The 5th Wave (18 page)

She gives me a shot in the back of my neck to numb me, then inserts the pellet under
my skin, near the base of my skull. She bandages the insertion point, then helps me
back into the wheelchair and takes me into the adjoining room. It’s much smaller than
the first room. A white reclining chair that reminds me of a dentist’s. A computer
and monitor. She helps me into the chair and proceeds to tie me down: straps across
my wrists, straps across my ankles. Her face is very close to mine. The perfume has
a slight edge today over the disinfectant in the Odor Wars. She doesn’t miss my expression.
“Don’t be scared,” she says. “It isn’t painful.”

Scared, I whisper, “What isn’t?”

She steps over to the monitor and starts punching in commands.

“It’s a program we found on a laptop that belonged to one of the infested,” Dr. Pam
explains. Before I can ask what the hell an infested is, she rolls on: “We’re not
sure what the infesteds had been using it for, but we know it’s perfectly safe. Its
code name is Wonderland.”

“What’s it do?” I ask. I’m not sure what she’s telling me, but it sounds like she’s
telling me that the aliens had somehow infiltrated Wright-Patterson and hacked into
its computer systems. I can’t get the word
infested
out of my head. Or the bloody face of the soldier bursting into my tent.
They’re inside us.

“It’s a mapping program,” she answers. Which really isn’t an answer.

“What does it map?”

She looks at me for one long, uncomfortable moment, as if she’s deciding whether to
tell the truth. “It maps you. Close your eyes, big, deep breath. Counting down from
three…two…one…”

And the universe implodes.

Suddenly I’m there, three years old, holding on to the sides of my crib, jumping up
and down and screaming like someone’s murdering me. I’m not remembering that day;
I’m experiencing it.

Now I’m six, swinging my plastic baseball bat. The one I loved; the one I forgot I
had.

Ten now, riding home from the pet store with a bag of goldfish in my lap and debating
names with my mom. She’s wearing a bright yellow dress.

Thirteen, it’s a Friday night, I’m playing pee-wee football, and the crowd is cheering.
Going deep.

The reel begins to slow. I feel like I’m drowning—drowning in the dream of my life.
My legs kick helplessly against the restraints, strapped in tight, running.

Running.

First kiss. Her name is Lacey. My ninth-grade algebra teacher and her horrible handwriting.
Getting my driver’s license. Everything there, no blank spaces, all of it pouring
out of me while I’m pouring into Wonderland.

All of it.

Green blob in the night sky.

Holding the boards while Dad nails them over the living room windows. The sound of
gunfire down the street, glass shattering, people screaming. And the hammer falling:
bam, bam, BAM
.

“Blow out the candles”: Mom’s hysterical whisper. “Can’t you hear them? They’re coming!”

And my father, calmly, in the pitch black: “If anything happens to me, take care of
your mother and baby sister.”

I’m in free fall. Terminal velocity. There’s no escaping it. I won’t just remember
that night. I’ll live it all over again.

It has chased me all the way to Tent City. The thing I ran from, that I’m still running
from, the thing that’s never let me go.

What I reach for. What I run from.

Take care of your mother. Take care of your baby sister.

The front door crashes open. Dad fires point-blank into the chest of the first intruder.
The guy must be high on something, because he just keeps coming. I see a sawed-off
shotgun in my father’s face, and that’s the last I see of my father’s face.

The room fills with shadows, and one of the shadows is my mother, and then more shadows
and hoarse shouts and I’m tearing up the stairs cradling Sissy in my arms, realizing
too late I’m running toward a dead end.

A hand catches my shirt and flings me backward, and I tumble back down the stairs,
shielding Sissy with my body, smacking down headfirst at the bottom.

Then shadows, huge shadows, and a swarm of fingers, pulling her out of my arms. And
Sissy, screaming,
Bubby, Bubby, Bubby, Bubby!

I reach for her in the dark. My fingers hook on the locket around her neck and tear
the silver chain free.

Then, like the day the lights blinked out forever, my sister’s voice abruptly dies.

Then the punks are on me. Three of them, jacked up on dope or desperate to find some,
kicking, punching, a furious rain of blows into my back, my stomach, and as I bring
up my hands to shield my face, I see the silhouette of Dad’s hammer rising over my
head.

It whistles down. I roll away. The head of the hammer grazes my temple, its momentum
carrying it right into the guy’s shin. He falls to his knees with an agonized howl.

On my feet now, running down the hall to the kitchen, and the thunder of footsteps
as they come after me.

Take care of your baby sister.

