The 5th Wave (33 page)

“Killing humans—isn’t that the aliens’ job?”

His face is beet red. He pounds the air with his fist. Flintstone makes a move to
calm him down, but Tank waves him away.

“Whoever’s too weak, too sick, too old, too slow, too stupid, or too little—they GO!”
Tank yells. “Anybody and everybody who can’t fight or support the fight—they’ll just
drag us down.”

“They’re expendable,” I shoot back sarcastically.

“The chain is only as strong as the weakest link,” Tank roars. “It’s frickin’ nature,
Zombie. Only the strong survive!”

“Hey, come on, man,” Flintstone says to him. “Zombie’s right. Nugget’s one of the
crew.”

“You get off my case, Flint,” Tank shouts. “All of you! Like it’s my fault. Like I’m
responsible for this shit!”

“Zombie, do something,” Dumbo begs me. “He’s going Dorothy.”

Dumbo’s referring to the recruit who snapped on the rifle range one day, turning her
weapon on her own squad members. Two people were killed and three seriously injured
before the drill sergeant popped her in the back of the head with his sidearm. Every
week there’s a story about someone “going Dorothy,” or sometimes we say “off to see
the wizard.” The pressure gets to be
too much, and you break. Sometimes you turn on others. Sometimes you turn on yourself.
Sometimes I question the wisdom of Central Command, putting high-powered automatic
weapons into the hands of some seriously effed-up children.

“Oh, go screw yourself,” Tank snarls at Dumbo. “Like you know anything. Like anybody
knows anything. What the hell are we doing here? You want to tell me, Dumbo? How about
you, squad leader? Can you tell me? Somebody better tell me and they better tell me
right now, or I’m taking this place out. I’m taking all of it and all of you out,
because this is seriously messed up, man. We’re going to take them on, the things
that killed seven billion of us? With what? With what?” Pointing the end of his rifle
at Nugget, who’s clinging to my leg. “With that?” Laughing hysterically.

Everybody goes stiff when the gun comes up. I hold up my empty hands and say as calmly
as I can, “Private, lower that weapon right now.”

“You’re not the boss of me! Nobody’s the boss of me!” Standing beside his bunk, the
rifle at his hip. On the yellow brick road, all right.

My eyes slide over to Flintstone, who’s the closest to Tank, standing a couple of
feet to his right. Flint answers with the tiniest of nods.

“Don’t you dumbasses ever wonder why they haven’t hit us yet?” Tank says. He’s not
laughing now. He’s crying. “You know they can. You know they know we’re here, and
you know they know what we’re doing here, so why are they letting us do it?”

“I don’t know, Tank,” I say evenly. “Why?”

“Because it doesn’t matter anymore what the hell we do! It’s over, man. It’s done!”
Swinging his gun around wildly. If it goes off…“And you and me and everybody else
on this damn base are history! We’re—”

Flint’s on him, ripping the rifle from his hand and shoving him down hard. Tank’s
head catches the edge of his bunk when he falls. He curls into a ball, holding his
head in both hands, screaming at the top of his lungs, and when his lungs are empty,
he fills them and lets loose again. Somehow it’s worse than waving around the loaded
M16. Poundcake races into the latrine to hide in one of the stalls. Dumbo covers his
big ears and scoots to the head of his bunk. Oompa has sidled closer to me, right
next to Nugget, who’s holding on to my legs with both hands now and peeking around
my hip at Tank writhing on the barracks floor. The only one unaffected by Tank’s meltdown
is Teacup, the seven-year-old. She’s sitting on her bunk staring stoically at him,
like every night Tank falls to the floor and screams as if he’s being murdered.

And it hits me: This
is
murder, what they’re doing to us. A very slow, very cruel murder, killing us from
our souls outward, and I remember the commander’s words:
It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to
fight.

It is hopeless. It is crazy. Tank is the sane one because he sees it clearly.

Which is why he has to go.

47

THE SENIOR DRILL INSTRUCTOR agrees with me, and the next morning Tank is gone, taken
to the hospital for a full psych eval. His bunk remains empty for a week, while our
squad, one man short, falls further and further behind in points. We’ll never graduate,
never
trade in our blue jumpsuits for real uniforms, never venture beyond the electric fence
and razor wire to prove ourselves, to pay back a fraction of what we’ve lost.

We don’t talk about Tank. It’s as if Tank never existed. We have to believe the system
is perfect, and Tank is a flaw in the system.

Then one morning in the P&D hangar, Dumbo motions me over to his table. Dumbo is training
to be the squad medic, so he has to dissect designated corpses, usually Teds, to learn
about human anatomy. When I come over, he doesn’t say anything, but nods at the body
lying in front of him.

It’s Tank.

