The 5th Wave (42 page)

MY FIRST REACTION is to yank off the hardware, but I don’t. I’m paralyzed with shock.
A shudder of revulsion next. Then panic. Followed closely by confusion. Ringer’s head
has lit up like a Christmas tree, bright enough to be seen a mile away. The green
fire sparks and swirls, so intense it burns an afterimage in my left eye.

“What is it?” she demands. “What happened?”

“You lit up. As soon as I pulled out the tracker.”

We stare at each other for a long couple of minutes. Then she says, “Unclean glows
green.”

I’m already on my feet, M16 in my hands, backing toward the door. And outside, beneath
the sound-deadening snowfall, Poundcake and the sniper, trading barbs. Unclean glows
green. Ringer doesn’t make a move for the rifle lying next to her. Through my right
eye, she’s normal. Through the left, she burns like a Roman candle.

“Think this through, Zombie,” she says. “Think this through.” Holding up her empty
hands, scratched and scuffed from her fall,
one caked in dried blood. “I lit up after you pulled out the implant. The eyepieces
don’t pick up infestations. They react when there’s no implant.”

“Excuse me, Ringer, but that makes no freaking sense. They lit up on those three infesteds.
Why would the eyepieces light up if they weren’t?”

“You know why. You just can’t admit it to yourself. They lit up because those people
weren’t infested. They’re just like us, the only difference being they don’t have
implants.”

She stands up. God, she looks so small, like a kid…But she is a kid, right? Through
one eye normal. Through the other a green fireball. Which is she?
What
is she?

“Take us in.” She steps toward me. I bring up the gun. She stops. “Tag and bag us.
Train us to kill.” Another step. I swing the muzzle toward her. Not at her. But toward
her:
Stay away.
“Anyone who isn’t tagged will glow green, and when they defend themselves or challenge
us, shoot at us like that sniper up there—well, that just proves they’re the enemy,
doesn’t it?” Another step. Now I’m aiming right at her heart.

“Don’t,” I beg her. “Please, Ringer.” One face pure. One face in fire.

“Until we’ve killed everyone who isn’t tagged.” Another step. Right in front of me
now. The end of the gun pressing lightly against her chest. “It’s the 5th Wave, Ben.”

I’m shaking my head. “No fifth wave. No fifth wave! The commander said—”

“The commander lied.”

She reaches up with bloody hands and pulls the rifle from my grip. I feel myself falling
into a completely different kind of
wonderland, where up is down and true is false and the enemy has two faces, my face
and his, the one who saved me from drowning, who took my heart and made it a battlefield.

She gathers her hands into mine and pronounces me dead:

“Ben,
we’re
the 5th Wave.”

61

WE ARE HUMANITY.

It’s a lie. Wonderland. Camp Haven. The war itself.

How easy it was. How incredibly easy, even after all that we’d been through. Or maybe
it was easy
because
of all we’d been through.

They gathered us in. They emptied us out. They filled us up with hate and cunning
and the spirit of vengeance.

So they could send us out again.

To kill what’s left of the rest of us.

Check and mate.

I’m going to be sick. Ringer hangs on to my shoulder while I heave all over a poster
that fell off the wall:
FALL INTO FASHION!

There’s Chris, behind the two-way glass. And there’s the button marked
EXECUTE
. And there’s my finger, slamming down. How easy it was to make me kill another human
being.

When I’m done, I rock back on my heels. I feel Ringer’s cool fingers rubbing my neck.
Hear her voice telling me it’s going to be okay. I yank off the eyepiece, killing
the green fire and giving Ringer back her face. She’s Ringer and I’m me, only I’m
not
sure what
me
means anymore. I’m not what I thought I was. The world is not what I thought it was.
Maybe that’s the point:

It’s their world now, and we’re the aliens.

“We can’t go back,” I choke out. And there’s her deep-cutting eyes and her cool fingers
massaging my neck.

“No, we can’t. But we can go forward.” She picks up my rifle and pushes it against
my chest. “And we can start with that son of a bitch upstairs.”

Not before taking out my implant. It hurts more than I expect, less than I deserve.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Ringer tells me while she digs it out. “They fooled all
of us.”

“And the ones they couldn’t, they called Dorothys and killed.”

“Not the only ones,” she says bitterly. And then it hits me like a punch in the heart:
the P&D hangar. The twin stacks spewing black and gray smoke. The trucks loaded with
bodies—hundreds of bodies every day. Thousands every week. And the buses pulling in
all night, every night, filled with refugees, filled with the walking dead.

“Camp Haven isn’t a military base,” I whisper as blood trickles down my neck.

She shakes her head. “Or a refugee camp.”

I nod. Swallow back the bile rising in my throat. I can tell she’s waiting for me
to say it out loud. Sometimes you have to speak the truth aloud or it doesn’t seem
real. “It’s a death camp.”

There’s an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don’t buy it. Sometimes the
truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts.

“Are you ready?” Ringer asks. She seems anxious to get it over with.

“We don’t kill him,” I say. Ringer gives me a look like
WTF?
But I’m thinking of Chris strapped to a chair behind a two-way mirror. Thinking of
heaving bodies onto the conveyor belt that carried its human cargo into the hot, hungry
mouth of the incinerator. I’ve been their tool long enough. “Neutralize and disarm,
that’s the order. Understood?”

She hesitates, then nods. I can’t read her expression—not unusual. Is she playing
chess again? We can still hear Poundcake firing from across the street. He has to
be getting low on ammo. It’s time.