Tripping on something in the backyard, probably the garden hose or one of Sissy’s
stupid toys. Falling face-first in the wet grass under a star-stuffed sky, and the
glowing green orb, the circling Eye, coldly staring down at me, the one with the silver
locket clutched in his bleeding hand, the one who lived, the one who did not go back,
the one who ran.

28

I’VE FALLEN SO DEEP, nothing can reach me. For the first time in weeks, I feel numb.
I don’t even feel like
me
. There’s no place where I end and the nothingness begins.

Her voice comes into the darkness, and I grab on to it, a lifeline to pull me out
of the bottomless well.

“It’s over. It’s all right. It’s over…”

I break the surface into the real world, gasping for air, crying uncontrollably like
a complete pansy, and I’m thinking,
You’re wrong, Doc. It’s never over. It just goes on and on and on.
Her face swims into view, and my arm jerks against the restraint as I try to grab
her. She needs to make this stop.

“What the hell was that?” I ask in a croaky whisper. My throat is burning, my mouth
dry. I feel like I weigh about five pounds, like all the flesh has been torn from
my bones. And I thought the plague was bad!

“It’s a way for us to see inside you, to look at what’s really going on,” she says
gently. She runs her hand over my forehead. The gesture reminds me of my mother, which
reminds me of losing my mother in the dark, of running from her in the night, which
reminds me I shouldn’t be strapped down in this white chair. I should be with them.
I should have stayed and faced what they faced.
Take care of your little sister.

“That’s my next question,” I say, fighting to stay focused. “What’s going on?”

“They’re inside us,” she answers. “We were attacked from the inside, by infected personnel
who’d been embedded in the military.”

She gives me a few minutes to process this while she wipes the tears from my face
with a cool, moist cloth. It’s maddening, how motherly she is, and the soothing coolness
of the cloth, a pleasant torture.

She sets aside the cloth and looks deeply into my eyes. “Using the ratio of infected
to clean here at the base, we estimate that one out of every three surviving human
beings on Earth is one of them.”

She loosens the straps. I’m insubstantial as a cloud, light as a balloon. When the
final strap comes free, I expect to fly out of the chair and smack the ceiling.

“Would you like to see one?” she asks.

Holding out her hand.

29

SHE WHEELS ME down a hallway to an elevator. It’s a one-way express that carries us
several hundred feet below the surface. The doors open into a long corridor with white
cinder-block walls. Dr. Pam tells me we’re in the bomb shelter complex that’s nearly
as large as the base above us, built to withstand a fifty-megaton nuclear blast. I
tell her I’m feeling safer already. She laughs like she thinks that’s very funny.
I’m rolling past side tunnels and unmarked doors and, though the floor is level, I
feel as if I’m being taken to the very bottom of the world, to the hole where the
devil sits. There are soldiers hurrying up and down the corridor; they avert their
eyes and stop talking as I’m wheeled past them.

Would you like to see one?

Yes. Hell no.

She stops at one of the unmarked doors and swipes a key card through the locking mechanism.
The red light turns green. She rolls me into the room, stopping the chair in front
of a long mirror, and my mouth falls open and I drop my chin and close my eyes, because
whatever is sitting in that wheelchair isn’t me, it can’t be me.

When the mothership first appeared, I was one hundred and ninety pounds, most of it
muscle. Forty pounds of that muscle is gone. The stranger in that mirror looked back
at me with the eyes of the starving: huge, sunken, ringed in puffy, black bags. The
virus has taken a knife to my face, carving away my cheeks, sharpening my chin, thinning
my nose. My hair is stringy, dry, falling out in places.

He’s gone zombie.

Dr. Pam nods at the mirror. “Don’t worry. He won’t be able to see us.”

He? Who’s she talking about?

She hits a button, and the lights in the room on the other side of the mirror flood
on. My image turns ghostlike. I can see through myself to the person on the other
side.

It’s Chris.

He’s strapped to a chair identical to the one in the Wonderland room. Wires run from
his head to a large console with blinking red lights behind him. He’s having trouble
keeping his head up, like a kid nodding off in class.

She notices my stiffening at the sight of him and asks, “What? Do you know him?”

“His name is Chris. He’s my…I met him in the refugee camp. He offered to share his
tent and he helped me when I got sick.”

“He’s your friend?” She seems surprised.

“Yes. No. Yes, he’s my friend.”

“He’s not what you think he is.”

She touches a button, and the monitor pops to life. I tear my eyes away from Chris,
from the outside of him to the inside, from apparent to hidden, because on the screen
I can see his brain encased in translucent bone, glowing a sickly yellowish green.