Down a long corridor awash in fluorescent lighting. Passing through another security checkpoint. More stone-faced, heavily armed soldiers. Reznik stops at an unmarked door and swipes his key card through the lock. We step inside a small room. A man in a lieutenant’s uniform greets us at the door, and we follow him down another hallway and into a large private office. A man sits behind the desk, leafing through a stack of computer printouts.
Vosch.
He dismisses Reznik and the lieutenant, and we’re alone.
“At ease, Private.”
I spread my feet, put my hands behind my back, right hand loosely gripping my left wrist. Standing in front of the big desk, eyes forward, chest out. He is the supreme commander. I’m a private, a lowly recruit, not even a real soldier yet. My heart is threatening to pop the buttons on my brand-new shirt.
“So, Ben, how are you?”
He’s smiling warmly at me. I don’t even know how to begin to answer his question. Plus I’m thrown by his calling me Ben. It sounds strange to my own ears after being Zombie for so many months.
He’s expecting an answer, and for some stupid reason I blurt out the first thing that pops into my head. “Sir! The private is ready to die, sir!”
He nods, still smiling, and then he gets up, comes around the desk, and says, “Let’s speak freely, soldier to soldier. After all, that’s what you are now, Sergeant Parish.”
I see them then: the sergeant’s stripes in his hand. So Ringer was right. I snap back to attention while he pins them on my collar. He claps me on the shoulder, his blue eyes boring into mine.
Hard to look him in the eye. The way he looks at you makes you feel naked, totally exposed.
“You lost a man,” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
“Terrible thing.”
“Yes, sir.”
He leans back against the desk, crosses his arms. “His profile was excellent. Not as good as yours, but…The lesson here, Ben, is that we all have a breaking point. We’re all human, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
He’s smiling. Why is he smiling? It’s cool in the underground bunker, but I’m beginning to sweat.
“You may ask,” he says with an inviting wave of his hand.
“Sir?”
“The question you must be thinking. The one you’ve had since Tank showed up in processing and disposal.”
“How did he die?”
“Overdose, as you no doubt suspected. One day after being taken off suicide watch.” He motions to the chair beside me. “Have a seat, Ben. There’s something I want to discuss with you.”
I sink into the chair, sitting on its edge, back straight, chin up. If it’s possible to be at attention while seated, I’m doing it.
“We all have our breaking points,” he says, blue eyes bearing down on me. “I’ll tell you about mine. Two weeks after the 4th Wave, gathering survivors at a refugee camp about six kilometers from here. Well, not every survivor. Just the children. Although we hadn’t detected the infestations yet, we were fairly confident whatever was going on didn’t involve children. Since we couldn’t know who was the enemy and who wasn’t, it was command’s decision to terminate any and all personnel over the age of fifteen.”
His face goes dark. His eyes cut away. Leaning back on the desk, gripping its edge so hard, his knuckles turn white.
“I mean, my decision.” Deep breath. “We killed them, Ben. After we loaded up the children, we killed every single one of them. And after we were done, we incinerated their camp. Wiped it off the face of the Earth.”
He looks back at me. Incredibly, I see tears in his eyes. “That was my breaking point. Afterward I realized, to my horror, that I was falling into their trap. I was an instrument for the enemy. For every infested person I murdered, three innocent people died. I will have to live with that—because I have to live. Do you understand what I mean?”
I nod. He smiles sadly. “Of course you do. We both have the blood of innocents on our hands, don’t we?”
He pushes himself upright, all business now. The tears are gone.
“Sergeant Parish, today we will graduate the top four squads of your battalion. As commander of the winning squad, you have first pick of assignments. Two squads will be deployed as perimeter patrols to protect this base. The other two will be deployed into enemy territory.”
This takes me a couple minutes to absorb. He lets me have them. He picks up one of the computer printouts and holds it in front of me. There’s a lot of numbers and squiggly lines and strange symbols that mean absolutely nothing to me.
