The Last Star (The 5th Wave, #3)(71)

What’s that, Cassie? What kind of boils?

Now I get it. Now I understand.

Cut the power. Open the floodgates. Unleash the pestilence. General Order Four is the invasion in microcosm, the acoustical version of the first three worldwide waves, same tune, different lyrics, and any intruder caught in their wake humanity’s avatar.

Which would be me. I am humanity.

Outside, outside, outside! I’m on the main floor, the main windowless floor based on my memory since I have no light and no glowing red exit sign to guide the way. Not in haste anymore. In full-bore panic.

Because I’ve been here before. I know what comes after the 3rd Wave.





84


SILENCER

TEN MILLENNIA ADRIFT.

Ten thousand years unbounded by space or time, stripped of the senses, pure thought, substance without form, motion without gesture, paralyzed force.

Then the dark split open and there was light.

Air filling its lungs. Blood moving through its veins. Imprisoned for ten millennia inside its limitless mind, now finite. Now free.

It climbs the stairs toward the surface.

Red light pulsing. Siren blaring. A human voice assaulting its ears:

“GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO REPORT TO YOUR DESIGNATED SECURE AREA.”

It rises from the deep.

The door above bangs open and a troop of the mammalian vermin thunders toward it. Juveniles carrying weapons. In the confined space of the stairwell, their human stench is overwhelming.

“What are you, f*cking deaf?” one of them shouts. The voice is grating, the sound of their language ugly. “We’re GO-Four, dipshit! Get your ass back down into that bunk—”

It snaps the juvenile’s neck. The others it kills with equal efficiency and speed. Their bodies gather around its feet. Broken necks, burst hearts, shattered skulls. In the instant before they died, perhaps they looked into its eyes, blank and unblinking, a shark’s eyes, the soulless predator rising from the depths.

“THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE.”

The stairwell plunges into darkness. An ordinary human would be sightless. Its human container, though, is not ordinary.

It has been enhanced.

In the first-floor hallway of the command center, the sprinkler system bursts to life. The Silencer lifts its face and drinks the lukewarm spray. It has not tasted water in ten millennia, and the sensation is both jarring and exhilarating.

The corridor is deserted. The vermin have retreated into safe rooms, where they will remain until the two intruders have been silenced.

Silenced by the inhuman thing inside this human body.

In the downpour, the wet jumpsuit quickly molds to its powerful physique. It is unburdened by this body’s history; it has no memory of childhood or the farm where its shell was raised, no recollection of the human family who loved and nurtured it, the same who died, one by one, while it stood by and did nothing.

It found no girl hiding inside a tent in the woods, a rifle in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. It never carried her broken body across a sea of white, never pulled her back from the edge of death. There was no rescue of her or her brother, no vow to protect her at all costs.

There is nothing human left in it, nothing human at all.

It does not remember the past; therefore, the past does not exist. Its humanity does not exist.

It does not even have a name.

The enhancement informs it that a chemical agent has been introduced into the water. It will feel none of the poison’s effects. It has been designed to endure pain, to be immune to suffering, its own and its victims’. The ancients had a saying for this, vincit qui patitur, and it applied to the vanquished as well as to the victor. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature’s ladder. The ones who created the program driving the human body that was once called Evan Walker understood this. They had studied the problem for thousands of years.

The fundamental flaw in humanity was its humanity. The useless, baffling, self-destructive human tendency to love, to empathize, to sacrifice, to trust, to imagine anything outside the boundaries of its own skin—these things had driven the species to the edge of destruction. Worse, this one organism threatened the survival of all life on Earth.

The Silencer’s makers did not have to look far for a solution. The answer lay in another species that had conquered the entirety of its domain, ruling it with unquestioned authority for millions of years. Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.

Once a human named Evan Walker had a dream—a dream it can no longer remember—and in that dream there was a tent in the woods and in that tent there was a girl who called herself humanity, and the girl was worth more to it than its own life.

No longer.

When it finds her, and it will find her, it will kill her. Without remorse, without pity. It will kill the one whom Evan Walker loved with all the emotion of a man stepping on a cockroach.