The 5th Wave (19 page)

“What is that?” I whisper.

“The infestation,” Dr. Pam says. She presses a button and zooms in on the front part
of Chris’s brain. The pukish color intensifies, glowing neon bright. “This is the
prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain—the part that makes us human.”

She zooms in tight on an area no larger than the head of a pin, and then I see it.
My stomach does a slow roll. Embedded in the soft tissue is a pulsing egg-shaped growth,
anchored by thousands of rootlike tendrils fanning out in all directions, digging
into every crease and crevice of his brain.

“We don’t know how they did it,” Dr. Pam says. “We don’t even know if the infected
are aware of their presence, or if they’ve been puppets their entire lives.”

The thing entangling itself in Chris’s brain, pulsing.

“Take it out of him.” I can barely form words.

“We’ve tried,” Dr. Pam says. “Drugs, radiation, electroshock, surgery. Nothing works.
The only way to kill them is to kill the host.”

She slides the keyboard in front of me. “He won’t feel anything.”

Confused, I shake my head. I don’t get it.

“It lasts less than a second,” Dr. Pam assures me. “And it’s completely painless.
This button right here.”

I look down at the button. It has a label:
EXECUTE
.

“You’re not killing Chris. You’re destroying the thing inside him that would kill
you.”

“He had his chance to kill me,” I argue. Shaking my head. It’s too much. I can’t deal.
“And he didn’t. He kept me alive.”

“Because it wasn’t time yet. He left you before the attack, didn’t he?”

I nod. I’m looking at him again through the two-way mirror, through the indistinct
frame of my see-through self.

“You’re killing the things that are responsible for this.” She presses something into
my hand.

Sissy’s locket.

Her locket, the button, and Chris. And the thing inside Chris.

And me. Or what’s left of me. What’s left of me? What do I have left? The metal links
of Sissy’s necklace cut into my palm.

“It’s how we stop them,” Dr. Pam urges me. “Before there’s no one left to stop them.”

Chris in the chair. The locket in my hand. How long have I been running? Running,
running, running. Christ, I’m sick of running. I should have stayed. I should have
faced it. If I had faced it then, I wouldn’t be facing it now, but sooner or later
you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not
face.

I bring my finger down as hard as I can.

30

I LIKE THE CONVALESCENT WING a lot more than the Zombie Ward. It smells better, for
one thing, and you get your own room. You’re not stuck out on the floor with a hundred
other people. The room is quiet and private, and it’s easy to pretend the world is
what it was before the attacks. For the first time in weeks, I’m able to eat solid
food and make it to the bathroom by myself—though I avoid looking in the mirror. The
days seem brighter, but the nights are bad: Every time I close my eyes, I see my skeletal
self in the execution room, Chris strapped down in the room on the other side, and
my bony finger coming down.

Chris is gone. Well, according to Dr. Pam, Chris never was. There was the thing inside
Chris controlling him that had embedded itself into his brain (they don’t know how)
sometime in the past (they don’t know when). No aliens descended from the mothership
to attack Wright-Patterson. The attack came from within, with infested soldiers turning
their guns on their comrades. Which meant they had been hiding inside us for a long
time, waiting for the first three waves to whittle our population down to a manageable
number before revealing themselves.

What did Chris say?
They know how we think.

They knew we’d seek safety in numbers. Knew we’d take shelter with the guys who had
guns. So, Mr. Alien, how do you overcome that? It’s simple, because you know how we
think, don’t you? You embed sleeper units where the guns are. Even if your troops
fail in the initial assault, like they did at Wright-Patterson,
you succeed in your ultimate goal of blowing society apart. If the enemy looks just
like you, how do you fight him?

At that point, it’s game over. Starvation, disease, wild animals: It’s only a matter
of time before the last, isolated survivors are dead.

From my window six stories up I can see the front gates. Around dusk, a convoy of
old yellow school buses rolls out, escorted by Humvees. The buses return several hours
later loaded down with people, mostly kids—though it’s hard to tell in the dark—who
are taken into the hangar to be tagged and bagged, the “infested” winnowed out and
destroyed. That’s what my nurses tell me, anyway. To me, the whole thing seems crazy,
given what we know about the attacks. How did they kill so many of us so quickly?
Oh yeah, because humans herd like sheep! And now here we are, clustering again. Right
in plain sight. We might as well paint a big red bull’s-eye on the base.
Here we are! Fire when ready!

And I can’t take it anymore.

Even as my body grows stronger, my spirit begins to crumple.

I really don’t get it. What’s the point? Not their point; that’s been pretty damn
clear from the beginning.

I mean what’s the point of us anymore? I’m sure if we didn’t cluster again, they’d
have another plan, even if that plan were using infested assassins to take us out
one stupid, isolated human at a time.

There’s no winning. If I had somehow saved my sister, it wouldn’t have mattered. I
would have bought her another month or two tops.

We’re the dead. There’s no one else now. There’s the past-dead and the future-dead.
Corpses and corpses-to-be.

Somewhere between the basement room and this room, I lost
Sissy’s locket. I wake up in the middle of the night, my hand clutching empty air,
and I hear her screaming my name like she’s standing two feet away, and I’m furious,
I’m pissed as hell, and I tell her to shut up, I lost it, it’s gone. I’m dead like
her, doesn’t she get it? A zombie, that’s me.

