Текст книги "The Infinite Sea"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

3

BY SUNRISE, I reach the southern outskirts of Urbana. Halfway there, right on schedule.

Clouds have rolled in from the north; the sun rises beneath the canopy and paints its underbelly a glistening maroon. I’ll hole up in the trees until nightfall, then hit the open fields to the west of the city and pray the cloud cover hangs around for a while, at least until I pick up the highway again on the other side. Going around Urbana adds a few miles, but the only thing riskier than navigating a town during the day is trying it at night.

And it’s all about risk.

Mist rises from the frozen ground. The cold is intense. It squeezes my cheeks, makes my chest ache with each breath. I feel the ancient yearning for fire embedded deep in my genes. The taming of fire was our first great leap: Fire protected us, kept us warm, transformed our brains by changing our diets from nuts and berries to protein-rich meat. Now fire is another weapon in our enemy’s arsenal. As deep winter sets in, we’re crushed between two unacceptable risks: freezing to death or alerting the enemy to our location.

Sitting with my back against a tree, I pull out the brochure. Ohio’s Most Colorful Caverns! Zombie’s right. We won’t survive till spring without shelter, and the caves are our best—maybe only—bet. Maybe they’ve been taken or destroyed by the enemy. Maybe they’re occupied by survivors who will shoot strangers on sight. But every day we stay at that hotel, the risk grows tenfold.

We don’t have an alternative if the caves don’t pan out. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and the idea of fighting is ludicrous. The clock winds down.

When I pointed this out to him, Zombie told me I think too much. He was smiling. Then he stopped smiling and said, “Don’t let ’em get inside your head.” As if this were a football game and I needed a halftime pep talk. Ignore the fifty-six to nothing score. Play for pride! It’s moments like those that make me want to slap him, not that slapping him would do any good, but it would make me feel better.

The breeze dies. There’s an expectant hush in the air, the stillness before a storm. If it snows, we’ll be trapped. Me in these woods. Zombie in the hotel. I’m still twenty or so miles from the caverns—should I risk the open fields by day or risk the snow holding off at least till nightfall?

Back to the R word. It’s all about risk. Not just ours. Theirs, too: embedding themselves in human bodies, establishing death camps, training kids to finish the genocide, all of it crazy risky, stupid risky. Like Evan Walker, discordant, illogical, and just damn strange. The opening attacks were brutal in their efficiency, wiping out 98 percent of us, and even the 4th Wave made some sense: It’s hard to muster a meaningful resistance if you can’t trust one another. But after that, their brilliant strategy starts to unravel. Ten thousand years to plan the eradication of humans from Earth and this is the best they can come up with? That’s the question I can’t stop turning over and over in my head, and haven’t been able to, since Teacup and the night of the rats.

Deeper in the woods, behind me and to my left, a soft moan slices through the silence. I recognize the sound immediately; I’ve heard it a thousand times since they came. In the early days, it was nearly omnipresent, a constant background noise, like the hum of traffic on a busy highway: the sound of a human being in pain.

I pull the eyepiece from my rucksack and adjust the lens carefully over my left eye. Deliberately. Without panic. Panic shuts down neurons. I stand up, check the bolt catch on the rifle, and ease through the trees toward the sound, scanning the terrain for the telltale green glow of an “infested.” Mist shrouds the trees; the world is draped in white. My footsteps thunder on the frozen ground. My breaths are sonic booms.

The delicate white curtain parts, and twenty yards away I see a figure slumped against a tree, head back, hands pressed into its lap. The head doesn’t glow in my eyepiece, which means he’s no civilian; he’s part of the 5th Wave.

I aim the rifle at his head. “Hands! Let me see your hands!”

His mouth hangs open. His vacant eyes regard the gray sky through bare branches glistening with ice. I step closer. A rifle identical to mine lies on the ground beside him. He doesn’t reach for it.

“Where’s the rest of your squad?” I ask. He doesn’t answer.

I lower my weapon. I’m an idiot. In this weather, I would see his breath and there is none. The moan I heard must have been his last. I do a slow 360, holding my breath, but see nothing but trees and mist, hear nothing but my own blood roaring in my ears. Then I step over to the body, forcing myself not to rush, to notice everything. No panic. Panic kills.

Same gun as mine. Same fatigues. And there’s his eyepiece on the ground beside him. He’s a 5th Waver all right.

I study his face. He looks vaguely familiar. I’m guessing he’s twelve or thirteen, around Dumbo’s age. I kneel beside him and press my fingertips against his neck. No pulse. I open the jacket and pull up his blood-soaked shirt to look for the wound. He was hit in the gut by a single, high-caliber round.

