The 5th Wave

42

BEN PARISH IS DEAD.

I don’t miss him. Ben was a wuss, a crybaby, a thumb-sucker.

Not Zombie.

Zombie is everything Ben wasn’t. Zombie is hardcore. Zombie is badass. Zombie is stone-cold.

Zombie was born on the morning I left the convalescent ward. Traded in my flimsy gown for a blue jumpsuit. Assigned a bunk in Barracks 10. Whipped back into shape by three squares a day and brutal physical training, but most of all by Reznik, the regiment’s senior drill instructor, the man who smashed Ben Parish into a million pieces, then reconstructed him into the merciless zombie killing machine that he is today.

Don’t get me wrong: Reznik is a cruel, unfeeling, sadistic bastard, and I fall asleep every night fantasizing about ways to kill him. From day one he’s made it his mission to make my life as miserable as possible, and he’s pretty much succeeded. I’ve been slapped, punched, pushed, kicked, and spat on. I’ve been ridiculed, mocked, and screamed at until my ears rang. Forced to stand for hours in the freezing rain, scrub the entire barracks floor with a toothbrush, disassemble and reassemble my rifle until my fingers bled, run until my legs turned to jelly… you get the idea.

I didn’t get it, though. Not at first. Was he training me to be a soldier or trying to kill me? I was pretty sure it was the latter. Then I realized it was both: He really was training me to be a soldier—by trying to kill me.

I’ll give you just one example. One’s enough.

Morning calisthenics in the yard, every squad in the regiment, over three hundred troops, and Reznik picks this time to publicly humiliate me. Looming over me, his legs spread wide, hands on knees, his fleshy, pockmarked face close to mine as I dipped into push-up number seventy-nine.

“Private Zombie, did your mother have any children that lived?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“I bet when you were born she took one look at you and tried to shove you back in!”

Jamming the heel of his black boot into my ass to force me down. My squad is doing knuckle push-ups on the asphalt trail that rings the yard, because the ground is frozen solid and asphalt absorbs blood; you don’t slip around as much. He wants to make me fail before I reach one hundred. I push against his heel: No way I’m starting over. Not in front of the entire regiment. I can feel my fellow recruits watching me. Waiting for my inevitable collapse. Waiting for Reznik to win. Reznik always wins.

“Private Zombie, do you think I’m mean?”

“Sir! No, sir!”

My muscles burn. My knuckles are scraped raw. I’ve gained back some of the weight, but have I gotten back the heart?

Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Almost there.

“Do you hate my guts?”

“Sir! No, sir!”

Ninety-three. Ninety-four. Someone from another squad whispers, “Who is that guy?” And someone else, a girl’s voice, says, “His name is Zombie.”

“Are you a killer, Private Zombie?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Do you eat alien brains for breakfast?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

Ninety-five. Ninety-six. The yard is funeral-quiet. I’m not the only recruit who loathes Reznik. One of these days, somebody’s going to beat him at his own game, that’s the prayer, that’s what’s on my shoulders as I fight to one hundred.

“Bullshit! I hear you’re a coward. I hear you run from a fight.”

“Sir! No, sir!”

Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Two more and I’ve won. I hear the same girl—she must be standing close by—whisper, “Come on.”

On the ninety-ninth push-up, Reznik shoves me down with his heel. I fall hard on my chest, roll my cheek against the asphalt, and there’s his puffy face and tiny pale eyes an inch from mine.

Ninety-nine; one short. The bastard.

“Private Zombie, you are a disgrace to the species. I’ve hacked up lugies tougher than you. You make me think the enemy was right about the human race. You should be ground up for slop and passed out a hog’s shithole! Well, what are you waiting for, you stinking bag of regurgitated puke, an effing invitation?”

My head rolls to one side. An invitation would be nice, thank you, sir. I see a girl around my age standing with her squad, her arms folded across her chest, shaking her head at me. Poor Zombie. She isn’t smiling. Dark eyes, dark hair, skin so fair it seems to be glowing in the early-morning light. I have the feeling I know her from somewhere, though this is the first time I remember seeing her. There are hundreds of kids being trained for war and hundreds more arriving every day, handed blue jumpsuits, assigned to squads, packed into the barracks ringing the yard. But she has the kind of face you remember.

“Get up, you maggot! Get up and give me a hundred more. One hundred more, or by God I will rip out your eyeballs and hang them from my rearview like a pair of fuzzy dice!”

I’m totally spent. I don’t think I’ve got enough left for even one more.

Reznik doesn’t give a crap about what I think. That’s the other thing it took me a while to understand: They not only don’t care what I think—they don’t want me to think.

His face is so close to mine, I can smell his breath. It smells like spearmint.

“What is it, sweetheart? Are you tired? Do you want nappy-time?”

Do I have at least one push-up left in me? If I can do just one more, I won’t be a total loser. I press my forehead against the asphalt and close my eyes. There is a place I go, a space I found inside me after Commander Vosch showed me the final battlefield, a center of complete stillness that isn’t touched by fatigue or hopelessness or anger or anything brought on by the coming of the Big Green Eye in the Sky. In that place, I have no name. I’m not Ben or Zombie—I just am. Whole, untouchable, unbroken. The last living person in the universe who contains all human potential—including the potential to give the biggest asshole on Earth just one more.

And I do.

43

NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING special about me.

Reznik is an equal-opportunity sadist. He treats the six other recruits of Squad 53 with the same savage indecency. Flintstone, who’s my age, with his big head and bushy unibrow; Tank, the skinny, quick-tempered farm boy; Dumbo, the twelve-year-old with the big ears and quick smile that disappeared quickly during the first week of basic; Poundcake, the eight-year-old who never talks, but who’s our best shot by far; Oompa, the chubby kid with the crooked teeth who’s last in every drill but first in chow line; and finally the youngest, Teacup, the meanest seven-year-old you’ll ever meet, the most gung ho of all of us, who worships the ground Reznik walks on, no matter how much she’s screamed at or kicked around.

I don’t know their real names. We don’t talk about who we were before or how we came to the camp or what happened to our families. None of that matters. Like Ben Parish, those guys—the pre-Flintstone, pre-Tank, pre-Dumbo, etc.—they’re dead. Tagged, bagged, and told we are the last, best hope for humanity, we are the new wine poured into old skins. We bonded through hatred—hatred of the infesteds and their alien masters, sure, but also our fierce, uncompromising, unadulterated hatred of Sergeant Reznik, our rage made all the more intense by the fact that we could never express it.

Then the kid named Nugget was assigned to Barracks 10, and one of us, like an idiot, couldn’t hold it inside any longer, and all the bottled-up fury exploded free.

I’ll give you one guess who that idiot was.

I couldn’t believe it when that kid showed up at roll call. Five years old tops, lost in his white jumpsuit, shivering in the cold morning air of the yard, looking like he was going to be sick, obviously scared out of his mind. And here comes Reznik with his hat pulled low over his beady eyes and his boots shined to a mirror finish and his voice perpetually hoarse from screaming, shoving his pasty, pockmarked grill down into the poor kid’s face. I don’t know how the little squirt kept from soiling himself.

Reznik always starts out slow and soft and builds to a big finish, the better to lull you into thinking he might be an actual human being.

“Well, what do we have here? What have they sent us from central casting—is this a hobbit? Are you a magical creature from a storybook realm come to enchant me with your dark magic?”

Reznik was just getting warmed up, and already the kid was fighting back tears. Fresh off the bus after going through God-knows-what on the outside, and here’s this crazy middle-aged man pouncing on him. I wondered how he was processing Reznik—or any of this craziness they call Camp Haven. I’m still trying to deal, and I’m a lot older than five.

“Oh, this is cute. This is so precious, I think I might cry! Dear God, I’ve dunked chicken nuggets bigger than you in my little plastic cup of spicy barbecue sauce!”

Ratcheting up the volume as he brought his face closer to the kid’s. And the kid holding up surprisingly well, flinching, eyes darting back and forth, but not moving an inch when I knew he must be thinking about taking off across the yard, just running until he couldn’t run anymore.

“What’s your story, Private Nugget? Have you lost your mommy? Do you want to go home? I know! Let’s close our eyes and make a wish and maybe Mommy will come and take us all home! Wouldn’t that be nice, Private Nugget?”

And the kid nodded eagerly, like Reznik had asked the question he’d been waiting to hear. Finally, somebody got to the point! Lifting up his big teddy-bear eyes into the drill sergeant’s beady ones… it was enough to break your heart. It was enough to make you scream.

