The 5th Wave

37

CASSIE, through the smudged window, shrinking.

Cassie, on the road, holding Bear.

Lifting his arm to help him wave good-bye.

Good-bye, Sammy.

Good-bye, Bear.

The road dust boiling up from the big black wheels of the bus, and Cassie shrinking into the brown swirl.

Good-bye, Cassie.

Cassie and Bear getting smaller and smaller, and the hardness of the glass beneath his fingers.

Good-bye, Cassie. Good-bye, Bear.

Until the dust swallows them, and he’s alone on the crowded bus, no Mommy no Daddy no Cassie, and maybe he shouldn’t have left Bear, because Bear had been with him since before he could remember anything. There had always been Bear. But there had always been Mommy, too. Mommy and Nan-Nan and Grandpa and the rest of his family. And the kids from Ms. Neyman’s class and Ms. Neyman and the Majewskis and the nice checkout lady at Kroger who kept the strawberry suckers beneath her counter. They had always been there, too, like Bear, since before he could remember, and now they weren’t. Who had always been there wasn’t anymore, and Cassie said they weren’t coming back.

Not ever.

The glass remembers it when he takes his hand away. It holds the memory of his hand. Not like a picture, more like a fuzzy shadow, the way his mother’s face is fuzzy when he tries to remember it.

Except Daddy’s and Cassie’s, all the faces he’s known since he knew what faces were are fading. Every face is new now, every face a stranger’s face.

A soldier walks down the aisle toward him. He’s taken off his black mask. His face is round, his nose small and dotted with freckles. He doesn’t look much older than Cassie. He’s passing out bags of gummy fruit snacks and juice boxes. Dirty fingers claw for the treats. Some of the children haven’t had a meal in days. For some, the soldiers are the first adults they’ve seen since their parents died. Some kids, the quietest ones, were found along the outskirts of town, wandering among the piles of blackened, half-burned bodies, and they stare at everything and everyone as if everything and everyone were something they’ve never seen before. Others, like Sammy, were rescued from refugee camps or small bands of survivors in search of rescue, and their clothes aren’t quite as ragged and their faces not quite as thin and their eyes not quite as vacant as the quiet ones’, the ones found wandering among the piles of the dead.

The soldier reaches the back row. He’s wearing a white band on his sleeve with a big red cross on it.

“Hey, want a snack?” the soldier asks him.

The juice box and the chewy gooey treats in the shape of dinosaurs. The juice is cold. Cold. He hasn’t had a cold drink in forever.

The soldier slides into the seat beside him and stretches his long legs into the aisle. Sammy pushes the thin plastic straw into the juice box and sips, while his eyes fall to the still form of a girl huddled in the seat across from them. Her shorts are torn, her pink top is stained with soot, her shoes caked with mud. She is smiling in her sleep. A good dream.

“Do you know her?” the soldier asks Sammy.

Sammy shakes his head. She had not been in the refugee camp with him.

“Why do you have that big red cross?”

“I’m a medic. I help sick people.”

“Why did you take off your mask?”

“Don’t need it now,” the medic answers. He pops a handful of gummies into his mouth.

“Why not?”

“The plague’s back there.” The soldier jerks his thumb toward the back window, where the dust boiled up and Cassie shrunk to nothing, holding Bear.

“But Daddy said the plague is everywhere.”

The soldier shakes his head. “Not where we’re going,” he says.

“Where are we going?”

“Camp Haven.”

Against the grumbling engine and the whooshing wind through the open windows, it sounded like the soldier said Camp Heaven.

“Where?” Sammy asks.

“You’re going to love it.” The soldier pats his leg. “We’ve got it all fixed up for you.”

“For me?”

“For everyone.”

Cassie on the road, helping Bear wave good-bye.

“Then why didn’t you bring everyone?”

“We will.”

“When?”

“As soon as you guys are safe.” The soldier glances at the girl again. He stands up, pulls off his green jacket, and gently lets it fall over her.

“You’re the most important thing,” the soldier says, and his boyish face is set and serious. “You’re the future.”

The narrow dusty road becomes a wider paved road, and then the buses turn onto an even wider road. Their engines rev up to a guttural roar, and they shoot toward the sun on a highway cleared of wrecks and stalled cars. They’ve been dragged or pushed onto the roadsides to clear the way for the busloads of children.

The freckle-nosed medic comes down the aisle again, and this time he’s handing out bottles of water and telling them to close the windows because some of the children are cold and some are scared by the rush of the wind that sounds like a monster roaring. The air in the bus quickly grows stale and the temperature rises, making the children sleepy.

