Текст книги "The Infinite Sea"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

28

A LIFETIME LATER, from his hiding place beneath the highway overpass, Evan watched the dark-haired girl sprint across the hotel parking lot, cross the interstate access ramp, trot a few hundred yards north on Highway 68, then pause beside an SUV to look back at the building. He followed her gaze to a second-story window, where a shadow flitted for an instant, then was gone.

Mayfly.

The dark-haired girl vanished into the trees bordering the highway. Why she had left and where she was going were unknown. Perhaps the group was splitting up—it would increase the chance of survival a little—or perhaps she was scouting a more secure hiding place to ride out the winter. Whichever the case, he had the sense he’d found them just in time.

The dark-haired girl was one, leaving at least four inside, the ones he had seen manning the windows. He did not know if any of them had survived the explosion. He wasn’t even sure it had been Cassie’s shadow in the window.

Not that it mattered. He’d made a promise. He had to go in.

He couldn’t approach openly. The situation was complicated by too many unknowns. What if it wasn’t Cassie but a squad of 5th Wave soldiers cut off when the base blew—like the squad he’d left in Grace’s care? He’d be dead before he crossed a dozen feet. The risk was nearly as great even if it was Cassie and a group of survivors: They might drop him before they realized who he was.

Going in now, though, posed its own set of risks. He didn’t know how many there were inside. Didn’t know if he could manage two, much less four, heavily armed trigger-happy kids jacked up on adrenaline, ready to blow away anything that moved. The system that augmented his body had crashed. I’m fully human, he’d told Cassie. Now that was literally true.

He was still weighing the options when a tiny figure appeared in the parking lot. A child wearing 5th Wave fatigues. Not Sam—Sam had been dressed in the white jumpsuit of the underaged and newly processed—but young. Six or seven, he guessed. Following the same route as the dark-haired girl, even pausing by the same SUV to look back at the hotel. This time he saw no shadow in the window; whoever had been there was gone.

That made two. Were they abandoning the hotel one at a time? Tactically, it made some sense. Shouldn’t he simply wait, then, for Cassie to come out, rather than risk his life going in?

And the stars spun overhead, marking the time winding down.

He started to get up, then sank back. Another one exited the hotel, much larger than the one before, a big kid with a large head, toting a rifle. Three now, none of them Cassie or Sam or the friend from Cassie’s high school—what was his name? Ken? With each exodus, the odds of Cassie not being in this group increased. Should he even attempt entry?

His instinct said go. No answers, no weapons, and hardly any strength. Instinct was all he had left.

He went.

29

FOR OVER FIVE YEARS he’d relied on the gifts that made him superior to humans in almost every way. Hearing. Eyesight. Reflexes. Agility. Strength. The gifts had spoiled him. He’d forgotten what normal felt like.

He was getting a crash course now.

He slipped into a ground-floor room through a broken-out window. Hobbled to the door and pressed his ear against it, but all he could hear was the thundering of his heart. Easing the door open, sliding into the hall, listening, waiting in vain for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Down the hall and into the lobby. His own breath, frosting in the frigid air, otherwise silence. Apparently the ground floor was deserted. He knew someone was standing at the small hallway window upstairs; he caught a glimpse of him as he maneuvered his way into the building.

Stairwell. Two flights. By the time he reached the second landing, he was dizzy from the pain and out of breath from the effort. He tasted blood. There was no light. He was entombed in utter darkness.

If there was only one person on the other side of this door, he had seconds. More than one and time didn’t matter; he was dead. Every instinct said wait.

He went.

In the hall on the other side of the door was a small kid with extraordinarily large ears and a mouth flying open in astonishment the moment before Evan locked him in the chokehold, pressing his forearm hard against the kid’s carotid, cutting off the blood supply to his brain. He dragged his squirming catch back into the black pit of the stairwell. The kid went limp before the door clicked shut again.

Evan waited for a few seconds on the other side. The hall had been empty, the snatch quick and relatively quiet. It could be a while before the others—if there were others—realized their sentry was gone. He dragged the kid to the bottom of the stairs and tucked his unconscious body into the small space between the steps and the wall. Went back up. Cracked open the door. Halfway down the hall, another door opened and two shadowy figures emerged. He watched them cross the hall and enter another room. They reappeared a moment later and went to another door.

They were checking each room. The stairs would be next. Or the elevator; he’d forgotten about the elevator. Would they drop down the shaft and take the stairs from below?

No. If there’re only two, they’ll split up. One for the stairs, one down the shaft, and meet up in the lobby.