But you don’t scream. You stand perfectly still, eyes forward, hands at your sides, chest out, heart breaking, watching it out of the corner of your eye while something comes loose inside you, uncoiling like a rattlesnake striking. Something you’ve been holding in for a long time as the pressure built. You don’t know when it’s going to blow, you can’t predict it, and when it happens there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

“Leave him alone.”

Reznik whipped around. No one made a sound, but you could hear the inward gasp. On the other side of the line, Flintstone’s eyes were wide; he couldn’t believe what I just did. I couldn’t, either.

“Who said that? Which one of you scum-sucking maggots just signed his own death warrant?”

Striding down the line, face red with fury, hands clinched into fists, knuckles bone white.

“Nobody, huh? Well, I’m going to fall on my knees and cover my head, because the Lord God his holy self has spoken to me from on high!”

He stopped in front of Tank, who was sweating through his jumpsuit though it was about forty degrees outside. “Was it you, puckerhole? I will tear your arms off!” He brought his fist back to punch Tank in the groin.

Cue the idiot.

“Sir, I said it, sir!” I shouted.

Reznik’s about-face was slow this time. His journey over to me took a thousand years. In the distance, a crow’s harsh call, but that was the only sound I heard.

He stopped just inside my range of vision, not directly in front of me, and that wasn’t good. I couldn’t turn toward him. I had to keep my eyes forward. Worst of all, I couldn’t see his hands; I wouldn’t know when—or where—the blow would land, which meant I wouldn’t know when to brace for it.

“So Private Zombie is giving the orders now,” Reznik said, so softly I could barely hear him. “Private Zombie is Squad Fifty-three’s very own catcher in the fucking rye. Private Zombie, I think I have a crush on you. You make me weak in the knees. You make me hate my own mother for giving birth to a male child, so now it’s impossible for me to have your babies.”

Where was it going to land? My knees? My crotch? Probably the stomach; Reznik has a soft spot for stomachs.

Nope. It was a chop to my Adam’s apple with the side of his hand. I staggered backward, fighting to stay upright, fighting to keep my hands at my sides, not going to give him the satisfaction, not going to give him an excuse to hit me again. The yard and the barracks were ringing, then jiggled and melted a little as my eyes filled with tears—of pain, sure, but of something else, too.

“Sir, he’s just a little kid, sir,” I choked out.

“Private Zombie, you have two seconds, exactly two seconds, to seal that sewer pipe posing as a mouth, or I will incinerate your ass with the rest of the infested alien sons of bitches!”

He took a deep breath, revving up for the next verbal barrage. Having completely lost my mind, I opened my mouth and let the words come out. I’ll be honest: Part of me was filled with relief and something that felt a hell of a lot like joy. I had kept the hate inside for too long.

“Then the senior drill instructor should do it, sir! The private really doesn’t care, sir! Just—just leave the kid alone.”

Total silence. Even the crow stopped fussing. The rest of the squad had stopped breathing. I knew what they were thinking. We’d all heard the story about the lippy recruit and the “accident” on the obstacle course that put him in the hospital for three weeks. And the other story about the quiet ten-year-old who they found in the showers strung up with an extension cord. Suicide, the doctor said. A lot of people weren’t so sure.

Reznik didn’t move. “Private Zombie, who is your squad leader?”

“Sir, the private’s squad leader is Private Flintstone, sir!”

“Private Flintstone, front and center!” Reznik barked. Flint took one step forward and snapped off a salute. His unibrow jiggled with tension. “Private Flintstone, you’re fired. Private Zombie is now squad leader. Private Zombie is ignorant and ugly, but he is not soft.” I could feel Reznik’s eyes boring into my face. “Private Zombie, what happened to your baby sister?”

I blinked. Twice. Trying not to show anything. My voice cracked a little when I answered, though. “Sir, the private’s sister is dead, sir!”

“Because you ran like a chickenshit!”

“Sir, the private ran like a chickenshit, sir!”

“But you’re not running now, are you, Private Zombie? Are you?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

He stepped back. Something flashed across his face. An expression I’d never seen before. It couldn’t be, of course, but it looked a lot like respect.

“Private Nugget, front and center!”

The newbie didn’t move until Poundcake gave him a poke in the back. He was crying. He didn’t want to, he was trying to choke it back, but dear Jesus, what little kid wouldn’t be crying by that point? Your old life barfs you out and this is where you land?

“Private Nugget, Private Zombie is your squad leader, and you will bunk with him. You will learn from him. He will teach you how to walk. He will teach you how to talk. He will teach you how to think. He will be the big brother you never had. Do you read me, Private Nugget?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” The tiny voice shrill and squeaky, but he got the rules down, and quickly.

And that’s how it began.

44

HERE’S A TYPICAL day in the atypical new reality of Camp Haven.

5:00 A.M.: Reveille and wash up. Dress and prep bunks for inspection.

5:10 A.M.: Fall in. Reznik inspects our billets. Finds a wrinkle in someone’s sheet. Screams for twenty minutes. Then picks another recruit at random and screams for another twenty for no real reason. Then three laps around the yard freezing our asses off, me urging Oompa and Nugget to keep up or I get to run another lap as the last man to finish. The frozen ground beneath our boots. Our breaths frosting in the air. The twin columns of black smoke from the power plant rising beyond the airfield and the rumble of buses pulling out of the main gate.

6:30 A.M.: Chow in the crowded mess hall that smells faintly like soured milk, reminding me of the plague and the fact that once upon a time I thought about just three things—cars, football, and girls, in that order. I help Nugget with his tray, urging him to eat because, if he doesn’t eat, boot camp will kill him. Those are my exact words: Boot camp will kill you. Tank and Flintstone laugh at me mothering Nugget. Already calling me Nugget’s Nanna. Screw them. After chow we check out the leaderboard. Every morning the scores from the previous day are posted on a big board outside the mess hall. Points for marksmanship. Points for best times on the obstacle course, the air raid drills, the two-mile runs. The top four squads will graduate at the end of November, and the competition is fierce. Our squad’s been stuck in tenth place for weeks. Tenth isn’t bad, but it’s not good enough.

7:30 A.M.: Training. Weapons. Hand-to-hand. Basic wilderness survival. Basic urban survival. Recon. Communications. My favorite is survival training. That memorable session where we had to drink our own urine.

12:00 P.M.: Noon chow. Some mystery meat between hard crusts of bread. Dumbo, whose jokes are as tasteless as his ears are big, cracks that we’re not incinerating the infested bodies but grinding them up to feed the troops. I have to pull Teacup off him before she smacks his head with a tray. Nugget stares at his burger like it might jump off his plate and bite his face. Thanks, Dumbo. The kid’s skinny enough as it is.

1:00 P.M.: More training. Mostly on the firing range. Nugget is issued a stick for a rifle and fires pretend rounds while we fire real ones into life-size plywood cutouts. The crack of the M16s. The screech of plywood being shredded. Poundcake earns a perfect score; I’m the worst shot in the squad. I pretend the cutout is Reznik, hoping that will improve my aim. It doesn’t.

5:00 P.M.: Evening chow. Canned meat, canned peas, canned fruit. Nugget pushes his food around and then bursts into tears. The squad glares at me. Nugget is my responsibility. If Reznik comes down on us for conduct unbefitting, there’s hell to pay, and I’m picking up the tab. Extra push-ups, reduced rations—he could even deduct some points. Nothing matters but getting through basic with enough points to graduate, get out into the field, rid ourselves of Reznik. Across the table, Flintstone is glowering at me from beneath the unibrow. He’s pissed at Nugget, but more pissed at me for taking his job. Not that I asked for squad leader. He came at me after that day and growled, “I don’t care what you are now, I’m gonna make sergeant when we graduate.” And I’m like, “More power to you, Flint.” The idea of my leading a unit into combat is ludicrous. Meanwhile, nothing I say calms Nugget down. He keeps going on about his sister. About how she promised to come for him. I wonder why the commander would stick a little kid who can’t even lift a rifle into our squad. If Wonderland winnowed out the best fighters, what sort of profile did this little guy produce?

6:00 P.M.: Drill instructor Q&A in the barracks, my favorite part of the day, where I get to spend some quality time with my favorite person in the whole wide world. After informing us what worthless piles of desiccated rat feces we are, Reznik opens the floor for questions and concerns.

Most of our questions have to do with the competition. Rules, procedures in case of a tie, rumors about this or that squad cheating. Making the grade is all we can think about. Graduation means active duty, real fighting—a chance to show the ones who died that we had not survived in vain.