But Sam gave Bear to Cassie to keep her company, and he’s never slept without Bear, not ever, not since Bear came to him, anyway. He is tired, but he is also Bearless. The more he tries to forget Bear, the more he remembers him, the more he misses him, and the more he wishes he hadn’t left him behind.

The soldier offers him a bottle of water. He sees something is wrong, though Sammy smiles and pretends he doesn’t feel so empty and Bearless. The soldier sits beside him again, asks his name, and says his name is Parker.

“How much farther?” Sammy asks. It will be dark soon, and the dark is the worst time. Nobody told him, but he just knows that when they finally come it will be in the dark and it will be without warning, like the other waves, and there will be nothing you can do about it, it will just happen, like the TV winking out and the cars dying and the planes falling and the plague, the Pesky Ants, Cassie and Daddy called it, and his mommy wrapped in bloody sheets.

When the Others first came, his father told him the world had changed and nothing would be like before, and maybe they’d take him inside the mothership, maybe even take him on adventures in outer space. And Sammy couldn’t wait to go inside the mothership and blast off into space just like Luke Skywalker in his X-wing starfighter. It made every night feel like Christmas Eve. When morning came, he thought he would wake up and all the wonderful presents the Others had brought would be there.

But the only thing the Others brought was death.

They hadn’t come to give him anything. They had come to take everything away.

When would it—when would they—stop? Maybe never. Maybe the aliens wouldn’t stop until they had taken everything away, until the whole world was like Sammy, empty and alone and Bearless.

So he asks the soldier, “How much farther?”

“Not far at all,” the soldier called Parker answers. “You want me to stay here with you?”

“I’m not afraid,” Sammy says. You have to be brave now, Cassie told him the day his mother died. When he saw the empty bed and knew without asking that she was gone with Nan-Nan and all the others, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t know, the ones they piled up and burned at the edge of town.

“You shouldn’t be,” the soldier says. “You’re perfectly safe now.”

That’s exactly what Daddy said on a night after the power died, after he boarded the windows and blocked off the doors, when the bad men with guns came out to steal things.

You’re perfectly safe.

After Mommy got sick and Daddy slipped the white paper mask over Cassie’s and his faces.

Just to be sure, Sam. I think you’re perfectly safe.

“And you’re gonna love Camp Haven,” the soldier says. “Wait till you see it. We fixed it up just for kids like you.”

“And they can’t find us there?”

Parker smiles. “Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s probably the most secure place in North America right now. There’s even an invisible force field, in case the visitors try anything.”

“Force fields aren’t real.”

“Well, people used to say the same thing about aliens.”

“Have you seen one, Parker?”

“Not yet,” Parker answers. “Nobody has, at least not in my company, but we’re looking forward to it.” He smiles a hard soldiery smile, and Sammy’s heart quickens. He wishes he were old enough to be a soldier like Parker.

“Who knows?” Parker says. “Maybe they look just like us. Maybe you’re looking at one right now.” A different kind of smile now. Teasing.

The soldier stands up, and Sammy reaches for his hand. He doesn’t want Parker to leave.

“Does Camp Heaven really have a force field?”

“Yep. And manned watchtowers and twenty-four/seven video surveillance and twenty-foot fencing topped with razor wire and big, mean guard dogs that can smell a nonhuman five miles away.”

Sammy’s nose crinkles. “That doesn’t sound like heaven! That sounds like prison!”

“Except a prison keeps the bad guys in and our camp keeps ’em out.”

38

NIGHT.

The stars above, bright and cold, and the dark road below, and the humming of the wheels on the dark road beneath the cold stars. The headlamps stabbing the thick dark. The swaying of the bus and the stale warm air.

The girl across the aisle is sitting up now, dark hair matted to the side of her head, cheeks hollow and skin drawn tight across her skull, making her eyes seem owly huge.

Sammy smiles hesitantly at her. She doesn’t smile back. Her stare is fixed on the water bottle leaning against his leg. He holds out the bottle. “Want some?” A bony arm shoots across the space between them, and she pulls the bottle from his hand, gulps down the rest of the water in four swallows, then tosses the empty bottle onto the seat beside her.

“I think they have more, if you’re still thirsty,” Sammy says.

The girl doesn’t say anything. She stares at him, hardly blinking.

“And they have gummies, too, if you’re hungry.”

She just looks at him, not speaking. Legs curled up beneath Parker’s green jacket, round eyes unblinking.

“My name’s Sam, but everybody calls me Sammy. Except Cassie. Cassie calls me Sams. What’s your name?”

