Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

“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.

“What’re we going to do with her?” Dumbo is on the edge of panic.

I’m grinning. Can’t help it. “We’re going to be the first squad to graduate,” I say.

And I’m right.

RINGER’S FIRST NIGHT in Barracks 10 in one word: awkward.

No banter. No dirty jokes. No macho bluster. We count the minutes ticking down to lights-out like a bunch of nervous geeks on a first date. Other squads might have girls her age; we have Teacup. Ringer seems oblivious to our discomfort. She sits on the edge of Tank’s old bunk, disassembling and cleaning her rifle. Ringer likes her rifle. A lot. You can tell by the way she lovingly runs the oily rag up and down the length of its barrel, shining it until the cold metal gleams under the fluorescents. We are trying so hard not to stare at her, it’s painful. She reassembles her weapon, places it carefully in the locker beside the bed, and comes over to my bunk. I feel something tighten in my chest. I haven’t spoken to a girl my age since…when? Before the plague. And I don’t think about my life before the plague. That was Ben’s life, not Zombie’s.

“You’re the squad leader,” she says. Her voice is flat, no emotion, like her eyes. “Why?”

I answer the challenge in her question with one of my own. “Why not?”

Stripped down to her skivvies and the standard-issue sleeveless T-shirt, her bangs stopping just short of her dark eyebrows, looking down at me. Dumbo and Oompa stop their card game to watch. Teacup is smiling, sensing a fight brewing. Flintstone, who’s been folding laundry, drops a clean jumpsuit on top of the pile.

“You’re a terrible shot,” Ringer says.

“I have other skills,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “You should see me with a potato peeler.”

“You’ve got a good body.” Somebody laughs under his breath; I think it’s Flint. “Are you an athlete?”

“I used to be.”

She’s standing over me with her fists on her hips, bare feet planted firmly on the floor. It’s her eyes that get to me. The deep dark of them. Is nothing there—or nearly everything? “Football.”

“Good guess.”

“And baseball, probably.”

“When I was younger.”

She changes the subject abruptly. “The guy I replaced went Dorothy.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “Does it matter?”

She nods. It doesn’t. “I was the leader of my squad.”

“No doubt.”

“Just because you’re leader doesn’t mean you’ll make sergeant after graduation.”

“I sure hope that’s true.”

“I know it’s true. I asked.”

She turns on her bare heel and goes back to her bunk. I look down at my feet and notice my nails need trimming. Ringer’s feet are very small, with nubby-type toes. When I look up again, she’s heading for the showers with a towel thrown over her shoulder. She pauses at the door. “If anybody in this squad touches me, I’ll kill them.”

There’s nothing menacing or funny about the way she says it. As if she’s stating a fact, like it’s cold outside.

“I’ll spread the word,” I say.

“And when I’m in the shower, off limits. Total privacy.”

“Roger that. Anything else?”

She pauses, staring at me from across the room. I feel myself tense up. What next? “I like to play chess. Do you play?”

I shake my head. Holler at the boys, “Any of you pervs play chess?”

“No,” Flint calls back. “But if she’s in the mood for some strip poker—”

It happens before I can get two inches off the mattress: Flint on the ground, holding his throat, kicking his legs like a stomped-on bug, Ringer standing over him.

“Also, no demeaning, sexist, pseudo-macho remarks.”

“You’re cool!” Teacup blurts out, and she means it. Maybe she needs to rethink this whole Ringer thing. Might not be such a bad arrangement having another girl around.

“That’s ten days half rations for what you just did,” I tell her. Maybe Flint had it coming, but I’m still the boss when Reznik’s not around, and Ringer needs to know it.

“Are you writing me up?” No fear in her voice. No anger. No anything.

“I’m giving you a warning.”

She nods, steps away from Flint, brushes past me on the way to fetch her toiletry kit. She smells—well, she smells like a girl, and for a second I’m a little light-headed.

“I’ll remember you going easy on me,” she says with a flip of her bangs, “when they make me Fifty-three’s new squad leader.”

A WEEK AFTER Ringer arrived, Squad 53 moved up from tenth to seventh place. By week three, we had edged past Squad 19 to take fifth. Then, with only two weeks to go, we hit a wall, falling sixteen points back from fourth place, a nearly insurmountable deficit.

Poundcake, who isn’t much for words but is a boss with numbers, breaks down the spread. In every category except one, there’s very little room for improvement: We’re second in obstacle course, third in air raid and the run, and first in “other duties as assigned,” a catchall that includes points for morning inspection and “conduct befitting a unit of the armed forces.” Our downfall is marksmanship, where we rank sixteenth, despite kickass shooters like Ringer and Poundcake. Unless we can pull up that score in the next two weeks, we’re doomed.

Of course, you don’t have to be a boss with numbers to know why our score is so low. The squad leader sucks at shooting. So the sucky-shooting squad leader goes to the senior drill instructor and requests extra practice time, but his scores don’t budge. My technique isn’t bad; I do all the right things in the right order; still, if I score one head shot out of a thirty-round clip, I’m lucky. Ringer agrees it’s just dumb luck. She says even Nugget could score one out of thirty. She tries hard not to show it, but my ineptitude with a gun pisses her off. Her former squad ranks second. If she hadn’t been reassigned, she’d be guaranteed to graduate with the first class and be first in line for a pair of sergeant stripes.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she says one morning as we hit the yard for the morning run. She’s wearing a headband to hold back her silky bangs. Not that I notice their silkiness. “I’ll help you, on one condition.”