The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(28)

Something stopped me, though. I didn’t head off into the woods. I didn’t rush off to embrace the one thing with the best chance to save me: distance.

It might have been the teddy bear that did it. When I picked it up, I saw my brother’s face pressed against the back window of the bus, heard his little voice inside my head.

For when you’re scared. But don’t leave him. Don’t forget.

I almost did forget. If I hadn’t walked over to check Branch for weapons, I would have. Branch had fallen practically on top of poor teddy.

Don’t leave him.

I didn’t actually see any bodies back there. Just Dad’s. What if someone had survived those three minutes of eternity in the barracks? They could have been wounded, still alive, left for dead.

Unless I didn’t leave. If there was someone still alive back there and the faux soldiers had gone, then I would be the one leaving them for dead.

Ah, crap.

You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don’t have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn’t mean they apply to you.

I turned around and headed back, stepping around the body of Branch as I went, and dove into the dusky tunnel of the trail.

23

I DIDN’T FORGET the assault rifle the third time around. I shoved the Luger into my belt, but I couldn’t very well expect to fire an assault rifle with a teddy bear in one hand, so I had to leave him on the trail.

“It’s okay. I won’t forget you,” I whispered to Sammy’s bear.

I stepped off the path and wove quietly through the trees. When I got close to the compound, I dropped and crawled the rest of the way to the edge.

Well, that’s why you didn’t hear them leave.

Vosch was talking to a couple of soldiers at the doorway to the storehouse. Another group was messing around by one of the Humvees. I counted seven in all, which left five more I couldn’t see. Were they off in the woods somewhere, looking for me? Dad’s body was gone—maybe the others had pulled disposal duty. There were forty-two of us, not counting the kids who had left on the buses. That’s a lot of disposing.

Turns out I was right: It was a disposal operation.

It’s just that Silencers don’t dispose of bodies the way we do.

Vosch had taken off his mask. So had the two guys who were with him. They didn’t have lobster mouths or tentacles growing out of their chins. They looked like perfectly ordinary human beings, at least from a distance.

They didn’t need the masks anymore. Why not? The masks must have been part of the act. We would expect them to protect themselves from infection.

Two of the soldiers came over from the Humvee carrying what looked like a bowl or globe the same dull gray metallic color as the drones. Vosch pointed at a spot midway between the storehouse and the barracks, the same spot, it looked like, where my father had fallen.

Then everybody left, except one female soldier, who was kneeling now beside the gray globe.

The Humvees roared to life. Another engine joined the duet: the flatbed troop carrier, parked at the head of the compound out of sight. I’d forgotten about that. The rest of the soldiers must have already loaded up and were waiting. Waiting for what?

The remaining soldier stood up and trotted back to the Humvee. I watched him climb aboard. Watched the Humvee spin out in a boiling cloud of dust. Watched the dust swirl and settle. The stillness of summer at dusk settled with it. The silence pounded in my ears.

And then the gray globe began to glow.

That was a good thing, a bad thing, or a thing that was neither good nor bad, but whatever it was, good, bad, or neither, depended on your point of view.

They had put the globe there, so to them it was a good thing.

The glow was getting brighter. A sickly yellowish green. Pulsing slightly. Like a…A what? A beacon?

I peered into the darkening sky. The first stars had begun to come out. I didn’t see any drones.

If it was a good thing from their point of view, that meant it was probably a bad thing from mine.

Well, not probably. Leaning more toward definitely.

The interval between pulses shortened every few seconds. The pulse became a flash. The flash became a blink.

Pulse…Pulse…Pulse…

Flash, flash, flash.

Blinkblinkblink.

In the gloom, the globe reminded me of an eye, a pale greenish-yellow eyeball winking at me.

The Eye will take care of her.

My memory has preserved what happened next as a series of snapshots, like freeze-frame stills from an art house movie, with those jerky, handheld camera angles.

SHOT 1: On my butt, doing a crab-crawl away from the compound.

SHOT 2: On my feet. Running. The foliage a blur of green and brown and mossy gray.

SHOT 3: Sammy’s bear. The chewed-up little arm gummed and gnawed since he was a baby slipping from my fingers.

SHOT 4: Me on my second attempt to pick up that damned bear.

SHOT 5: The ash pit in the foreground. I’m halfway between Crisco’s body and Branch’s. Clutching Sammy’s bear to my chest.

SHOTS 6–10: More woods, more me running. If you look closely, you can see the ravine in the left-hand corner of the tenth frame.

SHOT 11: The final frame. I’m suspended in midair above the shadow-filled ravine, taken right after I launched myself off the edge.

The green wave roared over my curled-up body at the bottom, carrying along tons of debris, a rocketing mass of trees, dirt, the bodies of birds and squirrels and woodchucks and insects, the contents of the ash pit, shards of the pulverized barracks and storehouse—plywood, concrete, nails, tin—and the first couple of inches of soil in a hundred-yard radius of the blast. I felt the shock wave before I hit the muddy bottom of the ravine. An intense, bone-rattling pressure over every inch of my body. My eardrums popped, and I remembered Crisco saying, You know what happens when you’re blasted with two hundred decibels?