The girl raises her voice over the hum of the wheels and the growl of the engine.

“Megan.”

Her thin fingers pluck at the green material of the army jacket. “Where did this come from?” she wonders aloud, her voice barely conquering the humming and growling in the background. Sammy gets up and slides into the empty space beside her. She flinches, drawing her legs back as far as she can.

“From Parker,” Sammy tells her. “That’s him sitting up there by the driver. He’s a medic. That means he takes care of sick people. He’s really nice.”

The thin girl named Megan shakes her head. “I’m not sick.”

Eyes cupped in dark circles, lips cracked and peeling, hair matted and entangled with twigs and dead leaves. Her forehead is shiny, and her cheeks are flushed.

“Where are we going?” she wants to know.

“Camp Heaven.”

“Camp… what?”

“It’s a fort,” Sammy says. “And not just any fort. The biggest, best, safest fort in the whole world. It even has a force field!”

It’s very warm and stuffy on the bus, but Megan can’t stop shivering. Sammy tucks Parker’s jacket under her chin. She stares at his face with her huge, owly eyes. “Who’s Cassie?”

“My sister. She’s coming, too. The soldiers are going back for her. For her and Daddy and all the others.”

“You mean she’s alive?”

Sammy nods, puzzled. Why wouldn’t Cassie be alive?

“Your father and your sister are alive?” Her bottom lip quivers. A tear cuts a trail through the soot on her face. The soot from the smoke from the fires from the bodies burning.

Without thinking, Sammy takes her hand. Like when Cassie took his the night she told him what the Others had done.

That was their first night in the refugee camp. The hugeness of what had happened over the past few months hadn’t hit him until that night, after the lamps were turned off and he lay curled next to Cassie in the dark. Everything had happened so fast, from the day the power died to the day his father wrapped Mommy in the white sheet to their arrival at the camp. He always thought they’d go home one day and everything would be like it was before they came. Mommy wouldn’t come back—he wasn’t a baby; he knew Mommy wasn’t coming back—but he didn’t understand that there was no going back, that what had happened was forever.

Until that night. The night Cassie held his hand and told him Mommy was just one of billions. That almost everybody on Earth was dead. That they would never live in their house again. That he would never go to school again. That all his friends were dead.

“It isn’t right,” Megan whispers now in the dark of the bus. “It isn’t right.” She is staring at Sammy’s face. “My whole family’s gone, and your father and your sister? It isn’t right!”

Parker has gotten up again. He’s stopping at each seat, speaking softly to each child, and then he’s touching their foreheads. When he touches them, a light glows in the gloom. Sometimes the light is green. Sometimes it’s red. After the light fades away, Parker stamps the child’s hand. Red light, red stamp. Green light, green stamp.

“My little brother was around your age,” Megan says to Sammy. It sounds like an accusation: How come you’re alive and he isn’t?

“What’s his name?” Sammy asks.

“What’s that matter? Why do you want to know his name?”

He wishes Cassie were here. Cassie would know what to say to make Megan feel better. She always knew the right thing to say.

“His name was Michael, okay? Michael Joseph, and he was six years old and he never did anything to anybody. Is that okay? Are you happy now? Michael Joseph was my brother’s name. You want to know everybody else’s?”

She is looking over Sammy’s shoulder at Parker, who has stopped at their row.

“Well, hello, sleepyhead,” the medic says to Megan.

“She’s sick, Parker,” Sammy tells him. “You need to make her better.”

“We’re going to make everybody better,” Parker says with a smile.

“I’m not sick,” Megan says, then shivers violently beneath Parker’s green jacket.

“Heck no,” Parker says with a nod and a big grin. “But maybe I should check your temperature, just to make sure. Okay?”

He holds up a quarter-size silver disk. “Anything over a hundred degrees glows green.” He leans over Sammy and presses the disk against Megan’s forehead. It lights up green. “Uh-oh,” Parker says. “Lemme check you, Sam.”

The metal is warm against his forehead. Parker’s face is bathed for a second in red light. Parker rolls the stamp over the back of Megan’s hand. The green ink shines wetly in the dimness. It’s a smiley face. Then a red smiley face for Sammy.

“Wait for them to call your color, okay?” Parker says to Megan. “Greens are going straight to the hospital.”

“I’m not sick,” Megan shouts hoarsely. Her voice cracks. She doubles over, coughing, and Sammy instinctively recoils.

Parker pats him on the shoulder. “It’s just a bad cold, Sam,” he whispers. “She’s gonna be okay.”