We stare at his face for a long moment. His eyes are open, staring sightlessly at
the ceiling. He’s so fresh, it’s unnerving. Dumbo glances around the hangar to make
sure no one can overhear us, and then whispers, “Don’t tell Flint.”

I nod. “What happened?”

Dumbo shakes his head. He’s sweating badly under the protective hood. “That’s the
really freaky thing, Zombie. I can’t find anything.”

I look back down at Tank. He isn’t pale. His skin is slightly pink without a mark
on it. How did Tank die? Did he go Dorothy in the psych ward, maybe overdose himself
on some drugs?

“What if you cut him open?” I ask.

“I’m not cutting Tank open,” he says. He’s looking at me as if I just told him to
jump off a cliff.

I nod. Stupid idea. Dumbo is no doctor; he’s a twelve-year-old kid. I glance around
the hangar again. “Get him off this table,” I say. “I don’t want anyone else to see
him.” Including me.

Tank’s body is stacked with the others by the hangar doors to
be disposed. He’s loaded onto the transport for the final leg of his journey to the
incinerators, where he will be consumed in fire, his ashes mixing with the gray smoke
and carried aloft in a column of superheated air, eventually to settle over us in
particles too fine to see or feel. He’ll stay with us—on us—until we shower that night,
washing what’s left of Tank into the drains connected to the pipes connected to the
septic tanks, where he will mix with our excrement before leaching into the ground.

48

TANK’S REPLACEMENT ARRIVES two days later. We know he’s coming, because the night
before Reznik announces it during Q&A. He won’t tell us anything about him, except
the name: Ringer. After he leaves, everybody in the squad is jacked up; Reznik must
have named him Ringer for a reason.

Nugget comes over to my bunk and asks, “What’s a ringer?”

“Someone who you slip into a team to give it an edge,” I explain. “Somebody who’s
really good.”

“Marksmanship,” Flintstone guesses. “That’s where we’re weakest. Poundcake’s our best,
and I’m okay, but you and Dumbo and Teacup suck. And Nugget can’t even shoot.”

“Come over here and say I suck,” Teacup shouts. Always looking for a fight. If I were
in charge, I’d give Teacup a rifle and a couple of clips and let her loose on every
Ted in a hundred-mile radius.

After the prayer, Nugget twists and squirms against my back until I can’t take it
anymore and hiss at him to go back to his bunk.

“Zombie, it’s her.”

“What’s her?”

“Ringer! Cassie is Ringer!”

It takes me a couple of seconds to remember who Cassie is.
Oh, God, not this shit again.

“I don’t think Ringer is your sister.”

“You don’t know she isn’t, either.”

It almost comes out of me:
Don’t be a dumbass, kid. Your sister isn’t coming for you because she’s dead.
But I hold it in. Cassie is Nugget’s silver locket. What he clings to because if
he lets go, there’s nothing to keep the tornado from taking him off to Oz like the
other Dorothys in camp. It’s why a kid army makes sense. Adults don’t waste their
time on magical thinking. They dwell on the same inconvenient truths that landed Tank
on the dissection table.

Ringer isn’t at roll call the next morning. And he isn’t on the morning run or at
chow. We gear up for the range, check our weapons, head out across the yard. It’s
a clear day, but very cold. Nobody says much. We’re all wondering where the new kid
is.

Nugget sees Ringer first, standing off in the distance on the firing range, and right
away we can see Flintstone was right: Ringer is a hell of a marksman. The target pops
out of the tall brown grass and
pop-pop!
the head of the target explodes. Then a different target, but the same result. Reznik
is standing off to one side, operating the controls on the targets. He sees us coming
and starts hitting buttons fast. The targets rocket out of the grass, one right
after the other, and this Ringer kid takes them out before they can get upright with
one shot. Beside me, Flintstone gives a long, appreciative whistle.

“He’s good.”

Nugget gets it before the rest of us. Something about the shoulders or maybe the hips,
but he goes, “It’s not a he,” before he takes off across the field toward the solitary
figure cradling the rifle that smokes in the freezing air.

She turns before he reaches her, and Nugget pulls up, first confused, then disappointed.
Apparently, Ringer is not his sister.

Weird that she looked taller from a distance. Around Dumbo’s height, but thinner than
Dumbo—and older. I’m guessing fifteen or sixteen, with a pixie face and dark, deep-set
eyes, flawless pale skin, and straight black hair. It’s the eyes that get you first.
The kind of eyes you search to find something there and you come away with only two
possibilities: Either what’s there is so deep you can’t see it, or there’s nothing
there at all.

It’s the girl from the yard, the one who caught me outside the P&D hangar with Nugget.

“Ringer is a girl,” Teacup whispers, wrinkling her nose like she’s caught a whiff
of something rotten. Not only is she not the baby of the squad anymore, now she’s
not the only girl.