Other topics: the status of the rescue and winnowing operation (code name Li’l Bo Peep; I’m not kidding). What news from the outside? When will we hunker full-time in the underground bunker, because obviously the enemy can see what we’re doing down here and it’s only a matter of time before they vaporize us. For that we get the standard-issue reply: Commander Vosch knows what he’s doing. Our job isn’t to worry about strategy and logistics. Our job is to kill the enemy.

8:30 P.M.: Personal time. Free of Reznik at last. We wash our jumpsuits, shine our boots, scrub the barracks floor and the latrine, clean our rifles, pass around dirty magazines, and swap other contraband like candy and chewing gum. We play cards and bust each other’s nuts and complain about Reznik. We share the day’s rumors and tell bad jokes and push back against the silence inside our own heads, the place where the never-ending voiceless scream rises like the superheated air above a lava flow. Inevitably an argument erupts and stops just short of a fistfight. It’s tearing away at us. We know too much. We don’t know enough. Why is our regiment composed entirely of kids like us, no one over the age of eighteen? What happened to all the adults? Are they being taken somewhere else and, if they are, where and why? Are the Teds the final wave, or is there another one coming, a fifth wave that will make the first four pale in comparison? Thinking about a fifth wave shuts down the conversation.

9:30 P.M.: Lights-out. Time to lie awake and think of a wholly new and creative way to waste Sergeant Reznik. After a while I get tired of that and think about the girls I’ve dated, shuffling them around in various orders. Hottest. Smartest. Funniest. Blondes. Brunettes. Which base I got to. They start to blend together into one girl, the Girl Who Is No More, and in her eyes Ben Parish, high school hallway god, lives again. From its hiding place under my bunk, I pull out Sissy’s locket and press it against my heart. No more guilt. No more grief. I will trade my self-pity for hate. My guilt for cunning. My grief for the spirit of vengeance.

“Zombie?” It’s Nugget in the bunk next to me.

“No talking after lights-out,” I whisper back.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Close your eyes and think of something nice.”

“Can we pray? Is that against the rules?”

“Sure you can pray. Just not out loud.”

I can hear him breathing, the creak of the metal frame as he flips and flops around on the bunk.

“Cassie always said my prayer with me,” he confesses.

“Who’s Cassie?”

“I told you.”

“I forgot.”

“Cassie’s my sister. She’s coming for me.”

“Oh, sure.” I don’t tell him that if she hasn’t shown up by now, she’s probably dead. It isn’t up to me to break his heart; that’s time’s job.

“She’s promised. Promised.”

A tiny hiccup of a sob. Great. Nobody knows for sure, but we accept it as fact that the barracks are bugged, that every second Reznik is spying on us, waiting for us to break one of the rules so he can bring the hammer down. Violating the no-talking rule at lights-out will earn all of us a week of kitchen patrol.

“Hey, it’s all right, Nugget…”

Reaching my hand out to comfort him, finding the top of his freshly shaved head, running my fingertips over his scalp. Sissy liked for me to rub her head when she felt bad—maybe Nugget likes it, too.

“Hey, stow that over there!” Flintstone calls out softly.

“Yeah,” Tank says. “You wanna get us busted, Zombie?”

“Come here,” I whisper to Nugget, scooting over and patting the mattress. “I’ll say your prayer with you, and then you can go to sleep, okay?”

The mattress gives with his added weight. Oh God, what am I doing? If Reznik pops in for a surprise inspection, I’ll be peeling potatoes for a month. Nugget lies on his side facing me, and his fists rub against my arm as he brings them up to his chin.

“What prayer does she say with you?” I ask.

“‘Now I lay me,’” he whispers.

“Somebody put a pillow over that nugget’s face,” Dumbo says from his bunk.

I can see the ambient light shining in his big brown eyes. Sissy’s locket pressed against my chest and Nugget’s eyes, glittering like twin beacons in the dark. Prayers and promises. The one his sister made to him. The unspoken one I made to my sister. Prayers are promises, too, and these are the days of broken promises. All of a sudden I want to put my fist through the wall.

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’”

He joins in on the next line.

“‘When in the morning light I wake, teach me the path of love to take.’”

The hisses and shushes pick up on the next stanza. Somebody hurls a pillow at us, but we keep praying.

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Your angels watch me through the night, and keep me safe till morning’s light.’”

On angels watch me, the hissing and shushing stops. A profound stillness settles over the barracks.

Our voices slow on the last stanza. Like we’re reluctant to finish because on the other side of a prayer is the nothingness of another exhausted sleep and then another day waiting for the last day, the day we will die. Even Teacup knows she probably won’t live to see her eighth birthday. But we’ll get up and put ourselves through seventeen hours of hell anyway. Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken.

“‘And if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’”

45

THE NEXT MORNING I’m in Reznik’s office with a special request. I know what his answer’s going to be, but I’m asking anyway.

“Sir, the squad leader requests that the senior drill instructor grant Private Nugget a special exemption from this morning’s detail.”

“Private Nugget is a member of this squad,” Reznik reminds me. “And as a member of this squad, he is expected to perform all duties assigned by Central Command. All duties, Private.”

“Sir, the squad leader requests that the senior drill instructor reconsider his decision based on Private Nugget’s age and—”

Reznik dismisses the point with a wave of his hand. “The boy didn’t drop out of the damned sky, Private. If he didn’t pass his prelims, he wouldn’t have been assigned to your squad. But the fact of the matter is he did pass his prelims, he was assigned to your squad, and he will perform all duties of your squad as assigned by Central Command, including P and D. Are we clear, Private?”

Well, Nugget, I tried.

“What’s P and D?” he asks at morning chow.

“Processing and disposal,” I answer, cutting my eyes away from him.

Across from us, Dumbo groans and pushes his tray away. “Great. The only way I can get through breakfast is by not thinking about it!”

“Churn and burn, baby,” Tank says, glancing at Flintstone for approval. Those two are tight. On the day Reznik gave me the job, Tank told me he didn’t care who was squad leader, he’d only listen to Flint. I shrugged. Whatever. Once we graduated—if we ever graduated—one of us would be promoted to sergeant, and I knew that someone would not be me.

“Dr. Pam showed you a Ted,” I say to Nugget. He nods. From his expression, I can tell it isn’t a pleasant memory. “You hit the button.” Another nod. Slower than the first one. “What do you think happens to the person on the other side of the glass after you hit the button?”

Nugget whispers, “They die.”

“And the sick people they bring in from the outside, ones that don’t make it once they get here—what do you think happens to them?”

“Oh, come on, Zombie, just tell him!” Oompa says. He’s pushed away his food, too. A first for him. Oompa is the only one in the squad who ever goes back for seconds. To put it in the nicest way, the food in camp sucks.

“It isn’t something we like to do, but it has to be done,” I say, echoing the company line. “Because this is war, you know? It’s war.”

I look down the table for support. The only one who will make eye contact with me is Teacup, who is nodding happily.

“War,” she says. Happily.

Outside the mess hall and across the yard, where several squads are drilling under the watchful eyes of their drill sergeants, Nugget trots along beside me. Zombie’s dog, the squad calls him behind his back. Cutting between Barracks 3 and 4 to the road that leads to the power plant and the processing hangars. The day is cold and cloudy; it feels like it might snow. In the distance, the sound of a Black Hawk taking off and the sharp tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons’ fire. Directly in front of us the twin towers of the plant belching black and gray smoke. The gray smoke fades into the clouds. The black lingers.

A large white tent has been set up outside the entrance to the hangar, the staging area festooned with red-and-white biohazard warning signs. Here we suit up for processing. Once I’m dressed, I help Nugget with his orange suit, the boots, the rubber gloves, the mask, and the hood. I give him the lecture about never, ever taking off any part of his suit inside the hangar, under any circumstances, ever. He has to ask permission before handling anything and, if he has to leave the building for any reason, he has to decon and pass inspection before reentering.

“Just stick with me,” I tell him. “It’ll be okay.”

He nods and his hood bounces back and forth, the faceplate smacking him in the forehead. He’s trying to hold it together, and it’s not going well. So I say, “They’re just people, Nugget. Just people.”

Inside the processing hangar, the bodies of the just-people are sorted, the infected from the clean—or, as we call them, the Ted from the unTed. Teds are marked with bright green circles on their foreheads, but you rarely need to look; the Teds are always the freshest bodies.

They’ve been stacked against the back wall, waiting for their turn to be laid out on the long metal tables that run the length of the hangar. The bodies are in various stages of decay. Some are months old. Some look fresh enough to sit up and wave hello.

It takes three squads to work the line. One squad carts the bodies over to the metal tables. Another processes. A third carries the processed corpses to the front and stacks them for pickup. You rotate the duties to help break up the monotony.

