The wind whips her hair to one side, a black banner flying.

“We left one behind,” I say.

She shakes her head sharply. Her bangs swing back and forth in a pleasant way. “Nugget? Zombie, you can’t go back for him. It’s suicide.”

“I can’t leave him. I made a promise.” I start to explain it, but I don’t even know how to begin. How do I put it into words? It isn’t possible. It’s like locating the starting point of a circle.

Or finding the first link in a silver chain.

“I ran one time,” I finally say. “I’m not running again.”

63

THERE IS THE SNOW, tiny pinpricks of white, spinning down.

There is the river reeking of human waste and human remains, black and swift and silent beneath the clouds that hide the glowing green eye of the mothership.

And there’s the seventeen-year-old high school football jock dressed up like a soldier with a high-powered semiautomatic rifle that the ones from the glowing green eye gave him, crouching by the statue of a real soldier who fought and died with clear mind and clean heart, uncorrupted by the lies of an enemy who knows how he thinks, who twists everything good in him to evil, who uses his hope and trust to turn him into a weapon against his own kind. The kid who didn’t go back when he should have and now goes back when he shouldn’t. The kid called Zombie, who made a promise, and if he breaks that promise, the war is over—not the big war, but the war that matters, the one in the battlefield of his heart.

Because promises matter. They matter now more than ever.

In the park by the river in the snow spinning down.

I feel the chopper before I hear it. A change in pressure, a thrumming against my exposed skin. Then the rhythmic percussion of the blades, and I rise unsteadily, pressing my hand into the bullet wound in my side.

“Where should I shoot you?” Ringer asked.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be the legs or the arms.”

And Dumbo, who had plenty of experience with human anatomy from processing duty: “Shoot him in the side. Close range. And angled this way, or you’ll puncture his intestines.”

And Ringer: “What do we do if I puncture your intestines?”

“Bury me, because I’ll be dead.”

A smile? No. Damn.

And afterward, as Dumbo examined the wound, she asked, “How long do we wait for you?”

“No more than a day.”

“A day?”

“Okay. Two days. If we aren’t back in forty-eight hours, we aren’t coming back.”

She didn’t argue with me. But she said, “If you aren’t back in forty-eight hours, I’m coming back for you.”

“Dumb move, chess player.”

“This isn’t chess.”

Black shadow roaring over the bare branches of the trees ringing the park, and the heavy pulsing beat of the rotors like an enormous racing heart, and the icy wind blasting down, pressing on my shoulders as I hoof it toward the open hatch.

The pilot whips his head around as I dive inside. “Where’s your unit?”

Falling into the empty seat. “Go! Go!”

And the pilot: “Soldier, where’s your unit?”

From the trees my unit answers, opening up a barrage of continuous fire, and the rounds slam and pop into the reinforced hull of the Black Hawk, and I’m shouting at the top of my lungs, “Go, go, go!” Which costs me: With every “Go!” blood is forced through the wound and dribbles through my fingers.

The pilot lifts off, shoots forward, then banks hard to the left. I close my eyes. Go, Ringer. Go.

The Black Hawk lays down strafing fire, pulverizing the trees, and the pilot is shouting something at the copilot, and the chopper is over the trees now, but Ringer and my crew should be long gone, down on the walking trail that borders the dark banks of the river. We circle the trees several times, firing until the trees are shattered stubs of their former selves. The pilot glances into the hold, sees me lying across two seats, holding my bloody side. He pulls up and hits the gas. The chopper shoots toward the clouds; the park is swallowed up by the white nothing of the snow.

I’m losing consciousness. Too much blood. Too much. There’s Ringer’s face, and damn if she isn’t just smiling, she’s laughing, and good for me, good for me that I made her laugh.

And there’s Nugget, and he definitely isn’t smiling.

Don’t promise, don’t promise, don’t promise! Don’t promise anything ever, ever, ever!

“I’m coming. I promise.”

64

I WAKE UP where it began, in a hospital bed, bandaged up and floating on a sea of painkillers, circle complete.

It takes me several minutes to realize I’m not alone. There’s someone sitting in the chair on the other side of the IV drip. I turn my head and see his boots first, black, shined to a mirror finish. The faultless uniform, starched and pressed. The chiseled face, the piercing blue eyes that bore down to the bottom of me.

