The Last Star (6 page)

12

THE SKIN OF THE C-160
glistened in the light of the setting sun. It was freezing on the airstrip, but the sunlight flirted on my cheeks. Four days until the spring equinox. Four days until the mothership drops her payload. Four days until the end.

Beside me, Constance was running through one last check of her gear while the ground crew ran through one last check of the plane’s. I had my sidearm and rifle and knife, the clothes on my back, and the small green pill in my pocket.

I’d accepted his final gift.

I understood why he wanted me to have it. And I knew what the offer meant: He’s going to keep his promise. Once Constance snatches Walker, we’re free.

What risk did we pose, really? There’s nowhere to hide. Months may pass before we face the ultimate choice between death on their terms or death on ours. And when we’re cornered or captured, out of all options except those two, I will have his gift. I will have that choice.

I looked down at Constance fussing with her rucksack. The back of her exposed neck glowed golden in the failing light. I imagined taking my knife and plunging it to the hilt into the soft skin. Hate was not the answer; I knew that. She was as much a victim as me, as the seven billion dead, as the child running through the sea of wheat. In fact, she and Walker and the thousands infected with the Silencer program were the saddest, most pitiful victims of all.

At least when I die, I’ll do it with my eyes wide-open. I’ll die knowing the truth.

She looked up at me. I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was waiting for me to tell her to fuck off again.

I didn’t. “Do you know him?” I asked. “Evan Walker. You must all know each other, right? You spent ten millennia together up there,”—with a tilt of my head toward the green smudge in the sky. “Did you have any idea he’d go rogue?”

Constance bared her big teeth and didn’t answer.

“Okay, that’s bullshit,” I said. “Everything you think is the truth is bullshit. Who you think you are, your memories, all of it. Before you were born, they embedded a program in your brain that booted up when you hit puberty. Probably a chemical reaction kick-started by the hormones.”

She nodded, still all teeth. “I’m sure that’s a comforting thought.”

“You’ve been infected with a viral program that literally rewired your brain to ‘remember’ things that didn’t happen. You aren’t an
alien consciousness here to wipe out humanity and colonize the Earth. You’re human. Like me. Like Vosch. Like everyone else.”

She said, “I’m not anything like you.”

“You probably believe that at some point you’ll return to the mothership and let the 5th Wave finish the human genocide, but you won’t, because they aren’t going to do it.
You’ll
end up fighting the very army you’ve created until there are no bullets left and history stops. Trust leads to cooperation leads to progress, and there’ll be no more progress. Not a new Stone Age, a
perpetual
Stone Age.”

Shouldering her rucksack, Constance rose from the tarmac. “That’s a fascinating theory. I like it.”

I sighed. There was no breaking through. I didn’t blame her, though. If she told me,
Your father wasn’t an artist and a drunk; he was a teetotaling Baptist minister,
I wouldn’t believe her.
Cogito ergo sum.
More than the sum of our experiences, our memories are the ultimate proof of reality.

The plane’s engines roared to life. I flinched at the sound. I spent forty days in the wilderness without any reminders of the mechanized world. The smell of the exhaust rushing over me and the air vibrating against my skin brought on the ache of nostalgia in my heart, because this, too, will end. The final battle hadn’t started, but the war was already over.

As if with a weary sigh, the sun dipped beneath the horizon. The green eye brightened against the darkening sky. Constance and I jogged up the platform into the plane and strapped in side by side.

The door locked into place with a loud hiss. A second later we were taxiing toward the runway. I looked over at Constance: her grin frozen in place and her dark eyes expressionless as a shark’s.
My hand shot out and grabbed her forearm, and I felt the hate boiling through the fabric of her heavy parka. The hate and rage and disgust cascaded from her into me, and I
knew
: Regardless of her orders and all of Vosch’s promises, once she acquired the target and our usefulness was over, she would kill me and Zombie and everyone else. There was too much risk in letting us live.

Which meant I had to kill her.

The plane lurched forward. My stomach protested; a wave of nausea rolled over me. Weird. I’d never had motion sickness before.

I leaned my back against the bulkhead and closed my eyes. The hub, answering my desire, shut down my hearing and tactile senses. In the gift of the numb silence that enfolded me, I worked through the options.

Constance had to die, but killing Constance compounded the Evan problem. Vosch might dispatch a second operative, but he’ll have lost all tactical advantage. If I kill Constance, he might decide to take us all out with a Hellfire missile.

Unless he didn’t need to kill Walker.

Unless Walker was already dead.

There was a sour taste in my mouth. I swallowed, fighting the urge to throw up.

Vosch had to run Walker through Wonderland. It was the only way to know why Evan rebelled against his programming—if the flaw lay in Walker or in the program or in some toxic combination of the two. A fundamental flaw in the program would create an unsustainable paradigm.

But if Walker was dead, Vosch couldn’t identify the flaw in the system, and the whole operation could collapse: You can’t have a war, especially of the endless variety, if everyone’s on the same
side. Whatever went “wrong” in Walker could go wrong in the other Silencers. He had to know
why
Evan’s programming failed.

I can’t let it happen. I can’t risk giving Vosch what he wants.