Processing is the most interesting, and where our squad begins. I tell Nugget not to touch, just watch me until he gets the idea.

Empty the pockets. Separate the contents. Trash goes in one bin, electronics in another, precious metals in a third, all other metals in a fourth. Wallets, purses, paper, cash—all trash. Some of the squads can’t help themselves—old habits die hard—and walk around with wads of useless hundred-dollar bills stuffed in their pockets.

Photographs, IDs, any little memento that isn’t made of ceramic—trash. Almost without exception, from the oldest to the youngest, the pockets of the dead are filled to the brim with the strangest things only the owners could understand the value for.

Nugget doesn’t say a word. He watches me work down the line, keeping right beside me as I sidestep to the next body. The hangar is ventilated, but the smell is overpowering. Like any omnipresent smell—or rather, like anything omnipresent—you get used to it; you stop smelling it after a while.

Same is true for your other senses. And your soul. After you’ve seen your five hundredth dead baby, how can you be shocked or sickened or feel anything at all?

Beside me, Nugget is silent, watching.

“Tell me if you’re going to be sick,” I tell him sternly. It’s horrible throwing up in your suit.

The overhead speakers pop to life, and the tunes begin. Most of the guys prefer rap while they process; I like to mix it up with a little heavy metal and some R&B. Nugget wants something to do, so I have him carry the ruined clothes to the laundry bins. They’ll be burned with the processed corpses later that night. Disposal happens next door, in the power plant incinerator. They say the black smoke is from the coal and the gray smoke is from the bodies. I don’t know if that’s true.

It’s the hardest processing I’ve done. I’ve got Nugget, my own bodies to process, and the rest of the squad to keep an eye on, because there’s no drill sergeants or any adult period inside the processing hangar, except the dead ones. Just kids, and sometimes it’s like at school when the teacher is suddenly called out of the room. Things can get crazy.

There’s little interaction among the squads outside P&D. The competition for the top slots on the leaderboard is too intense, and there’s nothing friendly about the rivalry.

So when I see the fair-skinned, dark-haired girl wheeling corpses from Poundcake’s table to the disposal area, I don’t go over and introduce myself and I don’t grab one of her team members to ask her name. I just watch her while I dig my fingers through the pockets of dead people. I notice she’s directing traffic at the door; she must be the squad leader. At the midmorning break, I pull Poundcake aside. He’s a sweet kid, quiet, but not in a weird way. Dumbo has a theory that one day the cork will pop and Poundcake won’t stop talking for a week.

“You know that girl from Squad Nineteen working at your table?” I ask him. He nods. “Know anything about her?” He shakes his head. “Why am I asking you this, Cake?” He shrugs. “Okay,” I say. “But don’t tell anyone I asked.”

By the fourth hour on the line, Nugget’s not too steady on his feet. He needs a break, so I take him outside for a few minutes, where we sit against the hangar door and watch the black and gray smoke billowing beneath the clouds.

Nugget yanks off his hood and leans his head against the cold metal door, his round face shiny with sweat.

“They’re just people,” I say again, basically because I don’t know what else to say. “It gets easier,” I go on. “Every time you do it, you feel it a little less. Until it’s like—I don’t know—like making your bunk or brushing your teeth.”

I’m all tense, waiting for him to lose it. Cry. Run. Explode. Something. But there’s just this blank, faraway look in his eyes, and suddenly I’m the one about to explode. Not at him. Or at Reznik for making me bring him. At them. At the bastards who did this to us. Forget about my life—I know how that ends. What about Nugget’s? Five frigging years old, and what’s he got to look forward to? And why the hell did Commander Vosch assign him to a combat unit? Seriously, he can’t even lift a rifle. Maybe the idea is to catch ’em young, train ’em from the ground up. So by the time he’s my age you don’t have a stone-cold killer, but an ice-cold one. One with liquid nitrogen for blood.

I hear his voice before I feel his hand on my forearm. “Zombie, are you okay?”

“Sure, I’m fine.” Here’s a strange turn of events, him worried about me.

A large flatbed pulls up to the hangar door, and Squad 19 begins loading bodies, tossing them onto the truck like relief workers heaving sacks of grain. There’s the dark-haired girl again, straining at the front end of a very fat corpse. She glances our way before going back inside for the next body. Great. She’ll probably report us for goofing off to knock a few points off our score.

“Cassie says it won’t matter what they do,” Nugget says. “They can’t kill all of us.”

“Why can’t they?” Because, kid, I’d really, really like to know.

“Because we’re too hard to kill. We’re invista… investra… invinta…”

“Invincible?”

“That’s it!” With a reassuring pat on my arm. “Invincible.”

Black smoke, gray smoke. And the cold biting our cheeks and the heat from our bodies trapped inside our suits, Zombie and Nugget and the brooding clouds above us and, hidden above them, the mothership that gave birth to the gray smoke and, in a way, to us. Us too.

46

EVERY NIGHT NOW Nugget crawls into my bunk after lights-out to say his prayer, and I let him stay until he falls asleep. Then I carry him back to his bunk. Tank threatens to turn me in, usually after I give him an order he doesn’t like. But he doesn’t. I think he secretly looks forward to prayer time.

It amazes me how quickly Nugget has adjusted to camp life. Kids are like that, though. They can get used to practically anything. He can’t lift a rifle to his shoulder, but he does everything else, and sometimes better than the older kids. He’s faster than Oompa on the obstacle course and a quicker study than Flintstone. The one squad member who can’t stand him is Teacup. I guess it’s jealousy: Before Nugget came, Teacup was the baby of the family.

Nugget did have a mini freakout during his first air raid drill. Like the rest of us, he had no idea it was coming, but unlike the rest of us, he had no idea what the hell was going on.

It happens once a month and always in the middle of the night. The sirens scream so loud, you can feel the floor shaking under your bare feet as you stumble around in the dark, yanking on jumpsuit and boots, grabbing your M16, racing outside as all the barracks empty out, hundreds of recruits pouring across the yard toward the access tunnels that lead underground.

I was a couple of minutes behind the squad because Nugget was hollering his head off and clinging to me like a monkey to his momma, thinking any minute the alien warships would start dropping their payloads.

I shouted at him to calm down and follow my lead. It was a waste of breath. Finally I just picked him up and slung him over my shoulder, rifle clutched in one hand, Nugget’s butt in the other. As I sprinted outside, I thought of another night and another screaming kid. The memory made me run harder.

Into the stairwell, down the four flights of stairs awash in yellow emergency light, Nugget’s head popping against my back, then through the steel-reinforced door at the bottom, down a short passageway, through the second reinforced door, and into the complex. The heavy door clanged shut behind us, sealing us inside. By now he had decided he might not be vaporized after all, and I could set him down.

The shelter is a confusing maze of dimly lit intersecting corridors, but we’ve been drilled so much, I could find my way to our station with my eyes closed. I yelled over the siren for Nugget to follow me and I took off. A squad heading in the opposite direction thundered past us.

Right, left, right, right, left, into the final passageway, my free hand gripping the back of Nugget’s neck to keep him from falling back. I could see my squad kneeling twenty yards from the back wall of the dead-end tunnel, their rifles trained at the metal grate that covers the airshaft leading to the surface.

And Reznik standing behind them, holding a stopwatch.

Crap.

We missed our time by forty-eight seconds. Forty-eight seconds that would cost us three days of free time. Forty-eight seconds that would drop us another place on the leaderboard. Forty-eight seconds that meant God knows how many more days of Reznik.

Back in the barracks now, we’re all too hyped up to sleep. Half the squad is pissed at me, the other half is pissed at Nugget. Tank, of course, blames me.

“You should have left him behind,” he says. His thin face is flushed with rage.

“There’s a reason we drill, Tank,” I remind him. “What if this had been the real thing?”

“Then I guess he’d be dead.”

“He’s a member of this squad, same as the rest of us.”

“You still don’t get it, do you, Zombie? It’s freakin’ nature. Whoever’s too sick or weak has to go.” He yanks off his boots, hurls them into his locker at the foot of the bunk. “If it was up to me, we’d throw all of ’em into the incinerator with the Teds.”

“Killing humans—isn’t that the aliens’ job?”

His face is beet red. He pounds the air with his fist. Flintstone makes a move to calm him down, but Tank waves him away.

“Whoever’s too weak, too sick, too old, too slow, too stupid, or too little—they GO!” Tank yells. “Anybody and everybody who can’t fight or support the fight—they’ll just drag us down.”

“They’re expendable,” I shoot back sarcastically.

“The chain is only as strong as the weakest link,” Tank roars. “It’s frickin’ nature, Zombie. Only the strong survive!”

