The 5th Wave (17 page)

I open my mouth. I taste blood. “Go away.”

Her image begins to shimmer. I rub my eyes, and my knuckles come away wet with blood.

You ran away. Bubby, why did you run?

And then the smoke pulls her apart, splinters her, smashes her body into nothing.
I call out to her. Crueler than seeing her is the not seeing her. I’m clutching the
silver chain so tight that the links cut into my palm.

Reaching for her. Running from her.

Reaching. Running.

Outside the tent, the red smoke of funeral pyres. Inside, the red fog of plague.

You’re the lucky one,
I tell Sissy.
You left before things got really messy.

Gunfire erupts in the distance. Only this time it’s not the sporadic
pop-pop
of some desperate refugee firing at shadows, but big guns that go off with an eardrum-thumping
puh-DOOM
. The high-pitched screeching of tracer fire. The rapid reports of automatic weapons.

Wright-Patterson is under attack.

Part of me is relieved. It’s like a release, the final cracking open of the storm
after the long wait. The other part of me, the one that still thinks I might survive
the plague, is ready to wet his pants. Too weak to move off the cot and too scared
to do it even if I wasn’t. I close my eyes and whisper a prayer for the men and women
of Wright-Patterson to waste an invader or two for me and Sissy. But mostly for Sissy.

Explosions now. Big explosions. Explosions that make the ground tremble, that vibrate
against your skin, that press hard against your temples and push on your chest and
squeeze. It sounds as if the world is being ripped apart, which in a way it is.

The little tent is choking with smoke, and the opening glows like a triangular eye,
a burning ember of bright hellish red.
This is it,
I’m thinking.
I’m not going to die of the plague after all. I’m going to live long enough to be
wasted by an actual alien invader. A better way to go, quicker anyway.
Trying to put a positive spin on my impending demise.

A gunshot rings out. Very close, judging by the sound of it, maybe two or three tents
down. I hear a woman screaming incoherently, another shot, and then the woman isn’t
screaming anymore. Then silence. Then two more shots. The smoke swirls, the red eye
glows. I can hear him now, coming toward me, hear his boots squishing in the wet earth.
I fumble under the wad of clothing and jumble of empty water bottles beside the cot
for my gun, a revolver Chris had given me on the day he invited me to be his tentmate.
Where’s your gun?
he asked. He was shocked to learn I wasn’t packing.
You have to have a gun, pal,
he said.
Even the kids have guns.
Never mind that I can’t hit the broad side of a barn or that the odds are very good
I’ll shoot off my own
foot; in the post-human age, Chris is a firm believer in the Second Amendment.

I wait for him to appear in the opening, Sissy’s silver locket in one hand, Chris’s
revolver in the other. In one hand, the past. In the other, the future. That’s one
way to look at it.

Maybe if I play possum he—or it—will move on. I watch the opening through slits for
eyes.

And then he’s here, a thick, black pupil in the crimson eye, swaying unsteadily as
he leans inside the tent, three, maybe four feet away, and I can’t see his face, but
I can hear him gasping for breath. I’m trying to control my own breathing, but no
matter how shallowly I do it, the rattle of the infection in my chest sounds louder
than the explosions of the battle. I can’t make out exactly what he’s wearing, except
his pants seem to be tucked into his tall boots. A soldier? Must be. He’s holding
a rifle.

I’m saved. I raise the hand holding the locket and call out weakly. He stumbles forward.
Now I can see his face. He’s young, just a little older than I am, and his neck is
shiny with blood, and so are the hands that hold the rifle. He goes to one knee beside
the cot, then recoils when he sees my face, the sallow skin, the swollen lips, and
the sunken bloodshot eyes that are the telltale signs of the plague.

Unlike mine, the soldier’s eyes are clear—and wide with terror.

“We had it wrong, all wrong!” he whispers. “They’re already here—been here—right here—inside
us—the whole time—inside us.”

Two large shapes leap through the opening. One grabs the soldier by the collar and
drags him outside. I raise the old revolver—or try to, because it slips from my hand
before I can lift it two inches above the blanket. Then the second one is on me, knocking
the revolver away, yanking me upright. The aftershock of pain
blinds me for a second. He yells over his shoulder at his buddy, who has just ducked
back inside. “Scan him!” A large metal disk is pressed against my forehead.

“He’s clean.”

“And sick.” Both men are dressed in fatigues—the same fatigues worn by the soldier
they took away.

“What’s your name, buddy?” one of them asks. I shake my head. I’m not getting this.
My mouth opens, but no intelligible sound comes out.

