Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

“In general? The hell out of here. After this next tunnel coming up on the right. It leads to an air shaft that we can—”

“Wait!” I grab his arm. In my shock at seeing him again, I’d completely forgotten. “Sammy’s tracker.”

He stares at me for a second, and then laughs ruefully. “I completely forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Sammy asks.

I go to one knee, take his hands in mine. We’re several corridors away from the safe room, but Major Bob’s megaphoned voice still bounces and skips along the tunnels. “Sams, there’s something we have to do. Something very important. The people here, they’re not who they say they are.”

“Who are they?” he whispers.

“Bad people, Sam. Very bad people.”

“Teds,” Ben puts in. “Dr. Pam, the soldiers, the commander…even the commander. They’re all infesteds. They tricked us, Nugget.”

Sammy’s eyes are big as pie plates. “The commander, too?”

“The commander, too,” Ben answers. “So we’re getting out of here and we’re going to meet up with Ringer.” He catches me staring at him. “That’s not her real name.”

“Really?” I shake my head. Zombie, Nugget, Ringer. Must be an army thing. I turn back to Sam. “They lied about a lot of things, Sam. About almost everything.” I let go of his hand and run my fingers up the back of his neck, finding the small lump beneath the skin. “This is one of their lies, this thing they put in you. They use it to track you—but they can also use it to hurt you.”

Ben squats down beside me. “So we have to get it out, Nugget.”

Sam nods, fat bottom lip quivering, big eyes filling up with tears. “Oh-kay-ay…”

“But you have to be very quiet and very still,” I caution him. “You can’t yell or cry or twist around. Think you can do that?”

He nods again, and a tear pops out and drops on my forearm. I stand up, and Ben and I step away for a brief preoperative conference.

“We’ll have to use this,” I say, showing him the ten-inch combat knife, which I’m careful not to let Sammy see.

Ben’s eyes widen. “If you say so, but I was going to use this.” And he pulls a scalpel from his lab coat pocket.

“That’s probably better.”

“You want to do it?”

“I should do it. He’s my brother.” But the thought of cutting into Sammy’s neck gives me the squishies.

“I can do it,” Ben offers. “You hold him, and I’ll cut.”

“So it’s not a disguise? You earned your MD here at E.T. University?”

He smiles grimly. “Just try to keep him as still as possible so I don’t slice into something important.”

We return to Sam, who’s sitting now with his back against the wall, pressing Bear into his chest and watching us, eyes flicking fearfully back and forth. I whisper to Ben, “If you hurt him, Parish, I’m sticking this knife into your heart.”

He looks at me, startled. “I would never hurt him.”

I ease Sam into my lap. Roll him over so he’s lying facedown across my legs, his chin hanging over the edge of my thigh. Ben kneels down. I look at the hand holding the scalpel. It’s shaking.

“I’m okay,” Ben whispers. “Really. I’m okay. Don’t let him move.”

“Cassie…!” Sammy whimpers.

“Shhhh. Shhhh. Stay very still. He’ll be quick,” I say. “Be quick,” I tell Ben.

I hold Sam’s head with both hands. As Ben’s hand approaches with the scalpel, it becomes rock steady.

“Hey, Nugget,” he says. “Okay if I take the locket back first?” Sammy nods, and Ben undoes the clasp. The metal clinks in his hand as he pulls it free.

“It’s yours?” I ask Ben, startled.

“My sister’s.” Ben drops the chain into his pocket. The way he says it, I know she’s dead.

I turn my head. Thirty minutes ago I’d blown a guy’s face off, and now I can’t watch someone make the tiniest of cuts. Sammy jerks when the blade breaks his skin. He bites down on my leg to keep from screaming. Bites hard. It takes everything in me to remain still. If I move, Ben’s hand might slip.

“Hurry,” I squeak, mouse-voiced.

“Got it!” The tracker adheres to the end of Ben’s bloody middle finger.

“Get rid of it.”

Ben shakes it off his hand and slaps a bandage over the wound. He came prepared. I came with a ten-inch combat knife.

“Okay, it’s over, Sam,” I moan. “You can stop biting me now.”

“It hurts, Cassie!”

“I know, I know.” I pull him up and give him a big hug. “And you were very brave.”

He nods seriously. “I know.”

Ben offers me his hand, helps me to my feet. His hand is tacky with my brother’s blood. He drops the scalpel into his pocket and then the gun is back in his hand.

“We better get moving,” he says calmly, like we might miss a bus.

Back into the main corridor, Sammy leaning hard against my side. We make the last turn, and Ben stops so suddenly, I run right into his back. The tunnel echoes with the sound of a dozen semiautomatics being racked, and I hear a familiar voice say, “You’re late, Ben. I expected you much sooner.”

A very deep voice, hard as steel.

I LOSE SAMMY for a second time. A Silencer-soldier takes him away, back to the safe room to be evacuated with the other kids, I guess. Another Silencer brings Ben and me to the execution room. The room with the mirror and the button. The room where innocent people are wired up and electrocuted. The room of blood and lies. Seems fitting.

“Do you know why we will win this war?” Vosch asks us after we’re locked inside. “Why we cannot lose? Because we know how you think. We’ve been watching you for six thousand years. When the pyramids rose in the Egyptian desert, we were watching you. When Caesar burned the library at Alexandria, we were watching you. When you crucified that first-century Jewish peasant, we were watching. When Columbus set foot in the New World…when you fought a war to free millions of your fellow humans from bondage…when you learned how to split the atom…when you first ventured beyond your atmosphere…What were we doing?”

Ben isn’t looking at him. Neither of us is. We’re both sitting in front of the mirror, looking straight ahead at our distorted reflections in the broken glass. The room on the other side is dark.

“You were watching us,” I say. Vosch is sitting in front of the monitor, about a foot away from me. On my other side, Ben, and behind us, a very well-built Silencer.

“We were learning how you think. That’s the secret to victory, as Sergeant Parish here already knows: understanding how your enemy thinks. The arrival of the mothership was not the beginning, but the beginning of the end. And now here you are, in a front-row seat for the finale, a special sneak peek into the future. Would you like to see the future? Your future? Would you like to stare all the way down to the bottom of the human cup?”

Vosch presses a button on the keyboard. The lights in the room on the other side of the mirror flicker on.

There is a chair, a Silencer standing beside it, and strapped to the chair is my brother, Sammy, thick wires attached to his head.

“This is the future,” Vosch whispers. “The human animal bound, its death at our fingertips. And when you have finished the work that we’ve given you, we will press the execute button and your deplorable stewardship of this planet will come to an end.”

“You don’t have to do this!” I shout. The Silencer behind me puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes hard. But not hard enough to keep me from jumping out of the chair. “All you have to do is implant us and download us into Wonderland. Won’t that tell you everything you want to know? You don’t have to kill him…”