“Hey, come on, man,” Flintstone says to him. “Zombie’s right. Nugget’s one of the crew.”

“You get off my case, Flint,” Tank shouts. “All of you! Like it’s my fault. Like I’m responsible for this shit!”

“Zombie, do something,” Dumbo begs me. “He’s going Dorothy.”

Dumbo’s referring to the recruit who snapped on the rifle range one day, turning her weapon on her own squad members. Two people were killed and three seriously injured before the drill sergeant popped her in the back of the head with his sidearm. Every week there’s a story about someone “going Dorothy,” or sometimes we say “off to see the wizard.” The pressure gets to be too much, and you break. Sometimes you turn on others. Sometimes you turn on yourself. Sometimes I question the wisdom of Central Command, putting high-powered automatic weapons into the hands of some seriously effed-up children.

“Oh, go screw yourself,” Tank snarls at Dumbo. “Like you know anything. Like anybody knows anything. What the hell are we doing here? You want to tell me, Dumbo? How about you, squad leader? Can you tell me? Somebody better tell me and they better tell me right now, or I’m taking this place out. I’m taking all of it and all of you out, because this is seriously messed up, man. We’re going to take them on, the things that killed seven billion of us? With what? With what?” Pointing the end of his rifle at Nugget, who’s clinging to my leg. “With that?” Laughing hysterically.

Everybody goes stiff when the gun comes up. I hold up my empty hands and say as calmly as I can, “Private, lower that weapon right now.”

“You’re not the boss of me! Nobody’s the boss of me!” Standing beside his bunk, the rifle at his hip. On the yellow brick road, all right.

My eyes slide over to Flintstone, who’s the closest to Tank, standing a couple of feet to his right. Flint answers with the tiniest of nods.

“Don’t you dumbasses ever wonder why they haven’t hit us yet?” Tank says. He’s not laughing now. He’s crying. “You know they can. You know they know we’re here, and you know they know what we’re doing here, so why are they letting us do it?”

“I don’t know, Tank,” I say evenly. “Why?”

“Because it doesn’t matter anymore what the hell we do! It’s over, man. It’s done!” Swinging his gun around wildly. If it goes off… “And you and me and everybody else on this damn base are history! We’re—”

Flint’s on him, ripping the rifle from his hand and shoving him down hard. Tank’s head catches the edge of his bunk when he falls. He curls into a ball, holding his head in both hands, screaming at the top of his lungs, and when his lungs are empty, he fills them and lets loose again. Somehow it’s worse than waving around the loaded M16. Poundcake races into the latrine to hide in one of the stalls. Dumbo covers his big ears and scoots to the head of his bunk. Oompa has sidled closer to me, right next to Nugget, who’s holding on to my legs with both hands now and peeking around my hip at Tank writhing on the barracks floor. The only one unaffected by Tank’s meltdown is Teacup, the seven-year-old. She’s sitting on her bunk staring stoically at him, like every night Tank falls to the floor and screams as if he’s being murdered.

And it hits me: This is murder, what they’re doing to us. A very slow, very cruel murder, killing us from our souls outward, and I remember the commander’s words: It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.

It is hopeless. It is crazy. Tank is the sane one because he sees it clearly.

Which is why he has to go.

47

THE SENIOR DRILL INSTRUCTOR agrees with me, and the next morning Tank is gone, taken to the hospital for a full psych eval. His bunk remains empty for a week, while our squad, one man short, falls further and further behind in points. We’ll never graduate, never trade in our blue jumpsuits for real uniforms, never venture beyond the electric fence and razor wire to prove ourselves, to pay back a fraction of what we’ve lost.

We don’t talk about Tank. It’s as if Tank never existed. We have to believe the system is perfect, and Tank is a flaw in the system.

Then one morning in the P&D hangar, Dumbo motions me over to his table. Dumbo is training to be the squad medic, so he has to dissect designated corpses, usually Teds, to learn about human anatomy. When I come over, he doesn’t say anything, but nods at the body lying in front of him.

It’s Tank.

We stare at his face for a long moment. His eyes are open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. He’s so fresh, it’s unnerving. Dumbo glances around the hangar to make sure no one can overhear us, and then whispers, “Don’t tell Flint.”

I nod. “What happened?”

Dumbo shakes his head. He’s sweating badly under the protective hood. “That’s the really freaky thing, Zombie. I can’t find anything.”

I look back down at Tank. He isn’t pale. His skin is slightly pink without a mark on it. How did Tank die? Did he go Dorothy in the psych ward, maybe overdose himself on some drugs?

“What if you cut him open?” I ask.

“I’m not cutting Tank open,” he says. He’s looking at me as if I just told him to jump off a cliff.

I nod. Stupid idea. Dumbo is no doctor; he’s a twelve-year-old kid. I glance around the hangar again. “Get him off this table,” I say. “I don’t want anyone else to see him.” Including me.

Tank’s body is stacked with the others by the hangar doors to be disposed. He’s loaded onto the transport for the final leg of his journey to the incinerators, where he will be consumed in fire, his ashes mixing with the gray smoke and carried aloft in a column of superheated air, eventually to settle over us in particles too fine to see or feel. He’ll stay with us—on us—until we shower that night, washing what’s left of Tank into the drains connected to the pipes connected to the septic tanks, where he will mix with our excrement before leaching into the ground.

48

TANK’S REPLACEMENT ARRIVES two days later. We know he’s coming, because the night before Reznik announces it during Q&A. He won’t tell us anything about him, except the name: Ringer. After he leaves, everybody in the squad is jacked up; Reznik must have named him Ringer for a reason.

Nugget comes over to my bunk and asks, “What’s a ringer?”

“Someone who you slip into a team to give it an edge,” I explain. “Somebody who’s really good.”

“Marksmanship,” Flintstone guesses. “That’s where we’re weakest. Poundcake’s our best, and I’m okay, but you and Dumbo and Teacup suck. And Nugget can’t even shoot.”

“Come over here and say I suck,” Teacup shouts. Always looking for a fight. If I were in charge, I’d give Teacup a rifle and a couple of clips and let her loose on every Ted in a hundred-mile radius.

After the prayer, Nugget twists and squirms against my back until I can’t take it anymore and hiss at him to go back to his bunk.

“Zombie, it’s her.”

“What’s her?”

“Ringer! Cassie is Ringer!”

It takes me a couple of seconds to remember who Cassie is. Oh, God, not this shit again.

“I don’t think Ringer is your sister.”

“You don’t know she isn’t, either.”

It almost comes out of me: Don’t be a dumbass, kid. Your sister isn’t coming for you because she’s dead. But I hold it in. Cassie is Nugget’s silver locket. What he clings to because if he lets go, there’s nothing to keep the tornado from taking him off to Oz like the other Dorothys in camp. It’s why a kid army makes sense. Adults don’t waste their time on magical thinking. They dwell on the same inconvenient truths that landed Tank on the dissection table.

Ringer isn’t at roll call the next morning. And he isn’t on the morning run or at chow. We gear up for the range, check our weapons, head out across the yard. It’s a clear day, but very cold. Nobody says much. We’re all wondering where the new kid is.

Nugget sees Ringer first, standing off in the distance on the firing range, and right away we can see Flintstone was right: Ringer is a hell of a marksman. The target pops out of the tall brown grass and pop-pop! the head of the target explodes. Then a different target, but the same result. Reznik is standing off to one side, operating the controls on the targets. He sees us coming and starts hitting buttons fast. The targets rocket out of the grass, one right after the other, and this Ringer kid takes them out before they can get upright with one shot. Beside me, Flintstone gives a long, appreciative whistle.

“He’s good.”

Nugget gets it before the rest of us. Something about the shoulders or maybe the hips, but he goes, “It’s not a he,” before he takes off across the field toward the solitary figure cradling the rifle that smokes in the freezing air.

She turns before he reaches her, and Nugget pulls up, first confused, then disappointed. Apparently, Ringer is not his sister.

Weird that she looked taller from a distance. Around Dumbo’s height, but thinner than Dumbo—and older. I’m guessing fifteen or sixteen, with a pixie face and dark, deep-set eyes, flawless pale skin, and straight black hair. It’s the eyes that get you first. The kind of eyes you search to find something there and you come away with only two possibilities: Either what’s there is so deep you can’t see it, or there’s nothing there at all.

It’s the girl from the yard, the one who caught me outside the P&D hangar with Nugget.

“Ringer is a girl,” Teacup whispers, wrinkling her nose like she’s caught a whiff of something rotten. Not only is she not the baby of the squad anymore, now she’s not the only girl.