He watched them come out of the last room, then go to the elevator, where one held the doors while the other dropped out of sight into the shaft. The one who remained had trouble standing, holding his stomach and grunting softly from the effort, favoring one side as he limped toward Evan.

He waited. Twenty feet. Ten. Five. Holding the rifle in his right hand, his gut with his left. Standing on the other side of the door, Evan smiled. Ben. Not Ken. Ben.

Found you.

Too dangerous to trust that Ben would recognize him and not shoot him on the spot. He burst through the door and rammed his fist as hard as he could into Ben’s wounded stomach. The blow knocked the breath out of him, but Ben refused to go down. Rocking back, he brought his rifle up. Evan slung it to one side and hit him again, same spot, and this time Ben went down, dropping to his knees at Evan’s feet. His head fell back. Their eyes met.

“I knew you weren’t for real,” Ben gasped.

“Where’s Cassie?”

He knelt, grabbed two fistfuls of the yellow hoodie Ben was wearing, and brought their faces close.

“Where’s Cassie?”

If he had been his old self, if the system hadn’t crashed, he would have seen the blur of the blade as it came around, heard the infinitesimally small whistle of it cutting through the air. Instead, he wasn’t aware of the knife until Ben had buried it in his thigh.

He fell back, dragging Ben with him. Hurled him to one side as Ben ripped the knife free. Evan slammed his knee down on Ben’s wrist to neutralize the threat and clamped both hands over Ben’s face, covering his nose and mouth and pushing hard. Time spun out. Beneath him, Ben thrashed and kicked, whipped his head from side to side, his free hand clawing for the rifle less than an inch from his fingertips, and time froze.

Then Ben went still and Evan fell away, gulping air, drenched in blood and sweat and feeling as if his body might burst into flames. No time to recover, though: Down the hall, through a crack in the door, a small, heart-shaped face turned his way.

Sam.

He pushed himself to his feet, lost his balance, careened into the wall, fell. Back up again, convinced now it was Cassie who had dropped into the shaft, but he had to secure Sam first, except the kid had slammed the door and was now screaming obscenities through it, and then, as Evan dropped his hand on the knob, he opened fire.

He threw himself against the wall next to the door while Sam emptied the magazine. When the pause came, he didn’t hesitate. Sam had to be neutralized before he could reload.

Evan had a choice: kick open the door with the bad foot or put all his weight on it while he kicked with the other. Neither option was good. He chose to kick with the broken one; he couldn’t risk losing his balance.

Three hard, sharp kicks. Three kicks that produced pain as he’d never experienced it before. But the lock broke with a loud wallop and the door slammed into the wall on the other side. He fell into the room and there was Cassie’s brother crab-crawling toward the window and somehow Evan remained upright, something held him up and propelled him toward the child, hand outstretched, I’m here, remember me? I saved you before; I’ll save you again . . .

And then, behind him, the last one, the final star, the one he carried across an infinite sea of white, the one thing he’d found worth dying for, opened fire.

And the bullet connected them when it wedded bone, binding them together as if by a silver cord.

30

THE BOY STOPPED talking the summer of the plague.

His father had disappeared. Their supply of candles ran low and he left one morning to find more. He never came back.

His mother was sick. Her head hurt. She ached all over. Even her teeth hurt, she told him. The nights were the worst. Her fever shot up. Her tummy couldn’t hold anything down. The next morning she would feel better. Maybe I’ll get over it, she said. She refused to go to the hospital. They’d heard stories, terrible stories, about the hospitals and walk-in clinics and emergency shelters.

One by one, families fled the neighborhood. Looting was getting bad and gangs roamed the streets at night. The man who lived two doors down was killed, shot in the head, for refusing to share his family’s drinking water. Sometimes a stranger wandered into the neighborhood and told stories of earthquakes and walls of water five hundred feet high, flooding the land as far east as Las Vegas. Thousands dead. Millions.

When his mother became too weak to get out of bed, the baby became his responsibility. They called him the baby, but he was actually almost three. Don’t bring him near me, his mother told him. He’ll get sick. The baby wasn’t that much work. He slept a lot. He played only a little. He was just a tiny kid; he didn’t know. Sometimes he would ask where his daddy was or what was the matter with Mommy. Most of the time, he asked for food.

