The Last Star (16 page)

37

SAM

THE FRONT DOOR
flew open and Cassie lunged in from the porch, holding her rifle.

“Sam! Quick, go wake up Evan. Someone’s—”

He didn’t wait for the rest. He raced down the hall to Evan’s room. Zombie had come back; Sam was sure of it.

Evan wasn’t asleep. He was sitting up in bed, staring at the ceiling.

“What is it, Sam?”

“Zombie’s back.”

Evan shook his head.
How could that be?
Then he slid from the bed, grabbed his rifle, and followed Sam down the hall and into the living room.

And Cassie was saying, “What do you mean, Dumbo’s gone?”

There was Zombie and Ringer and a stranger in the room with Cassie. Dumbo wasn’t there. Teacup wasn’t there.

“He’s dead,” Ringer answered, and Sam asked, “Teacup, too?” And Ringer nodded.
Teacup, too.

Behind him, Evan Walker asked, “Who is this?” He was talking about the stranger, a blond older lady with a nice face, about the age of Sam’s mother when she died.

“She’s with me,” Ringer said. “She’s okay.”

The lady was looking at Sam. She was smiling. “My name is Constance. And you must be Sam. Private Nugget. It’s very nice to meet you.”

She held out her hand. His daddy taught him to always shake hands firmly.
A good, strong grip, Sam my man, but don’t squeeze
too
hard.

The smiling lady did, though—very hard. She yanked Sam into her chest, wrapping an arm around his neck, and then he felt the end of a gun pressing against his temple.

38

“THIS IS GOING
to go smooth and easy,” the lady yelled over the jumbled-up shouts of Zombie and Cassie. “
Smooth
and
easy.
”

Zombie was looking at Ringer, who was looking at Evan Walker, and Cassie was looking at Ringer, too, and then his sister said, “You bitch.”

“Weapons, over there,” the lady said. Her voice still had a smile in it. “Stack ’em by the fireplace.
Now.
”

They disarmed, one by one. Cassie said, “Don’t hurt him.”

“Nobody’s getting hurt, sweetheart,” the lady said, smiley-voiced. “Where’s the other one?”

“The other what?” Cassie asked.

“Human. There’s one more. Where is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Cassie,” Evan Walker said. But he was looking over Sam’s head at the lady’s face. “Go get Megan.”

He saw his sister mouth to Evan Walker,
Do something.

Evan Walker shook his head no.

“She won’t come out of her room,” Cassie said.

“Maybe she’ll change her mind if you tell her I’m going to blow your little brother’s brains out.”

Zombie’s face was pale and caked in dried blood, so he looked like a real zombie. “That’s not going to happen,” Zombie said. “So what now?”

“Then she shoots Nugget and keeps shooting people until Megan comes out,” Ringer said. “Zombie, trust me on this.”

“Oh, sure,” Cassie said. “Terrific idea. Let’s all trust Ringer.”

“She’s not here to hurt anyone,” Ringer said. “But she will if she has to. Tell them, Constance.”

“Me,” Evan Walker said. “You’ve come for me, haven’t you?”

“The girl first,” Constance said. “Then we talk.”

Cassie said, “That’s fine. Talking’s one of my favorite things. But first maybe you could let my little brother go . . . take me instead?” Cassie’s hands were up and she was putting on her fake smile. It wasn’t a good fake smile. You could always tell when she was faking, because she didn’t look friendly; she looked like she was going to throw up.

The lady’s arm like an iron bar pressing against his windpipe, hard to breathe now, and something else pressing against the small of his back, his special secret, nobody knew, not Zombie or even Cassie, and not this lady, either.

Sam slipped his hand behind his back, into the space between him and Constance.

He was a soldier. He had forgotten his ABCs but he remembered the lessons of combat.
Your squad before God,
that’s what they taught him. He could remember only the vaguest outline of his mother’s face, but he knew their faces, Dumbo’s and Teacup’s, Poundcake’s and Oompa’s and Flintstone’s. His squad. His brothers and sisters. He couldn’t recall the name of his school or what the street he lived on looked like. Those things and the hundred other forever-gone things didn’t matter anymore. Only one thing mattered now, the cry of the firing range and the obstacle course rising from the throats of his squad:
No mercy ever!