“And so here you are,” Vosch says softly. “Safe if not entirely sound. The doctors tell me you’re extraordinarily lucky to have survived. No major damage; the bullet passed clean through. Amazing, really, given that you were shot at such close range.”

What are you going to tell him?

I’m going to tell him the truth.

“It was Ringer,” I tell him. You bastard. You son of a bitch. For months I saw him as my savior—as humanity’s savior, even. His promises gave me the cruelest gift: hope.

He cocks his head to one side, reminding me of some bright-eyed bird eyeing a tasty morsel.

“And why did Private Ringer shoot you, Ben?”

You can’t tell him the truth.

Okay. Screw the truth. I’ll give him facts instead.

“Because of Reznik.”

“Reznik?”

“Sir, Private Ringer shot me because I defended Reznik’s being there.”

“And why would you need to defend Reznik’s being there, Sergeant?” Crossing his legs and cupping his upraised knee with his hands. It’s hard to maintain eye contact with him for more than three or four seconds at a time.

“They turned on us, sir. Well, not all of them. Flintstone and Ringer—and Teacup, but only because Ringer did. They said Reznik’s being there proved that this was all a lie, and that you—”

He holds up a hand. “‘This’?”

“The camp, the infesteds. That we weren’t being trained to kill the aliens. The aliens were training us to kill one another.”

He doesn’t say anything at first. I almost wish he would laugh or smile or shake his head. If he did anything like that, I might have some doubt; I might rethink the whole this-is-an-alien-head-fake thing and conclude I am suffering from paranoia and battle-induced hysteria.

Instead he just stares back at me with no expression, with those bird-bright eyes.

“And you wanted no part of their little conspiracy theory?”

I nod. A good, strong, confident nod—I hope. “They went Dorothy on me, sir. Turned the whole squad against me.” I smile. A grim, tough, soldiery grin—I hope. “But not before I took care of Flint.”

“We recovered his body,” Vosch tells me. “Like you, he was shot at very close range. Unlike you, the target was a little higher up in the anatomy.”

Are you sure about this, Zombie? Why do you need to shoot him in the head?

They can’t know he’s been zapped. Maybe if I do enough damage, it’ll destroy the evidence. Stand back, Ringer. You know I don’t have the best aim in the world.

“I would have wasted the rest of them, but I was outnumbered, sir. I decided the best thing to do was get my ass back to base and report.”

Again he doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything for a long time. Just stares. What are you? I wonder. Are you human? Are you a Ted? Or are you…something else? What the hell are you?

“They’ve vanished, you know,” he finally says. Then waits for my answer. Luckily, I’ve thought of one. Or Ringer did. Credit where credit is due.

“They cut out their trackers.”

“Yours too,” he points out. And waits. Over his shoulder, I see orderlies in their green scrubs moving along the row of beds and hear the squeak of their shoes along the linoleum floor. Just another day in the hospital of the damned.

I’m ready for his question. “I was playing along. Waiting for an opening. Dumbo did Ringer next, after me, and that’s when I made my move.”

“Shooting Flintstone…”

“And then Ringer shot me.”

“And then…” Arms crossed over his chest now. Chin lowered. Studying me with hooded eyes. The way a bird of prey might its supper.

“And then I ran. Sir.”

So I’m able to take Reznik down in the dark in the middle of a snowstorm, but I can’t pop you from two feet away? He won’t buy it, Zombie.

I don’t need him to buy it. Just rent it for a few hours.

He clears his throat. Scratches beneath his chin. Studies the ceiling tiles for a little while before looking back at me. “How fortunate for you, Ben, that you made it to the evac point before bleeding to death.”

Oh, you bet, you whatever-you-are. Fortunate as hell.

A silence slams down. Blue eyes. Tight mouth. Folded arms.

“You haven’t told me everything.”

“Sir?”

“You’re leaving something out.”

I slowly shake my head. The room sways like a ship in a storm. How much painkiller did they give me?

“Your former drill sergeant. Someone in your unit must have searched him. And found one of these in his possession.” Holding up a silver device identical to Reznik’s. “At which point someone—I would think you, being the ranking officer—would wonder what Reznik was doing with a mechanism capable of terminating your lives with a touch of a button.”