They were running out of food. But his mother wouldn’t let him leave. It’s too dangerous. You’ll get lost. You’ll get abducted. You’ll get shot. He would argue with her. He was eight and very big for his age, the target of school-yard taunts and cruel insults since he was six. He was tough. He could handle himself. But she wouldn’t let him go. I can’t keep anything down and you could stand to lose a little weight anyway. She wasn’t being cruel; she was trying to be funny. He didn’t think it was funny, though.

Then they were down to their last can of condensed soup and wrapper of stale crackers. He heated the soup in the fireplace, over a fire he fed with pieces of broken-up furniture and his father’s old hunting magazines. The baby ate all the crackers but said he didn’t want the soup. He wanted mac and cheese. We don’t have mac and cheese. We have soup and crackers, and that’s all we have. The baby cried and rolled on the floor in front of the fireplace, screaming for mac and cheese.

He brought a cup of the soup to his mother. Her fever was bad. The night before, she had started throwing up the lumpy black stuff, which was the lining of her stomach mixed with blood, though he didn’t know that then. She watched him come into the room with dead, expressionless eyes, the fixed stare of the Red Death.

What do you think you’re doing? I can’t eat that. Take it away.

He took it away and ate it standing at the kitchen sink while his baby brother rolled on the floor and screamed and his mother sank deeper into mindlessness, the virus spreading into her brain. In the final hours, his mother would disappear. Her personality, her memory, the who of who she was, surrendering before her body. He ate the lukewarm soup and then licked the bowl clean. He would have to leave in the morning. There was no more food. He would tell his little brother to stay inside no matter what and he wouldn’t come back until he found something for them to eat.

He snuck out the next morning. He looked in abandoned groceries and convenience stores. He looked in looted restaurants and fast-food places. He found Dumpsters reeking of decaying produce and overflowing with torn-open garbage bags where many hands before his had searched. By late afternoon, he’d found only one edible morsel: a small cake about the size of his palm, still in its plastic wrapper, underneath an empty shelf in a gas station. It was getting late; the sun was going down. He decided to go home and return the next morning. Maybe there were more cakes and other kinds of food stashed or lost and he needed to look harder.

When he got home, the front door was ajar. He remembered closing it behind him, so he knew something was wrong. He ran inside. He called for the baby. He went room to room. He looked under beds and inside closets and in the cars that sat cold and useless in the garage. His mother called him into her room. Where had he been? The baby wouldn’t stop crying for him. He asked his mother where the baby was and she snapped at him, Can’t you hear him?

But he heard nothing.

He went outside and yelled the baby’s name. He checked the backyard, walked over to the neighbor’s house and banged on the door. He banged on every door on the street. Nobody answered. Either the people inside were too scared to come out or they were sick or dead or just gone. He walked several blocks one way, then several more the other way, calling his brother’s name until he was hoarse. An old woman tottered out onto her porch and screamed at him to go away; she had a gun. He went home.

The baby was gone. He decided not to tell his mother. What would she do about it? He didn’t want her to think he was bad for leaving. He should have brought him along, but he thought it was safer at home. Your home is the safest place on Earth.

That night, his mother called to him. Where is my baby? He told her the baby was asleep. It was the worst night yet. Bloody tissues wadded on the bed. Bloody tissues crowding the nightstand, littering the floor.

Bring me my baby.

He’s asleep.

I want to see my baby.

You might make him sick.

She cursed him. She told him to go to hell. She spat bloody phlegm at him. He stood in the doorway, hands nervously fiddling in his pockets, and the cake wrapper crackled, the plastic damaged by the heat.

Where have you been?

Looking for food.

She gagged. Don’t say that word!

Watching him with bright red, bloody eyes.

Why were you looking for food? You don’t need any food. You’re the most disgusting piece of pig lard I’ve ever seen. You could live till winter on just your belly fat.

He didn’t say anything. He knew it was the plague talking, not his mother. His mother loved him. When the teasing at school got bad, she went to the principal and said she would file a lawsuit if the bullying didn’t stop.

What’s that noise? What’s that horrible noise?

He told her he didn’t hear anything. She got very angry. She started to curse again and bloody spittle spattered on the headboard.

It’s coming from you. What are you playing with in your pocket?

There was nothing he could do. He had to show her. He pulled out the cake and she screamed for him to put it away and never take it out again. No wonder he was so fat. No wonder his baby brother was starving while he ate cakes and candies and all the mac and cheese. What sort of monster was he that he ate all his baby brother’s mac and cheese?

He tried to defend himself. But every time he started talking, she screamed at him to shut up, shut up, shut UP. His voice made her sick. He made her sick. He did it. He did something to her husband and he did something to his baby brother and he did something to her, made her sick, poisoned her, he was poisoning her.

