Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

“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.”

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.