Dumbo shakes his head. He’s sweating badly under the protective hood. “That’s the really freaky thing, Zombie. I can’t find anything.”
I look back down at Tank. He isn’t pale. His skin is slightly pink without a mark on it. How did Tank die? Did he go Dorothy in the psych ward, maybe overdose himself on some drugs?
“What if you cut him open?” I ask.
“I’m not cutting Tank open,” he says. He’s looking at me as if I just told him to jump off a cliff.
I nod. Stupid idea. Dumbo is no doctor; he’s a twelve-year-old kid. I glance around the hangar again. “Get him off this table,” I say. “I don’t want anyone else to see him.” Including me.
Tank’s body is stacked with the others by the hangar doors to be disposed. He’s loaded onto the transport for the final leg of his journey to the incinerators, where he will be consumed in fire, his ashes mixing with the gray smoke and carried aloft in a column of superheated air, eventually to settle over us in particles too fine to see or feel. He’ll stay with us—on us—until we shower that night, washing what’s left of Tank into the drains connected to the pipes connected to the septic tanks, where he will mix with our excrement before leaching into the ground.
48
TANK’S REPLACEMENT ARRIVES two days later. We know he’s coming, because the night before Reznik announces it during Q&A. He won’t tell us anything about him, except the name: Ringer. After he leaves, everybody in the squad is jacked up; Reznik must have named him Ringer for a reason.
Nugget comes over to my bunk and asks, “What’s a ringer?”
“Someone who you slip into a team to give it an edge,” I explain. “Somebody who’s really good.”
“Marksmanship,” Flintstone guesses. “That’s where we’re weakest. Poundcake’s our best, and I’m okay, but you and Dumbo and Teacup suck. And Nugget can’t even shoot.”
“Come over here and say I suck,” Teacup shouts. Always looking for a fight. If I were in charge, I’d give Teacup a rifle and a couple of clips and let her loose on every Ted in a hundred-mile radius.
After the prayer, Nugget twists and squirms against my back until I can’t take it anymore and hiss at him to go back to his bunk.
“Zombie, it’s her.”
“What’s her?”
“Ringer! Cassie is Ringer!”
It takes me a couple of seconds to remember who Cassie is.
“I don’t think Ringer is your sister.”
“You don’t know she isn’t, either.”
It almost comes out of me:
Ringer isn’t at roll call the next morning. And he isn’t on the morning run or at chow. We gear up for the range, check our weapons, head out across the yard. It’s a clear day, but very cold. Nobody says much. We’re all wondering where the new kid is.
Nugget sees Ringer first, standing off in the distance on the firing range, and right away we can see Flintstone was right: Ringer is a hell of a marksman. The target pops out of the tall brown grass and
“He’s good.”
Nugget gets it before the rest of us. Something about the shoulders or maybe the hips, but he goes, “It’s not a he,” before he takes off across the field toward the solitary figure cradling the rifle that smokes in the freezing air.
She turns before he reaches her, and Nugget pulls up, first confused, then disappointed. Apparently, Ringer is not his sister.
Weird that she looked taller from a distance. Around Dumbo’s height, but thinner than Dumbo—and older. I’m guessing fifteen or sixteen, with a pixie face and dark, deep-set eyes, flawless pale skin, and straight black hair. It’s the eyes that get you first. The kind of eyes you search to find something there and you come away with only two possibilities: Either what’s there is so deep you can’t see it, or there’s nothing there at all.
It’s the girl from the yard, the one who caught me outside the P&D hangar with Nugget.
“Ringer is a girl,” Teacup whispers, wrinkling her nose like she’s caught a whiff of something rotten. Not only is she not the baby of the squad anymore, now she’s not the only girl.
“What’re we going to do with her?” Dumbo is on the edge of panic.
I’m grinning. Can’t help it. “We’re going to be the first squad to graduate,” I say.
And I’m right.
49
RINGER’S FIRST NIGHT in Barracks 10 in one word: awkward.
No banter. No dirty jokes. No macho bluster. We count the minutes ticking down to lights-out like a bunch of nervous geeks on a first date. Other squads might have girls her age; we have Teacup. Ringer seems oblivious to our discomfort. She sits on the edge of Tank’s old bunk, disassembling and cleaning her rifle. Ringer likes her rifle. A lot. You can tell by the way she lovingly runs the oily rag up and down the length of its barrel, shining it until the cold metal gleams under the fluorescents. We are trying so hard not to stare at her, it’s painful. She reassembles her weapon, places it carefully in the locker beside the bed, and comes over to my bunk. I feel something tighten in my chest. I haven’t spoken to a girl my age since…when? Before the plague. And I don’t think about my life before the plague. That was Ben’s life, not Zombie’s.
“You’re the squad leader,” she says. Her voice is flat, no emotion, like her eyes. “Why?”
I answer the challenge in her question with one of my own. “Why not?”
Stripped down to her skivvies and the standard-issue sleeveless T-shirt, her bangs stopping just short of her dark eyebrows, looking down at me. Dumbo and Oompa stop their card game to watch. Teacup is smiling, sensing a fight brewing. Flintstone, who’s been folding laundry, drops a clean jumpsuit on top of the pile.
“You’re a terrible shot,” Ringer says.
“I have other skills,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “You should see me with a potato peeler.”
“You’ve got a good body.” Somebody laughs under his breath; I think it’s Flint. “Are you an athlete?”
“I used to be.”
She’s standing over me with her fists on her hips, bare feet planted firmly on the floor. It’s her eyes that get to me. The deep dark of them. Is nothing there—or nearly everything? “Football.”
“Good guess.”
“And baseball, probably.”
“When I was younger.”
She changes the subject abruptly. “The guy I replaced went Dorothy.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “Does it matter?”
She nods. It doesn’t. “I was the leader of my squad.”