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Megan tells Sammy after Parker returns to the front of the bus. She furiously rubs the back of her hand against the jacket, smearing the ink. The smiley face is now just a green blob.

“You have to,” Sammy says. “Don’t you want to get better?”

She shakes her head sharply. He doesn’t get it. “Hospitals aren’t where you go to get better. Hospitals are where you go to die.”

After his mother got sick, he asked Daddy, “Aren’t you going to take Mommy to the hospital?” And his father said that it wasn’t safe. Too many sick people, not enough doctors, and not anything the doctors could do for her, anyway. Cassie told him the hospital was broken, just like the TV and the lights and the cars and everything else.

“Everything’s broken?” he asked Cassie. “Everything?”

“No, not everything, Sams,” she answered. “Not this.”

She took his hand and put it against his chest, and his pounding heart pushed fiercely against his open palm.

“Unbroken,” she said.

39

HIS MOTHER WILL only come to him in the in-between space, the gray time between waking and sleeping. She stays away from his dreams, as if she knows not to go there, because dreams are not real but feel more than real when you’re dreaming them. She loves him too much to do that.

Sometimes he can see her face, though most of the time he can’t, just her shape, a little darker than the gray behind his lids, and he can smell her and touch her hair, feel it trail through his fingers. If he tries too hard to see her face, she fades into the dark. And if he tries to hold her too tightly, she slips away like her hair between his fingers.

The hum of the wheels on the dark road. The stale warm air and the swaying of the bus beneath the cold stars. How much farther to Camp Heaven? It seems like they’ve been on the dark road beneath the cold stars forever. He waits for his mother in the in-between space, his eyes closed, while Megan watches him with those big, round, owly eyes.

He falls asleep waiting.

He is still asleep when the three school buses pull up to the gates of Camp Haven. High above in the watchtower, the sentry pushes a button, the electronic lock releases, and the gate slides open. The buses pull in and the gate slides shut behind them.

He doesn’t wake up until the buses roll to a stop with a final, angry hiss of their brakes. Two soldiers are moving down the aisle, waking the children who have fallen asleep. The soldiers are heavily armed, but they smile and their voices are gentle. It’s okay. Time to get up. You’re perfectly safe now.

Sammy sits up, squinting in the sudden blaze of light flooding through the windows, and looks outside. They have stopped in front of a large airplane hangar. The big bay doors are closed, so he can’t see inside. For a moment he isn’t worried about being in a strange place without Daddy or Cassie or Bear. He knows what the bright light means: The aliens couldn’t kill the power here. It also means Parker told the truth: The camp does have a force field. It has to. They don’t care if the Others know about the camp.

They are perfectly safe.

Megan’s breath is heavy in his ear, and he turns to look at her. Her eyes are huge in the glare of the floodlights. She grabs his hand.

“Don’t leave me,” she begs.

A big man heaves himself onto the bus. He stands beside the driver, hands on hips. He has a wide, fleshy face and very small eyes.

“Good morning, boys and girls, and welcome to Camp Haven! My name is Major Bob. I know you’re tired and hungry and maybe a little scared… Who’s a little scared right now? Raise your hand.” No hands go up. Twenty-six pairs of eyes stare blankly at him, and Major Bob grins. His teeth are small, like his eyes. “That’s outstanding. And you know what? You shouldn’t be scared! Our camp is the safest place in the whole ding-dong world right now, I kid you not. You’re all perfectly safe.” He turns to one of the smiling soldiers, who hands him a clipboard. “Now there are only two rules here at Camp Haven. Rule number one: Remember your colors. Everybody hold up your colors!” Twenty-five fists fly into the air. The twenty-sixth, Megan’s, remains in her lap. “Reds, in a couple of minutes you’ll be escorted into Hangar Number One for processing. Greens, sit tight, you’ve got a little farther to go.”

“I’m not going,” Megan whispers in Sammy’s ear.

“Rule number two!” Major Bob booms. “Rule two is two words: Listen and follow. That’s easy to remember, right? Rule two, two words. Listen to your group leader. Follow every instruction your group leader gives you. Don’t question and don’t talk back. They are—we all are—here for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to keep you guys safe. And we can’t keep you guys safe unless you guys listen and follow all instructions, right away, no questions.” He hands the clipboard back to the smiling soldier, claps his pudgy hands, and says, “Any questions?”

“He just said don’t ask questions,” Megan whispers. “And then he asks if we have any questions.”

