The possibilities multiply. Where’s his squad? Dead? Hunting down the person who shot him? What if the person who shot him was a fellow recruit who went Dorothy? Forget his squad. What happens when reinforcements arrive?
I pull out my knife. It’s been five minutes since I found him. I’d be dead by now if someone knew I was here. I’ll wait till dark, but I have to prepare for the probability that another breaker of the 5th Wave is rolling toward me.
I press against the back of his neck until I find the tiny bulge beneath the scar. Stay calm. It’s like chess. Move and countermove.
I slice slowly along the scar and dig out the pellet with the tip of the knife, where it sits suspended on a droplet of blood.
So we’ll always know where you are. So we can keep you safe.
Risk. The risk of lighting up in an eyepiece. The opposing risk of the enemy frying my brain with the touch of a button.
The pellet in its bed of blood. The awful stillness of the trees and the clinching cold and the fog that curls between branches like fingers interlacing. And Zombie’s voice in my head: You think too much.
I tuck the pellet between my cheek and gums. Stupid. I should have wiped it off first. I can taste the kid’s blood.
I AM NOT ALONE.
I can’t see him or hear him, but I feel him. Every inch of my body tingles with the sensation of being watched. An uncomfortably familiar feeling now, present since the very beginning. Just the mothership silently hovering in orbit for the first ten days caused cracks in the human edifice. A different kind of viral plague: uncertainty, fear, panic. Clogged highways, deserted airports, overrun emergency rooms, governments in lockdown, food and gas shortages, martial law in some places, lawlessness in others. The lion crouches in the tall grass. The gazelle sniffs the air. The awful stillness before the strike. For the first time in ten millennia, we knew what it felt like to be prey again.
The trees are crowded with crows. Shiny black heads, blank black eyes, their hunched-shouldered silhouettes reminding me of little old men on park benches. There are hundreds of them perched in the trees and hopping about the ground. I glance at the body beside me, its eyes blank and bottomless as the crows’. I know why the birds have come. They’re hungry.
I am, too, so I dig out my baggie of beef jerky and only-slightly-expired gummy bears. Eating is a risk, too, because I’ll have to remove the tracker from my mouth, but I need to stay alert, and to stay alert, I need fuel. The crows watch me, cocking their heads as if straining to hear the sound of my chewing. You fat asses. How hungry could you be? The attacks yielded millions of tons of meat. At the height of the plague, huge flocks blotted out the sky, their shadows racing across the smoldering landscape. The crows and other carrion birds closed the loop of the 3rd Wave. They fed on infected bodies, then spread the virus to new feeding grounds.
I could be wrong. Maybe we’re alone, me and this dead kid. The more seconds that slip by, the safer I feel. If someone is watching, I can think of only one reason why he’d hold the shot: He’s waiting to see if any more idiotic kids playing soldier show up.
I finish my breakfast and slip the pellet back into my mouth. The minutes crawl. One of the most disorienting things about the invasion—after watching everyone you know and love die in horrible ways—was how time slowed down as events sped up. Ten thousand years to build civilization, ten months to tear it down, and each day lasted ten times longer than the one before, and the nights lasted ten times as long as the days. The only thing more excruciating than the boredom of those hours was the terror of knowing that any minute they could end.
Midmorning: The mist lifts and the snow begins to fall in flakes smaller than crows’ eyes. There’s not a breath of wind. The woods are draped in a dreamlike, glossy white glow. As long as the snow stays this light, I’m good till dark.
If I don’t fall asleep. I haven’t slept in over twenty hours, and I feel warm and comfortable and slightly spacy.
In the gossamer stillness, my paranoia ratchets up. My head is perfectly centered in his crosshairs. He’s high in the trees; he’s lying motionless like a lion in the brush. I’m a puzzle to him. I should be panicking. So he holds his fire, allowing the situation to develop. There must be some reason I’m hanging out here with a corpse.
But I don’t panic. I don’t bolt like a frightened gazelle. I am more than the sum of my fear.
It isn’t fear that will defeat them. Not fear or faith or hope or even love, but rage.
Fuck you, Sullivan said to Vosch. It’s the only part of her story that impressed me. She didn’t cry. She didn’t pray. She didn’t beg.
She thought it was over, and when it’s over, when the clock has wound to the final second, the time for crying, praying, and begging is over.
“Fuck you,” I whisper. Saying the words makes me feel better. I say them again, louder. My voice carries far in the winter air.
A flutter of black wings deep in the trees to my right, the petulant squawking of the crows, and through my eyepiece, a tiny green dot sparkling among the brown and white.
Found you.
The shot will be tough. Tough, not impossible. I’d never handled a firearm in my life until the enemy found me hiding in the rest stop outside Cincinnati, brought me to their camp, and placed a rifle in my hand, at which point the drill sergeant wondered aloud if command had slipped a ringer into the unit. Six months later, I put a bullet into that man’s heart.
I have a gift.
The fiery green light is coming closer. Maybe he knows I’ve spotted him. It doesn’t matter. I caress the smooth metal of the trigger and watch the blob of light expand through the eyepiece. Maybe he thinks he’s out of range or is positioning himself for a better shot.
Doesn’t matter.
It might not be one of Sullivan’s silent assassins. It might be just some poor lost survivor hoping for rescue.
Doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters anymore.
The risk.
AT THE HOTEL, Sullivan told me a story about shooting a soldier behind some beer coolers and how bad she felt afterward.
“It wasn’t a gun,” she tried to explain. “It was a crucifix.”
“Why is that important?” I asked. “It could have been a Raggedy Ann doll or a bag of M&Ms. What choice did you have?”
“I didn’t. That’s my point.”
I shook my head. “Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody’s fault. You just want to feel bad so you’ll feel better.”
“Bad so I feel better?” With a deep blush of anger spreading beneath her freckles. “That makes absolutely no friggin’ sense.”
“‘I killed an innocent guy, but look how guilty I feel about it,’” I explained. “Guy’s still dead.”
She stared at me for a long time. “Well. I see why Vosch wanted you for the team.”
• • •
The green blob of his head advances toward me, weaving through the trees, and now I can see the glint of a rifle through the languid snow. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a crucifix.