Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

His face goes dark. His eyes cut away. Leaning back on the desk, gripping its edge so hard, his knuckles turn white.

“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.

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.