“Outstanding!” Major Bob yells. “Let’s get you processed! Reds, your group leader is Corporal Parker. No running, pushing, or shoving, but keep it moving. No breaking line and no talking, and remember to show your stamp at the door. Let’s move it, people. The sooner we get you processed, the sooner you can catch some sleep and have some breakfast. I’m not saying the food is the best in the world, but there’s plenty of it!”

He lumbers down the steps. The bus rocks with each footfall. Sammy starts to get up, and Megan yanks him back down.

“Don’t leave me,” she says again.

“But I’m a red,” Sammy protests. He feels sorry for Megan, but he’s anxious to leave. It feels like he’s been on the bus forever. And the sooner the buses are empty, the sooner they can turn around and go back for Cassie and Daddy.

“It’s all right, Megan,” he tries to comfort her. “You heard Parker. They’re going to make everybody better.”

He falls into line behind the other reds. Parker is standing at the bottom of the steps, checking stamps. The driver shouts out, “Hey!” and Sammy turns, just as Megan hits the bottom step. She slams into Parker’s chest and screams when he grabs her flailing arms.

“Let me go!”

The driver pulls her from Parker’s grip and drags her back up the steps, an arm locked around her waist.

“Sammy!” Megan screams. “Sammy, don’t leave me! Don’t let them—”

The doors slam closed, cutting off her cries. Sammy glances up at Parker, who gives him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“She’s going to be fine, Sam,” the medic says quietly. “Come on.”

As he walks to the hangar, he can hear her screaming behind the yellow metal skin of the bus, over the throaty growl of its engine, the hiss of its brakes letting go. Screaming as if she’s dying, as if they’re torturing her. And then he steps through a side door into the hangar and he can’t hear her anymore.

A soldier is standing just inside the door. He hands Sammy a card with the number forty-nine printed on it.

“Go to the closest red circle,” the soldier tells him. “Sit down. Wait for your number to be called.”

“I gotta get over to the hospital now,” Parker says. “Stay frosty, champ, and remember it’s all cool now. There’s nothing that can hurt you here.” He tousles Sammy’s hair, promises he’ll see him again soon, and gives him a fist bump before leaving.

There are no planes in the huge hangar, much to Sammy’s disappointment. He’d never seen a fighter jet up close, though he has piloted one a thousand times since the Arrival. While his mother lay dying down the hall, he was in the cockpit of a Fighting Falcon, soaring at the edge of the atmosphere at three times the speed of sound, heading straight toward the alien mothership. Sure, its gray hull bristled with gun turrets and ray cannons and its force field glowed a fiendish, sickly green, but there was a weakness in the field, a hole only two inches wider than his fighter, that if he hit just right… And he’d have to hit it just right, because the whole squadron had been wiped out, he was down to his last missile, and there was no one left to defend the Earth from the alien horde but him, Sammy “the Viper” Sullivan.

Three large red circles have been painted on the floor. Sam joins the other children in the one closest to the door and sits down. He can’t get Megan’s terrified screams out of his head. Her huge eyes and the way her skin shimmered with sweat and the sick-smell of her breath. Cassie told him the Pesky Ants was over, that it had killed all the people it was going to kill because some people couldn’t catch it, like Cassie and Daddy and him and everyone else at Camp Ashpit. They were immune, Cassie said.

But what if Cassie’s wrong? Maybe the disease took longer to kill some people. Maybe it’s killing Megan right now.

Or maybe, he thinks, the Others have unleashed a second plague, one even worse than the Pesky Ants, one that will kill everyone who survived the first one.

He pushes the thought away. Since the death of his mother, he’s become good at pushing bad thoughts away.

There are over a hundred kids gathered into the three circles, but the hangar is very quiet. The boy sitting next to Sammy is so exhausted, he lies down on his side on the cold concrete, curls into a ball, and falls asleep. The boy is older than Sammy, maybe ten or eleven, and he sleeps with his thumb tucked firmly between his lips.

A bell rings, and then a lady’s voice blares over a loudspeaker. First in English, then in Spanish.

“WELCOME, CHILDREN, TO CAMP HAVEN! WE ARE SO HAPPY TO SEE ALL OF YOU! WE KNOW YOU’RE TIRED AND HUNGRY AND SOME OF YOU AREN’T FEELING VERY WELL, BUT EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE NOW. STAY IN YOUR CIRCLE AND LISTEN CAREFULLY FOR YOUR NUMBER TO BE CALLED. DON’T LEAVE YOUR CIRCLE FOR ANY REASON. WE DON’T WANT TO LOSE ANY OF YOU! STAY QUIET AND CALM AND REMEMBER THAT WE’RE HERE TO TAKE CARE OF YOU! YOU’RE PERFECTLY SAFE.”

