The 5th Wave (32 page)

“And the sick people they bring in from the outside, ones that don’t make it once
they get here—what do you think happens to them?”

“Oh, come on, Zombie, just tell him!” Oompa says. He’s pushed away his food, too.
A first for him. Oompa is the only one in the squad who ever goes back for seconds.
To put it in the nicest way, the food in camp sucks.

“It isn’t something we like to do, but it has to be done,” I say, echoing the company
line. “Because this is war, you know? It’s war.”

I look down the table for support. The only one who will make eye contact with me
is Teacup, who is nodding happily.

“War,” she says. Happily.

Outside the mess hall and across the yard, where several squads are drilling under
the watchful eyes of their drill sergeants, Nugget trots along beside me. Zombie’s
dog, the squad calls him behind his back. Cutting between Barracks 3 and 4 to the
road that leads to the power plant and the processing hangars. The day is cold and
cloudy; it feels like it might snow. In the distance, the sound of a Black Hawk taking
off and the sharp
tat-tat-tat
of automatic weapons’ fire. Directly in front of us the twin towers of the plant
belching black and gray smoke. The gray smoke fades into the clouds. The black lingers.

A large white tent has been set up outside the entrance to the hangar, the staging
area festooned with red-and-white biohazard warning signs. Here we suit up for processing.
Once I’m dressed, I help Nugget with his orange suit, the boots, the rubber gloves,
the mask, and the hood. I give him the lecture about never, ever taking off any part
of his suit inside the hangar, under any circumstances, ever. He has to ask permission
before handling anything and, if he
has to leave the building for any reason, he has to decon and pass inspection before
reentering.

“Just stick with me,” I tell him. “It’ll be okay.”

He nods and his hood bounces back and forth, the faceplate smacking him in the forehead.
He’s trying to hold it together, and it’s not going well. So I say, “They’re just
people, Nugget. Just people.”

Inside the processing hangar, the bodies of the just-people are sorted, the infected
from the clean—or, as we call them, the Ted from the unTed. Teds are marked with bright
green circles on their foreheads, but you rarely need to look; the Teds are always
the freshest bodies.

They’ve been stacked against the back wall, waiting for their turn to be laid out
on the long metal tables that run the length of the hangar. The bodies are in various
stages of decay. Some are months old. Some look fresh enough to sit up and wave hello.

It takes three squads to work the line. One squad carts the bodies over to the metal
tables. Another processes. A third carries the processed corpses to the front and
stacks them for pickup. You rotate the duties to help break up the monotony.

Processing is the most interesting, and where our squad begins. I tell Nugget not
to touch, just watch me until he gets the idea.

Empty the pockets. Separate the contents. Trash goes in one bin, electronics in another,
precious metals in a third, all other metals in a fourth. Wallets, purses, paper,
cash—all trash. Some of the squads can’t help themselves—old habits die hard—and walk
around with wads of useless hundred-dollar bills stuffed in their pockets.

Photographs, IDs, any little memento that isn’t made of ceramic—trash. Almost without
exception, from the oldest to the
youngest, the pockets of the dead are filled to the brim with the strangest things
only the owners could understand the value for.

Nugget doesn’t say a word. He watches me work down the line, keeping right beside
me as I sidestep to the next body. The hangar is ventilated, but the smell is overpowering.
Like any omnipresent smell—or rather, like anything omnipresent—you get used to it;
you stop smelling it after a while.

Same is true for your other senses. And your soul. After you’ve seen your five hundredth
dead baby, how can you be shocked or sickened or feel anything at all?

Beside me, Nugget is silent, watching.

“Tell me if you’re going to be sick,” I tell him sternly. It’s horrible throwing up
in your suit.

The overhead speakers pop to life, and the tunes begin. Most of the guys prefer rap
while they process; I like to mix it up with a little heavy metal and some R&B. Nugget
wants something to do, so I have him carry the ruined clothes to the laundry bins.
They’ll be burned with the processed corpses later that night. Disposal happens next
door, in the power plant incinerator. They say the black smoke is from the coal and
the gray smoke is from the bodies. I don’t know if that’s true.

It’s the hardest processing I’ve done. I’ve got Nugget, my own bodies to process,
and the rest of the squad to keep an eye on, because there’s no drill sergeants or
any adult period inside the processing hangar, except the dead ones. Just kids, and
sometimes it’s like at school when the teacher is suddenly called out of the room.
Things can get crazy.

There’s little interaction among the squads outside P&D. The competition for the top
slots on the leaderboard is too intense, and there’s nothing friendly about the rivalry.

So when I see the fair-skinned, dark-haired girl wheeling corpses from Poundcake’s
table to the disposal area, I don’t go over and introduce myself and I don’t grab
one of her team members to ask her name. I just watch her while I dig my fingers through
the pockets of dead people. I notice she’s directing traffic at the door; she must
be the squad leader. At the midmorning break, I pull Poundcake aside. He’s a sweet
kid, quiet, but not in a weird way. Dumbo has a theory that one day the cork will
pop and Poundcake won’t stop talking for a week.

“You know that girl from Squad Nineteen working at your table?” I ask him. He nods.
“Know anything about her?” He shakes his head. “Why am I asking you this, Cake?” He
shrugs. “Okay,” I say. “But don’t tell anyone I asked.”

By the fourth hour on the line, Nugget’s not too steady on his feet. He needs a break,
so I take him outside for a few minutes, where we sit against the hangar door and
watch the black and gray smoke billowing beneath the clouds.

