The sergeant stands up and pulls Nugget in front of her, two strong hands gripping his shoulders.
“Talk,” she says.
Nugget’s eyes staring into mine.
“Say something,” she orders.
She unholsters her sidearm and presses the muzzle against the side of his head. Nugget doesn’t even flinch. He doesn’t whimper or cry out. His body is as still as his eyes, and his eyes are saying, No, Zombie. No.
“Do it and see what you get,” I tell her.
“I’ll do them both,” she promises me. “First him, then the girl.” She moves the gun to the back of Nugget’s head. I don’t understand at first, then I wish I didn’t. When she pulls the trigger, I’ll get a faceful of Nugget’s brains.
“Okay,” I say, keeping my voice level—or as level as possible. “Then you can do me. Then we’re all dead and you can explain that inconvenient fact to your CO.”
And then I do something that totally throws her off guard, which is the purpose, the genius behind the design that’s worked since I was twelve years old: I smile. The full-on Parish Special.
“What was it before all this shit went down?” I ask her. “Sprinter, right? Or was it long-distance? Me, it was football. Wide receiver. Not much speed but I had hands.” I nod. “I had hands.” I look over Nugget’s head into her eyes. I can see starlight glinting in them, sparking like silver fire. “What happened to us, Sergeant Sprinter? What have they done to us? A year ago, could you imagine blowing out the brains of a little kid? I don’t know you, but somehow I don’t think so. Call me Dorothy, but I don’t think there were ten out of seven billion people who could. Now we stuff bombs down their throats and put guns to their heads like it’s the most natural thing on Earth, like putting on clothes or brushing our teeth. You wonder what’s next. I mean, after you reach that point, can you go any lower?”
“This is what I need,” she says, baring her teeth to mock the Parish Special. “You workin’ your Dorothy shit.”
“Marika’s going back to the place where that picture was taken,” I tell her, turning off the smile. Nugget’s eyes grow wide: Zombie! No! “Once she gets there, she’s going to find the asshole who fucked us over—her, you, me, and everybody else in this hemisphere—and when she finds him, she will kill him. Then she’s probably going to kill every brainwashed recruit on that base. And when you go back—if you make it back before that big green motherfucker up there starts shitting green bricks of death—she’ll kill you, too.”
I switch the smile back on. Dazzling. Brilliant. Irresistible. Well, at least that’s what people told me back in the day. “Now put down that gun, Sergeant Sprinter, and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
86
I’M YANKED to my feet and shoved into the house with Nugget, Megan, and two offensive-lineman-sized guys who’ve removed their jackets just to show how tough they are. They have identical tattoos on their ripped biceps: VQP. We hang in the front parlor, Megan on the sofa holding the teddy bear, Nugget glued to my side, though he isn’t happy with me right now.
“You told,” he accuses me.
I shrug. “Bullet’s left the chamber, Nugget. Not much they can do about it now.”
He shakes his head. The metaphor’s lost on him. I lean over and whisper in his ear: “At least I didn’t tell them about Cassie, right?”
The mention of his sister’s name nearly sends him over the edge. His bottom lip juts out; his eyes fill up.
“Hey, okay now, what’s this? Huh? Private, your actions tonight have shown extraordinary courage above and beyond the call of duty. You know what a field promotion is?”
Nugget shakes his head solemnly. “No.”
“Well, you just got one, Corporal Nugget.”
I place the edge of my hand to my forehead. His chest pops out, his chin comes up, his eyes burn with the ol’ Sullivan fire. He returns the salute smartly.
On the porch, the sarge is having a heated debate with her second-in-command. The topic’s no mystery; you can hear them clearly through the open door. They’ve completed the mission, the 2IC argues, time to off these bastards and return to base. Capture and contain, the sarge shoots back. My orders don’t say nothing about offing anybody. She’s wavering, though; you can hear it in her voice. Her 2IC comes back with my point about the bomb-shitting beast in high orbit: Whatever she decides about the Dorothys, they have to return to base before dawn or enjoy a front-row seat to Armageddon.
The screen door bangs open and she charges right up to my face, close enough for me to catch a whiff of perfume. It’s been so long since I smelled any that my headache disappears in a single, wondrous instant.
“How’s she gonna do all this?” she shouts. “How can one person . . . ?”
“It only takes one.” My quiet answer in counterpoint to her loud question. “Just one, and the world changes. It’s not unheard-of, Sergeant.”
She stares at me with those dark, flinty eyes filled with a hundred daggers of light. “Corporal,” she snaps to her 2IC without looking away from my face, “we’re bugging out. Escort the prisoners to the chopper. They’re gonna take a little trip down the rabbit hole.” Then to me: “You remember Wonderland.”
I nod. “I sure do.”
87
BLACK BIRD RISING, the Earth falling away—from the air, the caverns are invisible. The farmhouse and the fields shine silver, and the blast of cold wind is like the voice of the world screaming. The last time I rode in a chopper, I was heading back to a different camp, on a mission to save the kid who sits beside me now, whose once-round face is now lean and stern and full of grim purpose. One day he’ll ask his grandkids, Ever tell you about the time I was promoted to corporal at the age of six?