“What’re we going to do with her?” Dumbo is on the edge of panic.

I’m grinning. Can’t help it. “We’re going to be the first squad to graduate,” I say.

And I’m right.

49

RINGER’S FIRST NIGHT in Barracks 10 in one word: awkward.

No banter. No dirty jokes. No macho bluster. We count the minutes ticking down to lights-out like a bunch of nervous geeks on a first date. Other squads might have girls her age; we have Teacup. Ringer seems oblivious to our discomfort. She sits on the edge of Tank’s old bunk, disassembling and cleaning her rifle. Ringer likes her rifle. A lot. You can tell by the way she lovingly runs the oily rag up and down the length of its barrel, shining it until the cold metal gleams under the fluorescents. We are trying so hard not to stare at her, it’s painful. She reassembles her weapon, places it carefully in the locker beside the bed, and comes over to my bunk. I feel something tighten in my chest. I haven’t spoken to a girl my age since… when? Before the plague. And I don’t think about my life before the plague. That was Ben’s life, not Zombie’s.

“You’re the squad leader,” she says. Her voice is flat, no emotion, like her eyes. “Why?”

I answer the challenge in her question with one of my own. “Why not?”

Stripped down to her skivvies and the standard-issue sleeveless T-shirt, her bangs stopping just short of her dark eyebrows, looking down at me. Dumbo and Oompa stop their card game to watch. Teacup is smiling, sensing a fight brewing. Flintstone, who’s been folding laundry, drops a clean jumpsuit on top of the pile.

“You’re a terrible shot,” Ringer says.

“I have other skills,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “You should see me with a potato peeler.”

“You’ve got a good body.” Somebody laughs under his breath; I think it’s Flint. “Are you an athlete?”

“I used to be.”

She’s standing over me with her fists on her hips, bare feet planted firmly on the floor. It’s her eyes that get to me. The deep dark of them. Is nothing there—or nearly everything? “Football.”

“Good guess.”

“And baseball, probably.”

“When I was younger.”

She changes the subject abruptly. “The guy I replaced went Dorothy.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “Does it matter?”

She nods. It doesn’t. “I was the leader of my squad.”

“No doubt.”

“Just because you’re leader doesn’t mean you’ll make sergeant after graduation.”

“I sure hope that’s true.”

“I know it’s true. I asked.”

She turns on her bare heel and goes back to her bunk. I look down at my feet and notice my nails need trimming. Ringer’s feet are very small, with nubby-type toes. When I look up again, she’s heading for the showers with a towel thrown over her shoulder. She pauses at the door. “If anybody in this squad touches me, I’ll kill them.”

There’s nothing menacing or funny about the way she says it. As if she’s stating a fact, like it’s cold outside.

“I’ll spread the word,” I say.

“And when I’m in the shower, off limits. Total privacy.”

“Roger that. Anything else?”

She pauses, staring at me from across the room. I feel myself tense up. What next? “I like to play chess. Do you play?”

I shake my head. Holler at the boys, “Any of you pervs play chess?”

“No,” Flint calls back. “But if she’s in the mood for some strip poker—”

It happens before I can get two inches off the mattress: Flint on the ground, holding his throat, kicking his legs like a stomped-on bug, Ringer standing over him.

“Also, no demeaning, sexist, pseudo-macho remarks.”

“You’re cool!” Teacup blurts out, and she means it. Maybe she needs to rethink this whole Ringer thing. Might not be such a bad arrangement having another girl around.

“That’s ten days half rations for what you just did,” I tell her. Maybe Flint had it coming, but I’m still the boss when Reznik’s not around, and Ringer needs to know it.

“Are you writing me up?” No fear in her voice. No anger. No anything.

“I’m giving you a warning.”

She nods, steps away from Flint, brushes past me on the way to fetch her toiletry kit. She smells—well, she smells like a girl, and for a second I’m a little light-headed.

“I’ll remember you going easy on me,” she says with a flip of her bangs, “when they make me Fifty-three’s new squad leader.”

50

A WEEK AFTER Ringer arrived, Squad 53 moved up from tenth to seventh place. By week three, we had edged past Squad 19 to take fifth. Then, with only two weeks to go, we hit a wall, falling sixteen points back from fourth place, a nearly insurmountable deficit.

Poundcake, who isn’t much for words but is a boss with numbers, breaks down the spread. In every category except one, there’s very little room for improvement: We’re second in obstacle course, third in air raid and the run, and first in “other duties as assigned,” a catchall that includes points for morning inspection and “conduct befitting a unit of the armed forces.” Our downfall is marksmanship, where we rank sixteenth, despite kickass shooters like Ringer and Poundcake. Unless we can pull up that score in the next two weeks, we’re doomed.

Of course, you don’t have to be a boss with numbers to know why our score is so low. The squad leader sucks at shooting. So the sucky-shooting squad leader goes to the senior drill instructor and requests extra practice time, but his scores don’t budge. My technique isn’t bad; I do all the right things in the right order; still, if I score one head shot out of a thirty-round clip, I’m lucky. Ringer agrees it’s just dumb luck. She says even Nugget could score one out of thirty. She tries hard not to show it, but my ineptitude with a gun pisses her off. Her former squad ranks second. If she hadn’t been reassigned, she’d be guaranteed to graduate with the first class and be first in line for a pair of sergeant stripes.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she says one morning as we hit the yard for the morning run. She’s wearing a headband to hold back her silky bangs. Not that I notice their silkiness. “I’ll help you, on one condition.”

“Does it have anything to do with chess?”

“Resign as squad leader.”

I glance at her. The cold has painted her ivory cheeks a bright red. Ringer is a quiet person—not Poundcake quiet, but quiet in an intense, unnerving way, with eyes that seem to dissect you with the sharpness of one of Dumbo’s surgical knives.

“You didn’t ask for it, you don’t care about it, why not let me have it?” she asks, keeping her eyes on the path.

“Why do you want it so bad?”

“Giving the orders is my best chance to stay alive.”

I laugh. I want to tell her what I’ve learned. Vosch said it; I knew it to the bottom of my soul: You’re going to die. This wasn’t about survival. It was about payback.

Following the path that snakes out of the yard and across the hospital parking lot to the airfield access road. In front of us now the power plant barfing its black and gray smoke.

“How ’bout this,” I suggest. “You help me, we win, I step down.”

It’s a meaningless offer. We’re recruits. It isn’t our call who’s squad leader; it’s Reznik’s. And I know this really isn’t about who’s squad leader anyway. It’s about who makes sergeant when we’re activated for field duty. Being squad leader doesn’t guarantee a promotion, but it can’t hurt.

A Black Hawk thunders overhead, returning from night patrol.

“Ever wonder how they did it?” she asks, watching the chopper swing off to our right toward the landing zone. “Got everything running again after the EMP strike?”

“No,” I answer honestly. “What do you think?”

Her breaths tiny white explosions in the frigid air. “Underground bunkers, it has to be. That or…”

“Or what?”

She shakes her head, puffing out her cold-pinched cheeks, and her black hair swings back and forth as she runs, kissed by the bright morning sun.

“Too crazy, Zombie,” she says finally. “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got, football star.”

I’m four inches taller than she is. For every one stride I take, she has to take two. So I beat her.

Barely.

That afternoon we hit the range, bringing Oompa along to operate the targets. Ringer watches me fire off a few rounds, then offers her expert opinion: “You’re horrible.”

“That’s the problem. My horribleness.” I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove: It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn’t squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn’t even blink.

“Your technique is good. What’s going on when you shoot?”

“Generally speaking, I miss.”

She shakes her head. Speaking of smiles, I’ve yet to see so much as a thin-lipped grin from her. I decide to make it my mission to coax one out of her. More a Ben thought than a Zombie one, but old habits die hard.

“I mean between you and the target,” she says.

Huh? “Well, when it pops up—”

“No. I’m talking about what happens between here,” fingertips on my right hand, “and there,” pointing at the target twenty yards away.

“You’ve lost me, Ringer.”

“You have to think of your weapon as a part of you. Not the M16 firing; you firing. It’s like blowing on a dandelion. You breathe the bullet out.”

She swings her rifle off her shoulder and nods to Oompa. She doesn’t know where it’ll pop up, but the head of the target explodes in a shower of splinters before it even gets upright.

“It’s like there’s no space, nothing that isn’t you. The rifle is you. The bullet is you. The target is you. There’s nothing that’s not you.”

“So basically what you’re saying is I’m blowing my own head off.”

I almost got a smile with that one. The left corner of her mouth twitches.

“That’s very Zenlike,” I try again.

