The Last Star (12 page)

24

AT LEAST,
he’s dressed like one.

Black pants. Black shirt. White collar, yellowed by sweat, spotted with rust-colored stains. He’s standing just outside my reach, a small guy with a receding hairline and a pudgy, babyish face. He sees the wet knife in my hand and immediately raises his.

“I am not armed.” His voice is high-pitched, as childlike as his features.

I drop the knife and draw my sidearm. “Hands on top of your head. Kneel.”

He obeys instantly. I glance toward the road.
What happened to Constance?

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the little guy says. “It’s just that I haven’t seen another person in months. You’re with the military, yes?”

“Shut up,” I tell him. “Don’t talk.”

“Of course! I—sorry.” His mouth clamps shut. His cheeks are flushed with fear or maybe embarrassment. I step behind him. He remains very still while I run my free hand over his torso.

“Where did you come from?” I ask.

“Pennsylvania—”

“No. Where did you come from just now?”

“I’ve been living in the caves.”

“With who?”

“No one! I told you, I haven’t seen anyone in months. Since November . . .”

A hard metal object in his right-hand pocket. I fish it out. A crucifix. It’s seen better days. The cheap gold finish is chipped; the face of Christ has been worn down to a bald nub. I think of Sullivan’s Crucifix Soldier cowering behind the beer coolers.

“Please,” he whimpers. “Don’t take that.”

I toss the crucifix into the tall, dead grass between the silos and the barn.
Where the hell is Constance?
How did this dweeby little guy slip past her? More important, how did
I
let this dweeby little guy sneak up on me?

“Where’s your coat?” I ask him.

“Coat?”

I step in front of him and level the gun at his forehead. “It’s freezing. Aren’t you cold?”

“Oh. Oh!” He hiccups a nervous laugh. His teeth match the rest of him: small and scruffy with grime. “I completely forgot to
grab it. I was so excited when I heard that plane—I thought rescue had finally arrived!” The smile dies. “You
are
here to rescue me, aren’t you?”

My finger twitches on the trigger.
Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody’s fault,
I told Sullivan after hearing the story of the soldier.

“How old are you, may I ask?” he asks. “You seem much too young to be soldier.”

“I’m not a soldier,” I tell him. And I’m not.

I am the next step in human evolution.

I answer truthfully, “I am a Silencer.”

25

HE SPRINGS TOWARD ME,
an explosion of pale pink and black. A flash of tiny teeth, and the gun flies from my hand. The blow breaks my wrist. The next punch, flying faster than even my enhanced eyes can follow, hurls me six feet straight back into the silo. The metal screeches, folds around my body like a taco. Now Constance’s words come home:
You’ve reached a conclusion without knowing all the facts.

She wasn’t going into those caves to neutralize survivors. She was going in to silence a Silencer.

Thanks, Connie. You might have told me.

The fact that I don’t die on impact saves my life. The phony priest pauses, cocking his head at me in a weird, birdlike way. I
should be dead or at least unconscious. How is it that I’m still standing?

“My! This is . . . curious.”

Neither of us moves for several seconds. I’ve thrown off his game.
Stall, Ringer. Wait for Constance to come back.

If Constance comes back.

Constance may be dead.

“I’m not one of you,” I say, pulling free of the metal nook. “Vosch gave me the 12th System.”

His bemused expression doesn’t change, but his shoulders tense. It is the only explanation that makes sense, yet it makes no sense.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” he murmurs. “Why would the commander enhance a human?”

Time to lie. The enemy taught me that great things can be accomplished by the smallest of lies.

“He’s turned on you. He’s given the 12th System to all of us.”

He shakes his head and smiles. He knows I’m full of shit.

“And we’re coming for all of you now,” I go on. “
Before
the pods can bring you to the ship.”

My rifle lies on the ground a yard from his foot. I don’t know where my sidearm ended up. The knife is very close, lying about halfway between us. He’ll expect me to go for the knife.

