For history to repeat itself. For the circle to come round.
Only one place I can think of that’s reasonably safe. I’m not happy about it and I know he sure as hell won’t be. But this kid is anything but soft; he’ll deal. “Past the building, then straight on about twenty yards,” I tell him as we scoot along on our bellies. “Big hole. Full of bodies.”
“Bodies?”
I imagine a red dot shimmering between my shoulder blades or on the back of Nugget’s head. I’ve got eyes on him now, and if I see that red dot, I’m going Dumbo on it again. The ground rises slightly as we near the pit, and then we can smell it, and the stench makes Nugget retch. I lock down on his arm and tug him to the edge. He doesn’t want to look, but he looks.
“It’s just dead people,” I choke out. “Come on, I’ll lower you down.”
He pulls against my grip. “I won’t be able to get back out.”
“It’s safe, Nugget. Perfectly safe.” Unfortunate choice of words. “They’d have taken the shot by now if they knew where we were.”
He nods. Makes sense to him. “But Megan . . .”
“I’m going back for her.”
He looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. I take his wrists and lower him feetfirst into the hole. “You hear anything, you play dead,” I remind Nugget.
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Breathe through your mouth.”
His lips part. I see the tiny pellet glistening inside his mouth. I give him a thumbs-up. He raises his right hand very slowly and puts it against his forehead in salute.
78
CRAWLING AWAY from the death pit, I know what’s going to happen. I know I’m going to die.
My time’s been borrowed and you can’t cheat death forever. Sooner or later you have to pay up, with interest, only please don’t let Nugget and Megan be the price for my abandoning my sister. So I say to God, You took Dumbo for the debt, Poundcake and Teacup, that’s enough, let that be enough. Take me but let them live.
The ground explodes in front of me. Clods of dirt and stone fly into my face. Well, shit, crawling’s pointless now. I heave myself up, but the bad leg buckles, and down I go. The next shot rips into my sleeve, nicking my biceps before exiting the opposite side; I hardly feel it. Instinctively I curl into a ball and wait for the finishing round. I know what’s happening. These are soldiers of the 5th Wave. Their hearts have been filled with hate, their minds conditioned for cruelty. They’re playing with me. Gonna make it last, you infested sonofabitch. Gonna make it fun!
And my sister’s face before me, then Bo’s and Cake’s and Cup’s, then more faces than I can count, faces I recognize and faces I don’t, there’s Nugget and Megan, Cassie and Ringer, there’s the recruits in camp and the bodies in the processing hangar laid end to end, hundreds of faces, thousands, tens of thousands, living and dead but mostly dead. In the pit behind me, one living face among hundreds that aren’t, and Vosch’s rule applies to him, too.
Hand raised in salute. Mouth open and the tiny pellet that glistens inside.
Holy shit, Parish, the tracker. That’s what you forgot.
I jam my hand into the pocket, pull out the pellet, and stuff it into my mouth. In the cluster of trees across the road, on the rooftop of the welcome center, and from wherever the hell else they might be, the shooters hold their fire when the green inferno that surrounds my head winks out.
79
CALL ME ZOMBIE.
Everything hurts. Even blinking hurts. But I’m getting up. That’s what zombies do.
We rise.
Maybe the shooters don’t notice at first. Maybe they’ve turned their attention elsewhere, looking for green targets. Whatever the reason, when I get up, nobody takes me down. No hobbling this time, no dragging my wounded leg, no shuffling in the dirt like a damned zombie. I run full out through the pain, calling Megan’s name now, fingers clawing in the dark until they wrap around her wrist.
Then I’ve got her outside. Her arm around my neck. Her breath in my ear.
I know the circle’s complete. I know the bill’s come due. Just let me save her first, dear Christ, suffer her not to die.
I don’t see it coming. Megan does. The teddy bear falls to the ground. Her mouth flies open in a silent scream.
Something smashes into the base of my skull. The world goes white, then there’s nothing, nothing at all.