Stepping into the lobby is a dive into total darkness. We advance shoulder-to-shoulder,
trailing our fingers along the walls to keep our bearings in the dark, trying every
door, looking for the one to the stairs. The only sounds are our breath in the stale,
cold air and the sloshing of our boots through an inch of sour-smelling, freezing
cold water; a pipe must have burst. I push open a door at the end of the hall and
feel a rush of fresh air. Stairwell.

We pause on the fourth-floor landing, at the bottom of the narrow steps that lead
up to the roof. The door is cracked open; we can hear the sharp report of the sniper’s
rifle, but can’t see him. Hand signals are useless in the dark, so I pull Ringer close
and press my lips against her ear.

“Sounds like he’s straight ahead.” She nods. Her hair tickles my nose. “We go in hard.”

She’s the better shooter; Ringer will go first. I’ll take the second shot if she misses
or goes down. We’ve drilled this a hundred times, but we always practiced eliminating
the target, not disabling it. And the target never fired back at us. She steps up
to the door. I’m standing right behind her, hand on her shoulder.
The wind whistles through the crack like the mewling of a dying animal. Ringer waits
for my signal with her head bowed, breathing evenly and deeply, and I wonder if she’s
praying and, if she is, if she prays to the same God I do. Somehow I don’t think so.
I pat her once on the shoulder and she kicks open the door and it’s like she’s been
shot out of a cannon, disappearing in the swirl of snow before I’m two steps onto
the roof, and I hear the sharp
pop-pop-pop
of her weapon before I almost trip over her kneeling in the wet, white carpet of
snow. Ten feet in front of her, the sniper lies on his side, clutching his leg with
one hand while he reaches for his rifle with the other. It must have flown from his
grip when she popped him. Ringer fires again, this time at the reaching hand. It’s
three inches across, and she scores a direct hit. In the murky dark. Through heavy
snow. He pulls his hand back to his chest with a startled scream. I tap Ringer on
the top of her head and signal her to pull up.

“Lie still!” I yell at him. “Don’t move!”

He sits up, pressing his shattered hand against his chest, facing the street, hunched
over, and we can’t see what his other hand is doing, but I see a flash of silver and
hear him growl, “Maggots,” and something inside me goes cold. I know that voice.

It has screamed at me, mocked me, belittled me, threatened me, cursed me. It followed
me from the minute I woke to the minute I went to bed. It’s hissed, hollered, snarled,
and spat at me, at all of us.

Reznik.

We both hear it. And it nails down our feet. It stops our breath. It freezes our thoughts.

And it buys him time.

Time that grinds down as he comes up, slowing as if the
universal clock set in motion by the big bang is running out of steam.

Pushing himself to his feet. That takes about seven or eight minutes.

Turning to face us. That takes at least ten.

Holding something in his good hand. Punching at it with his bloody one. That lasts
a good twenty minutes.

And then Ringer comes alive. The round slams into his chest. Reznik falls to his knees.
His mouth comes open. He pitches forward and lands facedown in front of us.

The clock resets. No one moves. No one says anything.

Snow. Wind. Like we’re standing alone on the summit of an icy mountaintop. Ringer
goes over to him, rolls him onto his back. Pulls the silver device from his hand.
I’m looking down at that pasty, pockmarked, rat-eyed face, and somehow I’m surprised
and not surprised.

“Spend months training us so he can kill us,” I say.

Ringer shakes her head. She’s looking at the display of the silver device. Its light
shines on her face, playing up the contrast between her fair skin and jet-black hair.
She looks beautiful in its light, not angelic-beautiful, more like avenging angel–beautiful.

“He wasn’t going to kill us, Zombie. Until we surprised him and gave him no choice.
And then not with the rifle.” She holds up the device so I can see the display. “I
think he was going to kill us with this.”

A grid occupies the top half of the display. There’s a cluster of green dots on the
far left-hand corner. Another green dot closer to the middle.

“The squad,” I say.

“And this lone dot here must be Poundcake.”

“Which means if we hadn’t cut out our implants—”

“He’d have known exactly where we were,” Ringer says. “He’d be waiting for us, and
we’d be screwed.”

She points out the two highlighted numbers on the bottom of the screen. One of them
is the number I was assigned when Dr. Pam tagged and bagged me. I’m guessing the other
one is Ringer’s. Beneath the numbers is a flashing green button.

“What happens if you press that button?” I ask.

“My guess is nothing.” And she presses it.

I flinch, but her guess is right.

“It’s a kill switch,” she says. “Has to be. Linked to our implants.”

He could have fried all of us anytime he wanted. Killing us wasn’t the goal, so what
was? Ringer sees the question in my eyes. “The three ‘infesteds’—that’s why he fired
the opening shot,” she says. “We’re the first squad out of the camp. It makes sense
they’d monitor us closely to see how we perform in actual combat. Or what we think
is actual combat. To make sure we react to the green bait like good little rats. They
must have dropped him in before us—to pull the trigger in case we didn’t. And when
we didn’t, he gave us a little incentive.”

“And he kept firing at us because…?”

“Kept us hyped and ready to blow away any damn green shiny thing that glowed.”

In the snow, it’s as if she’s looking at me through a gauzy white curtain. Flakes
dust her eyebrows, sparkle in her hair.

“Awful big risk to take,” I point out.

“Not really. He had us on this little radar. Worst-case scenario, all he had to do
was hit the button. He just didn’t consider the worst-worst case.”