I stop eating. I refuse my meds. I lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, waiting
for it to be over, waiting to join my sister and the seven billion other lucky ones.
The virus that was eating me has been replaced by a different disease that’s even
more hungry. A disease with a kill rate of 100 percent. And I tell myself,
Don’t let them do it, man! This is part of their plan, too,
but it doesn’t do any good. I can give myself pep talks all day long; it doesn’t
change the fact that the moment the mothership appeared in the sky, it was game over.
Not a matter of if, but when.

And right when I reach the point of no return, when the last part of me able to fight
is about to die, as if he’s been waiting all this time for me to reach that point,
my savior appears.

The door opens and his shadow fills the space—tall, lean, hard-edged, as if his shadow
were cut from a slab of black marble. That shadow falls over me as he walks toward
the bed. I want to look away, but I can’t. His eyes—cold and blue as a mountain lake—pin
me down. He comes into the light, and I can see his short-cropped sandy hair and his
sharp nose and his thin lips drawn tight in a humorless smile. Crisp uniform. Shiny
black boots. The officer insignia on his collar.

He looks down at me in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment. Why can’t I look
away from those ice-blue eyes? His face is so chiseled it looks unreal, like a wood
carving of a human face.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks. His voice is deep, very deep,
a voice-over-on-a-movie-preview deep. I shake my head. How the hell could I know that?
I’d never seen him before in my life.

“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vosch, the commander of this base.”

He doesn’t offer me his hand. He just stares at me. Steps around to the end of the
bed, looks at my chart. My heart is pounding hard. It feels like I’ve been called
to the principal’s office.

“Lungs good. Heart rate, blood pressure. Everything’s good.” He hangs the chart back
on the hook. “Only everything isn’t good, is it? In fact, everything is pretty damn
bad.”

He pulls a chair close to the bed and sits down. The motion is seamless, smooth, uncomplicated,
like he’s practiced it for hours and gotten sitting down to an exact science. He adjusts
the crease in his pants into a perfectly straight line before he goes on.

“I’ve seen your Wonderland profile. Very interesting. And very instructive.”

He reaches into his pocket, again with so much grace that it’s more like a dance move
than a gesture, and pulls out Sissy’s silver locket.

“I believe this is yours.”

He drops it on the bed next to my hand. Waits for me to grab it. I force myself to
lie still, I’m not sure why.

His hand returns to his breast pocket. He tosses a wallet-size photo into my lap.
I pick it up. There’s a little blond kid around six, maybe seven. With Vosch’s eyes.
Being held in the arms of a pretty lady around Vosch’s age.

“You know who they are?”

Not a hard question. I nod. For some reason, the picture bothers me. I hold it out
for him to take back. He doesn’t.

“They’re my silver chain,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.

“They didn’t have to do it this way, you know. Have you thought about that? They could
have taken their own sweet time killing us—so why did they decide to kill us so quickly?
Why send down a plague that kills nine out of every ten people? Why not seven out
of ten? Why not five? In other words, what’s their damn hurry? I have a theory about
that. Would you like to hear it?”

No,
I think.
I wouldn’t. Who is this guy, and why is he here talking to me?

“There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is
a statistic.’ Can you imagine seven billion of anything? I have trouble doing it.
It pushes the limits of our ability to comprehend. And that’s exactly why they did
it. Like running up the score in football. You played football, right? It isn’t about
destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.”

He takes the photograph and slips it back into his pocket. “So I don’t think about
the 6.98 billion people. I think about just two.”

He nods toward Sissy’s locket. “You left her. When she needed you, you ran. And you’re
still running. Don’t you think it’s time you stop running and fight for her?”

I open my mouth, and whatever I meant to say comes out as, “She’s dead.”

He waves his hand in the air. I’m being stupid. “We’re all dead, son. Some of us are
just a little further along than others. You’re wondering who the hell I am and why
I’m here. Well, I told you who I am, and now I’m going to tell you why I’m here.”

“Good,” I whisper. Maybe after he tells me, he’ll leave me alone. He’s weirding me
out. Something about the way he looks at me
with that icy stare, the—there’s no other word for it—hardness of him, like he’s a
statue come to life.

“I’m here because they’ve killed almost all of us, but not all of us. And that’s their
mistake, son. That’s the flaw in their plan. Because if you don’t kill all of us all
at once, whoever’s left are not going to be the weak ones. The strong ones—and only
the strong ones—will survive. The bent but unbroken, if you know what I mean. People
like me. And people like you.”

I’m shaking my head. “I’m not strong.”

“Well, that’s where you and I will have to disagree. You see, Wonderland doesn’t just
map out your experiences; it maps out
you
. It tells us not just who you are, but what you are. Your past and your potential.
And your potential, I kid you not, is off the charts. You are exactly what we need
at exactly the time we need it.”

He stands up. Towering over me. “Get up.”

Not a request. His voice is as rock hard as his features. I heave myself onto the
floor. He brings his face close to mine and says in a low, dangerous voice, “What
do you want? Be honest.”