She cocks her head, and the side of her mouth twitches in an almost-but-not-quite smile. “Check.”
I give her back an honest-to-goodness smile, the old Ben Parish smile, the one that got me practically everything I wanted. Well, not practically; I’m being modest.
“Is that check as in yes, or are you giving me a chess lesson?”
She sets her gun aside and turns her back to me. Bows her head. Pulls her silky black hair away from her neck.
“Both.”
Pop-pop-pop goes Poundcake’s gun. And the sniper answers. Their jam plays in the background as I kneel behind Ringer with my knife. Part of me more than willing to humor her if it keeps me—and the rest of the unit—alive. The other part screaming silently, Aren’t you, like, giving a mouse a cookie? What will she demand next—a physical inspection of my cerebral cortex?
“Relax, Zombie,” she says, quiet and calm, the old Ringer again. “If the trackers aren’t ours, it’s probably not a good idea to have them inside us. If they are ours, Dr. Pam can always implant us again when we get back. Agreed?”
“Checkmate.”
“Check and mate,” she corrects me.
Her neck is long and graceful and very cold beneath my fingers as I explore the area beneath the scar for the lump. My hand shakes. Just humor her. It probably means a court-martial and the rest of your life peeling potatoes, but at least you’ll be alive.
“Be gentle,” she whispers.
I take a deep breath and draw the tip of the blade along the tiny scar. Her blood wells up bright red, shockingly red against her pearly skin. She doesn’t even flinch, but I have to ask: “Am I hurting you?”
“No, I like it a lot.”
I tease the implant from her neck with the tip of the blade. She grunts softly. The pellet clings to the metal, sealed within a droplet of blood.
“So,” she says, turning around. The almost-smile is almost there. “How was it for you?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. I’ve lost the ability to talk. The knife falls from my hand. I’m two feet away looking right at her, but her face is gone. I can’t see it through my eyepiece.
Ringer’s entire head is lit up in a blinding green fire.
MY FIRST REACTION is to yank off the hardware, but I don’t. I’m paralyzed with shock. A shudder of revulsion next. Then panic. Followed closely by confusion. Ringer’s head has lit up like a Christmas tree, bright enough to be seen a mile away. The green fire sparks and swirls, so intense it burns an afterimage in my left eye.
“What is it?” she demands. “What happened?”
“You lit up. As soon as I pulled out the tracker.”
We stare at each other for a long couple of minutes. Then she says, “Unclean glows green.”
I’m already on my feet, M16 in my hands, backing toward the door. And outside, beneath the sound-deadening snowfall, Poundcake and the sniper, trading barbs. Unclean glows green. Ringer doesn’t make a move for the rifle lying next to her. Through my right eye, she’s normal. Through the left, she burns like a Roman candle.
“Think this through, Zombie,” she says. “Think this through.” Holding up her empty hands, scratched and scuffed from her fall, one caked in dried blood. “I lit up after you pulled out the implant. The eyepieces don’t pick up infestations. They react when there’s no implant.”
“Excuse me, Ringer, but that makes no freaking sense. They lit up on those three infesteds. Why would the eyepieces light up if they weren’t?”
“You know why. You just can’t admit it to yourself. They lit up because those people weren’t infested. They’re just like us, the only difference being they don’t have implants.”
She stands up. God, she looks so small, like a kid…But she is a kid, right? Through one eye normal. Through the other a green fireball. Which is she? What is she?
“Take us in.” She steps toward me. I bring up the gun. She stops. “Tag and bag us. Train us to kill.” Another step. I swing the muzzle toward her. Not at her. But toward her: Stay away. “Anyone who isn’t tagged will glow green, and when they defend themselves or challenge us, shoot at us like that sniper up there—well, that just proves they’re the enemy, doesn’t it?” Another step. Now I’m aiming right at her heart.
“Don’t,” I beg her. “Please, Ringer.” One face pure. One face in fire.
“Until we’ve killed everyone who isn’t tagged.” Another step. Right in front of me now. The end of the gun pressing lightly against her chest. “It’s the 5th Wave, Ben.”
I’m shaking my head. “No fifth wave. No fifth wave! The commander said—”
“The commander lied.”
She reaches up with bloody hands and pulls the rifle from my grip. I feel myself falling into a completely different kind of wonderland, where up is down and true is false and the enemy has two faces, my face and his, the one who saved me from drowning, who took my heart and made it a battlefield.
She gathers her hands into mine and pronounces me dead:
“Ben, we’re the 5th Wave.”
WE ARE HUMANITY.
It’s a lie. Wonderland. Camp Haven. The war itself.
How easy it was. How incredibly easy, even after all that we’d been through. Or maybe it was easy because of all we’d been through.
They gathered us in. They emptied us out. They filled us up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance.
So they could send us out again.
To kill what’s left of the rest of us.
Check and mate.
I’m going to be sick. Ringer hangs on to my shoulder while I heave all over a poster that fell off the wall: FALL INTO FASHION!
There’s Chris, behind the two-way glass. And there’s the button marked EXECUTE. And there’s my finger, slamming down. How easy it was to make me kill another human being.
When I’m done, I rock back on my heels. I feel Ringer’s cool fingers rubbing my neck. Hear her voice telling me it’s going to be okay. I yank off the eyepiece, killing the green fire and giving Ringer back her face. She’s Ringer and I’m me, only I’m not sure what me means anymore. I’m not what I thought I was. The world is not what I thought it was. Maybe that’s the point:
It’s their world now, and we’re the aliens.
“We can’t go back,” I choke out. And there’s her deep-cutting eyes and her cool fingers massaging my neck.
“No, we can’t. But we can go forward.” She picks up my rifle and pushes it against my chest. “And we can start with that son of a bitch upstairs.”
Not before taking out my implant. It hurts more than I expect, less than I deserve.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Ringer tells me while she digs it out. “They fooled all of us.”
“And the ones they couldn’t, they called Dorothys and killed.”
“Not the only ones,” she says bitterly. And then it hits me like a punch in the heart: the P&D hangar. The twin stacks spewing black and gray smoke. The trucks loaded with bodies—hundreds of bodies every day. Thousands every week. And the buses pulling in all night, every night, filled with refugees, filled with the walking dead.
“Camp Haven isn’t a military base,” I whisper as blood trickles down my neck.
She shakes her head. “Or a refugee camp.”
I nod. Swallow back the bile rising in my throat. I can tell she’s waiting for me to say it out loud. Sometimes you have to speak the truth aloud or it doesn’t seem real. “It’s a death camp.”
There’s an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don’t buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts.