by Rick Yancey
She hesitates, then nods. I can’t read her expression—not unusual. Is she playing chess again? We can still hear Poundcake firing from across the street. He has to be getting low on ammo. It’s time.
Stepping into the lobby is a dive into total darkness. We advance shoulder-to-shoulder, trailing our fingers along the walls to keep our bearings in the dark, trying every door, looking for the one to the stairs. The only sounds are our breath in the stale, cold air and the sloshing of our boots through an inch of sour-smelling, freezing cold water; a pipe must have burst. I push open a door at the end of the hall and feel a rush of fresh air. Stairwell.
We pause on the fourth-floor landing, at the bottom of the narrow steps that lead up to the roof. The door is cracked open; we can hear the sharp report of the sniper’s rifle, but can’t see him. Hand signals are useless in the dark, so I pull Ringer close and press my lips against her ear.
“Sounds like he’s straight ahead.” She nods. Her hair tickles my nose. “We go in hard.”
She’s the better shooter; Ringer will go first. I’ll take the second shot if she misses or goes down. We’ve drilled this a hundred times, but we always practiced eliminating the target, not disabling it. And the target never fired back at us. She steps up to the door. I’m standing right behind her, hand on her shoulder. The wind whistles through the crack like the mewling of a dying animal. Ringer waits for my signal with her head bowed, breathing evenly and deeply, and I wonder if she’s praying and, if she is, if she prays to the same God I do. Somehow I don’t think so. I pat her once on the shoulder and she kicks open the door and it’s like she’s been shot out of a cannon, disappearing in the swirl of snow before I’m two steps onto the roof, and I hear the sharp pop-pop-pop of her weapon before I almost trip over her kneeling in the wet, white carpet of snow. Ten feet in front of her, the sniper lies on his side, clutching his leg with one hand while he reaches for his rifle with the other. It must have flown from his grip when she popped him. Ringer fires again, this time at the reaching hand. It’s three inches across, and she scores a direct hit. In the murky dark. Through heavy snow. He pulls his hand back to his chest with a startled scream. I tap Ringer on the top of her head and signal her to pull up.
“Lie still!” I yell at him. “Don’t move!”
He sits up, pressing his shattered hand against his chest, facing the street, hunched over, and we can’t see what his other hand is doing, but I see a flash of silver and hear him growl, “Maggots,” and something inside me goes cold. I know that voice.
It has screamed at me, mocked me, belittled me, threatened me, cursed me. It followed me from the minute I woke to the minute I went to bed. It’s hissed, hollered, snarled, and spat at me, at all of us.
Reznik.
We both hear it. And it nails down our feet. It stops our breath. It freezes our thoughts.
And it buys him time.
Time that grinds down as he comes up, slowing as if the universal clock set in motion by the big bang is running out of steam.
Pushing himself to his feet. That takes about seven or eight minutes.
Turning to face us. That takes at least ten.
Holding something in his good hand. Punching at it with his bloody one. That lasts a good twenty minutes.
And then Ringer comes alive. The round slams into his chest. Reznik falls to his knees. His mouth comes open. He pitches forward and lands facedown in front of us.
The clock resets. No one moves. No one says anything.
Snow. Wind. Like we’re standing alone on the summit of an icy mountaintop. Ringer goes over to him, rolls him onto his back. Pulls the silver device from his hand. I’m looking down at that pasty, pockmarked, rat-eyed face, and somehow I’m surprised and not surprised.
“Spend months training us so he can kill us,” I say.
Ringer shakes her head. She’s looking at the display of the silver device. Its light shines on her face, playing up the contrast between her fair skin and jet-black hair. She looks beautiful in its light, not angelic-beautiful, more like avenging angel–beautiful.
“He wasn’t going to kill us, Zombie. Until we surprised him and gave him no choice. And then not with the rifle.” She holds up the device so I can see the display. “I think he was going to kill us with this.”
A grid occupies the top half of the display. There’s a cluster of green dots on the far left-hand corner. Another green dot closer to the middle.
“The squad,” I say.
“And this lone dot here must be Poundcake.”
“Which means if we hadn’t cut out our implants—”
“He’d have known exactly where we were,” Ringer says. “He’d be waiting for us, and we’d be screwed.”
She points out the two highlighted numbers on the bottom of the screen. One of them is the number I was assigned when Dr. Pam tagged and bagged me. I’m guessing the other one is Ringer’s. Beneath the numbers is a flashing green button.
“What happens if you press that button?” I ask.
“My guess is nothing.” And she presses it.
I flinch, but her guess is right.
“It’s a kill switch,” she says. “Has to be. Linked to our implants.”
He could have fried all of us anytime he wanted. Killing us wasn’t the goal, so what was? Ringer sees the question in my eyes. “The three ‘infesteds’—that’s why he fired the opening shot,” she says. “We’re the first squad out of the camp. It makes sense they’d monitor us closely to see how we perform in actual combat. Or what we think is actual combat. To make sure we react to the green bait like good little rats. They must have dropped him in before us—to pull the trigger in case we didn’t. And when we didn’t, he gave us a little incentive.”
“And he kept firing at us because…?”
“Kept us hyped and ready to blow away any damn green shiny thing that glowed.”
In the snow, it’s as if she’s looking at me through a gauzy white curtain. Flakes dust her eyebrows, sparkle in her hair.
“Awful big risk to take,” I point out.
“Not really. He had us on this little radar. Worst-case scenario, all he had to do was hit the button. He just didn’t consider the worst-worst case.”
“That we’d cut out the implants.”
Ringer nods. She wipes away the snow clinging to her face. “I don’t think the dumb bastard expected us to turn and fight.”
She hands the device to me. I close the cover, slip it into my pocket.
“It’s our move, Sergeant,” she says quietly, or maybe it’s the snow tamping down her voice. “What’s the call?”
I suck down a lungful of air, let it out slowly. “Get back to the squad. Pull everyone’s implant…”
“And?”
“Hope like hell there isn’t a battalion of Rezniks on its way right now.”
I turn to go. She grabs my arm. “Wait! We can’t go back without implants.”
It takes me a second to get it. Then I nod, rubbing the back of my hand across my numb lips. We’ll light up in their eyepieces without the implants. “Poundcake will drop us before we’re halfway across the street.”
“Hold them in our mouths?”
I shake my head. What if we accidently swallow them? “We have to stick them back where they came from, bandage the wounds up tight, and….”
“Hope like hell they don’t fall out?”
“And hope pulling them out didn’t deactivate them… What?” I ask. “Too much hope?”
The side of her mouth twitches. “Maybe that’s our secret weapon.”
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 en
tirely 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.
