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.”
62
“THIS IS SERIOUSLY, seriously messed up,” Flintstone says to me. “Reznik was sniping us?”
We’re sitting against the concrete half wall of the garage, Ringer and Poundcake on the flanks, watching the street below. Dumbo is on one side of me, Flint on the other, Teacup between them, pressing her head against my chest.
“Reznik is a Ted,” I tell him for the third time. “Camp Haven is theirs. They’ve been using us to—”
“Stow it, Zombie! That’s the craziest, most paranoid load of crap I’ve ever heard!” Flintstone’s wide face is beet red. His unibrow jumps and twitches. “You wasted our drill instructor! Who was trying to waste us! On a mission to waste Teds! You guys can do what you want, but this is it for me. This is it.”
He pushes himself to his feet and shakes his fist at me. “I’m going back to the rendezvous point to wait for the evac. This is…” He searches for the right word, then settles for, “Bullshit.”
“Flint,” I say, keeping my voice low and steady. “Stand down.”
“Unbelievable. You’ve gone Dorothy. Dumbo, Cake, are you buying this? You can’t be buying this.”
I pull the silver device from my pocket. Flip it open. Shove it toward his face. “See that green dot right there? That’s you.” I scroll down to his number and highlight with a jab of my thumb. The green button flashes. “Know what happens when you hit the green button?”
It’s one of those things you lie awake at night for the rest of your life and wish you could take back.
Flintstone jumps forward and snatches the device from my hand. I might have gotten to him in time, but Teacup’s in my lap and it slows me down. All that happens before he hits the button is my shout of “No!”
Flintstone’s head snaps back violently as if someone has smacked him hard in the forehead. His mouth flies open, his eyes roll toward the ceiling.
Then he drops, straight down and loose-limbed, like a puppet whose strings have lost their tension.
Teacup is screaming. Ringer pulls her off me, and I kneel beside Flint. Though I do it anyway, I don’t have to check his pulse to know he’s dead. All I have to do is look at the display of the device clutched in his hand, at the red dot where the green one used to be.
“Guess you were right, Ringer,” I say over my shoulder.
I ease the control pad out of Flintstone’s lifeless hand. My own hand is shaking. Panic. Confusion. But mostly anger: I’m furious at Flint. I am seriously tempted to smash my fist into his big, fat face.
Behind me, Dumbo says, “What are we going to do now, Sarge?” He’s panicking, too.
“Right now you’re going to cut out Poundcake’s and Teacup’s implants.”
His voice goes up an octave. “Me?”
Mine goes down one. “You’re the medic, right? Ringer will do yours.”
“Okay, but then what are we going to do? We can’t go back. We can’t—where’re we supposed to go now?”
Ringer is looking at me. I’m getting better at reading her expressions. That slight downturn of her mouth means she’s bracing herself, like she already knows what I’m about to say. Who knows? She probably does.
“You’re not going back, Dumbo.”
“You mean
I stand up. It seems to take me forever to get upright. I step over to her. The wind whips her hair to one side, a black banner flying.
“We left one behind,” I say.
She shakes her head sharply. Her bangs swing back and forth in a pleasant way. “Nugget? Zombie, you can’t go back for him. It’s suicide.”
“I can’t leave him. I made a promise.” I start to explain it, but I don’t even know how to begin. How do I put it into words? It isn’t possible. It’s like locating the starting point of a circle.
Or finding the first link in a silver chain.
“I ran one time,” I finally say. “I’m not running again.”
63
THERE IS THE SNOW, tiny pinpricks of white, spinning down.
There is the river reeking of human waste and human remains, black and swift and silent beneath the clouds that hide the glowing green eye of the mothership.
And there’s the seventeen-year-old high school football jock dressed up like a soldier with a high-powered
