He sidled over to the bed, I don’t know, maybe because he was concerned I might jump him in a moment of misplaced fury. Not that that’s ever happened. He gingerly pressed one hand to her forehead while prying her mouth open with the other. Stuck his eye close. “Hard to see anything,” he muttered.
“That’s why I used this,” I said, handing him Sam’s camp-issued penlight.
He shone the light down her throat. “It’s pretty red,” he observed.
“Right. Which is why she said it hurt.”
Ben scratched his stubble, worrying over the problem. “Not ‘help me’ or ‘I’m cold’ or even ‘resistance is futile.’ Just ‘my throat hurts.’”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “‘Resistance is futile’? Really?”
Sam was hovering in the doorway. Big brown saucer eyes. “Is she okay, Cassie?” he asked.
“She’s alive,” I said.
“She swallowed it!” Ben said. The Idea Man. “You didn’t find it because it’s in her stomach!”
“Those tracking devices are the size of a grain of rice,” I reminded him. “Why would swallowing one hurt her throat?”
“I’m not saying the device hurt her throat. Her throat has nothing to do with it.”
“Then why are you so worried about it being sore?”
“Here’s what I’m worried about, Sullivan.” He was trying very hard to stay calm, because clearly somebody had to be. “Her showing up out of the blue like this could mean a lot of things, but none of those things could be a good thing. In fact, it can only be a bad thing. A very bad thing made even badder by the fact that we don’t know the reason she was sent here.”
“Badder?”
“Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can’t talk the Queen’s English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.”
I sighed. The rage was leaching out of me, leaving me a hollow, bloodless, human-shaped lump.
Ben looked at Megan for a long moment. “We have to wake her up,” he decided.
Then Dumbo and Poundcake crowded into the room. “Don’t tell me,” Ben said to Poundcake, who of course wouldn’t. “You didn’t find nothing.”
“Anything,” Dumbo corrected him.
Ben didn’t punch him in the face. But he did hold out his hand. “Give me your canteen.” He unscrewed the cap and held the container over Megan’s forehead. A drop of water hung quivering on the lip for an eternity.
Before eternity ended, a croaky voice spoke up behind us. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Evan Walker was awake.
38
EVERYBODY FROZE. Even the drop of water, swelling at the edge of the canteen’s mouth, held still. From his bed, Evan watched us with red, fever-bright eyes, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question, which Ben finally did: “Why?”
“Waking her like that could make her take a very deep breath, and that would be bad.”
Ben turned to face him. The water dribbled onto the carpet. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Evan swallowed, grimacing from the effort. His face was as white as the pillowcase beneath it. “She is implanted—but not with a tracking device.”
Ben’s lips tightened into a hard, white line. He got it before the rest of us. He whipped on Dumbo and Poundcake. “Out. Sullivan, you and Sam, too.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.
“You should,” Evan said. “I don’t know how finely it’s been calibrated.”
“How finely what’s been calibrated to what?” I demanded.
“The incendiary device to CO2.” His eyes cut away. The next words were hard for him. “Our breath, Cassie.”
Everybody understood by that point. But there’s a difference between understanding and accepting. The idea was unacceptable. After all we had experienced, there were still places our minds simply refused to go.
“Get downstairs now, all of you,” Ben snarled.
Evan shook his head. “Not far enough. You should leave the building.”
Ben grabbed Dumbo’s arm with one hand and Poundcake’s with the other and slung them toward the door. Sam had backed into the bathroom entrance, tiny fist pressed against his mouth.
“Also, somebody should open that window,” Evan gasped.
I pushed Sam into the hall, trotted over to the window, and pushed hard against the frame, but it wouldn’t budge, probably frozen shut. Ben pushed me out of the way and smashed out the glass with the butt of his rifle. Freezing air rushed into the room. Ben strode back to Evan’s bed and considered him for a second before grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking him forward.
“You son of a bitch . . .”
“Ben!” I put my hand on his arm. “Let him go. He didn’t—”
“Oh, right. I forgot. He’s a good evil alien.” He let go. Evan fell back; he didn’t have the strength to stay up. Then Ben suggested he do something to himself that was anatomically impossible.
Evan’s eyes cut over to me. “In her throat. Suspended directly above the epiglottis.”
“She’s a bomb,” Ben said, his voice quavering with rage and disbelief. “They took a child and turned her into an IED.”
“Can we remove it?” I asked.
Evan shook his head. “How?”
“That’s what she’s asking you, dipshit,” Ben barked.
“The explosive is connected to a CO2 detector imbedded in her throat. If the connection’s lost, it detonates.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I pointed out. “Can we remove it without blowing ourselves into orbit?”
“It’s feasible . . .”
“Feasible. Feasible.” Ben was laughing this weird, hiccupping kind of laugh. I was worried that he might be falling over the proverbial edge.
“Evan,” I said as softly and calmly as I could. “Can we do it without . . .” I couldn’t say it, and Evan didn’t make me.
“The odds of it not detonating are a lot better if you did.”
