61
WE ARE HUMANITY.
It’s a lie. Wonderland. Camp Haven. The war itself.
How easy it was. How incredibly easy, even after all that we’d been through. Or maybe it was easy because of all we’d been through.
They gathered us in. They emptied us out. They filled us up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance.
So they could send us out again.
To kill what’s left of the rest of us.
Check and mate.
I’m going to be sick. Ringer hangs on to my shoulder while I heave all over a poster that fell off the wall: FALL INTO FASHION!
There’s Chris, behind the two-way glass. And there’s the button marked EXECUTE. And there’s my finger, slamming down. How easy it was to make me kill another human being.
When I’m done, I rock back on my heels. I feel Ringer’s cool fingers rubbing my neck. Hear her voice telling me it’s going to be okay. I yank off the eyepiece, killing the green fire and giving Ringer back her face. She’s Ringer and I’m me, only I’m not sure what me means anymore. I’m not what I thought I was. The world is not what I thought it was. Maybe that’s the point:
It’s their world now, and we’re the aliens.
“We can’t go back,” I choke out. And there’s her deep-cutting eyes and her cool fingers massaging my neck.
“No, we can’t. But we can go forward.” She picks up my rifle and pushes it against my chest. “And we can start with that son of a bitch upstairs.”
Not before taking out my implant. It hurts more than I expect, less than I deserve.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Ringer tells me while she digs it out. “They fooled all of us.”
“And the ones they couldn’t, they called Dorothys and killed.”
“Not the only ones,” she says bitterly. And then it hits me like a punch in the heart: the P&D hangar. The twin stacks spewing black and gray smoke. The trucks loaded with bodies—hundreds of bodies every day. Thousands every week. And the buses pulling in all night, every night, filled with refugees, filled with the walking dead.
“Camp Haven isn’t a military base,” I whisper as blood trickles down my neck.
She shakes her head. “Or a refugee camp.”
I nod. Swallow back the bile rising in my throat. I can tell she’s waiting for me to say it out loud. Sometimes you have to speak the truth aloud or it doesn’t seem real. “It’s a death camp.”
There’s an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don’t buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts.
“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 cannon, disappearing in the swirl of snow before I’m two steps onto the roof, and I hear the sharp pop-pop-pop of her weapon before I almost trip over her kneeling in the wet, white carpet of snow. Ten feet in front of her, the sniper lies on his side, clutching his leg with one hand while he reaches for his rifle with the other. It must have flown from his grip when she popped him. Ringer fires again, this time at the reaching hand. It’s three inches across, and she scores a direct hit. In the murky dark. Through heavy snow. He pulls his hand back to his chest with a startled scream. I tap Ringer on the top of her head and signal her to pull up.
“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 running out of steam.
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.”