And every time he tried to speak, she screamed at him. Shut up, shut up, shut UP.

She died two days later.

He wrapped her in a clean sheet and carried her body into the backyard. He doused the body with his father’s charcoal lighter fluid and set it on fire. He burned his mother’s body and all the bedding, too. He waited another week for his baby brother to come home, but he never did. He searched for him—and for food. He found food, but not his brother. He stopped calling for him. He stopped talking altogether. He shut up.

Six weeks later, he was walking down a highway dotted with stalled-out cars and wrecks of cars and trucks and motorcycles when he saw black smoke in the distance and, after a few minutes, the source of the smoke, a yellow school bus full of children. There were soldiers on the bus and the soldiers asked his name and where he was from and how old he was, and later he remembered nervously stuffing his hands in his pockets and finding the old piece of cake, still in its wrapper.

Pig lard. Live till winter on your belly fat.

What’s the matter, kid? Can’t you talk?

His drill sergeant heard the story of how he came to camp with nothing but the clothes on his back and a piece of cake in his pocket. Before he heard the story, the drill sergeant called him Fatboy. After he heard the story, the drill sergeant renamed him Poundcake.

I like you, Poundcake. I like the fact that you’re a born shooter. I bet you popped out of your momma with a gun in one hand and a doughnut in the other. I like the fact that you got the looks of Elmer Fudd and the goddamned heart of Mufasa. And I especially like the fact that you don’t talk. Nobody knows where you’re from, where you’ve been, what you think, how you feel. Hell, I don’t know and I don’t give a shit, and you shouldn’t, either. You’re a mute-assed, stone-cold killer from the heart of darkness with a heart to match, aren’t you, Private Poundcake?

He wasn’t.

Not yet.

31

THE FIRST THING I planned to do when he woke up was kill him.

If he woke up.

Dumbo wasn’t sure that would happen. “He’s messed up bad,” he told me after we stripped him down and Dumbo got a good look at the damage. Stabbed in one leg, shot in the other, covered in burns, bones broken, shaking with a high fever—though we piled covers on him, Evan still shook so violently that it looked like the bed was vibrating.

“Sepsis,” Dumbo muttered. He noticed me staring dumbly at him and added, “When the infection gets into your bloodstream.”

“What do we do?” I asked.

“Antibiotics.”

“Which we don’t have.”

I sat on the other bed. Sam scooted to the foot, clutching the empty pistol. He refused to give it up. Ben was leaning on the wall, cradling his rifle and eyeing Evan warily, like he was sure any second Evan would bolt out of bed and make another attempt to take us out.

“He didn’t have a choice,” I told Ben. “How could he just stroll up in the dark without somebody shooting him?”

“I want to know where Poundcake and Teacup are,” Ben said through gritted teeth.

Dumbo told him to get off his feet. He’d repacked the bandages, but Ben had lost a lot of blood. Ben waved him away. He pushed himself from the wall, limped to Evan’s bedside, and whacked him across the cheek with the back of his hand.

“Wake up!” Whack. “Wake up, you son of a bitch!”

I shot from the bed and grabbed Ben’s wrist before he could pop Evan again.

“Ben, this won’t—”

“Fine.” He yanked his arm away and lurched toward the door. “I’ll find them myself.”

“Zombie!” Sam called out. He popped up and ran to his side. “I’ll come, too!”

“Cut it out, both of you,” I snapped. “Nobody’s going anywhere until we—”

“What, Cassie?” Ben yelled. “Until we what?”

My mouth opened and no words came out. Sam was tugging on his arm: Come on, Zombie! My five-year-old brother waving around an empty gun; there’s a metaphor for you.

“Ben, listen to me. Are you listening to me? You go out there now—”

“I am going out there now—”

“—and we might lose you, too!” Shouting over him. “You don’t know what happened out there—Evan probably knocked them out like he did you and Dumbo. But maybe he didn’t—maybe they’re on the way back right now, and going out there is a stupid risk—”

“Don’t lecture me about stupid risks. I know all about—”

Ben swayed. The color drained from his face and he went down to one knee, Sam grabbing futilely on his sleeve. Dumbo and I pulled him up and got him to the empty bed, where he fell back, cussing us and cussing Evan Walker and cussing the whole fucked-up situation in general. Dumbo was giving me a deer-in-headlights look, like You got the answers, right? You know what to do, right?

Wrong.