“No. You don’t.”
“You’re wondering if you should kiss me good-bye.”
“Why do you do that?” I ask. “Flirt with me.”
He shrugs. His grin is crooked, like his body leaning against the counter.
“It’s normal. Don’t you miss normal?” he asks. Eyes digging deep into mine, always looking for something, I’m never sure what. “You know, drive-thrus and movies on a Saturday night and ice cream sandwiches and checking your Twitter feed?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t Twitter.”
“Facebook?”
I’m getting a little pissed. Sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine how Zombie made it this far. Pining for things we lost is the same as hoping for things that can never be. Both roads dead-end in despair. “It’s not important,” I say. “None of that matters.”
Zombie’s laugh comes from deep in his gut. It bubbles to the surface like the superheated air of a hot spring, and I’m not pissed anymore. I know he’s putting on the charm, and somehow knowing what he’s doing does nothing to blunt the effect. Another reason Zombie’s a little unnerving.
“It’s funny,” he says. “How much we thought all of it did. You know what really matters?” He waits for my answer. I feel as if I’m being set up for a joke, so I don’t say anything. “The tardy bell.”
Now he’s forced me into a corner. I know there’s manipulation going on here, but I feel helpless to stop it. “Tardy bell?”
“Most ordinary sound in the world. And when all of this is done, there’ll be tardy bells again.” He presses the point. Maybe he’s worried I don’t get it. “Think about it! When a tardy bell rings again, normal is back. Kids rushing to class, sitting around bored, waiting for the final bell, and thinking about what they’ll do that night, that weekend, that next fifty years. They’ll be learning like we did about natural disasters and disease and world wars. You know: ‘When the aliens came, seven billion people died,’ and then the bell will ring and everybody will go to lunch and complain about the soggy Tater Tots. Like, ‘Whoa, seven billion people, that’s a lot. That’s sad. Are you going to eat all those Tots?’ That’s normal. That’s what matters.”
So it wasn’t a joke. “Soggy Tater Tots?”
“Okay, fine. None of that makes sense. I’m a moron.”
He smiles. His teeth seem very white surrounded by the scruffy beard, and now, because he suggested it, I think about kissing him and if the stubble on his upper lip would tickle.
I push the thought away. Promises are priceless, and a kiss is a kind of promise, too.
2
UNDIMMED, THE STARLIGHT sears through the black, coating the highway in pearly white. The dry grass shines; the bare trees shimmer. Except for the wind cutting across the dead land, the world is winter quiet.
I hunker beside a stalled SUV for one last look back at the hotel. A nondescript two-story white rectangle among a cluster of other nondescript white rectangles. Only four miles from the huge hole that used to be Camp Haven, we nicknamed it the Walker Hotel, in honor of the architect of that huge hole. Sullivan told us the hotel was her and Evan’s prearranged rendezvous point. I thought it was too close to the scene of the crime, too difficult to defend, and anyway, Evan Walker was dead: It takes two to rendezvous, I reminded Zombie. I was overruled. If Walker really was one of them, he may have found a way to survive.
“How?” I asked.
“There were escape pods,” Sullivan said.
“So?”
Her eyebrows came together. She took a deep breath. “So . . . he could have escaped in one.”
I looked at her. She looked back. Neither of us said anything. Then Zombie said, “Well, we have to take shelter somewhere, Ringer.” He hadn’t found the brochure for the caverns yet. “And we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“The benefit of what doubt?” I asked.
“That he is who he says he is.” Zombie looked at Sullivan, who was still glaring at me. “That he’ll keep his promise.”
“He promised he’d find me,” she explained.
“I saw the cargo plane,” I said. “I didn’t see an escape pod.”
Beneath the freckles, Sullivan was blushing. “Just because you didn’t see one . . .”
I turned to Zombie. “This doesn’t make sense. A being thousands of years more advanced than us turns on its own kind—for what?”
“I wasn’t filled in on the why part,” Zombie said, half smiling.
“His whole story is strange,” I said. “Pure consciousness occupying a human body—if they don’t need bodies, they don’t need a planet.”
“Maybe they need the planet for something else.” Zombie was trying hard.
“Like what? Raising livestock? A vacation getaway?” Something else was bothering me, a nagging little voice that said, Something doesn’t add up. But I couldn’t pin down what that something was. Every time I chased after it, it skittered away.
“There wasn’t time to go into all the details,” Sullivan snapped. “I was sort of focused on rescuing my baby brother from a death camp.”
I let it go. Her head looked like it was about to explode.
I can make out that same head now on my last look back, silhouetted in the second-story window of the hotel, and that’s bad, really bad: She’s an easy target for a sniper. The next Silencer Sullivan encounters might not be as love struck as the first one.
I duck into the thin line of trees that borders the road. Stiff with ice, the autumn ruins crunch beneath my boots. Leaves curled up like fists, trash and human bones scattered by scavengers. The cold wind carries the faint odor of smoke. The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.
And human bodies, according to Sullivan, despite the fact that, also according to Sullivan, they don’t need bodies.
A virtual existence doesn’t require a physical planet.
When I’d first said that, Sullivan wouldn’t listen and Zombie acted like it didn’t matter. For whatever reason, he said, the bottom line is they want all of us dead. Everything else is just noise.
Maybe. But I don’t think so.
Because of the rats.
I forgot to tell Zombie about the rats.
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 g
rows 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.