“He’s gone zombie,” his partner says. “Leave him.”

The other one nods, rubbing his chin, looking down at me. Then he says, “The commander
ordered retrieval of all uninfected civilians.”

He tucks the blanket around me, and with one fluid motion heaves me out of the bunk
and over his shoulder. As a definitively infected civilian, I’m pretty shocked.

“Chill, zombie,” he tells me. “You’re going to a better place now.”

I believe him. And for a second I let myself believe I’m not going to die after all.

26

THEY TAKE ME to a quarantined floor at the base hospital reserved for plague victims,
nicknamed the Zombie Ward, where I get an armful of morphine and a powerful cocktail
of antiviral drugs. I’m treated by a woman who introduces herself as Dr. Pam. She
has soft eyes, a calm voice, and very cold hands. She wears her
hair in a tight bun. And she smells like hospital disinfectant mingled with a hint
of perfume. The two smells don’t go well together.

I have a one-in-ten chance of survival, she tells me. I start to laugh. I must be
a little delirious from the drugs. One in ten? And here I was thinking the plague
was a death sentence. I couldn’t be happier.

Over the next two days, my fever soars to a hundred and four. I break into a cold
sweat, and even my sweat is flecked with blood. I float in and out of a delirious
twilight sleep while they throw everything at the infection. There is no cure for
the Red Death. All they can do is keep me doped up and comfortable until the bug decides
whether it likes the way I taste.

The past shoves its way in. Sometimes Dad is sitting next to me, sometimes Mom, but
most of the time it’s Sissy. The room turns red. I see the world through a diaphanous
curtain of blood. The ward recedes behind the red curtain. It’s just me and the invader
inside me and the dead—not just my family, but all the dead, all however-many-billion
of them, reaching for me as I run. Reaching. Running. And it occurs to me that there’s
no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense:
past-dead and future-dead.

On the third day, the fever breaks. By the fifth, I’m holding down liquids and my
eyes and lungs have begun to clear. The red curtain pulls back, and I can see the
ward, the gowned and masked doctors and nurses and orderlies, the patients in various
stages of death, past and future, floating on the gentle sea of morphine or being
wheeled out of the room with their faces covered, the present-dead.

On the sixth day, Dr. Pam declares the worst over. She orders me off all meds, which
kind of bums me out; I’m going to miss my morphine.

“Not my call,” she tells me. “You’re being moved into the convalescent ward till you
can get back on your feet. We’re going to need you.”

“Need me?”

“For the war.”

The war. I remember the firefight, the explosions, the soldier bursting into the tent
and
they’re inside us!

“What’s going on?” I ask. “What happened here?”

She’s already turned away, handing my chart to an orderly and telling him in a quiet
voice, but not so quiet I can’t hear, “Bring him to the exam room at fifteen hundred
hours, after he’s clear of the meds. Let’s tag and bag him.”

27

I’M TAKEN TO a large hangar near the entrance to the base. Everywhere I look, there’re
signs of the recent battle. Burned-out vehicles, the rubble of demolished buildings,
stubborn little fires smoldering, pockmarked asphalt, and three-foot-wide craters
from mortar fire. But the security fence has been repaired, and beyond it I can see
a no-man’s-land of blackened earth where Tent City used to be.

Inside the hangar, soldiers are painting huge red circles on the shiny concrete floor.
There are no planes. I’m wheeled through a door in the back, into an examination room,
where I’m heaved onto the table and left alone for a few minutes, shivering in my
thin hospital gown under the bright fluorescent lights. What’s with the big red circles?
And how did they get the power back on?
And what did she mean by “Let’s tag and bag him”? I can’t keep my thoughts from flying
in every direction. What happened here? If the aliens attacked the base, where are
the dead aliens? Where’s their downed spacecraft? How did we manage to defend ourselves
against an intelligence thousands of years more advanced than ours—and defeat it?

The inner door opens, and Dr. Pam comes in. She shines a bright light in my eyes.
Listens to my heart, my lungs, thumps on a couple places. She shows me a silver-gray
pellet about the size of a grain of rice.

“What’s that?” I ask. I half expect her to say it’s an alien spaceship: We’ve discovered
they’re the size of an amoeba.

Instead, she says the pellet is a tracking device, hooked into the base’s mainframe.
Highly classified, been used by the military for years. The idea is to implant all
surviving personnel. Each pellet transmits its own unique signal, a signature that
can be picked up by detectors as far as a mile away. To keep track of us, she tells
me. To keep us safe.