The 5th Wave (29 page)

He sees his crib. And there’s Bear lying next to him in the crib, and then there’s
the mobile of stars and planets spinning lazily over his bed. He sees his mother,
leaning over him, holding a spoonful of medicine and telling him he has to take it.
There’s Cassie in the backyard, and it’s summer and he’s toddling around in a pair
of Pull-Ups, and Cassie is spraying water from the hose high into the air so a rainbow
springs up out of nothing. She whips the hose back and forth, laughing as he chases
it, the fleeting, uncatchable colors, shimmering splinters of the golden light. “Catch
the rainbow, Sammy! Catch the rainbow!”

The images and memories pour out of him, like water rushing down a drain. In no more
than ninety seconds, the entirety of Sammy’s life roars out of him and into the mainframe,
an avalanche of touch and smell and taste and sound, before fading into the white
nothingness. His mind is laid bare in the blinding white, all that he has experienced,
all that he remembers, and even those
things that he can’t remember; everything that makes up the personality of Sammy Sullivan
is pulled and sorted and transmitted by the device at the base of his neck into Dr.
Pam’s computer.

Number forty-nine has been mapped.

41

DR. PAM UNDOES the straps and helps him out of the chair. Sammy’s knees give out.
She holds on to his arms to keep him from falling. His stomach heaves, and he vomits
on the white floor. Everywhere he looks, black blobs jiggle and bounce. The big, unsmiling
nurse takes him back to the examination room, puts him on the table, tells him everything
is fine, asks if she can bring him anything.

“I want my bear!” he screams. “I want my daddy and my Cassie and I want to go home!”

Dr. Pam appears beside him. Her kind eyes glow with understanding. She knows what
he’s feeling. She tells him how brave he is, how brave and lucky and smart to have
come this far. He passed the final test with flying colors. He’s perfectly healthy
and perfectly safe. The worst is over.

“That’s what my daddy said every time something bad happened, and every time it just
got worse,” Sammy says, choking back tears.

They bring him a white jumpsuit to put on. It reminds him of a fighter pilot’s outfit,
zippered in the front, the material slick to
the touch. The suit is too big for him. The sleeves keep falling over his hands.

“Do you know why you’re so important to us, Sammy?” Dr. Pam asks. “Because you’re
the future. Without you and all those other children, we won’t stand a chance against
them. That’s why we searched for you and brought you here and why we’re doing all
this. You know some of the things they’ve done to us, and they’re terrible. Terrible,
awful things, but that isn’t the worst part, that isn’t everything they’ve done.”

“What else have they done?” Sammy whispers.

“Do you really want to know? I can show you, but only if you want to know.”

In the white room, he had just relived his mother’s death, smelled her coppery blood,
watched his father wash it from his hands. But those weren’t the worst things the
Others had done, the doctor said. Did he really want to know?

“I want to know,” he says.

The doctor holds up the small silver disk the nurse had used to take his temperature,
the same device Parker had pressed against his and Megan’s foreheads on the bus.

“This isn’t a thermometer, Sammy,” Dr. Pam says. “It does detect something, but it
isn’t your temperature. It tells us who you are. Or maybe I should say
what
you are. Tell me something, Sam. Have you seen one of them yet? Have you seen an
alien?”

He shakes his head no. Shivering inside the white suit. Curled up on the little examination
table. Sick to his stomach, head pounding, weak from hunger and exhaustion. Something
in him wants her to stop. He nearly shouts out,
Stop! I don’t want to know!
But he bites his lip. He doesn’t want to know; he
has
to know.

“I’m very sorry to say you have seen one,” Dr. Pam says in a soft, sad voice. “We
all have. We’ve been waiting for them to come since the Arrival, but the truth is
they’ve been here, right under our noses, for a very long time.”

He is shaking his head over and over. Dr. Pam is wrong. He’s never seen one. For hours
he listened to Daddy speculating about what they might look like. Heard his father
say they might never know what they look like. There had been no messages from them,
no landers, no signs of their existence except the grayish-green mothership in high
orbit and the unmanned drones. How could Dr. Pam be saying he had seen one?

She holds out her hand. “If you want to see, I can show you.”

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.