Okay, so the lie doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll try the truth, but my hopes aren’t high. “I’m probably wasting my breath here, but you should know that you’re as human as I am. You’re being used, just like they’re using everyone else. Everything you think you know about who you are, everything you remember, is a lie. Everything.”

He nods, smiling at me the way you smile at a crazy person.
That’s your cue, Constance. Jump out of the shadows and plunge your knife into his back.
But Constance misses her entrance.

“I’m really at a loss,” he says. “What should I do with you?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “What I do know is I’m going to take that knife and bleed you out like a pig.”

I don’t look at the knife. I know if I look, I won’t stand a chance—he’ll see through the ruse instantly. By not looking, I force him to look. He glances down only for a second, but a second is longer than I need.

The tip of my steel-toed boot catches him under the chin and his little body flies ten feet before thumping down hard. Before he can get his feet beneath him, the knife leaves my hand and rockets toward his throat; he bats it into the air, then catches the knife on its descent, a move so wickedly graceful, I can’t help but admire it.

I dive for the rifle. He beats me to it. His fist slams into my temple and I fall. My mouth smacks the ground; my upper lip splits open.
Here it comes.
Now he’ll slit my throat. He’ll pick up the rifle and blow my brains out. I’m a piker, an amateur, a newbie still adjusting to the augmentation he’s lived with since he was thirteen.

He twists a fistful of my hair into his hand and flings me onto my back. Blood filling my mouth, I gag. He towers over me, all five feet three of him, knife in one hand, rifle in the other.

“Who
are
you?”

I spit the blood from my mouth. “My name is Ringer.”

“Where are you from?”

“Well, I was born in San Francisco—”

He kicks me in the ribs. Not full force. Full force would have
punctured a lung or burst my spleen. He doesn’t want to kill me—not yet.

“Why are you here?”

I look into his eyes and answer, “To kill you.”

He flings the rifle away. It sails a hundred yards, arching over the road into the field beyond. He seizes me by the throat and hauls me into the air. My toes leave the ground. His head turns: the curious crow, the alert owl.

Against the next attack there is no defense. His consciousness lances into me, a savage thrust that rips into my mind with such force that my autonomic system shuts down. I am plunged into darkness absolute. No sound, no sight, no sensation. His mind chews through mine, and what I feel in him is a hatred wider than the universe, pure rage and utter disgust and, weird as it sounds,
envy.

“Ahhhh,” he sighs. “Who do you seek? Not the ones who were lost. A little girl, a sad, soulful boy. They died that you might live. Yes? Yes. Oh, how lonely you are. How empty!”

I’m holding Teacup against me in the old hotel, fighting to keep her warm. Razor is holding me in the bowels of the base, fighting to keep me alive.
It’s a circle, Zombie, bound by fear.

“But there is another,” the priest murmurs. “Hmmm. Do you know? Have you discovered it yet?”

His soft chuckle is cut short. I know why. There’s no guessing: We are one. He’s dredged up Constance and that stupid, vapid soccer-mom smile.

He flings me away like he flung the rifle—disdainfully, a useless piece of human-made garbage. The hub prepares my body for impact. There’s plenty of time for that while I sail through the air.

I smash into the rotten porch railing of the white farmhouse. The wood explodes with a loud wallop as the old boards crack beneath me. I lie still. The world spins.

Worse than the physical beating, though, was the pummeling of my mind. I can’t think. Fragmented, disconnected images explode into being, fade, bloom again. Zombie’s smile. Razor’s eyes. Teacup’s scowl. Then Vosch’s face, cut from stone, massive as a mountain, and the eyes that pierce to the very bottom, that see everything, that
know
me.

I roll onto my side. My stomach heaves. I throw up on the porch steps until there’s nothing left in my stomach, and then I throw up some more.

You have to get up, Ringer. If you don’t get up, Zombie’s lost.

I try to stand. I fall.

I try to sit up. I keel over.

The Silencer priest felt them inside me—I thought they were gone, I thought I had lost them, but you never lose those who love you, because love is a constant; love endures.

Someone’s arms are lifting me up: Razor’s.

Someone’s hands steady me: Teacup’s.