I’m nodding. Ringer and I figured he’d go there, and I’m ready with an answer. Whether he buys it or not, that’s the question.

“There’s only one explanation that makes any sense, sir. It was our first mission, our first real combat. We needed to be monitored. And you needed a fail-safe in case any of us went Dorothy—turned on the others…”

I trail off, out of breath and glad that I am, because I don’t trust myself on the dope. My thinking isn’t crystal clear. I’m walking through a minefield in some very dense fog. Ringer anticipated this. She made me practice this part over and over as we waited in the park for the chopper to return, right before she pressed her sidearm against my stomach and pulled the trigger.

The chair scrapes against the floor, and suddenly Vosch’s lean, hard face fills my vision.

“It really is extraordinary, Ben. For you to resist the group dynamics of combat, the enormous pressure to follow the herd. It’s almost—well, inhuman, for lack of a better word.”

“I’m human,” I whisper, heart beating in my chest so hard, for a second I’m sure he can see it beating through my thin gown.

“Are you? Because that’s the crux of it, isn’t it, Ben? That’s the whole ballgame! Who is human—and who is not. Have we not eyes, Ben? Hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

The hard angle of the jaw. The severity of the blue eyes. The thin lips pale against the flushed face.

“Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Spoken by a member of a despised and persecuted race. Like our race, Ben. The human race.”

“I don’t think they hate us, sir.” Trying to keep my cool in this strange and unexpected turn in the minefield. My head is spinning. Gut-shot, doped up, discussing Shakespeare with the commandant of one of the most efficient death camps in the history of the world.

“They have a strange way of showing their affection.”

“They don’t love or hate us. We’re just in the way. Maybe to them, we’re the infestation.”

“Periplaneta americana to their Homo sapiens? In that contest, I’ll take the cockroach. Very difficult to eradicate.”

He pats me on the shoulder. Gets very serious. We’ve come to the real meat of it, do or die time, pass or fail; I can feel it. He’s turning the sleek silver device over and over in his hand.

Your plan sucks, Zombie. You know that.

Okay. Let’s hear yours.

We stay together. Take our chances with whoever’s holed up in the courthouse.

And Nugget?

They won’t hurt him. Why are you so worried about Nugget? God, Zombie, there are hundreds of kids—

Yeah, there are. But I made a promise to one.

“This is a very grave development, Ben. Very grave. Ringer’s delusion will drive her to seek shelter with the very things she was tasked to destroy. She will share with them everything she knows about our operations. We’ve dispatched three more squads to preempt her, but I’m afraid it may be too late. If it is too late, we’ll have no choice but to execute the option of last resort.”

His eyes burn with their own pale blue fire. I actually shiver when he turns away, cold all of a sudden, and very, very scared.

What is the option of last resort?

He may not have bought it, but he did rent it. I’m still alive. And as long as I’m alive, Nugget has a chance.

He turns back as if he’s just remembered something.

Crap. Here it comes.

“Oh, one more thing. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we’re pulling you off the pain meds so we can run a full debriefing on you.”

“Debriefing, sir?”

“Combat is a funny thing, Ben. It plays tricks on your memory. And we’ve found that the meds interfere with the program. It should take about six hours for your system to be clear.”

I still don’t get it, Zombie. Why do I have to shoot you? Why can’t the story be you gave us the slip? It’s a little over-the-top, if you ask me.

I have to be injured, Ringer.

Why?

So they’ll put me on meds.

Why?

To buy me time. So they don’t take me straight there from the chopper.

Take you where?

So I don’t have to ask what Vosch is talking about, but I ask anyway: “You’re plugging me in to Wonderland?”

He crooks his finger at an orderly, who comes forward holding a tray. A tray with a syringe and a tiny silver pellet.

“We’re plugging you in to Wonderland.”

65

WE FELL ASLEEP last night in front of the fireplace, and this morning I woke up in our bed—no, not our bed. My bed. Val’s bed? The bed, and I don’t remember climbing the stairs, so he must have carried me up and tucked me in, only he isn’t in bed with me now. I’m a little panicky when I realize he’s not here. It’s a lot easier to push down my doubt when he’s with me. When I can see those eyes the color of melted chocolate and hear his deep voice that falls over me like a warm blanket on a cold night. Oh, you’re such a hopeless case, Cassie. Such a train wreck.

