Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

“Lie still!” I yell at him. “Don’t move!”

He sits up, pressing his shattered hand against his chest, facing the street, hunched over, and we can’t see what his other hand is doing, but I see a flash of silver and hear him growl, “Maggots,” and something inside me goes cold. I know that voice.

It has screamed at me, mocked me, belittled me, threatened me, cursed me. It followed me from the minute I woke to the minute I went to bed. It’s hissed, hollered, snarled, and spat at me, at all of us.

Reznik.

We both hear it. And it nails down our feet. It stops our breath. It freezes our thoughts.

And it buys him time.

Time that grinds down as he comes up, slowing as if the universal clock set in motion by the big bang is running out of steam.

Pushing himself to his feet. That takes about seven or eight minutes.

Turning to face us. That takes at least ten.

Holding something in his good hand. Punching at it with his bloody one. That lasts a good twenty minutes.

And then Ringer comes alive. The round slams into his chest. Reznik falls to his knees. His mouth comes open. He pitches forward and lands facedown in front of us.

The clock resets. No one moves. No one says anything.

Snow. Wind. Like we’re standing alone on the summit of an icy mountaintop. Ringer goes over to him, rolls him onto his back. Pulls the silver device from his hand. I’m looking down at that pasty, pockmarked, rat-eyed face, and somehow I’m surprised and not surprised.

“Spend months training us so he can kill us,” I say.

Ringer shakes her head. She’s looking at the display of the silver device. Its light shines on her face, playing up the contrast between her fair skin and jet-black hair. She looks beautiful in its light, not angelic-beautiful, more like avenging angel–beautiful.

“He wasn’t going to kill us, Zombie. Until we surprised him and gave him no choice. And then not with the rifle.” She holds up the device so I can see the display. “I think he was going to kill us with this.”

A grid occupies the top half of the display. There’s a cluster of green dots on the far left-hand corner. Another green dot closer to the middle.

“The squad,” I say.

“And this lone dot here must be Poundcake.”

“Which means if we hadn’t cut out our implants—”

“He’d have known exactly where we were,” Ringer says. “He’d be waiting for us, and we’d be screwed.”

She points out the two highlighted numbers on the bottom of the screen. One of them is the number I was assigned when Dr. Pam tagged and bagged me. I’m guessing the other one is Ringer’s. Beneath the numbers is a flashing green button.

“What happens if you press that button?” I ask.

“My guess is nothing.” And she presses it.

I flinch, but her guess is right.

“It’s a kill switch,” she says. “Has to be. Linked to our implants.”

He could have fried all of us anytime he wanted. Killing us wasn’t the goal, so what was? Ringer sees the question in my eyes. “The three ‘infesteds’—that’s why he fired the opening shot,” she says. “We’re the first squad out of the camp. It makes sense they’d monitor us closely to see how we perform in actual combat. Or what we think is actual combat. To make sure we react to the green bait like good little rats. They must have dropped him in before us—to pull the trigger in case we didn’t. And when we didn’t, he gave us a little incentive.”

“And he kept firing at us because…?”

“Kept us hyped and ready to blow away any damn green shiny thing that glowed.”

In the snow, it’s as if she’s looking at me through a gauzy white curtain. Flakes dust her eyebrows, sparkle in her hair.

“Awful big risk to take,” I point out.

“Not really. He had us on this little radar. Worst-case scenario, all he had to do was hit the button. He just didn’t consider the worst-worst case.”

“That we’d cut out the implants.”

Ringer nods. She wipes away the snow clinging to her face. “I don’t think the dumb bastard expected us to turn and fight.”

She hands the device to me. I close the cover, slip it into my pocket.

“It’s our move, Sergeant,” she says quietly, or maybe it’s the snow tamping down her voice. “What’s the call?”

I suck down a lungful of air, let it out slowly. “Get back to the squad. Pull everyone’s implant…”

“And?”

“Hope like hell there isn’t a battalion of Rezniks on its way right now.”

I turn to go. She grabs my arm. “Wait! We can’t go back without implants.”

It takes me a second to get it. Then I nod, rubbing the back of my hand across my numb lips. We’ll light up in their eyepieces without the implants. “Poundcake will drop us before we’re halfway across the street.”

“Hold them in our mouths?”

I shake my head. What if we accidently swallow them? “We have to stick them back where they came from, bandage the wounds up tight, and….”

“Hope like hell they don’t fall out?”

“And hope pulling them out didn’t deactivate them… What?” I ask. “Too much hope?”

The side of her mouth twitches. “Maybe that’s our secret weapon.”

“THIS IS SERIOUSLY, seriously messed up,” Flintstone says to me. “Reznik was sniping us?”

We’re sitting against the concrete half wall of the garage, Ringer and Poundcake on the flanks, watching the street below. Dumbo is on one side of me, Flint on the other, Teacup between them, pressing her head against my chest.

“Reznik is a Ted,” I tell him for the third time. “Camp Haven is theirs. They’ve been using us to—”

“Stow it, Zombie! That’s the craziest, most paranoid load of crap I’ve ever heard!” Flintstone’s wide face is beet red. His unibrow jumps and twitches. “You wasted our drill instructor! Who was trying to waste us! On a mission to waste Teds! You guys can do what you want, but this is it for me. This is it.”

He pushes himself to his feet and shakes his fist at me. “I’m going back to the rendezvous point to wait for the evac. This is…” He searches for the right word, then settles for, “Bullshit.”

“Flint,” I say, keeping my voice low and steady. “Stand down.”

“Unbelievable. You’ve gone Dorothy. Dumbo, Cake, are you buying this? You can’t be buying this.”

I pull the silver device from my pocket. Flip it open. Shove it toward his face. “See that green dot right there? That’s you.” I scroll down to his number and highlight with a jab of my thumb. The green button flashes. “Know what happens when you hit the green button?”

It’s one of those things you lie awake at night for the rest of your life and wish you could take back.

Flintstone jumps forward and snatches the device from my hand. I might have gotten to him in time, but Teacup’s in my lap and it slows me down. All that happens before he hits the button is my shout of “No!”

Flintstone’s head snaps back violently as if someone has smacked him hard in the forehead. His mouth flies open, his eyes roll toward the ceiling.

Then he drops, straight down and loose-limbed, like a puppet whose strings have lost their tension.

Teacup is screaming. Ringer pulls her off me, and I kneel beside Flint. Though I do it anyway, I don’t have to check his pulse to know he’s dead. All I have to do is look at the display of the device clutched in his hand, at the red dot where the green one used to be.

“Guess you were right, Ringer,” I say over my shoulder.