A moment later, the first number is called out. The child rises from his red circle and is escorted by a soldier to a door painted the same color at the far end of the hangar. The soldier takes the card from him and opens the door. The child goes in alone. The soldier closes the door and returns to his station beside a red circle. Each circle has two soldiers, both heavily armed, but they smile. All the soldiers smile. They never stop smiling.

One by one the children’s numbers are called. They leave their circle, cross the hangar floor, and disappear behind the red door. They don’t come back.

It takes almost an hour for the lady to call Sammy’s number. Morning comes, and sunlight breaks through the high windows, filling the hangar with golden light. He’s very tired, ravenously hungry, and a little stiff from sitting so long, but he leaps up when he hears it—“FORTY-NINE! PROCEED TO THE RED DOOR, PLEASE! NUMBER FORTY-NINE!”—and in his hurry nearly trips over the sleeping boy beside him.

A nurse is waiting for him on the other side of the door. He knows she’s a nurse because she’s wearing green scrubs and soft-soled sneakers like Nurse Rachel from his doctor’s office. Her smile is warm like Nurse Rachel’s, too, and she takes his hand and leads him into a small room. There’s a hamper overflowing with dirty clothing and paper robes hanging from hooks next to a white curtain.

“Okay, champ,” the nurse says. “How long has it been since you’ve had a bath?”

She laughs at his startled expression. Then the nurse whips back the white curtain to reveal a shower stall.

“Everything comes off and into the hamper. Yes, even the underwear. We love children here, but not lice or ticks or anything with more than two legs!”

Though he protests, the nurse insists on doing the chore herself. He stands with his arms folded in front of him while she squirts a stream of foul-smelling shampoo into his hair and sudses his entire body, from his head to his toes. “Keep your eyes closed tight or it’ll burn,” the nurse gently instructs him.

She lets him dry himself off, and then tells him to put on one of the paper robes.

“Go through that door over there.” She points at the door at the other end of the room.

The robe is much too big for him. The bottom of it trails the floor as he goes to the next room. Another nurse is waiting there for him. She’s heavier than the first one, older, and not quite so friendly. She has Sammy step onto the scale, writes down his weight on a clipboard beside his number, and then has him hop onto the examination table. She places a metal disk—the same kind Parker used on the bus—against his forehead.

“I’m taking your temperature,” she explains.

He nods. “I know. Parker told me. Red means normal.”

“You’re red, all right,” the nurse says. Her cold fingers press on his wrist, taking his pulse.

Sammy shivers. He’s goose-bumpy cold in the flimsy robe and a little scared. He never liked going to the doctor, and he’s worried they might give him a shot. The nurse sits down in front of him and says she needs to ask some questions. He’s supposed to listen carefully and answer as honestly as he can. If he doesn’t know the answer, that’s okay. Does he understand?

What’s his full name? How old is he? What town is he from? Did he have any brothers or sisters? Are they alive?

“Cassie,” Sammy says. “Cassie’s alive.”

The nurse writes down Cassie’s name. “How old is Cassie?”

“Cassie is sixteen. They’re going back to get her,” Sammy tells the nurse.

“Who is?”

“The soldiers. The soldiers said there wasn’t room for her, but they were going back to get her and Daddy.”

“Daddy? So your father is alive, too? What about your mother?”

Sammy shakes his head. Bites his lower lip. He shudders violently. So cold. He remembers two empty seats on the bus, the one Parker sat next to him in and the one he sat in next to Megan. He blurts out, “They said there was no room on the bus, but there was room. Daddy and Cassie could have come, too. Why didn’t the soldiers let them come?”

The nurse answers, “Because you’re the first priority, Samuel.”

“But they’re going to bring them, too, right?”

“Eventually, yes.”

More questions. How did his mother die? What happened after that?

The nurse’s pen flies over the page. She gets up and pats his bare knee. “Don’t be scared,” she tells him before she leaves. “You’re perfectly safe here.” Her voice sounds flat to Sammy, like she’s repeating something she’s said a thousand times. “Sit tight. The doctor will be here in a minute.”

It feels much longer than a minute to Sammy. He wraps his thin arms around his chest, trying to hold in his body heat. His eyes restlessly roam the little room. A sink and cabinet. The chair the nurse sat in. A rolling stool in one corner and, mounted from the ceiling directly above the stool, a camera, its gleaming black eye aimed directly at the examination table.

