The 5th Wave (36 page)

“I mean, my decision.” Deep breath. “We killed them, Ben. After we loaded up the children,
we killed every single one of them. And after we were done, we incinerated their camp.
Wiped it off the face of the Earth.”

He looks back at me. Incredibly, I see tears in his eyes. “That was my breaking point.
Afterward I realized, to my horror, that I was falling into their trap. I was an instrument
for the enemy. For every infested person I murdered, three innocent people died. I
will have to live with that—because I have to live. Do you understand what I mean?”

I nod. He smiles sadly. “Of course you do. We both have the blood of innocents on
our hands, don’t we?”

He pushes himself upright, all business now. The tears are gone.

“Sergeant Parish, today we will graduate the top four squads of your battalion. As
commander of the winning squad, you have first pick of assignments. Two squads will
be deployed as perimeter patrols to protect this base. The other two will be deployed
into enemy territory.”

This takes me a couple minutes to absorb. He lets me have them. He picks up one of
the computer printouts and holds it in front of me. There’s a lot of numbers and squiggly
lines and strange symbols that mean absolutely nothing to me.

“I don’t expect you to be able to read it,” he says. “But would you like to guess
what this is?”

“That’s all it would be, sir,” I answer. “A guess.”

“It’s the Wonderland analytics of an infested human being.”

I nod. Why the hell am I nodding? It’s not like I understand:
Ah, yes, Commander, an analytic! Please, go on.

“We’ve been running them through Wonderland, of course, but we haven’t been able to
untangle the infestation’s map from the victim’s—or clone or whatever it is. Until
now.” He holds up the readout. “This, Sergeant Parish, is what an alien consciousness
looks like.”

Again, I’m nodding. But this time because I’m starting to get it. “You know what they’re
thinking.”

“Exactly!” Beaming at me, the star pupil. “The key to winning this war isn’t tactics
or strategy or even imbalances in technology. The real key to winning this war, or
any war, is understanding how your enemy thinks. And now we do.”

I wait for him to break it to me gently. How does the enemy think?

“Much of what we assumed is correct. They have been watching us for some time. Infestations
were embedded in key individuals around the world, sleeper agents, if you will, waiting
for the signal to launch a coordinated attack after our population had been whittled
down to a manageable number. We know how that attack turned out here at Camp Haven,
and we strongly suspect that other military installations were not as fortunate.”

He slaps the paper on his thigh. I must have flinched, because he gives me a reassuring
smile.

“A third of the surviving population. Planted here to eradicate those who survived
the first three waves. You. Me. Your team members. All of us. If you have any fear,
as poor Tank did, that a fifth wave is coming, you can put it aside. There will be
no fifth wave. They have no intention of leaving their mothership until the human
race is exterminated.”

“Is that why they haven’t…?”

“Attacked us again? We think so. It seems their foremost desire
is to preserve the planet for colonization. Now we are in a war of attrition. Our
resources are limited; they can’t last forever. We know it. They know it. Cut off
from supplies, with no means to marshal any significant fighting force, eventually
this camp—and any others out there like it—will wither and die, like a vine cut off
from its roots.”

Weird. He’s still smiling. Like something about this doomsday scenario turns him on.

“So what do we do?” I ask.

“The only thing we can do, Sergeant. We take the battle to them.”

The way he says it: no doubt, no fear, no hopelessness.
We take the battle to them.
That’s why he’s the commander. Standing over me, smiling, confident, his chiseled
features reminding me of some ancient statue, noble, wise, strong. He is the rock
against which the alien waves crash, and he is unbroken.
We are humanity
, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.
He
is humanity, the beating, unbeaten, invincible heart of it. In that moment, if Commander
Vosch had told me to put a bullet through my head for the cause, I would have. I would
have without a second thought.

“Which brings us back to your assignment,” he says quietly. “Our recon flights have
identified significant pockets of infested combatants clustered in and around Dayton.
A squad will be dropped in—and for the next four hours, it will be on its own. The
odds of making it out alive are roughly one in four.”