Nugget yanks off his hood and leans his head against the cold metal door, his round
face shiny with sweat.

“They’re just people,” I say again, basically because I don’t know what else to say.
“It gets easier,” I go on. “Every time you do it, you feel it a little less. Until
it’s like—I don’t know—like making your bunk or brushing your teeth.”

I’m all tense, waiting for him to lose it. Cry. Run. Explode. Something. But there’s
just this blank, faraway look in his eyes, and suddenly I’m the one about to explode.
Not at him. Or at Reznik for making me bring him. At them. At the bastards who did
this to us. Forget about my life—I know how that ends. What about Nugget’s? Five frigging
years old, and what’s he got to look forward to? And why the hell did Commander Vosch
assign him
to a combat unit? Seriously, he can’t even lift a rifle. Maybe the idea is to catch
’em young, train ’em from the ground up. So by the time he’s my age you don’t have
a stone-cold killer, but an ice-cold one. One with liquid nitrogen for blood.

I hear his voice before I feel his hand on my forearm. “Zombie, are you okay?”

“Sure, I’m fine.” Here’s a strange turn of events, him worried about me.

A large flatbed pulls up to the hangar door, and Squad 19 begins loading bodies, tossing
them onto the truck like relief workers heaving sacks of grain. There’s the dark-haired
girl again, straining at the front end of a very fat corpse. She glances our way before
going back inside for the next body. Great. She’ll probably report us for goofing
off to knock a few points off our score.

“Cassie says it won’t matter what they do,” Nugget says. “They can’t kill all of us.”

“Why can’t they?” Because, kid, I’d really, really like to know.

“Because we’re too hard to kill. We’re invista…investra…invinta…”

“Invincible?”

“That’s it!” With a reassuring pat on my arm. “Invincible.”

Black smoke, gray smoke. And the cold biting our cheeks and the heat from our bodies
trapped inside our suits, Zombie and Nugget and the brooding clouds above us and,
hidden above them, the mothership that gave birth to the gray smoke and, in a way,
to us. Us too.

46

EVERY NIGHT NOW Nugget crawls into my bunk after lights-out to say his prayer, and
I let him stay until he falls asleep. Then I carry him back to his bunk. Tank threatens
to turn me in, usually after I give him an order he doesn’t like. But he doesn’t.
I think he secretly looks forward to prayer time.

It amazes me how quickly Nugget has adjusted to camp life. Kids are like that, though.
They can get used to practically anything. He can’t lift a rifle to his shoulder,
but he does everything else, and sometimes better than the older kids. He’s faster
than Oompa on the obstacle course and a quicker study than Flintstone. The one squad
member who can’t stand him is Teacup. I guess it’s jealousy: Before Nugget came, Teacup
was the baby of the family.

Nugget did have a mini freakout during his first air raid drill. Like the rest of
us, he had no idea it was coming, but unlike the rest of us, he had no idea what the
hell was going on.

It happens once a month and always in the middle of the night. The sirens scream so
loud, you can feel the floor shaking under your bare feet as you stumble around in
the dark, yanking on jumpsuit and boots, grabbing your M16, racing outside as all
the barracks empty out, hundreds of recruits pouring across the yard toward the access
tunnels that lead underground.

I was a couple of minutes behind the squad because Nugget was hollering his head off
and clinging to me like a monkey to his momma, thinking any minute the alien warships
would start dropping their payloads.

I shouted at him to calm down and follow my lead. It was a
waste of breath. Finally I just picked him up and slung him over my shoulder, rifle
clutched in one hand, Nugget’s butt in the other. As I sprinted outside, I thought
of another night and another screaming kid. The memory made me run harder.

Into the stairwell, down the four flights of stairs awash in yellow emergency light,
Nugget’s head popping against my back, then through the steel-reinforced door at the
bottom, down a short passageway, through the second reinforced door, and into the
complex. The heavy door clanged shut behind us, sealing us inside. By now he had decided
he might not be vaporized after all, and I could set him down.

The shelter is a confusing maze of dimly lit intersecting corridors, but we’ve been
drilled so much, I could find my way to our station with my eyes closed. I yelled
over the siren for Nugget to follow me and I took off. A squad heading in the opposite
direction thundered past us.

Right, left, right, right, left, into the final passageway, my free hand gripping
the back of Nugget’s neck to keep him from falling back. I could see my squad kneeling
twenty yards from the back wall of the dead-end tunnel, their rifles trained at the
metal grate that covers the airshaft leading to the surface.

And Reznik standing behind them, holding a stopwatch.

Crap.

We missed our time by forty-eight seconds. Forty-eight seconds that would cost us
three days of free time. Forty-eight seconds that would drop us another place on the
leaderboard. Forty-eight seconds that meant God knows how many more days of Reznik.

Back in the barracks now, we’re all too hyped up to sleep. Half the squad is pissed
at me, the other half is pissed at Nugget. Tank, of course, blames me.

“You should have left him behind,” he says. His thin face is flushed with rage.

“There’s a reason we drill, Tank,” I remind him. “What if this had been the real thing?”

“Then I guess he’d be dead.”

“He’s a member of this squad, same as the rest of us.”

“You still don’t get it, do you, Zombie? It’s freakin’ nature. Whoever’s too sick
or weak has to go.” He yanks off his boots, hurls them into his locker at the foot
of the bunk. “If it was up to me, we’d throw all of ’em into the incinerator with
the Teds.”