“Ahhhh,” he sighs. “Who do you seek? Not the ones who were lost. A little girl, a sad, soulful boy. They died that you might live. Yes? Yes. Oh, how lonely you are. How empty!”
I’m holding Teacup against me in the old hotel, fighting to keep her warm. Razor is holding me in the bowels of the base, fighting to keep me alive. It’s a circle, Zombie, bound by fear.
“But there is another,” the priest murmurs. “Hmmm. Do you know? Have you discovered it yet?”
His soft chuckle is cut short. I know why. There’s no guessing: We are one. He’s dredged up Constance and that stupid, vapid soccer-mom smile.
He flings me away like he flung the rifle—disdainfully, a useless piece of human-made garbage. The hub prepares my body for impact. There’s plenty of time for that while I sail through the air.
I smash into the rotten porch railing of the white farmhouse. The wood explodes with a loud wallop as the old boards crack beneath me. I lie still. The world spins.
Worse than the physical beating, though, was the pummeling of my mind. I can’t think. Fragmented, disconnected images explode into being, fade, bloom again. Zombie’s smile. Razor’s eyes. Teacup’s scowl. Then Vosch’s face, cut from stone, massive as a mountain, and the eyes that pierce to the very bottom, that see everything, that know me.
I roll onto my side. My stomach heaves. I throw up on the porch steps until there’s nothing left in my stomach, and then I throw up some more.
You have to get up, Ringer. If you don’t get up, Zombie’s lost.
I try to stand. I fall.
I try to sit up. I keel over.
The Silencer priest felt them inside me—I thought they were gone, I thought I had lost them, but you never lose those who love you, because love is a constant; love endures.
Someone’s arms are lifting me up: Razor’s.
Someone’s hands steady me: Teacup’s.
Someone’s smile is giving me hope: Zombie’s.
I should have told him when I had the chance how much I love the way he smiles.
I rise.
Razor lifting, Teacup steadying, Zombie smiling.
You know what you do when you can’t stand up and march, soldier? Vosch asks. You crawl.
26
ZOMBIE
NORTH OF URBANA, the old highway cuts through farm country, the fallow fields on either side glowing silver-gray in the brilliant starlight, the burned-out shells of the farmhouses black freckles against the sheen. The caverns lie nine miles as the crow flies to the northeast, but I’m no crow; I’m not leaving this highway and risking getting lost. If I keep up the pace without stopping to rest, I should reach the target before dawn.
That’ll be the easy part.
Superhuman assassins who can look like anyone—for example, a sweet, hymn-singing senior citizen. Little kids who wander near encampments and hideouts with bombs embedded in their throats. Doesn’t exactly encourage hospitality to strangers.
There’ll be sentries, hidden bunkers, snipers’ nests, maybe a vicious German shepherd or a Doberman or two, trip wires, booby traps. The enemy has blown apart the fundamental glue that binds us together, turning every outsider into the intolerable other. That’s funny, the sick type of funny: After the aliens arrived, we became aliens.
Which means the odds of them shooting me on sight are pretty high. Like in the 99.9 percent neighborhood.
Oh, well. YOLO, right?
I’ve looked at the little map printed on the back of the brochure so many times, it’s burned into my memory like an afterimage. US 68 north to SR 507. SR 507 east to SR 245. Then a half mile north and you’re there. Easy-peasy, no problemo. Three to four hours quick-stepping on an empty stomach with no rest or sleep and sunrise coming.
I’ll need time to reconnoiter. I have no time. I’ll need a game plan of how to approach a hostile sentry. I have no plan. I’ll need the right words to convince them I’m one of the good guys. I have no words. All I’ve got is my winning personality and a killer smile.
At the corner of 507 and 245 there’s a waist-high sign with a big rust-colored arrow pointing north: OHIO CAVERNS. The ground rises; the road arches toward the stars. I adjust my eyepiece and scan the woods on the left for green glow. I drop to my belly shy of the hillcrest and crawl the rest of the way to the top. A paved access road winds through more trees toward a cluster of buildings, tiny black smudges against gray. Fifty yards away are two stone markers with white signs mounted on top of each: OC.
I inch forward the way we were taught in camp, low-crawl-style: face in the dirt, rifle in one hand, the other extended forward. At this pace, I won’t reach the caverns until well after my twenty-first birthday, but that’s preferable to not being alive to celebrate it. Every few feet I pause to lift my head and scan the terrain. Trees. Grass. A snarl of downed power lines. Trash. A single, tiny tennis shoe lying on its side.
After another hundred yards—and a hundred years later—my outstretched fingers brush metal. I don’t lift my head; I drag the object in front of my face.
A crucifix.
A chill goes down my spine. I didn’t have time to think, Sullivan told me. I saw the light glinting off the metal. I thought it was a gun. So I killed him. Over a crucifix, I killed him.
I wish she’d never told me that story. If I didn’t know better, I’d consider finding a random crucifix in the dirt to be a good sign. I might even hang on to it for luck. Instead, it feels like a big black cat crossing my path. I leave Jesus lying in the dirt.
Scooch, scooch, pause. Look. Scooch, scooch, pause. Look. I can see buildings now, a gift shop and welcome center, the remnants of a stone well. Beyond the buildings, weaving between the tree-shaped gashes in the dark, is a thumbnail-sized, fiery green blob of light headed straight toward me.