I clear my throat. “And two squads stay here.”

He nods. Blue eyes boring deep—to the marrow deep. “Your call.”

That same small, secretive smile. He knows what I’m going to say. He knew before I
walked through the door. Maybe my Wonderland profile told him, but I don’t think so.
He knows me.

I rise from the chair to full attention.

And tell him what he already knows.

52

AT 0900 the entire battalion musters in the yard, creating a sea of blue jumpsuits
headed by the top four squads in their crisp new fatigues. Over a thousand recruits
standing in perfect formation, facing east, the direction of new beginnings, toward
the speakers’ platform erected the day before. Flags snap in the icy breeze, but we
don’t feel the cold. We are lit from within by a fire hotter than the one that turned
Tank into ash. The brass of Central Command moves down the first line—the winning
line—shaking our hands and congratulating us for a job well done. Then a personal
word of gratitude from the drill instructors. I’ve been dreaming of what to say to
Reznik when he shakes my hand.
Thanks for making my life a living hell…Oh, die. Just die, you son of a bitch…
Or my favorite, short and sweet and to the point:
Eff you.
But when he salutes and offers me his hand, I almost lose it. I want to hit him in
the face and hug him at the same time.

“Congratulations, Ben,” he says, which totally throws me off. I had no idea he even
knew my name. He gives me a wink and continues down the line.

There’re a couple of short speeches by officers I’ve never seen before. Then the supreme
commander is introduced and the troops go crazy, waving our hats, pumping our fists.
Our cheers echo off the buildings encircling the yard, making the roar twice as loud
and us seem twice as many. Commander Vosch raises his hand very slowly and deliberately
to his forehead, and it’s as if he hit a switch: The noise cuts off as we raise our
own hands in salute. I can hear quiet snuffling all around me. It’s too much. After
what brought us here and what we went through here, after all the blood and death
and fire, after being shown the ugly mirror of the past through Wonderland and facing
the uglier truth of the future in the execution room, after months of brutal training
that pushed some of us past the point of no return, we have arrived. We have survived
the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will
ever fight, the Earth’s final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance.

I don’t hear a word of Vosch’s speech. I watch the sun rising over his shoulder, framed
between the twin towers of the power plant, its light glinting off the mothership
in orbit, the sole imperfection in the otherwise perfect sky. So small, so insignificant.
I feel like I can reach up and pluck it from the sky, throw it to the ground, grind
it to dust beneath my heel. The fire in my chest grows white-hot, spreads over every
inch of my body. It melts my bones; it incinerates my skin; I am the sun gone supernova.

I was wrong about Ben Parish dying on the day he left the convalescent ward. I’ve
been carrying his stinking corpse inside me all through basic. Now the last of him
is burned away as I stare up at the solitary figure who lit that fire. The man who
showed me the true battlefield. Who emptied me so I might be filled. Who killed
me so I might live. And I swear I can see him staring back at me with those icy blue
eyes that see down to the bottom of my soul, and I know—I know—what he’s thinking.

We are one, you and I. Brothers in hate, brothers in cunning, brothers in the spirit
of vengeance.

53

YOU SAVED ME.

Lying in his arms that night with those words in my ears, and I’m thinking,
Idiot, idiot, idiot. You can’t do this. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

The first rule: Trust no one. Which leads to the second rule: The only way to stay
alive as long as possible is to stay alone as long as possible.

Now I’ve broken both.

Oh, they’re so clever. The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together.
And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

The point is I had my chance and I didn’t do so well on my own. In fact, I sucked.
I would have died if Evan hadn’t found me.

His body is pressed against my back, his arm is wrapped protectively around my waist,
his breath a delicious tickle against my neck. The room is very cold; it would be
nice to climb under the covers, but I don’t want to move. I don’t want him to move.
I run my fingers along his bare forearm, remembering the warmth of his lips, the silkiness
of his hair between my fingers. The boy who never sleeps, sleeping. Coming to rest
upon the Cassiopeian shore, an island in the middle of a sea of blood.
You have your promise, and I have you.