Her eyebrows come together. Strike three. “It’s more like quantum mechanics.”

I nod seriously. “Oh, sure. That’s what I meant to say. Quantum mechanics.”

She turns her head away. To hide a smile? So I don’t see an exasperated eye roll? When she turns back, all I get is that intense, stomach-tightening stare.

“Do you want to graduate?”

“I want to get the hell away from Reznik.”

“That isn’t enough.” She points across the field at one of the cutouts. The wind plays with her bangs. “What do you see when you sight a target?”

“I see a plywood cutout of a person.”

“Okay, but who do you see?”

“I know what you meant. Sometimes I picture Reznik’s face.”

“Does it help?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s about connection,” she says. She motions for me to sit down. She sits in front of me, takes my hands. Hers are freezing, cold as the bodies in P&D. “Close your eyes. Oh, come on, Zombie. How’s your way been working for you? Good. Okay, remember, it’s not you and the target. It’s not what’s between you, but what connects you. Think about the lion and the gazelle. What connects them?”

“Um. Hunger?”

“That’s the lion. I’m asking what they share.”

This is heavy stuff. Maybe it was a bad idea, accepting her offer. Not only do I have her thoroughly convinced I’m a lousy soldier, now there’s a real possibility that I’m also a moron.

“Fear,” she whispers in my ear, as if she’s sharing a secret. “For the gazelle, fear of being eaten. For the lion, fear of starvation. Fear is the chain that binds them together.”

The chain. I carry one in my pocket attached to a silver locket. The night my sister died was a thousand years ago; that night was last night. It’s over. It’s never over. It isn’t a line from that night to this day; it’s a circle. My fingers tighten around hers.

“I don’t know what your chain is,” she goes on, warm breath in my ear. “It’s different for everyone. They know. Wonderland tells them. It’s the thing that made them put a gun in your hand, and it’s the same thing that chains you to the target.” Then, as if she’s read my mind: “It isn’t a line, Zombie. It’s a circle.”

I open my eyes. The setting sun creates a halo of golden light around her. “There is no distance.”

She nods and urges me to my feet. “It’s almost dark.”

I bring up my rifle and tuck the butt against my shoulder. You don’t know where the target will rise—you only know that it will. Ringer signals Oompa, and the tall, dead grass rustles to my right a millisecond before the target pops, but that’s more than enough time; it’s an eternity.

There is no distance. Nothing between me and the not-me.

The target’s head disintegrates with a satisfying crack! Oompa gives a shout and pumps his fist in the air. I forget myself and grab Ringer around the waist, swinging her off the ground and twirling her around. I’m one very dangerous second away from kissing her. When I set her down, she takes a couple of steps back and tucks her hair carefully behind her ears.

“That was out of line,” I say. I don’t know who’s more embarrassed. We’re both trying to catch our breaths. Maybe for different reasons.

“Do it again,” she says.

“Shoot or twirl, which one?”

Her mouth twitches. Oh, I’m so close.

“The one that means something.”

51

GRADUATION DAY.

Our new uniforms were waiting for us when we returned from morning chow, pressed and starched and neatly folded on our bunks. And an extra special bonus surprise: headbands equipped with the latest in alien detection technology, a clear, quarter-size disk that slips over your left eye. Infested humans will light up through the lens. Or so we’re told. Later that day, when I asked the tech exactly how it worked, his answer was simple: Unclean glows green. When I politely asked for a brief demo, he laughed. “You’ll get your demo in the field, soldier.”

For the first time since coming to Camp Haven—and probably for the last time in our lives—we are kids again. Whooping it up and jumping from bunk to bunk, throwing high fives. Ringer’s the only one who ducks into the latrine to change. The rest of us strip where we stand, throwing the hated blue jumpsuits into a pile in the middle of the floor. Teacup has the bright idea to set them on fire and would have if Dumbo didn’t snatch the lit match from her hand at the last second.

The only one without a uniform is sitting on his bunk in his white jumpsuit, legs swinging back and forth, arms folded over his chest, bottom lip stuck out a mile. I’m not oblivious. I get it. After I’m dressed, I sit beside him and slap him on the leg.

“You’ll get your turn, Private. Hang in there.”

“Two years, Zombie.”

“So? Think what a hardass you’ll be in two years. Put all of us to shame.”

Nugget’s being assigned to another training squad after we deploy. I promised him he could bunk with me whenever I’m on base, though I have no idea when—or if—I’m ever coming back. Our mission is still top secret, known only to Central Command. I’m not sure even Reznik knows where we’re going. I don’t really care, as long as Reznik stays here.

“Come on, soldier. You’re supposed to be happy for me,” I tease him.

“You’re not coming back.” He says it with so much angry conviction that I don’t know what to say. “I’ll never see you again.”

“Of course you’re going to see me again, Nugget. I promise.”

He hits me as hard as he can. Again and again, right over my heart. I grab his wrist, and he lays into me with his other hand. I grab that one and order him to stand down.

“Don’t promise, don’t promise, don’t promise! Don’t promise anything ever, ever, ever!” His little face screwed up with rage.

“Hey, Nugget, hey.” I fold his arms over his chest and bend down to look him in the eye. “Some things you don’t have to promise. You just do.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out Sissy’s locket. Undo the clasp. I haven’t done that since I fixed it at Tent City. Circle broken. I draw it around his neck and hook the ends together. Circle complete.

“No matter what happens out there, I’ll come back for you,” I promise him.

Over his shoulder, I see Ringer come out of the bathroom, tucking her hair beneath her new cap. I stand at attention and snap off a salute.

“Private Zombie reporting for duty, squad leader!”

“My one day of glory,” she says, returning the salute. “Everybody knows who’s making sergeant.”

I shrug modestly. “I don’t listen to rumors.”

“You made a promise you knew you couldn’t keep,” she says matter-of-factly—which is pretty much the way she says everything. The unfortunate thing is she says it right in front of Nugget. “Sure you don’t want to take up chess, Zombie? You’d be very good at it.”

Since laughing seems like the least dangerous thing to do at that moment, I laugh.

The door flies open, and Dumbo shouts, “Sir! Good morning, sir!”

We rush to the ends of our bunks and stand at attention as Reznik moves down the line for what will be our final inspection. He’s subdued, for Reznik. He doesn’t call us maggots or scumbags. He’s nitpicky as ever, though. Flintstone’s shirt is untucked on one side. Oompa’s hat is crooked. He brushes off a speck of lint that only he can see from Teacup’s collar. He lingers over Teacup for a long moment, staring down into her face, almost comical in its seriousness.

“Well, Private. Are you ready to die?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Teacup shouts in her loudest warrior voice.

Reznik turns to the rest of us. “How about you? Are you ready?”

Our voices thunder as one: “Sir! Yes, sir!”

Before he leaves, Reznik orders me front and center. “Come with me, Private.” A final salute to the troops, then: “See you at the party, children.”

On my way out, Ringer gives me a knowing look, as if to say, Told you so.

I follow two paces behind the drill sergeant as he marches across the yard. Blue-suited recruits are putting the finishing touches on the speaker’s platform, hanging bunting, setting up chairs for the high brass, unrolling a red carpet. A huge banner has been hung across the barracks on the far side: WE ARE HUMANITY. And on the opposite side: WE ARE ONE.

Into a nondescript one-story building on the western side of the compound, passing through a security door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Through a metal detector manned by heavily armed, stone-faced soldiers. Into an elevator that carries us four stories beneath the earth. Reznik doesn’t talk. He doesn’t even look at me. I have a pretty good idea where we’re going, but no idea why. I nervously pick at the front of my new uniform.

Down a long corridor awash in fluorescent lighting. Passing through another security checkpoint. More stone-faced, heavily armed soldiers. Reznik stops at an unmarked door and swipes his key card through the lock. We step inside a small room. A man in a lieutenant’s uniform greets us at the door, and we follow him down another hallway and into a large private office. A man sits behind the desk, leafing through a stack of computer printouts.

Vosch.

He dismisses Reznik and the lieutenant, and we’re alone.

“At ease, Private.”

I spread my feet, put my hands behind my back, right hand loosely gripping my left wrist. Standing in front of the big desk, eyes forward, chest out. He is the supreme commander. I’m a private, a lowly recruit, not even a real soldier yet. My heart is threatening to pop the buttons on my brand-new shirt.

“So, Ben, how are you?”

He’s smiling warmly at me. I don’t even know how to begin to answer his question. Plus I’m thrown by his calling me Ben. It sounds strange to my own ears after being Zombie for so many months.

