The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(34)

“They’re inside us,” she answers. “We were attacked from the inside, by infected personnel who’d been embedded in the military.”

She gives me a few minutes to process this while she wipes the tears from my face with a cool, moist cloth. It’s maddening, how motherly she is, and the soothing coolness of the cloth, a pleasant torture.

She sets aside the cloth and looks deeply into my eyes. “Using the ratio of infected to clean here at the base, we estimate that one out of every three surviving human beings on Earth is one of them.”

She loosens the straps. I’m insubstantial as a cloud, light as a balloon. When the final strap comes free, I expect to fly out of the chair and smack the ceiling.

“Would you like to see one?” she asks.

Holding out her hand.

29

SHE WHEELS ME down a hallway to an elevator. It’s a one-way express that carries us several hundred feet below the surface. The doors open into a long corridor with white cinder-block walls. Dr. Pam tells me we’re in the bomb shelter complex that’s nearly as large as the base above us, built to withstand a fifty-megaton nuclear blast. I tell her I’m feeling safer already. She laughs like she thinks that’s very funny. I’m rolling past side tunnels and unmarked doors and, though the floor is level, I feel as if I’m being taken to the very bottom of the world, to the hole where the devil sits. There are soldiers hurrying up and down the corridor; they avert their eyes and stop talking as I’m wheeled past them.

Would you like to see one?

Yes. Hell no.

She stops at one of the unmarked doors and swipes a key card through the locking mechanism. The red light turns green. She rolls me into the room, stopping the chair in front of a long mirror, and my mouth falls open and I drop my chin and close my eyes, because whatever is sitting in that wheelchair isn’t me, it can’t be me.

When the mothership first appeared, I was one hundred and ninety pounds, most of it muscle. Forty pounds of that muscle is gone. The stranger in that mirror looked back at me with the eyes of the starving: huge, sunken, ringed in puffy, black bags. The virus has taken a knife to my face, carving away my cheeks, sharpening my chin, thinning my nose. My hair is stringy, dry, falling out in places.

He’s gone zombie.

Dr. Pam nods at the mirror. “Don’t worry. He won’t be able to see us.”

He? Who’s she talking about?

She hits a button, and the lights in the room on the other side of the mirror flood on. My image turns ghostlike. I can see through myself to the person on the other side.

It’s Chris.

He’s strapped to a chair identical to the one in the Wonderland room. Wires run from his head to a large console with blinking red lights behind him. He’s having trouble keeping his head up, like a kid nodding off in class.

She notices my stiffening at the sight of him and asks, “What? Do you know him?”

“His name is Chris. He’s my…I met him in the refugee camp. He offered to share his tent and he helped me when I got sick.”

“He’s your friend?” She seems surprised.

“Yes. No. Yes, he’s my friend.”

“He’s not what you think he is.”

She touches a button, and the monitor pops to life. I tear my eyes away from Chris, from the outside of him to the inside, from apparent to hidden, because on the screen I can see his brain encased in translucent bone, glowing a sickly yellowish green.

“What is that?” I whisper.

“The infestation,” Dr. Pam says. She presses a button and zooms in on the front part of Chris’s brain. The pukish color intensifies, glowing neon bright. “This is the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain—the part that makes us human.”

She zooms in tight on an area no larger than the head of a pin, and then I see it. My stomach does a slow roll. Embedded in the soft tissue is a pulsing egg-shaped growth, anchored by thousands of rootlike tendrils fanning out in all directions, digging into every crease and crevice of his brain.

“We don’t know how they did it,” Dr. Pam says. “We don’t even know if the infected are aware of their presence, or if they’ve been puppets their entire lives.”

The thing entangling itself in Chris’s brain, pulsing.

“Take it out of him.” I can barely form words.

“We’ve tried,” Dr. Pam says. “Drugs, radiation, electroshock, surgery. Nothing works. The only way to kill them is to kill the host.”

She slides the keyboard in front of me. “He won’t feel anything.”

Confused, I shake my head. I don’t get it.

“It lasts less than a second,” Dr. Pam assures me. “And it’s completely painless. This button right here.”

I look down at the button. It has a label: EXECUTE.

“You’re not killing Chris. You’re destroying the thing inside him that would kill you.”

“He had his chance to kill me,” I argue. Shaking my head. It’s too much. I can’t deal. “And he didn’t. He kept me alive.”

“Because it wasn’t time yet. He left you before the attack, didn’t he?”

I nod. I’m looking at him again through the two-way mirror, through the indistinct frame of my see-through self.

“You’re killing the things that are responsible for this.” She presses something into my hand.