“Do it without . . . what?” Ben was having a hard time following. Not his fault. He was still flailing in the unthinkable place like a poor swimmer caught in a riptide.
“Killing her first,” Evan explained.
39
BEN AND I CONVENED the latest oh-we’re-screwed planning meeting in the hallway. Ben ordered everybody else to go across the parking lot and hide in the diner until he gave them the all-clear—or the hotel blew up, whichever came first. Sam refused. Ben got stern. Sam teared up and pouted. Ben reminded him that he was a soldier and a good soldier follows orders. Besides, if he stayed, who was going to protect Poundcake and Dumbo?
Before he left, Dumbo said, “I’m the medic.” He’d figured out what Ben was up to. “I should do it, Sarge.”
Ben shook his head. “Get out of here,” he said tersely.
Then we were alone. Ben’s eyes would not stay still. The trapped cockroach. The cornered rat. The falling man, off the cliff and no scrawny shrub to grasp.
“Well, I guess the big riddle’s been answered, huh?” he said. “What I don’t get is why they didn’t just waste us with a couple of Hellfire missiles. They know we’re here.”
“Not their style,” I said.
“Style?”
“Hasn’t it ever struck you how personal it’s been—from the beginning? There’s something about killing us that gets them off.”
Ben looked at me with sick wonder. “Yeah. Well. I can see why you’d want to date one of them.” Not the thing to say. He realized it immediately and quickly backed off. “Who’re we kidding, Cassie? There’s nothing really to decide, except who’s going to do it. Maybe we should flip a coin.”
“Maybe it should be Dumbo. Didn’t you tell me he trained in field surgery at the camp?”
He frowned. “Surgery? Y
ou’re kidding, right?”
“Well, how else are we . . . ?” Then I understood. Couldn’t accept, but understood. I was wrong about Ben. He had dropped farther than me into that unthinkable place. He was five thousand fathoms down.
He read the look on my face and dropped his chin toward his chest. His face was flushed. Not embarrassed so much as angry, intensely angry, the anger that’s past all words.
“No, Ben. We can’t do that.”
He lifted his head. His eyes shone. His hands shook. “I can.”
“No, you can’t.” Ben Parish was drowning. He was so far under, I wasn’t sure I could reach him, wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull him back to the surface.
“I didn’t ask for this,” he said. “I didn’t ask for any of this!”
“Neither did she, Ben.”
He leaned close and I saw a different kind of fever burning in his eyes. “I’m not worried about her. An hour ago, she didn’t exist. Understand? She was nothing, literally nothing. I had you, and I had your little brother, and I had Poundcake and Dumbo. She was theirs. She belongs to them. I didn’t take her. I didn’t trick her into getting on a bus and tell her she was perfectly safe and then stuff a bomb down her throat. This isn’t my fault. It isn’t my responsibility. My job is to keep my ass and your ass alive for as long as possible, and if that means somebody else who is nothing to me dies, then I guess that’s what it means.”
I wasn’t holding up well. He was too deep, there was too much pressure, I couldn’t breathe.
“That’s it,” he said bitterly. “Cry, Cassie. Cry for her. Cry for all the children. They can’t hear you and they can’t see you and they can’t feel how really bad you feel, but cry for them. A tear for each of them, fill up the fucking ocean, cry.
“You know I’m right. You know I don’t have a choice. And you know Ringer was right. It’s about the risk. It’s always been about the risk. And if one little girl has to die so six people can live, then that’s the price. That’s the price.”
He pushed past me and limped down the hall to the broken door, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. I didn’t lift a finger or frame an argument to stop him. I’d reached the end of words, and gestures seemed pointless.
Stop him, Evan. Please, stop him, because I can’t.
In the safe room underground, their faces lifted up to me, and my silent prayer, my hopeless promise: Climb onto my shoulders, climb onto my shoulders, climb onto my shoulders.
He wouldn’t shoot her. Because of the risk. He’d smother her. Place a pillow over her face and press until he didn’t need to press anymore. He wouldn’t leave her body there: the risk. He would carry it outside, but he wouldn’t bury it or burn it: the risk. He would take it far into the woods and toss it on the frozen ground like so much trash for the buzzards and crows and insects. The risk.
I sank down the wall and drew my knees to my chest, ducked my head, and covered it up with my arms. I stopped my ears. I closed my eyes. And there was Vosch’s finger slamming down on the button, Ben’s hands holding the pillow, my finger on the trigger. Sam, Megan. The Crucifix Soldier. And Ringer’s voice, speaking out of the silent dark: Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody’s fault.
And when Ben came out, all torn up and empty, I would get up and I would go to him and I would comfort him. I would take the hand that murdered a child and we would grieve for ourselves and the choices we made that weren’t choices at all.
Ben came out. He sat against the wall ten doors down. After a minute, I got up and went to him. He didn’t look up. He rested his forearms on his upraised knees and bowed his head. I sat next to him.
“You’re wrong,” I said. He twirled his hand: Whatever. “She did belong to us. They all belong to us.”
His head fell back against the wall. “Hear them? Those mother-effing rats.”
