“Oh, that’s great.” Ben turned to Cassie. “Let’s everybody form a prayer circle, quick, because we have just been royally fucked.”
“It’ll be okay,” Evan assured him. He touched Cassie’s cheek. “It’s not the end. Not yet.” He stood up. “They came here for one thing,” he said quietly, his voice barely audible above the inferno over them. “They opened fire because they assumed they’d failed. They think I’m dead. I’m going to show them that they’re wrong.”
Mystified, Ben shook his head. He didn’t understand. Cassie did, though, and her face darkened with anger.
“Evan Walker, don’t you dare do this again.”
“Last time, Mayfly. I promise.”
43
HE PAUSED AT the base of the stairs that led up into the smoke and flame. Behind him, Cassie was screaming, calling his name, cursing him.
He climbed anyway.
Ringer called it: They don’t want us. They want him.
Halfway up, he wondered if he should have killed Ben Parish. He would be a liability to Cassie. Slow her down. Be a burden she may not be able to bear.
He pushed the thought from his mind. Too late now. Too late to turn back. Too late to run, too late to hide. Like Cassie beneath the car that day, like Ben beneath the imploding death camp, he had reached the moment of facing that which he thought he could not face. He had risked everything to save her before, but those times the risk was measured, calculated, and a small chance always remained that he would endure.
Not this time. This time he was marching straight into the belly of the beast.
He turned once, at the top of the stairs, but he could not see her and he could not hear her. She was lost in a haze of dust and smoke and the slowly spinning gossamer strands of cobweb.
A cyclone whipped through the wreckage, the chopper making a pass, and the wind from its blades slung aside the smoke and tamped down the fire, flattening it out like a rolling red sea. He looked up and saw the pilot at the controls, looking down.
He raised his hands and shuffled forward. The fire encircled him. The smoke engulfed him. He walked through the maelstrom into clear, clean air.
Evan Walker stood still in the middle of the road, hands up, as the helicopter came down.
44
SQUAD ONE-NINE
FROM THEIR POSITION three hundred yards to the north, the five-member strike team from Squad 19 watch the chopper fire two missiles, then it’s bye-bye, house, blasted down to its concrete foundation in an orgasm of fire and smoke.
In Milk’s earpiece, the pilot’s voice: “Hold your position, One-nine. Repeat: Hold position.”
Milk raises his fist to signal his team: We hold.
The chopper makes a wide arc to circle back over the target. Crouched beside Milk, Pixie sighs loudly, fussing with his eyepiece. The strap’s too big for his little head, and he can’t keep it snug. Swizz whispers for him to shut up and Pix instructs him to kiss his ass. Milk tells them both to shut up.
The team huddles beneath a faded Havoline sign beside an old brick building that had been a body shop before the world went FUBAR. Stacks of used tires and piles of rims, discarded engine parts and tools, all scattered around the lot like wind-driven leaves; the cars and trucks and SUVs and minivans are coated in dust and grime, with shattered windows and mildewed upholstery, relics of the irrelevant past. The generation that followed Squad 19—if there was a generation to follow—would not recognize the strange symbols attached to the trunks and grills of these rusting hulks. In a hundred years, no one would be able to read the sign over their heads or even understand that the letters symbolized sounds.
Like it matters anymore. Like anyone cares. Better not to remember. Better not to know. You can’t mourn what you never had.
The chopper hovers over the wreckage, and the downdraft from its blades flattens the smoke and pushes the flames sideways. They squint through their eyepieces, Milk and Pix to the south toward the chopper, Swizz and Snicks to the west, Gummy to the north, scanning the terrain for the green glow of an alien-infested enemy. They will wait for the Black Hawk to pull out, then move south down the highway, clearing the area as they go—if there’s any damn thing to clear. Unless the Teds took off when they heard the chopper’s approach, anything caught in that house was toast.
Pix saw it first: a tiny neon-green spark that bobbed about in the flames like a firefly in the summer dusk. He poked Milk in the leg and pointed. Milk nodded with a grim smile. Oh yeah. They’ve drilled for this, dear Jesus, they can’t remember how often, but this is the first time in a real combat situation. A living, breathing, honest-to-God, in-the-flesh infested.
Six months, two weeks, and three days since the buses brought them together, the girls and boys of Squad 19. One hundred and ninety-nine days. Four thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six hours. Two hundred eighty-six thousand, five hundred and sixty minutes since Pix was Ryan, cowering in a drainage ditch, covered in scabs and sores and lice, with a bloated stomach and stick-thin arms and bulging, buggy eyes, brought onto the bus sobbing tearlessly because his body was starved for water. And Milk was called Kyle then, rescued from a camp a couple miles from the Canadian border, a big kid, sullen and angry and itching for payback, hard to control, difficult to break, but in the end they broke him.
They broke all of them.
Jeremy to Swizz, Luis to Gummy, Emily to Snickers. A bunch of candy-assed names for a bunch of candy-assed recruits.
The ones they could not break, the ones Wonderland told them were unfit, and the ones whose minds or bodies gave way in basic disappeared into incinerators or into secret holding rooms to retrofit their bodies into bombs. It was easy. It was absurdly easy. Empty the vessel of hope and faith and trust and you can fill it with anything you like. They could have told the kids in Squad 19 that two plus two equals five and they would have believed it. No, not just believed it; they would have killed anyone who claimed otherwise.