The nurse comes back in, followed by the doctor. Dr. Pam is as tall and thin as the nurse is short and round. Immediately, Sammy feels calmer. There is something about the tall doctor lady that reminds him of his mother. Maybe it’s the way she talks to him, looking directly into his eyes, her voice warm and gentle. Her hands are warm, too. She doesn’t wear gloves to touch him like the nurse did.

She does what he expects, the doctor stuff he’s used to. Shines a light in his eyes, in his ears, down his throat. Listens to him breathe through the stethoscope. Rubs just beneath his jaw, but not too hard, all the while humming softly under her breath.

“Lie all the way back, Sam.”

Firm fingers pressing on his belly.

“Any pain when I do this?”

She has him stand up, bend over, reach for his toes, while she runs her hands up and down along his spine.

“Okay, sport, hop back on the table.”

He jumps back quickly onto the crinkly paper, sensing the visit is almost over. There won’t be a shot. Maybe they’ll prick his finger, and that’s no fun, but at least there won’t be a shot.

“Hold out your hand for me.”

Dr. Pam places a tiny gray tube no larger than a grain of rice into his palm.

“Know what this is? It’s called a microchip. Did you ever have a pet, a dog or a cat, Sammy?”

No. His father is allergic. He always wanted a dog, though.

“Well, some owners put a device very much like this one into their pets in case they run away or get lost. This one’s a little different, though. It puts out a signal that we can track.”

It goes just underneath the skin, the doctor explains, and no matter where Sammy is, they’ll be able to find him. Just in case something happens. It’s very safe here at Camp Haven, but just a few months ago everyone thought the world was safe from an alien attack, so now we have to be careful, we have to take every precaution…

He stops listening after the words underneath the skin. They’re going to inject that gray tube into him? Fear begins to gnaw anew around the edges of his heart.

“It won’t hurt,” the doctor says, sensing the nibbling fear. “We give you a little shot to numb you first, and then you’ll have just a small sore spot for a day or two.”

The doctor is very kind. He can see that she understands how much he hates shots and she really doesn’t want to do it. She has to do it. She shows him the needle used for the shot to numb him. It’s very tiny, hardly wider than a human hair. Like a mosquito bite, the doctor says. That isn’t so bad. He’s been bitten by mosquitoes lots of times. And Dr. Pam promises he won’t feel the gray tube go in. He won’t feel anything at all after the numbing shot.

He lies on his tummy, tucking his face into the crook of his elbow. The room is cold, and the swipe of the alcohol at the base of his neck makes him shudder violently. The nurse tells him to relax. “The more you tense up, the sorer you’ll be,” she tells him. He tries to think of something nice, something that will take his mind off what’s about to happen. He sees Cassie’s face in his mind’s eye, and he’s surprised. He expected to see his mother’s face.

Cassie is smiling. He smiles back at her, into the crook of his arm. A mosquito that must be the size of a bird bites down hard on the back of his neck. He doesn’t move, but whimpers softly against his skin. In less than a minute, it’s over.

Number forty-nine has been tagged.

40

AFTER THE DOCTOR bandages the insertion point, she makes a note in his chart, hands the chart to the nurse, and tells Sammy there’s just one more test.

He follows the doctor into the next room. It’s much smaller than the examination room, hardly larger than a closet. In the middle of the room is a chair that reminds Sammy of the one at his dentist’s, narrow and high-backed, thin armrests on either side.

The doctor tells him to have a seat. “Lean all the way back, head back, too, that’s right. Stay relaxed.”

Whirrr. The back of the chair lowers, the front rises, bringing up his legs until he is almost fully reclined. The doctor’s face comes into view. Smiling.

“Okay, Sam, you’ve been very patient with us, and this is the last test, I promise. It doesn’t last long and it doesn’t hurt, but sometimes it can be a little, well, intense. It’s a test of the implant we just put in. To make sure it’s working okay. It takes a few minutes to run, and you have to keep very, very still. That can be hard to do, can’t it? You can’t wiggle or squirm or even scratch your nose, or it will ruin the test. Think you can do that?”

Sammy nods. He is returning the doctor’s warm smile. “I’ve played freeze tag before,” he assures her. “I’m really good at it.”

“Good! But just in case, I’m going to put these straps around your wrists and ankles, not very tight, but just in case your nose does start to itch. The straps will remind you to keep still. Would that be okay?”

Sammy nods. When he’s strapped in, she says, “Okay, I’m going to step over to the computer now. The computer is going to send a signal to calibrate the transponder, and the transponder is going to send a signal back. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds, but it may feel longer—maybe a lot longer. Different people react in different ways. Ready to give it a try?”