“Ben, I think you need to go. Now. Don’t wait till morning. Take Dumbo and Poundcake and get to the caverns as fast as you can.” Maybe Ringer could help him. He listened to her, always seemed a little intimidated by her, even awed.
He laughed from a spot deep in his gut. “I’m kind of busted up right now. Broke. I’m broke, Sullivan.” He looked at me. “And Walker is in no shape to do it.”
“No shape to do what?”
“Cut the damn thing out. You’re the only one here who has half a chance.”
“You didn’t . . . ?”
“I couldn’t.”
He laughed again. His head broke the surface and he took a deep, life-giving breath.
“I couldn’t.”
40
THE ROOM WHERE she lay was colder than a walk-in freezer, and Evan was sitting up now, watching me as I walked in. A pillow on the floor where Ben had dropped it, and me picking it up and sitting at the foot of Evan’s bed. Our breaths congealing and our hearts beating and the silence thickening between us.
Until I said, “Why?”
And he said, “To blow apart what remains. To break the final, unbreakable bond.”
I hugged the pillow to my chest and rocked slowly back and forth. Cold. So cold.
“No one can be trusted,” I said. “Not even a child.” The cold bored down to my bones and curled inside the marrow. “What are you, Evan Walker? What are you?”
He wouldn’t look at me. “I told you.”
I nodded. “Yes, you did. Mr. Great White Shark. I’m not, though. Not yet. We’re not going to kill her, Evan. I’m going to pull it out, and you’re going to help me.”
He didn’t argue. He knew better.
Ben helped me gather the supplies before he left to join the others in the diner across the parking lot. Washcloth. Towels. A can of air freshener. Dumbo’s field kit. We said good-bye at the stairway door. I told him to be careful, there were some slippery rat guts on the way down.
“I lost it back there,” he said, lowering his eyes and scrubbing his foot across the carpet like an embarrassed little boy caught in a lie. “That wasn’t cool.”
“Your secret is safe with me.”
He smiled. “Sullivan . . . Cassie . . . in case you don’t . . . I wanted to tell you . . .”
I waited. I didn’t push him.
“They made a major mistake,” he blurted out, “the dumb bastards, when they didn’t start by killing you first.”
“Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone’s ever given me.”
I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth.
“You know,” I whispered, “a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that.”
He shook his head. “Not worth it.” And, for one–ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.
“Get out of here,” I told him. “And if you let anything happen to my little brother, I’ll hunt you down like a dog.”
“I may be dumb, but I’m not that dumb.”
He disappeared into the absolute dark of the stairwell.
I went back to the room. I couldn’t do this. I had to do this. Evan scooted back in the bed until his butt touched the headboard. I slid my arms beneath Megan and slowly lifted her, turned, and then lowered her carefully onto Evan, leaning her head back into his lap. I picked up the spray can of air freshener (A Delicate Blend of Essences!) and saturated the washcloth. My hands were shaking. No way could I do this. No way I couldn’t.
“A five-pronged hook,” Evan said quietly. “Embedded beneath the right tonsil. Don’t try to pull it out. Get a good grip on the wire,
make the cut as close to the hook as you can, then pull the hook out—slowly. If the wire comes loose from the capsule . . .”
I nodded impatiently. “Kaboom. I know. You already told me that.”
I opened the med kit and took out a pair of tweezers and surgical scissors. Small, but they seemed huge. I clicked on the penlight and stuck the butt end between my teeth.
I handed Evan the washcloth reeking of pine. He pressed the cloth over Megan’s nose and mouth. Her body jerked, her eyelids fluttered open, her eyes rolled to the back of her head. Her hands, folded primly in her lap, twitched, became still. Evan dropped the cloth onto her chest.
“If she wakes up while I’m in there . . .” I said around the flashlight, sounding like a very bad ventriloquist: Eh chee wecks uh . . .
Evan nodded. “A hundred ways it can go wrong, Cassie.”
He tilted her head back and forced her mouth open. I stared down a glistening red tunnel the width of a razor and a mile deep. Tweezers in my left hand. Scissors in my right. Both hands the size of footballs.
“Can you open it any wider?” I asked.
“If I open it any wider, I’ll dislocate her jaw.”
Well, in the grand scheme of things, a dislocated jaw was better than being able to pick up our pieces with this pair of tweezers. But whatever.
“This one?” Touching the tonsil gently with the end of the tweezers.
“I can’t see.”
“When you said right tonsil, you meant her right, not my right, right?”
“Her right. Your left.”
“Okay,” I breathed. “Just wanted to make sure.”
I couldn’t see what I was doing. I had the tweezers down her throat but not the scissors, and I didn’t know how I was going to stuff both in the tiny mouth of this little girl.
“Hook the wire with the end of the tweezers,” Evan suggested. “Then very slowly lift it up so you can see what you’re doing. Don’t yank. If the wire disconnects from the capsule—”
“Dear Jesus Christ, Walker, you don’t have to warn me every two minutes what happens if the freaking wire disconnects from the freaking capsule!” I felt the tip of the tweezers catch on something. “Okay, I think I’ve got it.”