Denying him what he wanted might be the only hope we had left. And there was only one way to do that.

Evan Walker had to die.

13

SAM

ZOMBIE ON THE ROAD,
shrinking.

Zombie and Dumbo walking down the empty road awash in starlight, fading.

Sam pulls the silver chain from his pocket and holds it tightly in his hand.

Promise?

Have I broken one yet?

And the dark closing around Zombie like a monster’s mouth until there is no Zombie, only the monster, only the dark.

He presses his other hand against the cold glass. On the day the bus took him to Camp Haven, he watched Cassie on the brown road, holding Bear, shrinking away to nothing, swallowed by the dust like Zombie was swallowed by the dark.

Behind him, Cassie says to Evan Walker in her angry voice, “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“I tried,” Evan Walker answers.

“Not very hard.”

“Short of breaking his legs, I don’t know what I could have done.”

When Sam takes his hand away, the glass holds the memory of it like the bus window once did, a misty imprint of where his hand had been.

“After you lost Sam, could anyone have stopped you from finding him?” Evan Walker asks. Then he goes outside.

Sam can see his sister’s face reflected in the glass. Like everything else since they came, Cassie’s changed. She’s not the same Cassie shrinking on the dusty road. Her nose is kind of crooked, like the nose of someone pressing her face against a windowpane.

“Sam,” she says. “It’s late. What do you say—wanna sleep in my room tonight?”

He shakes his head. “I have to watch Megan. Zombie’s orders.”

She starts to say something. Then she stops. Then she says, “Okay. I’ll be there in a minute to say your prayers with you.”

“I’m not going to pray.”

“Sam, you have to pray.”

“I prayed for Mommy and she died. I prayed for Daddy and he died, too. When you pray for people, they die.”

“That isn’t why they died, Sam.”

She reaches for him. He pulls away. “I’m not going to pray for anybody anymore,” he tells her.

In the bedroom, Megan sits on the bed, holding Bear.

“Zombie left,” Sam tells her.

“Where’d he go?” she whispers. A whisper is as loud as her voice goes. Cassie and Evan Walker hurt something in her throat when they pulled out the pill-bomb.

“He’s going on recon to find Ringer and Teacup.”

Megan shakes her head. She doesn’t know who Ringer and Teacup are. Her hand squeezes Bear’s head and Bear’s mouth puckers like he wants a kiss.

“Be careful,” Sam says. “Don’t hurt his head.”

The window in this bedroom is boarded up. You can’t see outside. At night, after you turn off the lamp, the dark is so heavy, you can feel it pressing against your skin all over. Dangling from the ceiling are loose wires and a couple of balls that Zombie said were supposed to be Jupiter and Neptune. This is the room where Evan Walker tried to kill the evil Grace lady with wire from the mobile. There’re bloodstains on the carpet and splatters of blood on the walls. It’s like his mother’s bedroom after she got the Red Death and her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. She bled from her nose and her mouth, and near the end, blood came out of her eyes and even her ears. Sam remembers her blood; he can’t remember her face.

“I thought we were all staying here until Evan blew up the ship,” Megan whispers, squeezing Bear.

Sam opens the closet door. Besides clothes and shoes that smell faintly of the plague, there are board games and action figures and a big Hot Wheels collection. One day Cassie came into the room and saw him on the floor playing with the dead kids’ stuff. She watched him sitting on the big bloodstain in the middle of the floor. He’d made a camp, and there was his old squad, Squad 53, and they had a Jeep and a plane and they were on a mission to infiltrate an infested stronghold. Only, the infesteds saw them coming and their drones dropped bombs and everybody was hurt except Sam, and Zombie told him,
It’s up to you now, Private. You’re the only one who can save us.
His sister watched him play for a few minutes and then she started to cry for no reason, and that made him mad. He didn’t know she was watching. He didn’t
understand why she was crying. He felt embarrassed. He was a soldier now, not a baby who played with toys. He stopped playing after that.

He hesitates before stepping into the closet. Megan is watching him from the bed. She doesn’t know about his secret. Nobody does. But Zombie gave him an order and he has to follow it. Zombie is his commanding officer.

“If he blows up the ship, how does he keep from blowing himself up, too?” she asks.

Sam looks over his shoulder at her before stepping into the closet. “I hope he does,” he says.

Zombie said he didn’t trust Evan Walker. He was an infested and it didn’t matter that he had been helping them. The enemy was the enemy was the enemy, and you can’t trust traitors, Zombie said. Cassie said Evan Walker wasn’t her boyfriend, but Sam saw the way she looked at him and heard the way she talked to him, and he didn’t believe her when she said they could trust him or that he would make everything okay. He had trusted the soldiers at Camp Haven, too, and they turned out to be the enemy.

Inside the closet, he kneels beside the heap of clothes piled against one wall. Nobody knows what he hid there, not even Zombie.

