Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

5:00 P.M.: Evening chow. Canned meat, canned peas, canned fruit. Nugget pushes his food around and then bursts into tears. The squad glares at me. Nugget is my responsibility. If Reznik comes down on us for conduct unbefitting, there’s hell to pay, and I’m picking up the tab. Extra push-ups, reduced rations—he could even deduct some points. Nothing matters but getting through basic with enough points to graduate, get out into the field, rid ourselves of Reznik. Across the table, Flintstone is glowering at me from beneath the unibrow. He’s pissed at Nugget, but more pissed at me for taking his job. Not that I asked for squad leader. He came at me after that day and growled, “I don’t care what you are now, I’m gonna make sergeant when we graduate.” And I’m like, “More power to you, Flint.” The idea of my leading a unit into combat is ludicrous. Meanwhile, nothing I say calms Nugget down. He keeps going on about his sister. About how she promised to come for him. I wonder why the commander would stick a little kid who can’t even lift a rifle into our squad. If Wonderland winnowed out the best fighters, what sort of profile did this little guy produce?

6:00 P.M.: Drill instructor Q&A in the barracks, my favorite part of the day, where I get to spend some quality time with my favorite person in the whole wide world. After informing us what worthless piles of desiccated rat feces we are, Reznik opens the floor for questions and concerns.

Most of our questions have to do with the competition. Rules, procedures in case of a tie, rumors about this or that squad cheating. Making the grade is all we can think about. Graduation means active duty, real fighting—a chance to show the ones who died that we had not survived in vain.

Other topics: the status of the rescue and winnowing operation (code name Li’l Bo Peep; I’m not kidding). What news from the outside? When will we hunker full-time in the underground bunker, because obviously the enemy can see what we’re doing down here and it’s only a matter of time before they vaporize us. For that we get the standard-issue reply: Commander Vosch knows what he’s doing. Our job isn’t to worry about strategy and logistics. Our job is to kill the enemy.

8:30 P.M.: Personal time. Free of Reznik at last. We wash our jumpsuits, shine our boots, scrub the barracks floor and the latrine, clean our rifles, pass around dirty magazines, and swap other contraband like candy and chewing gum. We play cards and bust each other’s nuts and complain about Reznik. We share the day’s rumors and tell bad jokes and push back against the silence inside our own heads, the place where the never-ending voiceless scream rises like the superheated air above a lava flow. Inevitably an argument erupts and stops just short of a fistfight. It’s tearing away at us. We know too much. We don’t know enough. Why is our regiment composed entirely of kids like us, no one over the age of eighteen? What happened to all the adults? Are they being taken somewhere else and, if they are, where and why? Are the Teds the final wave, or is there another one coming, a fifth wave that will make the first four pale in comparison? Thinking about a fifth wave shuts down the conversation.

9:30 P.M.: Lights-out. Time to lie awake and think of a wholly new and creative way to waste Sergeant Reznik. After a while I get tired of that and think about the girls I’ve dated, shuffling them around in various orders. Hottest. Smartest. Funniest. Blondes. Brunettes. Which base I got to. They start to blend together into one girl, the Girl Who Is No More, and in her eyes Ben Parish, high school hallway god, lives again. From its hiding place under my bunk, I pull out Sissy’s locket and press it against my heart. No more guilt. No more grief. I will trade my self-pity for hate. My guilt for cunning. My grief for the spirit of vengeance.

“Zombie?” It’s Nugget in the bunk next to me.

“No talking after lights-out,” I whisper back.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Close your eyes and think of something nice.”

“Can we pray? Is that against the rules?”

“Sure you can pray. Just not out loud.”

I can hear him breathing, the creak of the metal frame as he flips and flops around on the bunk.

“Cassie always said my prayer with me,” he confesses.

“Who’s Cassie?”

“I told you.”

“I forgot.”

“Cassie’s my sister. She’s coming for me.”

“Oh, sure.” I don’t tell him that if she hasn’t shown up by now, she’s probably dead. It isn’t up to me to break his heart; that’s time’s job.

“She’s promised. Promised.”

A tiny hiccup of a sob. Great. Nobody knows for sure, but we accept it as fact that the barracks are bugged, that every second Reznik is spying on us, waiting for us to break one of the rules so he can bring the hammer down. Violating the no-talking rule at lights-out will earn all of us a week of kitchen patrol.

“Hey, it’s all right, Nugget…”

Reaching my hand out to comfort him, finding the top of his freshly shaved head, running my fingertips over his scalp. Sissy liked for me to rub her head when she felt bad—maybe Nugget likes it, too.

“Hey, stow that over there!” Flintstone calls out softly.

“Yeah,” Tank says. “You wanna get us busted, Zombie?”

“Come here,” I whisper to Nugget, scooting over and patting the mattress. “I’ll say your prayer with you, and then you can go to sleep, okay?”

The mattress gives with his added weight. Oh God, what am I doing? If Reznik pops in for a surprise inspection, I’ll be peeling potatoes for a month. Nugget lies on his side facing me, and his fists rub against my arm as he brings them up to his chin.

“What prayer does she say with you?” I ask.

“‘Now I lay me,’” he whispers.

“Somebody put a pillow over that nugget’s face,” Dumbo says from his bunk.

I can see the ambient light shining in his big brown eyes. Sissy’s locket pressed against my chest and Nugget’s eyes, glittering like twin beacons in the dark. Prayers and promises. The one his sister made to him. The unspoken one I made to my sister. Prayers are promises, too, and these are the days of broken promises. All of a sudden I want to put my fist through the wall.

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’”

He joins in on the next line.

“‘When in the morning light I wake, teach me the path of love to take.’”

The hisses and shushes pick up on the next stanza. Somebody hurls a pillow at us, but we keep praying.

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Your angels watch me through the night, and keep me safe till morning’s light.’”

On angels watch me , the hissing and shushing stops. A profound stillness settles over the barracks.

Our voices slow on the last stanza. Like we’re reluctant to finish because on the other side of a prayer is the nothingness of another exhausted sleep and then another day waiting for the last day, the day we will die. Even Teacup knows she probably won’t live to see her eighth birthday. But we’ll get up and put ourselves through seventeen hours of hell anyway. Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken.

“‘And if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’”

THE NEXT MORNING I’m in Reznik’s office with a special request. I know what his answer’s going to be, but I’m asking anyway.

“Sir, the squad leader requests that the senior drill instructor grant Private Nugget a special exemption from this morning’s detail.”