“Okay.”

“Good! Close your eyes. Keep them closed until I say you can open them. Take big, deep breaths. Here we go. Keep those eyes closed now. Counting down from three… two… one…”

A blinding white fireball explodes inside Sammy Sullivan’s head. His body stiffens; his legs strain against the restraints; his tiny fingers lock on to the chair arms. He hears the doctor’s soothing voice on the other side of the blinding light, saying, “It’s all right, Sammy. Don’t be afraid. Just a few more seconds, I promise…”

He sees his crib. And there’s Bear lying next to him in the crib, and then there’s the mobile of stars and planets spinning lazily over his bed. He sees his mother, leaning over him, holding a spoonful of medicine and telling him he has to take it. There’s Cassie in the backyard, and it’s summer and he’s toddling around in a pair of Pull-Ups, and Cassie is spraying water from the hose high into the air so a rainbow springs up out of nothing. She whips the hose back and forth, laughing as he chases it, the fleeting, uncatchable colors, shimmering splinters of the golden light. “Catch the rainbow, Sammy! Catch the rainbow!”

The images and memories pour out of him, like water rushing down a drain. In no more than ninety seconds, the entirety of Sammy’s life roars out of him and into the mainframe, an avalanche of touch and smell and taste and sound, before fading into the white nothingness. His mind is laid bare in the blinding white, all that he has experienced, all that he remembers, and even those things that he can’t remember; everything that makes up the personality of Sammy Sullivan is pulled and sorted and transmitted by the device at the base of his neck into Dr. Pam’s computer.

Number forty-nine has been mapped.

41

DR. PAM UNDOES the straps and helps him out of the chair. Sammy’s knees give out. She holds on to his arms to keep him from falling. His stomach heaves, and he vomits on the white floor. Everywhere he looks, black blobs jiggle and bounce. The big, unsmiling nurse takes him back to the examination room, puts him on the table, tells him everything is fine, asks if she can bring him anything.

“I want my bear!” he screams. “I want my daddy and my Cassie and I want to go home!”

Dr. Pam appears beside him. Her kind eyes glow with understanding. She knows what he’s feeling. She tells him how brave he is, how brave and lucky and smart to have come this far. He passed the final test with flying colors. He’s perfectly healthy and perfectly safe. The worst is over.

“That’s what my daddy said every time something bad happened, and every time it just got worse,” Sammy says, choking back tears.

They bring him a white jumpsuit to put on. It reminds him of a fighter pilot’s outfit, zippered in the front, the material slick to the touch. The suit is too big for him. The sleeves keep falling over his hands.

“Do you know why you’re so important to us, Sammy?” Dr. Pam asks. “Because you’re the future. Without you and all those other children, we won’t stand a chance against them. That’s why we searched for you and brought you here and why we’re doing all this. You know some of the things they’ve done to us, and they’re terrible. Terrible, awful things, but that isn’t the worst part, that isn’t everything they’ve done.”

“What else have they done?” Sammy whispers.

“Do you really want to know? I can show you, but only if you want to know.”

In the white room, he had just relived his mother’s death, smelled her coppery blood, watched his father wash it from his hands. But those weren’t the worst things the Others had done, the doctor said. Did he really want to know?

“I want to know,” he says.

The doctor holds up the small silver disk the nurse had used to take his temperature, the same device Parker had pressed against his and Megan’s foreheads on the bus.

“This isn’t a thermometer, Sammy,” Dr. Pam says. “It does detect something, but it isn’t your temperature. It tells us who you are. Or maybe I should say what you are. Tell me something, Sam. Have you seen one of them yet? Have you seen an alien?”

He shakes his head no. Shivering inside the white suit. Curled up on the little examination table. Sick to his stomach, head pounding, weak from hunger and exhaustion. Something in him wants her to stop. He nearly shouts out, Stop! I don’t want to know! But he bites his lip. He doesn’t want to know; he has to know.

“I’m very sorry to say you have seen one,” Dr. Pam says in a soft, sad voice. “We all have. We’ve been waiting for them to come since the Arrival, but the truth is they’ve been here, right under our noses, for a very long time.”

He is shaking his head over and over. Dr. Pam is wrong. He’s never seen one. For hours he listened to Daddy speculating about what they might look like. Heard his father say they might never know what they look like. There had been no messages from them, no landers, no signs of their existence except the grayish-green mothership in high orbit and the unmanned drones. How could Dr. Pam be saying he had seen one?

She holds out her hand. “If you want to see, I can show you.”