A round I didn’t hear. Either he’s been lying here for a while or the shooter is using a silencer.

Silencer.

• • •

According to Sullivan, Evan Walker took out an entire squad by himself, at night, injured and outnumbered, sort of a warm-up to his single-handed blowing up of an entire military installation. At the time, I found Cassie’s story hard to believe. Now there’s a dead soldier at my feet. His squad MIA. And me alone with the silence of the woods and the milky white screen of fog.

Doesn’t seem that far-fetched now.

Think fast. Don’t panic. Like chess. Weigh the odds. Measure the risk.

I have two options. Stay put until something develops or night falls. Or get out of these woods, fast. Whoever killed him could be miles away or hunkered down behind a tree, waiting for a clear shot.

The possibilities multiply. Where’s his squad? Dead? Hunting down the person who shot him? What if the person who shot him was a fellow recruit who went Dorothy? Forget his squad. What happens when reinforcements arrive?

I pull out my knife. It’s been five minutes since I found him. I’d be dead by now if someone knew I was here. I’ll wait till dark, but I have to prepare for the probability that another breaker of the 5th Wave is rolling toward me.

I press against the back of his neck until I find the tiny bulge beneath the scar. Stay calm. It’s like chess. Move and countermove.

I slice slowly along the scar and dig out the pellet with the tip of the knife, where it sits suspended on a droplet of blood.

So we’ll always know where you are. So we can keep you safe.

Risk. The risk of lighting up in an eyepiece. The opposing risk of the enemy frying my brain with the touch of a button.

The pellet in its bed of blood. The awful stillness of the trees and the clinching cold and the fog that curls between branches like fingers interlacing. And Zombie’s voice in my head: You think too much.

I tuck the pellet between my cheek and gums. Stupid. I should have wiped it off first. I can taste the kid’s blood.

4

I AM NOT ALONE.

I can’t see him or hear him, but I feel him. Every inch of my body tingles with the sensation of being watched. An uncomfortably familiar feeling now, present since the very beginning. Just the mothership silently hovering in orbit for the first ten days caused cracks in the human edifice. A different kind of viral plague: uncertainty, fear, panic. Clogged highways, deserted airports, overrun emergency rooms, governments in lockdown, food and gas shortages, martial law in some places, lawlessness in others. The lion crouches in the tall grass. The gazelle sniffs the air. The awful stillness before the strike. For the first time in ten millennia, we knew what it felt like to be prey again.

The trees are crowded with crows. Shiny black heads, blank black eyes, their hunched-shouldered silhouettes reminding me of little old men on park benches. There are hundreds of them perched in the trees and hopping about the ground. I glance at the body beside me, its eyes blank and bottomless as the crows’. I know why the birds have come. They’re hungry.

I am, too, so I dig out my baggie of beef jerky and only-slightly-expired gummy bears. Eating is a risk, too, because I’ll have to remove the tracker from my mouth, but I need to stay alert, and to stay alert, I need fuel. The crows watch me, cocking their heads as if straining to hear the sound of my chewing. You fat asses. How hungry could you be? The attacks yielded millions of tons of meat. At the height of the plague, huge flocks blotted out the sky, their shadows racing across the smoldering landscape. The crows and other carrion birds closed the loop of the 3rd Wave. They fed on infected bodies, then spread the virus to new feeding grounds.

I could be wrong. Maybe we’re alone, me and this dead kid. The more seconds that slip by, the safer I feel. If someone is watching, I can think of only one reason why he’d hold the shot: He’s waiting to see if any more idiotic kids playing soldier show up.

I finish my breakfast and slip the pellet back into my mouth. The minutes crawl. One of the most disorienting things about the invasion—after watching everyone you know and love die in horrible ways—was how time slowed down as events sped up. Ten thousand years to build civilization, ten months to tear it down, and each day lasted ten times longer than the one before, and the nights lasted ten times as long as the days. The only thing more excruciating than the boredom of those hours was the terror of knowing that any minute they could end.

Midmorning: The mist lifts and the snow begins to fall in flakes smaller than crows’ eyes. There’s not a breath of wind. The woods are draped in a dreamlike, glossy white glow. As long as the snow stays this light, I’m good till dark.

If I don’t fall asleep. I haven’t slept in over twenty hours, and I feel warm and comfortable and slightly spacy.

In the gossamer stillness, my paranoia ratchets up. My head is perfectly centered in his crosshairs. He’s high in the trees; he’s lying motionless like a lion in the brush. I’m a puzzle to him. I should be panicking. So he holds his fire, allowing the situation to develop. There must be some reason I’m hanging out here with a corpse.