I dress quickly in the weak light of dawn and go downstairs. He’s not there, either, but my M16 is, cleaned and loaded and leaning against the mantel. I call out his name. Silence answers.

I pick up the gun. The last time I fired it was on Crucifix Soldier Day.

Not your fault, Cassie. And not his fault.

I close my eyes and see my father lying gut-shot in the dirt, telling me, No, Cassie, right before Vosch walked over and silenced him.

His fault. Not yours. Not the Crucifix Soldier’s. His.

I have a very vivid image of ramming the end of the rifle against Vosch’s temple and blowing his head off his shoulders.

First I have to find him. And then politely ask him to stand still so I can ram the end of my rifle against his temple and blow his head off his shoulders.

I find myself on the sofa next to Bear, and I cradle them both, Bear in one arm, my rifle in the other, like I’m back in the woods in my tent under the trees that were under the sky that was under the baleful eye of the mothership that was beneath the explosion of stars of which ours is just one—and what are the freaking odds that the Others would pick our star out of the 100 sextillion in the universe to set up shop?

It’s too much for me to handle. I can’t defeat the Others. I’m a cockroach. Okay, I’ll go with Evan’s mayfly metaphor; mayflies are prettier, and at least they can fly. But I can take out a few of the bastards before my single day on Earth is over. And I plan to start with Vosch.

A hand falls on my shoulder. “Cassie, why are you crying?”

“I’m not. It’s my allergies. This damn bear is full of dust.”

He sits down next to me, on the bear side, not the gun side.

“Where were you?” I ask to change the subject.

“Checking out the weather.”

“And?” Full sentences, please. I’m cold and I need your warm-blanky voice to keep me safe. I draw my knees up to my chest, resting my heels on the edge of the sofa cushion.

“I think we’re good for tonight.” The morning light sneaks through a crack in the sheets hung over the window and paints his face golden. The light shimmers in his dark hair, sparkles in his eyes.

“Good.” I snuffle loudly.

“Cassie.” He touches my knee. His hand is warm; I feel its heat through my jeans. “I had this weird idea.”

“All of this is just a really bad dream?”

He shakes his head, laughs nervously. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, so hear me out before you say anything, okay? I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I wouldn’t even mention it if I didn’t think—”

“Tell me, Evan. Just—tell—me.” Oh God, what’s he going to tell me? My body tightens up. Never mind, Evan. Don’t tell me.

“Let me go.”

I shake my head, confused. Is this a joke? I look down at his hand on my knee, fingers gently squeezing. “I thought you were going.”

“I mean, let me go.” Giving my knee a tiny shake to get me to look at him.

Then I get it. “Let you go by yourself. I stay here, and you go find my brother.”

“Okay, now, you promised to hear me out—”

“I didn’t promise you anything.” I push his hand off my knee. The thought of his leaving me behind isn’t just offensive—it’s terrifying. “My promise was to Sammy, so drop it.”

He doesn’t. “But you don’t know what’s out there.”

“And you do?”

“Better than you.”

He reaches for me; I put my hand against his chest. Oh no, buddy. “Then tell me what’s out there.”

He throws up his hands. “Think about who has a better chance of living long enough to keep your promise. I’m not saying it’s because you’re a girl or because I’m stronger or tougher or whatever. I’m saying if just one of us goes, then the other one would still have a chance of finding him in case the worst happens.”

“Well, you’re probably right about that last part. But it shouldn’t be you who tries first. He’s my brother. Like hell I’m going to wait around here for a Silencer to knock on the door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar. I’ll just go by myself.”

I push myself off the sofa like I’m heading out at that very second. He grabs my arm; I yank it back.

“Stop it, Evan. You keep forgetting that I’m letting you go with me, not the other way around.”

He drops his head. “I know. I know that.” Then a rueful laugh. “I also knew what your answer would be, but I had to ask.”

“Because you think I can’t take care of myself?”

“Because I don’t want you to die.”