The 5th Wave

“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 ca

“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 ru

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.”