80
CASSIE
YOU CAN SEE IT from miles away: The air base is an island of blazing light in a dark, horizonless sea, a white-hot ember of civilization glowing in the middle of a wasteland of black, though civilization is too nice a word for what it is. After all we dreamed and all those dreams we made real, all that’s left of us are these bases, the lighted fools to guide humanity’s way to dusty death.
Macbeth was never my favorite, but there you go.
The chopper banks to the left, bringing us toward the base from the east. We pass over a river, black water reflecting the conflagration of stars above it. Then the treeless buffer zone surrounding the camp that’s laced with trenches and razor wire and booby-trapped with land mines, protection against an enemy who will never come, who isn’t even here and maybe not even there—in the mothership that swings into view when we turn for the final approach. I look at it. It looks back at me.
What are you? What are you? The Others, my father called you, but aren’t we also that to you? Other-than-us, therefore not-worthy-of-us. Not worthy of life.
What are you? The shepherd culls the herd. The homemaker buys the bug spray. The blood of the lamb on its knees, the herky-jerky of the cockroach on its back. Neither has an inkling of the knife or the poison. The shepherd and the homemaker will lose no sleep. There’s nothing immoral about it. It’s murder without crime, killing without sin.
That’s what they’ve done. That’s the lesson they’ve brought home. We’ve been reminded who we are—not much—and what we were—too many. Roaches can scurry, sheep can run, it’s no matter. We’ll never get too big for our britches again; they’ll see to that. I’m looking at an object in our sky that will be there until our sky is gone.
Our escorts peel off as we shoot straight toward the landing zone. They’ll stay in the air to monitor the situation after we land. There’s a swarm of activity beneath us, trucks and armored Humvees racing toward the strip, troops swarming like ants from a kicked-over mound. Sirens blare, searchlights stab into the sky, antiaircraft guns swing into position. This should be fun.
Ringer pats Bob on the shoulder. “Good job, Bob.”
“Fuck you!”
Oh, Bob. Gonna miss you. Gonna miss you so bad.
Ringer climbs back into the hold with me, grabs the bag of Sammy-bombs, and plops into the seat across the aisle. Her dark eyes shine. She’s the bullet in the chamber, the powder in the hole. You can’t blame her. Evan pointed it out a long time ago: For any of this shit to mean anything, you gotta live long enough for your death to matter. Not necessarily make a difference—neither her death nor mine will—just to matter.
Suddenly I need to pee.
“VQP, Sullivan!” she shouts. We’ve taken off our headsets.
I nod. Give her the thumbs-up. VQP, you bet.
Our descent begins. The hold is lit up by searchlights. Motes of dust sparkle and spin around her head: Saint Ringer, the raven-haired angel of death. Outside the blue circle upon which Bob puts us down, a ring of soldiers inside a barricade of armored vehicles, surrounded by watchtowers manned by snipers, beneath four attack helicopters patrolling overhead.
We are so doomed.
81
RINGER LEANS BACK in the seat and closes her eyes like she’s going to grab a quick power nap before the big final exam. Bag in one hand, detonator in the other. I’ve got a rifle, a handgun, a very large knife, a couple of grenades, a half-full (think positive!) bottle of water, two
high-energy bars, and a full bladder. Bob throttles the chopper down and now you can really hear those sirens blasting. Ringer’s eyes pop open and she stares at me like she’s memorizing my face—I decide that so I don’t obsess about my crooked nose.
Then she says so softly I can barely hear her: “See you at the checkpoint, Sullivan.”
One-Eyed Bob throws off his harness. He whips around and screams in Ringer’s face, “He wanted you to come back, you stupid bitch! Why do you think you’re still alive?” Then he flies out of the cockpit, his legs pumping cartoon-fast before his feet even touch the ground, waving his hands over his head and screaming loud enough to be heard over the sirens.
“Pull back! Pull back! She’s gonna blow! SHE’S GONNA BLOW!”
