The Last Star (The 5th Wave, #3)(16)

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.