His grandkids. According to Ringer, they’ll be fighting the same war he is. So will their grandkids and their grandkids’ grandkids. The war that can’t end while the enemy’s ship sails serenely over our heads. How could it end when all our descendants have to do is look up?
Like Sergeant Sprinter watching me from across the narrow aisle of the hold. The perfectly scary and scarily perfect thing about their plan is it doesn’t matter that she knows I’m Ted-free. Whoever’s not with us is against us. That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This time it has.
I look away from her face to the screaming world outside the chopper. I can’t see the ground. Just the thin black line of the horizon, the congregation of a million stars, and the green eye-shaped orb that hangs just above the line separating heaven from Earth.
Someone’s touching my thigh. And it’s not the someone I expect. Dirty, scratched-up hands, chipped nails, pencil-thin arms, pinched face, a headful of tangled hair despite Sullivan’s valiant attempts to keep it combed. I touch that hair, drawing it back to tuck behind her ear, and Megan glances shyly at me but doesn’t pull away. The last time she rode in a chopper, the people she trusted had just placed a bomb inside her throat. The same people she was going back to now. How do you deal with something like that? How do you make it make sense? I almost say it; the words push against my lips and almost escape. Not going to let it happen, Megs. This time you’re safe.
The sergeant is shouting something over the headset. I catch only about 10 percent. Go four? Go four, you sure? And We got the juice for that? And a bunch of expletives you really can’t include in the percentage. At hearing the words Go four, the other recruits in the hold tighten up. I don’t know what the hell Go four means, but it doesn’t sound good.
Not good at all.
88
RINGER
FROM THE ROOF of the command center, I hear the window shatter two hundred yards away. A body tumbles out and writhes in the dirt beneath the broken window, its uniform speckled with shards of glass, groaning in pain. I can’t see her face—but even from this distance, I recognize the tangle of strawberry curls.
I sprint across the rooftop, leap forty feet to the roof of the adjacent building, then jump three stories to the ground. Sullivan sees my boots hit the grass a foot from her head and screams. She fumbles with her sidearm. I kick it out of her hand and haul her to her feet. Her uniform is soaked. Her eyes are swollen and red, her face pockmarked with angry crimson boils. She’s shaking uncontrollably, going into shock. I’ll have to act fast.
I throw her over my shoulder and sprint toward a small storage shed located on the back side of the building. The door’s padlocked. I bust it apart with one kick and carry her inside. The hub processes the data transmitted by the olfactory drones: something in the water, something toxic.
I strip off her jacket. Rip off her shirt and undershirt. Slipping in and out of consciousness, she barely resists. Boots, socks, pants, underwear. Her skin’s inflamed and clammy to the touch. I press my hand against her chest; her heart slams against my palm. I look into her weeping, unseeing eyes and shove my way into her. The toxin won’t kill her—I hope—but her terror might.
I tamp down the panic to slow her heart. The primitive part of her brain pushes back: The fight-or-flight response is older and more powerful than the technology I contain. The struggle continues for several minutes.
Our hearts, the war.
Her body, the battlefield.
89
I THROW MY JACKET over her bare shoulders. She pulls it tight across her chest, a good sign that I haven’t lost her yet.
“Where. The hell. Were you?”
“Watching this entire camp bunker-dive,” I tell her. “They’ve cut the power . . .”
She laughs harshly, then turns her head and spits. Her spittle is flecked with blood, and I think of the plague. “Did they? I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s pretty smart,” I say. “Flush us outside, where our options are limited, then dispatch enhanced personnel to finish—”
She’s shaking her head. “We have no options, Ringer. Wonderland. We have to get to Wonderland . . .” She tries to stand. Her knees buckle and she goes down. “Where the fuck are my clothes?”
“Here, take mine. I’ll wear yours.”
For some reason she laughs. “Commando. That’s funny.”
I don’t get it.
I can feel the toxin worm its way into my legs after I pull on her fatigues, and thousands of microscopic bots swarm to neutralize its effects. I hand her my dry shirt, shrug into her wet one.
“The poison doesn’t do anything to you?” she asks.
“I don’t feel anything.”
She rolls her eyes. “I already knew that.”
“I’ll take it from here,” I tell her. “You stay.”
“Like hell.”
“Sullivan, the risk is—”
“I don’t give a shit about your risk.”
“I’m not talking about the risk to the mission. Your risk.”
“That doesn’t matter.” She stands up. This time she stays up. “Where’s my rifle?”
I shake my head. “Didn’t see it.”
“Okay then. What about my gun?”
I take a deep breath. This isn’t going to work. She’s more a liability now than an asset, and she’s never been much of an asset. She’ll slow me down. She might get me killed. I should leave her here. Knock her out if I have to. Screw our deal. Walker’s dead; he must be; there’s no reason Vosch would keep him alive once he’s been downloaded into Wonderland. Which means Sullivan is risking everything for nothing.