But I don’t panic. I don’t bolt like a frightened gazelle. I am more than the sum of my fear.

It isn’t fear that will defeat them. Not fear or faith or hope or even love, but rage.

Fuck you, Sullivan said to Vosch. It’s the only part of her story that impressed me. She didn’t cry. She didn’t pray. She didn’t beg.

She thought it was over, and when it’s over, when the clock has wound to the final second, the time for crying, praying, and begging is over.

“Fuck you,” I whisper. Saying the words makes me feel better. I say them again, louder. My voice carries far in the winter air.

A flutter of black wings deep in the trees to my right, the petulant squawking of the crows, and through my eyepiece, a tiny green dot sparkling among the brown and white.

Found you.

The shot will be tough. Tough, not impossible. I’d never handled a firearm in my life until the enemy found me hiding in the rest stop outside Cincinnati, brought me to their camp, and placed a rifle in my hand, at which point the drill sergeant wondered aloud if command had slipped a ringer into the unit. Six months later, I put a bullet into that man’s heart.

I have a gift.

The fiery green light is coming closer. Maybe he knows I’ve spotted him. It doesn’t matter. I caress the smooth metal of the trigger and watch the blob of light expand through the eyepiece. Maybe he thinks he’s out of range or is positioning himself for a better shot.

Doesn’t matter.

It might not be one of Sullivan’s silent assassins. It might be just some poor lost survivor hoping for rescue.

Doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters anymore.

The risk.

5

AT THE HOTEL, Sullivan told me a story about shooting a soldier behind some beer coolers and how bad she felt afterward.

“It wasn’t a gun,” she tried to explain. “It was a crucifix.”

“Why is that important?” I asked. “It could have been a Raggedy Ann doll or a bag of M&Ms. What choice did you have?”

“I didn’t. That’s my point.”

I shook my head. “Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody’s fault. You just want to feel bad so you’ll feel better.”

“Bad so I feel better?” With a deep blush of anger spreading beneath her freckles. “That makes absolutely no friggin’ sense.”

“‘I killed an innocent guy, but look how guilty I feel about it,’” I explained. “Guy’s still dead.”

She stared at me for a long time. “Well. I see why Vosch wanted you for the team.”

• • •

The green blob of his head advances toward me, weaving through the trees, and now I can see the glint of a rifle through the languid snow. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a crucifix.

Cradling my rifle, leaning my head against the tree as if I’m dozing or looking at the flakes float between the glistening bare branches, lioness in the tall grass.

Fifty yards away. The muzzle velocity of a M16 is 3,100 feet per second. Three feet in a yard, which means he has two-thirds of a second left on Earth.

Hope he spends it wisely.

I swing the rifle around, square my shoulders, and let loose the bullet that completes the circle.

The murder of crows rockets from the trees, a riot of black wings and hoarse, scolding cries. The green ball of light drops and doesn’t rise.

I wait. Better to wait and see what happens next. Five minutes. Ten. No motion. No sound. Nothing but the thunderous silence of snow. The woods feel very empty without the company of the birds. With my back pressed against the tree, I slide up and hold still another couple of minutes. Now I can see the green glow again, on the ground, not moving. I step over the body of the dead recruit. Frozen leaves crackle beneath my boots.

Each footstep measures out the time winding down. Halfway to the body, I realize what I’ve done.

Teacup lies curled into a tight ball beside a fallen tree, her face covered in the crumbs of last year’s leaves.

Behind a row of empty beer coolers, a dying man hugged a bloody crucifix to his chest. His killer didn’t have a choice. They gave her no choice. Because of the risk. To her. To them.

I kneel beside her. Her eyes are wide with pain. She reaches for me with hands dark crimson in the gray light.

“Teacup,” I whisper. “Teacup, what are you doing here? Where’s Zombie?”

I scan the woods but don’t hear or see him or anyone else. Her chest heaves and frothy blood boils over her lips. She’s choking. I gently push her face toward the ground to clear her mouth.

She must have heard me cursing. That’s how she found me, by my own voice.

Teacup screams. The sound knifes through the stillness, bounces and ricochets off the trees. Unacceptable. I press my hand down hard over her bloody lips and tell her to hush. I don’t know who shot the kid I found, but whoever did it can’t be far. If the sound of my rifle doesn’t bring him back to investigate, her screaming will.

Damn it, shut up. Shut up. What the hell are you doing out here, sneaking up on me like that, you little shit? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Teeth scrape frantically against my palm. Tiny fingers seek my face. My cheeks painted with her blood. With my free hand, I tug open her jacket. I’ve got to compress the wound or she’ll bleed out.