When they first got to the house, they checked out every room until only the basement was left, and Zombie wouldn’t let him go down there. Zombie went down with Dumbo and Evan Walker, and when they came up again, they were carrying weapons. Rifles and pistols and explosives
and
a very big tube-shaped gun with a shoulder mount that Zombie called an FIM Stinger. You could blow up helicopters and planes with it, Zombie explained, blow ’em right out of the sky. Then he told Sam the basement was
unauthorized; Sam wasn’t allowed to go down there or touch any of the weapons. Even though he was a soldier just like Dumbo and just like Zombie. It wasn’t fair.

Sam reaches beneath the mound of clothes and pulls out the gun. An M9 Beretta. So
cool.

“What are you doing in there?” Megan asks, plucking at Bear’s ear. She shouldn’t do that. He told her not to a thousand times. Dumbo’s had to sew up Bear’s ear twice since they came to the house. He let Megan keep Bear even though Bear has always been his for as long as he can remember, even though she squishes his head and plucks at his ears and calls him a different name. They got in a fight about it.

“His name is Bear,” Sam told her that day.

“That’s not a name. A bear is what he
is.
I named him Captain.”

“You can’t do that.”

She shrugged. “I did.”

“He’s mine.”

“Then take him back,” she said. “I don’t care.”

He shook his head. He didn’t want Bear back. He wasn’t a baby anymore. He was a soldier. All he wanted was for her to call Bear by his right name.

“You used to be Sam and now you have a different name,” Megan said.

“That’s not the same. Bear’s not part of the squad.”

She didn’t stop. Once she found out he hated the name, she called Bear Captain all the time, just to bug him.

Keeping his back to Megan, he jams the gun into his waistband and pulls the big red sweatshirt over his stomach to hide the bulge.

“Sam? Captain wants to know what you’re doing in there.”

He asked Zombie that night if he could have one of the guns.
There were dozens of them,
a freakin’ armory down there,
Zombie said, but he also said no. Cassie was standing there, so Sam waited until she was out of the room and asked Zombie again if he could have a gun. It wasn’t right that everybody carried one except him and Megan, but she didn’t count. She was a civilian. She hadn’t been trained like he had.

They had taken her from the bus and hidden her until it was time to plant the pill-bomb in her throat. She wasn’t alone, she said. There were a lot of kids they pulled from the buses. Hundreds of children, and Evan Walker said each of them was used to trick survivors. The children were airlifted or driven to places where the enemy knew people were hiding. The people brought in the children to save them. Then the people died.

And Cassie said they had to trust Evan Walker!

The gun under his shirt is cold against his bare skin. It’s a nice feeling, better than a hug. He isn’t afraid of the gun. He isn’t afraid of anything. His orders are to watch Megan, but Zombie left nobody in charge of watching Evan Walker. So Sam will do that, too.

At Camp Haven, the soldiers in charge said they would protect him. They told him he was perfectly safe. They told him everything was going to be all right. And they lied. They lied about everything because everybody is a liar. They make promises they don’t keep. Even his mommy and daddy lied. When the mothership came, they said they would never leave him, and they did. They promised everything would be all right, and it wasn’t.

He crawls into the bed opposite Megan’s and stares at the bare wires and the two dusty metal balls hanging from the ceiling. Megan is watching him, pulling Bear tight against her chest, and her mouth hangs open a little, like the air is running out.

He turns his head toward the wall. He doesn’t want Megan to see him cry.

He isn’t a baby. He’s a soldier.

There’s no way you can tell who’s human anymore. Evan Walker looked human but he wasn’t, not inside, not where it matters. Even people like Megan, who are human—
maybe
—couldn’t be trusted, because you can’t know what the enemy has done to them. Zombie, Cassie, Dumbo . . . you can’t really trust them, either. They could be just like Evan Walker.

In the pressing dark beneath the broken mobile, Sam’s heart speeds up. Maybe they’re
all
tricking him. Even Zombie. Even Cassie.

His breath catches in his throat. It’s hard to breathe.
You have to pray,
Cassie said. He used to pray every night, all the time, and the only answer God ever gave was no.
Let Mommy live, God.
No.
Let Daddy come back, God.
No. You can’t trust God, either. Even God is a liar. He put rainbows in the sky as a promise he’d never kill everyone again, and then he let the Others come and do it. All the people who died must have prayed, too, and God said,
No, no, no,
seven billion times, seven billion nos, God said
no, no, no.

The cool metal of the gun against his bare skin. The cold like a hand against his forehead, pressing. Megan breathing through her mouth, reminding him of bombs triggered by human breath.

They won’t stop,
he thinks.
They’ll never stop until everyone is dead. God let it happen because God wants it to happen. And nobody can win against God. He’s God.

Megan’s breathing fades away. Sam’s tears dry. He floats in a vast, empty space. There’s nothing and no one, just empty space that goes on and on and on.

Maybe that’s it,
he thinks.
Maybe there’s already nobody human left. Maybe they’re all infested.

Which means he’s the last one. He’s the last human on Earth.

Sam presses his hands against the pistol. Touching the gun comforts him. Megan has Bear. He has the gun.

If it is a trick, if they’re all aliens in disguise, he won’t let them win. He’ll kill them all if he has to. Then
he’ll
ride the rescue pod up to the mothership and blow it up. They’ll lose—the last human will die—but at least the Others won’t win.

God said no. He can,
too.