Rick Yancey - The Infinite Sea

“Badder?”

“Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can’t talk the Queen’s English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.”

I sighed. The rage was leaching out of me, leaving me a hollow, bloodless, human-shaped lump.

Ben looked at Megan for a long moment. “We have to wake her up,” he decided.

Then Dumbo and Poundcake crowded into the room. “Don’t tell me,” Ben said to Poundcake, who of course wouldn’t. “You didn’t find nothing.”

“Anything,” Dumbo corrected him.

Ben didn’t punch him in the face. But he did hold out his hand. “Give me your canteen.” He unscrewed the cap and held the container over Megan’s forehead. A drop of water hung quivering on the lip for an eternity.

Before eternity ended, a croaky voice spoke up behind us. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Evan Walker was awake.

EVERYBODY FROZE. Even the drop of water, swelling at the edge of the canteen’s mouth, held still. From his bed, Evan watched us with red, fever-bright eyes, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question, which Ben finally did: “Why?”

“Waking her like that could make her take a very deep breath, and that would be bad.”

Ben turned to face him. The water dribbled onto the carpet. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Evan swallowed, grimacing from the effort. His face was as white as the pillowcase beneath it. “She is implanted—but not with a tracking device.”

Ben’s lips tightened into a hard, white line. He got it before the rest of us. He whipped on Dumbo and Poundcake. “Out. Sullivan, you and Sam, too.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.

“You should,” Evan said. “I don’t know how finely it’s been calibrated.”

“How finely what’s been calibrated to what?” I demanded.

“The incendiary device to CO2.” His eyes cut away. The next words were hard for him. “Our breath, Cassie.”

Everybody understood by that point. But there’s a difference between understanding and accepting. The idea was unacceptable. After all we had experienced, there were still places our minds simply refused to go.

“Get downstairs now, all of you,” Ben snarled.

Evan shook his head. “Not far enough. You should leave the building.”

Ben grabbed Dumbo’s arm with one hand and Poundcake’s with the other and slung them toward the door. Sam had backed into the bathroom entrance, tiny fist pressed against his mouth.

“Also, somebody should open that window,” Evan gasped.

I pushed Sam into the hall, trotted over to the window, and pushed hard against the frame, but it wouldn’t budge, probably frozen shut. Ben pushed me out of the way and smashed out the glass with the butt of his rifle. Freezing air rushed into the room. Ben strode back to Evan’s bed and considered him for a second before grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking him forward.

“You son of a bitch…”

“Ben!” I put my hand on his arm. “Let him go. He didn’t—”

“Oh, right. I forgot. He’s a good evil alien.” He let go. Evan fell back; he didn’t have the strength to stay up. Then Ben suggested he do something to himself that was anatomically impossible.

Evan’s eyes cut over to me. “In her throat. Suspended directly above the epiglottis.”

“She’s a bomb,” Ben said, his voice quavering with rage and disbelief. “They took a child and turned her into an IED.”

“Can we remove it?” I asked.

Evan shook his head. “How?”

“That’s what she’s asking you, dipshit,” Ben barked.

“The explosive is connected to a CO2 detector imbedded in her throat. If the connection’s lost, it detonates.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I pointed out. “Can we remove it without blowing ourselves into orbit?”

“It’s feasible…”

“Feasible. Feasible. ” Ben was laughing this weird, hiccupping kind of laugh. I was worried that he might be falling over the proverbial edge.

“Evan,” I said as softly and calmly as I could. “Can we do it without…” I couldn’t say it, and Evan didn’t make me.

“The odds of it not detonating are a lot better if you did.”

“Do it without… what?” Ben was having a hard time following. Not his fault. He was still flailing in the unthinkable place like a poor swimmer caught in a riptide.

“Killing her first,” Evan explained.

BEN AND I CONVENED the latest oh-we’re-screwed planning meeting in the hallway. Ben ordered everybody else to go across the parking lot and hide in the diner until he gave them the all-clear—or the hotel blew up, whichever came first. Sam refused. Ben got stern. Sam teared up and pouted. Ben reminded him that he was a soldier and a good soldier follows orders. Besides, if he stayed, who was going to protect Poundcake and Dumbo?

Before he left, Dumbo said, “I’m the medic.” He’d figured out what Ben was up to. “I should do it, Sarge.”

Ben shook his head. “Get out of here,” he said tersely.

Then we were alone. Ben’s eyes would not stay still. The trapped cockroach. The cornered rat. The falling man, off the cliff and no scrawny shrub to grasp.

“Well, I guess the big riddle’s been answered, huh?” he said. “What I don’t get is why they didn’t just waste us with a couple of Hellfire missiles. They know we’re here.”

“Not their style,” I said.

“Style?”

“Hasn’t it ever struck you how personal it’s been—from the beginning? There’s something about killing us that gets them off.”

Ben looked at me with sick wonder. “Yeah. Well. I can see why you’d want to date one of them.” Not the thing to say. He realized it immediately and quickly backed off. “Who’re we kidding, Cassie? There’s nothing really to decide, except who’s going to do it. Maybe we should flip a coin.”

“Maybe it should be Dumbo. Didn’t you tell me he trained in field surgery at the camp?”

He frowned. “Surgery? You’re kidding, right?”

“Well, how else are we…?” Then I understood. Couldn’t accept, but understood. I was wrong about Ben. He had dropped farther than me into that unthinkable place. He was five thousand fathoms down.

He read the look on my face and dropped his chin toward his chest. His face was flushed. Not embarrassed so much as angry, intensely angry, the anger that’s past all words.

“No, Ben. We can’t do that.”

He lifted his head. His eyes shone. His hands shook. “I can.”

“No, you can’t.” Ben Parish was drowning. He was so far under, I wasn’t sure I could reach him, wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull him back to the surface.

“I didn’t ask for this,” he said. “I didn’t ask for any of this!”

“Neither did she, Ben.”

He leaned close and I saw a different kind of fever burning in his eyes. “I’m not worried about her. An hour ago, she didn’t exist. Understand? She was nothing, literally nothing. I had you, and I had your little brother, and I had Poundcake and Dumbo. She was theirs. She belongs to them. I didn’t take her. I didn’t trick her into getting on a bus and tell her she was perfectly safe and then stuff a bomb down her throat. This isn’t my fault. It isn’t my responsibility. My job is to keep my ass and your ass alive for as long as possible, and if that means somebody else who is nothing to me dies, then I guess that’s what it means.”