He’s expecting an answer, and for some stupid reason I blurt out the first thing that pops into my head. “Sir! The private is ready to die, sir!”

He nods, still smiling, and then he gets up, comes around the desk, and says, “Let’s speak freely, soldier to soldier. After all, that’s what you are now, Sergeant Parish.”

I see them then: the sergeant’s stripes in his hand. So Ringer was right. I snap back to attention while he pins them on my collar. He claps me on the shoulder, his blue eyes boring into mine.

Hard to look him in the eye. The way he looks at you makes you feel naked, totally exposed.

“You lost a man,” he says.

“Yes, sir.”

“Terrible thing.”

“Yes, sir.”

He leans back against the desk, crosses his arms. “His profile was excellent. Not as good as yours, but… The lesson here, Ben, is that we all have a breaking point. We’re all human, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s smiling. Why is he smiling? It’s cool in the underground bunker, but I’m beginning to sweat.

“You may ask,” he says with an inviting wave of his hand.

“Sir?”

“The question you must be thinking. The one you’ve had since Tank showed up in processing and disposal.”

“How did he die?”

“Overdose, as you no doubt suspected. One day after being taken off suicide watch.” He motions to the chair beside me. “Have a seat, Ben. There’s something I want to discuss with you.”

I sink into the chair, sitting on its edge, back straight, chin up. If it’s possible to be at attention while seated, I’m doing it.

“We all have our breaking points,” he says, blue eyes bearing down on me. “I’ll tell you about mine. Two weeks after the 4th Wave, gathering survivors at a refugee camp about six kilometers from here. Well, not every survivor. Just the children. Although we hadn’t detected the infestations yet, we were fairly confident whatever was going on didn’t involve children. Since we couldn’t know who was the enemy and who wasn’t, it was command’s decision to terminate any and all personnel over the age of fifteen.”

His face goes dark. His eyes cut away. Leaning back on the desk, gripping its edge so hard, his knuckles turn white.

“I mean, my decision.” Deep breath. “We killed them, Ben. After we loaded up the children, we killed every single one of them. And after we were done, we incinerated their camp. Wiped it off the face of the Earth.”

He looks back at me. Incredibly, I see tears in his eyes. “That was my breaking point. Afterward I realized, to my horror, that I was falling into their trap. I was an instrument for the enemy. For every infested person I murdered, three innocent people died. I will have to live with that—because I have to live. Do you understand what I mean?”

I nod. He smiles sadly. “Of course you do. We both have the blood of innocents on our hands, don’t we?”

He pushes himself upright, all business now. The tears are gone.

“Sergeant Parish, today we will graduate the top four squads of your battalion. As commander of the winning squad, you have first pick of assignments. Two squads will be deployed as perimeter patrols to protect this base. The other two will be deployed into enemy territory.”

This takes me a couple minutes to absorb. He lets me have them. He picks up one of the computer printouts and holds it in front of me. There’s a lot of numbers and squiggly lines and strange symbols that mean absolutely nothing to me.

“I don’t expect you to be able to read it,” he says. “But would you like to guess what this is?”

“That’s all it would be, sir,” I answer. “A guess.”

“It’s the Wonderland analytics of an infested human being.”

I nod. Why the hell am I nodding? It’s not like I understand: Ah, yes, Commander, an analytic! Please, go on.

“We’ve been running them through Wonderland, of course, but we haven’t been able to untangle the infestation’s map from the victim’s—or clone or whatever it is. Until now.” He holds up the readout. “This, Sergeant Parish, is what an alien consciousness looks like.”

Again, I’m nodding. But this time because I’m starting to get it. “You know what they’re thinking.”

“Exactly!” Beaming at me, the star pupil. “The key to winning this war isn’t tactics or strategy or even imbalances in technology. The real key to winning this war, or any war, is understanding how your enemy thinks. And now we do.”

I wait for him to break it to me gently. How does the enemy think?

“Much of what we assumed is correct. They have been watching us for some time. Infestations were embedded in key individuals around the world, sleeper agents, if you will, waiting for the signal to launch a coordinated attack after our population had been whittled down to a manageable number. We know how that attack turned out here at Camp Haven, and we strongly suspect that other military installations were not as fortunate.”

He slaps the paper on his thigh. I must have flinched, because he gives me a reassuring smile.

“A third of the surviving population. Planted here to eradicate those who survived the first three waves. You. Me. Your team members. All of us. If you have any fear, as poor Tank did, that a fifth wave is coming, you can put it aside. There will be no fifth wave. They have no intention of leaving their mothership until the human race is exterminated.”

“Is that why they haven’t…?”

“Attacked us again? We think so. It seems their foremost desire is to preserve the planet for colonization. Now we are in a war of attrition. Our resources are limited; they can’t last forever. We know it. They know it. Cut off from supplies, with no means to marshal any significant fighting force, eventually this camp—and any others out there like it—will wither and die, like a vine cut off from its roots.”

Weird. He’s still smiling. Like something about this doomsday scenario turns him on.

“So what do we do?” I ask.

“The only thing we can do, Sergeant. We take the battle to them.”

The way he says it: no doubt, no fear, no hopelessness. We take the battle to them. That’s why he’s the commander. Standing over me, smiling, confident, his chiseled features reminding me of some ancient statue, noble, wise, strong. He is the rock against which the alien waves crash, and he is unbroken. We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes. He is humanity, the beating, unbeaten, invincible heart of it. In that moment, if Commander Vosch had told me to put a bullet through my head for the cause, I would have. I would have without a second thought.

“Which brings us back to your assignment,” he says quietly. “Our recon flights have identified significant pockets of infested combatants clustered in and around Dayton. A squad will be dropped in—and for the next four hours, it will be on its own. The odds of making it out alive are roughly one in four.”

I clear my throat. “And two squads stay here.”

He nods. Blue eyes boring deep—to the marrow deep. “Your call.”

That same small, secretive smile. He knows what I’m going to say. He knew before I walked through the door. Maybe my Wonderland profile told him, but I don’t think so. He knows me.

I rise from the chair to full attention.

And tell him what he already knows.

52

AT 0900 the entire battalion musters in the yard, creating a sea of blue jumpsuits headed by the top four squads in their crisp new fatigues. Over a thousand recruits standing in perfect formation, facing east, the direction of new beginnings, toward the speakers’ platform erected the day before. Flags snap in the icy breeze, but we don’t feel the cold. We are lit from within by a fire hotter than the one that turned Tank into ash. The brass of Central Command moves down the first line—the winning line—shaking our hands and congratulating us for a job well done. Then a personal word of gratitude from the drill instructors. I’ve been dreaming of what to say to Reznik when he shakes my hand. Thanks for making my life a living hell… Oh, die. Just die, you son of a bitch… Or my favorite, short and sweet and to the point: Eff you. But when he salutes and offers me his hand, I almost lose it. I want to hit him in the face and hug him at the same time.

“Congratulations, Ben,” he says, which totally throws me off. I had no idea he even knew my name. He gives me a wink and continues down the line.

There’re a couple of short speeches by officers I’ve never seen before. Then the supreme commander is introduced and the troops go crazy, waving our hats, pumping our fists. Our cheers echo off the buildings encircling the yard, making the roar twice as loud and us seem twice as many. Commander Vosch raises his hand very slowly and deliberately to his forehead, and it’s as if he hit a switch: The noise cuts off as we raise our own hands in salute. I can hear quiet snuffling all around me. It’s too much. After what brought us here and what we went through here, after all the blood and death and fire, after being shown the ugly mirror of the past through Wonderland and facing the uglier truth of the future in the execution room, after months of brutal training that pushed some of us past the point of no return, we have arrived. We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth’s final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance.

I don’t hear a word of Vosch’s speech. I watch the sun rising over his shoulder, framed between the twin towers of the power plant, its light glinting off the mothership in orbit, the sole imperfection in the otherwise perfect sky. So small, so insignificant. I feel like I can reach up and pluck it from the sky, throw it to the ground, grind it to dust beneath my heel. The fire in my chest grows white-hot, spreads over every inch of my body. It melts my bones; it incinerates my skin; I am the sun gone supernova.

I was wrong about Ben Parish dying on the day he left the convalescent ward. I’ve been carrying his stinking corpse inside me all through basic. Now the last of him is burned away as I stare up at the solitary figure who lit that fire. The man who showed me the true battlefield. Who emptied me so I might be filled. Who killed me so I might live. And I swear I can see him staring back at me with those icy blue eyes that see down to the bottom of my soul, and I know—I know—what he’s thinking.

We are one, you and I. Brothers in hate, brothers in cunning, brothers in the spirit of vengeance.