I grab the collar of her shirt and rip downward, exposing her torso. I wad up the remnant and press it just below her rib cage, against the bullet hole weeping blood. She jerks at my touch with a strangled sob.

“What did I tell you about that, soldier?” I whisper. “What’s the first priority?”

Slick lips slide over my palm. No words come out.

“No bad thoughts,” I tell her. “No bad thoughts. No bad thoughts. Because bad thoughts make us go soft. They make us soft. Soft. Soft. And we can’t go soft. We can’t. What happens when we go soft?”

The woods brim with menacing shadows. Deep in the trees, there’s a snapping sound. A boot crunching on the frozen ground? Or an ice-encrusted branch, splintering? We could be surrounded by a hundred enemies. Or zero.

I race through our options. There aren’t many. And they all suck.

First option: We stay. The problem is stay for what. The dead recruit’s unit is unaccounted for. Whoever killed the kid is also unaccounted for. And Teacup has no chance of surviving without medical attention. She has minutes, not hours.

Second option: We run. The problem is where. The hotel? Teacup would bleed to death before we make it back, plus she may have taken off for a good reason. The caverns? Can’t risk going through Urbana, which means adding miles of open fields and many hours to a journey that ends at a place that probably isn’t safe, either.

There’s a third option. The unthinkable one. And the only one that makes sense.

The snow falls heavier, the gray deepens. I cup her face with one hand and press the other into the wound, but I know it’s hopeless. My bullet tore through her gut; the injury is catastrophic.

Teacup is going to die.

I should leave her. Now.

But I don’t. I can’t. Like I told Zombie on the night Camp Haven blew, the minute we decide one person doesn’t matter, they’ve won, and now my words are the chain that binds me to her.

I hold her in my arms in the awful dead stillness of the woods in snow.

6

I EASE HER DOWN onto the forest floor. Drained of all color, her face is only slighter darker than the snow. Her mouth hangs open, her eyelids flutter. She’s slipped into unconsciousness. I don’t think she’ll wake again.

My hands are shaking. I’m struggling to keep it together. I’m pissed as hell at her, at myself, at the seven billion impossible dilemmas their arrival brought, at the lies and the maddening inconsistencies and all the ridiculous, hopeless, stupid unspoken promises that have been broken since they came.

Don’t go soft. Think about what matters, right here, right now; you’re good at that.

I decide to wait. It can’t be much longer. Maybe after she’s dead, the softness inside me will pass and I’ll be able to think clearly. Every uneventful minute means I still have time.

But the world is a clock winding down, and there are no such things as uneventful minutes anymore.

A heartbeat after I decide to stay with her, the percussive thrum of rotors shatters the silence. The sound of the choppers snaps the spell. Knowing what matters: besides shooting, the thing I’m best at.

I can’t let them take Teacup alive.

If they take her, they may be able to save her. And if they save her, they’ll run her through Wonderland. There’s the tiniest chance that Zombie’s still safe at the hotel. A chance that Teacup wasn’t running from anything, just snuck off to find me. One trip by either of us down the rabbit hole and everybody’s doomed.

I pull my sidearm from the holster.

The minute we decide . . . I wish I had a minute. I wish I had thirty seconds. Thirty seconds would be a lifetime. A minute would be an eternity.

I level the gun at her head and lift up my face to the gray. Snow settles on my skin, where it quivers for a moment before melting.

Sullivan had her Crucifix Soldier and now I have mine.

No. I am the soldier. Teacup is the cross.

7

I FEEL HIM THEN, the one standing deep in the trees, motionless, watching me. I look, and then I see him, a lighter human-shaped shadow between the dark trunks. For a moment, neither of us moves. I know, without understanding how, that he is the one who shot the kid and the other members of his squad. And I know the shooter can’t be a recruit. His head does not glow in my eyepiece.

The snow spins, the cold squeezes. I blink, and the shadow is gone. If the shadow was ever there.

I’m losing my grip. Too many variables. Too much risk. Shaking uncontrollably, I wonder if they’ve finally broken me; after surviving the tsunami that took my home, the plague that took my family, the death camp that took my hope, the innocent little girl who took my bullet, I am terminal, done, finished, and was it ever in question, never if but always when?

The choppers bear down. I have to finish what I started with Teacup or I’ll join her where she lies.

I sight along the barrel of my pistol into the pale, angelic face at my feet, my victim, my cross.

And the roar of the Black Hawks’ approach makes my thoughts seem like the tiny squeaking whimpers of a dying rodent.

It’s like the rats, isn’t it, Cup? Just like the rats.