I am, too. For something I can’t even put into words. The same something I saw in her eyes that I cannot name. Something that has nothing to do with Vosch or avenging what he’s done to me. It’s more important than that. More solid. But that’s about as close as I can come to describing it.
Something inviolable.
But I don’t say any of that. My mouth comes open and these words come out instead: “You won’t need a weapon, Sullivan. You’ll have me.”
90
I LEAVE HER for a little while. First I make her promise to stay. She’s not interested in making promises; she wants to hear them. So I promise I’ll come back for her.
She seems better when I get back. Her face is still red, but the hives or boils or whatever they were have almost disappeared. She’s not happy about it, but she throws her arm around my neck and leans against me on the way to the command center.
The entire base is eerily quiet. Our footsteps fall like thunder. You’re watching us, I silently tell Vosch. I know you’re watching. Sullivan pushes away when we reach the door.
“How’re you gonna do this?” she demands. “We’ll be burned alive by the toxin.”
“Don’t think so. I just shut off the water main.”
I smash my fist through the steel door and push down the bar on the opposite side. No alarm sounds. No light blinds us. No bullets take us down. The silence is stifling.
Sullivan breathes in my ear, “It’s the waves, Ringer. The power. The water. The plague. You know what’s next. You know what’s coming.”
I nod. “I know.”
We find the bodies in the stairwell that leads to the underground complex. Seven recruits, no blood, and not a scratch on them. Obviously, whoever did this was enhanced. Two of the kids have their heads completely twisted around so they stare up at us, though their bodies are facedown. I hand Sullivan one of their pistols. We pick our way through the pile and continue down. She holds the gun in one hand; the other is clutching my sleeve. She couldn’t see the recruits and didn’t ask what happened or what I saw. She either doesn’t want to know or she figures it doesn’t matter.
Only one thing matters, she said. She’s right. I’m just not sure either one of us can explain what that is.
At the very bottom there is darkness and silence and a hallway even my enhanced eyes cannot see the end of. But I remember where I am. I’ve been here before, beneath the constant glow. This is where Razor found me, rescued me, gave me hope, and then betrayed me.
I stop. Her hand grips my sleeve hard.
“I can’t see a goddamned thing,” Sullivan whispers. “Where’s the green door?”
“You’re standing in front of it.”
I ease her to one side and trot down the hall a dozen yards to get a running start. For all I know, even an enhanced human being can’t bust through that door’s locking mechanism. No choice, though. Halfway to the door, I’ve reached full velocity and nearly don’t have the space to pull up when Sullivan steps in front of me and tries the handle.
The door opens. I slide six feet to a stop. And I’m glad she can’t see the startled expression on my face. She’d laugh.
“They don’t need to lock the door if there’s no power,” she points out. “Wonderland needs juice, right?”
Of course she’s right. I feel stupid for not foreseeing the obvious.
“I understand,” she says, reading my mind. “You’re not used to feeling stupid. Trust me, you get used to it.” She smiles. “Maybe Wonderland has its own dedicated power system—just in case.”
We step into the room. Sullivan closes the door behind us. Her fingertips brush over the dead keypad for a second before dropping to her side. After everything, her capacity to hope has not died.
“What now?” she asks after I’ve pressed several buttons on the console with no result.
I don’t know, Sullivan. You’re the one who demanded we come here when you knew they killed the power.
“There’s no backup?” she asks. “You’d think it’d have batteries or something, in case they accidentally lost power.”
Then she says, more to fill the silence than anything else, “I’ll stay here. You go find the power station or whatever and get the lights back on.”
“Sullivan. I’m thinking.”
“You’re thinking.”
“Yes.
”
“That’s what you’re doing. Thinking.”
“It’s what I do best.”
“And all this time I thought killing people was what you did best.”
“Well, if I had to pick two things to be really good at . . .”
“Don’t joke,” she says.
“I never do.”
“See? That’s fundamental. That’s a critical flaw.”
“So is talking too much.”
“You’re right. I should kill more and talk less.”
I’m running my hands along the tabletop. Nothing. I drop to the floor and crawl beneath the counter. A tangle of wires, couplings, extension cords. I stand up. On the wall, flat-screen monitors—no cords, probably wirelessly connected to the system. Nothing else to Wonderland except the keyboard, but there has to be something else. Where is the data stored? Where’s the processor? Of course, this is alien technology. Vosch could be carrying the processor in his pocket. It could be on a chip the size of a single grain of sand embedded in his brain.
The most puzzling thing is the risk. Wonderland is a vital piece of machinery, an important component in the winnowing of the 5th Wave, key to picking out the bad apples, including Evan Walker, the most rotten apple in the barrel.
The room is dry. No sprinklers came on in here. So where’s the power? The power might be out in every other part of the complex, but it should be on in this room. The risk is too great.
“Ringer?” Being unable to see me has unnerved her. I see her hand reaching out in my direction. “What are you thinking about now?”
“They can’t risk losing power to Wonderland.”
“Which is why I asked about backup batteries or—”
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I hope Sullivan is right. I hope I can get used to feeling stupid. I step around her and hit the light switch.
Wonderland comes to life.
91