Ringer goes right, and I go left toward a terraced garden of fatigues identical to the ones I’m wearing, rifles pointed at my head, the front row kneeling, back row standing, and then Ringer hits the detonator and the chopper hops five feet in the air with an emphatic whuuu-uuump. The concussion shoves me right into the line of soldiers, the heat from the blast singeing their faces and burning away the hairs on the back of my neck. I bowl into the pack while the pack reverts to its instincts, just like Ringer said it would, everybody flattening on the tarmac and covering their heads with their hands.
You’ll want to run but you gotta hold, Ringer told me back at the cave. Once the chopper blows, they’ll lose you, so you have to wait for me.
So here I am, just another recruit lying on her belly like the hundred others around her, hands over her head, her cheek pressed against the freezing concrete. Dress just like ’em, look just like ’em, act just like ’em: It’s Vosch’s own game turned against him.
People are screaming orders but nobody can hear them over the sirens. I wait until somebody taps me on the shoulder, but I’m no higher than hands-and-knees when Ringer sets off the IED somewhere in the vicinity of the hangar fifty yards away. That sets off full-panic mode. Any semblance of order breaks down as troops run for the nearest cover. I take off toward the control tower and the cluster of white buildings beyond it.
A hand grabs my shoulder, whips me around, and then I’m face-to-face with some random teenager who, as bad luck would have it, I’m going to kill.
“Who the fuck are you?” he screams in my face.
His body stiffens, welcoming the bullet. Not my bullet. I don’t even have the gun out of the holster. The kill belongs to Ringer, Vosch’s inhuman human firing from half a football field away. The kid’s dead before he hits the ground. I take off again.
I turn back once, at the base of the control tower. Searchlights crisscrossing the field, the chopper burning, squads running willy-nilly, Humvees screeching in every direction. Chaos is what Ringer promised and chaos is what we got.
I sling the rifle into my hands and sprint toward the white buildings, heading for the command center located in the middle of the complex. There I’ll find (I hope) the key that will open the lock that bars the door that leads to the room that will keep my baby brother safe.
As I fall in behind a cluster of recruits crowding the door into the first building, Ringer sets off the second bomb. Somebody yells Jesus Christ! and the logjam breaks. We all tumble inside like clowns bursting from the car at the circus.
There’s a part of me that hopes I find him first. Not Evan. Ringer’s creator. I’ve invested a lot of time imagining what I’d do to him—how I’d pay him back for the blood of the seven billion. Most of it’s too gross to talk about.
I’m moving through the lobby of the main administration building. Huge banners hang from the ceiling: WE ARE HUMANITY and WE ARE ONE. A sign that says UNITY and another that screams COURAGE. The largest spans the length of an entire wall, VINCIT QUI PATITUR. I run beneath it.
A red light spins in the corridor on the other side of the lobby. I jump when a voice booms from the ceiling: “GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. REPEAT: GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO REPORT TO YOUR DESIGNATED SECURITY AREA. REPEAT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO REPORT . . .”
Through the door at the end of the hall. Up the stairs straight ahead to the next door. Which is locked. With a keypad. I press my back against the wall beside the pad and wait. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three . . . While I’m counting, the third bomb detonates outside, a muffled pop! like someone coughing in another room. Then I hear the pop-pop, pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire. At one thousand eight, the door bursts open and a squad lumbers through. Right past me, not even a backward glance. Now, that’s too easy; I’m using up my quota of good luck way too soon.
I duck through the doorway and jog down another corridor, which is disconcertingly identical to the first corridor. Same spinning red light, same high-pitched UUUH-UHHH of the siren, same annoying Siri-on-dope voice, “GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. YOU HAVE THREE MINUTES TO REPORT TO YOUR DESIGNATED SECURITY AREA . . .” It’s like a dream from which you can’t wake up. At the end of this hall is an identical door with an identical keypad. The only difference is the window right beside this door.
