It found no girl hiding inside a tent in the woods, a rifle in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. It never carried her broken body across a sea of white, never pulled her back from the edge of death. There was no rescue of her or her brother, no vow to protect her at all costs.
There is nothing human left in it, nothing human at all.
It does not remember the past; therefore, the past does not exist. Its humanity does not exist.
It does not even have a name.
The enhancement informs it that a chemical agent has been introduced into the water. It will feel none of the poison’s effects. It has been designed to endure pain, to be immune to suffering, its own and its victims’. The ancients had a saying for this, vincit qui patitur, and it applied to the vanquished as well as to the victor. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature’s ladder. The ones who created the program driving the human body that was once called Evan Walker understood this. They had studied the problem for thousands of years.
The fundamental flaw in humanity was its humanity. The useless, baffling, self-destructive human tendency to love, to empathize, to sacrifice, to trust, to imagine anything outside the boundaries of its own skin—these things had driven the species to the edge of destruction. Worse, this one organism threatened the survival of all life on Earth.
The Silencer’s makers did not have to look far for a solution. The answer lay in another species that had conquered the entirety of its domain, ruling it with unquestioned authority for millions of years. Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.
Once a human named Evan Walker had a dream—a dream it can no longer remember—and in that dream there was a tent in the woods and in that tent there was a girl who called herself humanity, and the girl was worth more to it than its own life.
No longer.
When it finds her, and it will find her, it will kill her. Without remorse, without pity. It will kill the one whom Evan Walker loved with all the emotion of a man stepping on a cockroach.
The Silencer has awakened.
85
ZOMBIE
THE FIRST PERSON I SEE is Dumbo.
That’s how I know I’m dead.
I go where you go, Sarge.
Well, Bo, this time it looks like I’ve gone where you went.
I watch through a shimmering fog as he pulls a cold pack from his med kit and breaks the seal to mix the chemicals. The familiar serious look on his face—the mask of worry—like the welfare of the entire world rests on his shoulders, I’ve missed that.
“A cold pack?” I ask him. “What the hell kind of heaven is this, anyway?”
He gives me his shut-up-I’m-working look. Then he presses the pack into my hand and tells me to hold it against the back of my head. His ears look smaller in the shimmering fog. Maybe that’s his heavenly reward: smaller ears.
“I shouldn’t have left you, Bo,” I confess. “I’m sorry.”
He fades into the fog. I wonder who I’ll see next. Teacup? Poundcake? Maybe Flintstone or Tank. I hope it isn’t my old tentmate, Chris. My parents? My sister? Thinking of seeing her again makes my stomach tighten. Dear God, we have stomachs in heaven? I wonder what the food is like.
The face that swims into view isn’t one I know. It’s a black girl around my age, with model-perfect cheekbones and beautiful eyes, though there’s no warmth in them. They shine hard as polished marble. She’s wearing fatigues with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves.
Damn. So far the afterlife is depressingly like my forelife.
“Where is she?” the girl asks.
She squats in front of me and rests her forearms on her thighs. Lean body, like a runner’s. Long, graceful fingers, nicely trimmed nails.
“I’m gonna make you a promise,” she says. “I won’t bullshit you if you don’t bullshit me. Where is she?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” The cold pack feels deliciously good against my throbbing head, and that’s about the only thing that does. It’s starting to dawn on me that I might not be so dead after all.
She reaches into her breast pocket, pulls out a crinkled piece of paper, and tosses it into my lap. Dear God, there’s Ringer lying in a hospital bed with tubes running everywhere, some kind of screenshot from a video camera. Must have been taken around the time Vosch loaded her up with the 12th System.
I look up at the sergeant and say, “I’ve never seen this person before in my life.”
She sighs, then picks up the photo and stuffs it back into her pocket. She stares across the brown fields shimmering in the blaze of starlight. The fog lifts a little. A broken wooden railing, the faded white wall of a farmhouse, and the silhouette of a silo over her shoulder. I’m guessing we’re on the front porch.
“Where was she going?” the girl asks. “And what was she going to do when she got there?”
“Judging from that picture, she’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”
The kids. What have you done with Megan and Nugget? I press my lips together to hold the question inside. They have Megan, no doubt about that—she was with me when Mount Rushmore fell on my head. Maybe not Nugget, though. Maybe he’s still hiding in the pit.