Someone’s smile is giving me hope: Zombie’s.

I should have told him when I had the chance how much I love the way he smiles.

I rise.

Razor lifting, Teacup steadying, Zombie smiling.

You know what you do when you can’t stand up and march, soldier?
Vosch asks.
You crawl.

26

ZOMBIE

NORTH OF URBANA,
the old highway cuts through farm country, the fallow fields on either side glowing silver-gray in the brilliant starlight, the burned-out shells of the farmhouses black freckles against the sheen. The caverns lie nine miles as the crow flies to the northeast, but I’m no crow; I’m not leaving this highway and risking getting lost. If I keep up the pace without stopping to rest, I should reach the target before dawn.

That’ll be the easy part.

Superhuman assassins who can look like anyone—for example, a sweet, hymn-singing senior citizen. Little kids who wander near encampments and hideouts with bombs embedded in their throats. Doesn’t exactly encourage hospitality to strangers.

There’ll be sentries, hidden bunkers, snipers’ nests, maybe a vicious German shepherd or a Doberman or two, trip wires, booby traps. The enemy has blown apart the fundamental glue that binds us together, turning every outsider into the intolerable
other.
That’s funny, the sick type of funny: After the aliens arrived,
we
became aliens.

Which means the odds of them shooting me on sight are pretty high. Like in the 99.9 percent neighborhood.

Oh, well. YOLO, right?

I’ve looked at the little map printed on the back of the brochure so many times, it’s burned into my memory like an afterimage. US 68 north to SR 507. SR 507 east to SR 245. Then a half
mile north and you’re there. Easy-peasy, no problemo. Three to four hours quick-stepping on an empty stomach with no rest or sleep and sunrise coming.

I’ll need time to reconnoiter. I have no time. I’ll need a game plan of how to approach a hostile sentry. I have no plan. I’ll need the right words to convince them I’m one of the good guys. I have no words. All I’ve got is my winning personality and a killer smile.

At the corner of 507 and 245 there’s a waist-high sign with a big rust-colored arrow pointing north: O
HIO
C
AVERNS
.
The ground rises; the road arches toward the stars. I adjust my eyepiece and scan the woods on the left for green glow. I drop to my belly shy of the hillcrest and crawl the rest of the way to the top. A paved access road winds through more trees toward a cluster of buildings, tiny black smudges against gray. Fifty yards away are two stone markers with white signs mounted on top of each:
OC.

I inch forward the way we were taught in camp, low-crawl-style: face in the dirt, rifle in one hand, the other extended forward. At this pace, I won’t reach the caverns until well after my twenty-first birthday, but that’s preferable to not being alive to celebrate it. Every few feet I pause to lift my head and scan the terrain. Trees. Grass. A snarl of downed power lines. Trash. A single, tiny tennis shoe lying on its side.

After another hundred yards—and a hundred years later—my outstretched fingers brush metal. I don’t lift my head; I drag the object in front of my face.

A crucifix.

A chill goes down my spine.
I didn’t have time to think,
Sullivan told me.
I saw the light glinting off the metal. I thought it was a gun. So I killed him. Over a crucifix, I killed him.

I wish she’d never told me that story. If I didn’t know better, I’d
consider finding a random crucifix in the dirt to be a
good
sign. I might even hang on to it for luck. Instead, it feels like a big black cat crossing my path. I leave Jesus lying in the dirt.

Scooch, scooch,
pause. Look.
Scooch, scooch,
pause. Look. I can see buildings now, a gift shop and welcome center, the remnants of a stone well. Beyond the buildings, weaving between the tree-shaped gashes in the dark, is a thumbnail-sized, fiery green blob of light headed straight toward me.

I freeze. I’m totally exposed. No place to take cover. The blob grows larger, edging along the front of the welcome center now. I rise to my elbows and sight him through the scope of the M16. He’s such a little guy that at first I think he’s a kid.

Black pants, black shirt, and a collar that in better days was white.

Looks like I’ve found the owner of the crucifix.

I should probably shoot him before he sees me.