“I don’t expect you to be able to read it,” he says. “But would you like to guess what this is?”
“That’s all it would be, sir,” I answer. “A guess.”
“It’s the Wonderland analytics of an infested human being.”
I nod. Why the hell am I nodding? It’s not like I understand: Ah, yes, Commander, an analytic! Please, go on.
“We’ve been running them through Wonderland, of course, but we haven’t been able to untangle the infestation’s map from the victim’s—or clone or whatever it is. Until now.” He holds up the readout. “This, Sergeant Parish, is what an alien consciousness looks like.”
Again, I’m nodding. But this time because I’m starting to get it. “You know what they’re thinking.”
“Exactly!” Beaming at me, the star pupil. “The key to winning this war isn’t tactics or strategy or even imbalances in technology. The real key to winning this war, or any war, is understanding how your enemy thinks. And now we do.”
I wait for him to break it to me gently. How does the enemy think?
“Much of what we assumed is correct. They have been watching us for some time. Infestations were embedded in key individuals around the world, sleeper agents, if you will, waiting for the signal to launch a coordinated attack after our population had been whittled down to a manageable number. We know how that attack turned out here at Camp Haven, and we strongly suspect that other military installations were not as fortunate.”
He slaps the paper on his thigh. I must have flinched, because he gives me a reassuring smile.
“A third of the surviving population. Planted here to eradicate those who survived the first three waves. You. Me. Your team members. All of us. If you have any fear, as poor Tank did, that a fifth wave is coming, you can put it aside. There will be no fifth wave. They have no intention of leaving their mothership until the human race is exterminated.”
“Is that why they haven’t…?”
“Attacked us again? We think so. It seems their foremost desire is to preserve the planet for colonization. Now we are in a war of attrition. Our resources are limited; they can’t last forever. We know it. They know it. Cut off from supplies, with no means to marshal any significant fighting force, eventually this camp—and any others out there like it—will wither and die, like a vine cut off from its roots.”
Weird. He’s still smiling. Like something about this doomsday scenario turns him on.
“So what do we do?” I ask.
“The only thing we can do, Sergeant. We take the battle to them.”
The way he says it: no doubt, no fear, no hopelessness. We take the battle to them. That’s why he’s the commander. Standing over me, smiling, confident, his chiseled features reminding me of some ancient statue, noble, wise, strong. He is the rock against which the alien waves crash, and he is unbroken. We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes. He is humanity, the beating, unbeaten, invincible heart of it. In that moment, if Commander Vosch had told me to put a bullet through my head for the cause, I would have. I would have without a second thought.
“Which brings us back to your assignment,” he says quietly. “Our recon flights have identified significant pockets of infested combatants clustered in and around Dayton. A squad will be dropped in—and for the next four hours, it will be on its own. The odds of making it out alive are roughly one in four.”
I clear my throat. “And two squads stay here.”
He nods. Blue eyes boring deep—to the marrow deep. “Your call.”
That same small, secretive smile. He knows what I’m going to say. He knew before I walked through the door. Maybe my Wonderland profile told him, but I don’t think so. He knows me.
I rise from the chair to full attention.
And tell him what he already knows.
52
AT 0900 the entire battalion musters in the yard, creating a sea of blue jumpsuits headed by the top four squads in their crisp new fatigues. Over a thousand recruits standing in perfect formation, facing east, the direction of new beginnings, toward the speakers’ platform erected the day before. Flags snap in the icy breeze, but we don’t feel the cold. We are lit from within by a fire hotter than the one that turned Tank into ash. The brass of Central Command moves down the first line—the winning line—shaking our hands and congratulating us for a job well done. Then a personal word of gratitude from the drill instructors. I’ve been dreaming of what to say to Reznik when he shakes my hand. Thanks for making my life a living hell…Oh, die. Just die, you son of a bitch… Or my favorite, short and sweet and to the point: Eff you. But when he salutes and offers me his hand, I almost lose it. I want to hit him in the face and hug him at the same time.