I open up with the M16 at full stride. The glass explodes and I dive through the blasted-out opening without missing a step. And Defiance shall be my name! Back outside in the fresh, clean Canadian air, running across the narrow strip of land that separates the buildings. A voice springs from the dark, hollering, “Halt!” I fire in the voice’s general direction. I don’t even look. Then, off to my left, in the vicinity of the newly repaired armory, the fourth bomb detonates. A chopper roars right over my head, sweeping its lights back and forth, and I slam into the side of the building and press my body flat against the steel-reinforced concrete.
The chopper moves off and I move on, around the side of the building to the sliver of a path that cuts down its length, wall on one side, a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire on the other. There should be a padlocked gate at the far end.
So the lock—I shoot it off, I said to Ringer back in the caves.
That only works in the movies, Sullivan.
Yeah, you’re right: It’s good this isn’t a movie, or the hectoring, self-important, annoying secondary character would definitely be dead by now.
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL. GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. YOU HAVE TWO MINUTES TO REPORT . . .”
All right already, I get it. General Order Four is in effect. What the hell is General Order Four? Ringer never mentioned anything about general orders, four or otherwise. It must mean a lockdown of the base, all hands to battle stations, that kind of thing. That’s what I decide. Anyway, what they do doesn’t change what I have to do.
I jam a grenade into the diamond-shaped hole in the chain link, right above the lock, pull the pin, then hustle back the way I came, far enough not to get killed by the shrapnel, but not far enough to escape being peppered by a thousand tiny needles. If I hadn’t turned away at the last second, my face would have been shredded. The largest piece hits right in the middle of my back, wasp-sting sharp times ten. My left hand got a taste, too. I look down and see a wet glove of blood glistening in the starlight.
The grenade didn’t just take out the lock; it blew the entire gate from its hinges. It’s halfway across the courtyard, right next to the statue of some war hero from the days when wars had heroes. You know, the good ol’ days when we slaughtered each other for all the right reasons.
I trot toward the building on the other side of the courtyard. There are three doors evenly spaced along the wall facing me, and out of one, two, or all of them I can expect a welcoming committee, according to Ringer. I’m not disappointed. The middle door flies open right before my second grenade flies toward it and, predictively, somebody yells, “Grenade!” They slam the door closed—with the grenade inside.
The blast hurls the entire door toward my head. I dive out of the way. This is where i
t gets hard, Ringer said. There’s gonna be blood.
How much blood?
How much can you take?
What are you, my sensei or something? How many 5th Wavers am I going to have to kill?
As it turns out, at least three. I count that many semiautomatic rifles lying on the other side of the missing door, but it’s an educated guess. Hard to tell when the troops have been blown to pieces. I slip through the mess and sprint down the hall, leaving bloody boot prints in my wake.
Red light. Siren. Voice. “GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO REPORT . . .” Somewhere on the base, the next bomb goes off, meaning two things: Ringer’s still at large, and she’s got one bomb left. I’m a building away from the command center, beneath which is the bunker that houses the Wonderland room. It’s also, as Ringer pointed out numerous times, a dead end. If we get trapped or cornered, there won’t be any vinciting to our patituring.
Little Red Ridinghood Lost Her Way. The clever mnemonic device I came up with to navigate this next-to-last building. I hang a left at the first juncture, then a right, then another right, then a left. Her stands for high, meaning I hit the first stairwell after Lost. Of course, I could have just used the word high, but that would ruin the mnemonics. Little Red Ridinghood’s Lost Highway? Come on.
I don’t see anyone, don’t hear anyone except the eerie General Order Four voice echoing down the empty halls—“YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS”—and now I’m starting to get a very bad feeling about this General Order Four business, and I’m cursing Ringer, because obviously General Order Four must be an important piece of intel she either should have known about or chose not to mention for reasons only clear to her.
As I race up the stairs, the final countdown begins: “TEN SECONDS . . . NINE . . . EIGHT . . . SEVEN . . . SIX . . .”
Landing. One more flight. Then straight ahead to the walkway that connects this building with the command center. Almost there, Cassie. You’ve got this.