Oh, how stupid. What a dumb idea. Shoot him and you’ll have the whole encampment on your ass. Fire only if you’re fired upon. You’re here to
save
people, remember?

The man in black with the green blobby head disappears around the corner of the building. I count the seconds. When I reach 120 and he hasn’t reappeared, I high-crawl it to the nearest tree, where I brush the dead grass and dirt from my face and try to collect my breath and my thoughts, in that order. I do better on the breath part.

I’m getting now why Vosch passed over Ringer to promote me to squad leader. She was definitely the wiser choice: smarter than me, a better shot, sharper instincts. But I got the nod instead because I had one thing that she didn’t: blind loyalty to
the cause, and unflinching faith in its leader. Okay, that’s actually
two
things. Whatever. My point is that faith trumps smarts every time. Guts beat brains. At least that’s true if you want an army of misguided, suicidal buffoons willing to sacrifice their lives so the enemy doesn’t have to.

Can’t hide here forever. And I didn’t leave Dumbo behind so he could die while I hid with my thumb up my ass waiting for an idea to spring forth in this Cro-Magnon brain I’ve been blessed with.

What I really need, I decide, is a hostage.

Of course, that idea comes five minutes after the perfect candidate disappears.

I peek around the tree toward the welcome center. Nothing. I haul ass to the closest tree, stop, drop, peek. Nothing. Two trees later and about fifty yards closer, I still don’t see him. He probably just found a private place to take a leak. Or he’s already below, safe and warm and telling Ringer all’s clear topside while he gently rocks Teacup to sleep.

I’ve been having fantasies about these caves since Ringer left, minus the priest, in which she and Teacup stay warm and dry and well-fed throughout this endless goddamned winter. I think about what I’ll say when I finally see her. What she’ll say to me. How the perfectly dropped phrase might finally make her smile. There’s a part of me that’s convinced this everlasting war will end when I coax a smile out of that girl.

Okay, I decide, forget the priest. That welcome center has to be manned. I might end up with half a dozen hostages instead of one, but beggars can’t be choosers. I need to get into those caves ASAP.

I scan the terrain, plot my route, mentally rehearse the assault. I have one flash grenade left. I have the element of surprise.
Surprise is good. I have my rifle and Dumbo’s sidearm. Probably will not be enough. I’ll be outgunned, which means I will die. Which means Dumbo will die.

There’s a single window facing me. I’ll smash it with the butt of my rifle, toss the grenade, and then hoof it around the building to the front door. Six seconds, tops. They won’t know what hit them.

That’ll be my story, anyway, when I tell my grandkids about this day: I was so focused on the window, I forgot to look where I was going.

I wish I had another explanation for how I fell into that damn hole, six feet wide and twice as deep, a hole you couldn’t miss, even in the dark, not only because of its size but because of what it contained.

Bodies.

Hundreds of bodies.

Big bodies, little bodies, medium-sized bodies. Clothed bodies, half-clothed bodies, naked bodies. Freshly dead bodies and bodies not-so-freshly dead. Whole bodies and body parts and parts that used to be inside bodies but no longer were.

I went down to my hips into the slimy, reeking mass, and my feet found no bottom—I just kept . . . sinking. Nothing to grab hold of except bodies, which slid down with me. I came face-to-face with a fresh one as I sank—like a
really
fresh one, a woman in her thirties, her blond hair caked in dirt and blood, two black eyes, one cheek swollen to the size of my fist, her skin still pink, her lips plump. She couldn’t have been more than a few hours dead.

I twist away. I’d rather face a dozen rotted faces than one that looks that alive.

I’m shoulder-deep by this point and still being sucked under.
I’m going to be suffocated by human remains. I’m going to drown in death. It’s so ridiculously metaphorical, I nearly bust out laughing.

That’s when the fingers lock around my neck.

Then her definitely-not-corpse-cold lips against my ear: “Don’t make a sound, Ben. Play dead.”

Ben
? I try to turn my head. No way. Her grip is too strong.

“We’ve got one shot,” the voice whispers. “So don’t move. It knows where we are now and it’s
coming.
”