This might not be Ringer’s doing—it may be the result of Vosch exercising the final option.
It takes me hours to reach the last level, the bottom of this death pit.
She barely lifts her head when I open the stairwell door. I may have shouted her name; I don’t remember.
I also don’t remember stepping over Vosch’s body, but I must have: It was in my way. My boot hits the kill switch lying beside her. It skitters across the floor.
“Walker . . . ,” she gasps, pointing over my shoulder down the long hallway. “I think he’s—”
I shake my head. She’s hurt and still imagines I’d worry about him for even one second? I touch her shoulder. Her dark hair brushes the back of my hand. Her eyes shine. Their brightness goes all the way down.
“You found me,” she says.
I kneel beside her. I take her hand. “I found you.”
“My back is broken,” she says. “I can’t walk.”
I slide my arms beneath her. “I’ll carry you.”
BEN
THE LATE-AFTERNOON SUN polishes the dusty windows of the superstore a lustrous gold. Inside, the light has faded to gray. We’ve got less than an hour to beat the dark back to the house. The day may belong to us, but the night belongs to the coyotes and the packs of wild dogs that roam the banks of the Colorado and wander the outskirts of Marble Falls. I’m well-armed, I’ve got no love for coyotes, but I hate shooting the dogs. The older ones were somebody’s pet once; it feels like giving up all hope of redemption.
And it isn’t just dogs and coyotes. A couple of weeks after we crossed the border into Texas, back in late summer, Marika spotted escapees from some zoo drinking a few miles upriver—a lioness and her two cubs. Ever since then, Sam has been itching for a safari. He wants to capture and tame an elephant so he can ride on it like Aladdin. Or catch a monkey to domesticate. He isn’t picky.
“Hey, Sam,” I call down the aisle. He’s wandered off again in search of treasure. Lately it’s been LEGOs. Before that it was Lincoln Logs. He’s developed a love for building things. He’s made a fort, a tree house, and started on an underground bunker in the backyard.
“What?” he shouts back from the toy section.
“It’s getting late. We have to make a decision here.”
“I told you I don’t care! You decide!” Something crashes off a shelf and he curses loudly.
“Hey, what’d I tell you about that?” I call over to him. “Watch your language.”
“Fuckety fuck fuck, shithole.”
I sigh. “Come on, Sam, we gotta haul this thing back three friggin’ miles, which I’d rather not do in the dark.”
“I’m busy.”
I turn back to the display. Well, the prelits are useless. That leaves either the six, eight, or ten foot. The tens are too tall for the ceiling. Either the six or eight, then. A six would be easier to transport, but it looks like crap. The Texas heat has done a number on it. Needles bent and soft, big bare spots in some places where they fell off. The eights don’t look much better, but they’re not quite as scrawny. But eight damn feet! Maybe their storeroom has new ones in boxes.
I’m still debating with myself when I hear an all-too-familiar, all-too-sickening sound: a bullet racking into the chamber of a pistol.
“Don’t move!” Sam shouts. “Lemme see your hands! Hands!”
I draw my own weapon and race down the aisle as fast as my bum leg will allow, slipping on the carpet of rat droppings and hopping over fallen shelving and ripped-open boxes, until I reach the toy section and the kid who’s got a downed man at gunpoint.
My age. Wearing fatigues. A 5th Wave eyepiece hangs around his scrawny neck. He’s leaning against the back wall beneath the board games, one arm pressing against his gut, the other on top of his head. My heart slows a little. I didn’t think it was a Silencer—Marika killed the one assigned to Marble Falls months ago—but you can never be sure.
“Other arm!” Sam shouts at him.
“I’m unarmed . . . ,” the guy gasps in a deep Texas drawl.
Sam says to me, “Search him, Zombie.”
“Where’s your squad?” I ask. I have a vision of being ambushed.
“No squad. Just me.”
“You’re hurt,” I say. I can see the blood, mostly dried but some fresh, on his shirtfront. “What happened?”
He shakes his head and coughs. A rattle in his chest. Pneumonia, maybe. “Sniper,” he manages after catching his breath.
“Where? Here in Marble Falls or . . . ?”
The arm pressing against his gut moves. I feel Sam tense beside me and I reach out and put my hand over the barrel of his Beretta. “Wait,” I murmur.
“I’m not telling you anything, you infested piece of shit.”
“Okay. Then I’ll tell you: We aren’t infested. Nobody is.” I’m wasting my breath. I might as well tell him that he’s actually a geranium having a very weird dream. “Hang on a second.”
I tug Sam to the opposite end of the aisle and whisper, “This is a problem.”
He shakes his head vehemently. “No, it isn’t. We have to kill him.”
“Nobody’s killing anybody, Sam. That’s done.”
“We can’t leave him here, Zombie. What if he’s lying about his squad? What if he’s faking being hurt? We have to kill him before he kills us.”
His face turned up to me, his eyes shining in the dying light, shining with hate and fear. Kill him before he kills us. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I wonder what Cassie died for. The tiger’s loosed from its cage and there’s no capturing it. How do we rebuild what’s been lost? In an abandoned convenience store, a terrified girl mows down an innocent man because her trust has been shattered. There’s no other way to be sure, no other option to be safe.