“You now have fifteen seconds,” the lady holding him said. “Don’t make me count them down; it’s so
melodramatic.
”

Then the gun was in his hand and he did not hesitate. He knew what to do. He was a soldier.

The gun kicked in his hand when he fired; he almost dropped it. The bullet ripped through the lady’s abdomen and exited her lower back, the slug burying itself in the dusty sofa cushions. The noise was very loud in the small space, and Cassie cried out: For an awful second, she must have thought it was the lady’s gun that went off.

The shot failed to drop the Constance lady or break her hold on his neck. Her grip loosened, though, at the shock of impact, and Sam heard the tiniest of gasps, a startled
huh,
and before he could blink, Ringer was flying over the coffee table, arm drawn back, hand curled into a fist. Her knuckles grazed his cheek before landing against the side of Constance’s head, and then a hand he didn’t see flung off the arm around his neck and he stumbled free. His sister reached for him, but he spun away, holding the gun with both hands, and Ringer yanked Constance completely off her feet and swung her body high into the air like an axman cutting firewood, smashing her down onto the coffee table. The table exploded, wood and glass and pieces of jigsaw puzzle spewing in every direction.

Constance sat up; Ringer rammed the heel of her hand into Constance’s nose.
Pop!
You could hear it break. Blood burst from her open mouth.

Fingers clawing at his shirt: Cassie’s. He pulled away. Cassie wasn’t part of a squad. She didn’t know what it meant to be a soldier. He did. He knew exactly what it meant.

No mercy ever.

He stepped over the broken pieces of the table and pointed the gun at the middle of the lady’s face. Her bloody mouth pulled into a soulless snarl of a smile, bloody lips and bloody teeth, and
then he was back in his mother’s room, and she was dying of the plague, the Red Death, Cassie called it, and he was standing by her bed and she was smiling at him with bloody teeth, face stained with bloody tears; he saw it so clearly, the face he’d forgotten in the face he saw now.

In the instant before he pulled the trigger, Sammy Sullivan remembered his mother’s face, the face
they
had given her, and the bullet that tore down the barrel held his rage, bore his grief, contained the sum of all he had lost. It connected them as if by a silver cord. When her face blew apart, they became one, victim and perpetrator, predator and prey.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

39

RINGER

THE BLOOD SPRAY
blinds me for a second, but the hub retains the data of Nugget’s location and the precise position of the gun. By the time that second expires, his hand is empty and mine isn’t.

At the end of the next second, the gun is trained at the face of Evan Walker.

Walker is the linchpin, the fulcrum upon which our survival rests. Alive, he’s an unacceptable risk. Pulling the trigger might cost my own life; I know that. Cassie—even Zombie—might kill me for killing him, but I don’t have a choice. We’re out of time.

None of them can hear it yet, but I can—the sound of the chopper bearing down from the north, loaded with Hellfire missiles and a squad of Vosch’s best sharpshooters. The loss of Constance’s signal can only mean one thing.

“Ringer,” Zombie cries hoarsely. “What the fuck?”

A tiny figure rushes from my right. Nugget. I pull the punch so I don’t break his sternum, but the blow sends him flying off his feet and into Sullivan’s chest. They plop to the floor in a sprawl of arms and legs.

I stay focused on the target.

“Ben, don’t,” Walker says calmly, though Zombie hasn’t moved. “Let’s hear what she wants.”

“You know what I want.” Finger tightening on the trigger.

There’s no question that Walker has to die. It’s so obvious, even Nugget would agree if he knew the facts. His sister, too. Well, maybe not. Love blinds more than it reveals. Razor taught me that.

“Ben!” Walker shouts. “
No.
”

Zombie doesn’t dive for a weapon. He doesn’t leap toward me. He takes two very slow, very deliberate steps to put his body between me and Evan Walker.

“Sorry, Ringer,” Zombie says. Incredibly, he’s decided to whip out the slayer smile. “Not going to happen.” He raises his arms as if to offer a better target.

“Zombie, you don’t know . . .”

“Well, that’s a given. I don’t know shit.”

If it were anyone else.

Sullivan, even Nugget.

What is the cost, Marika? What is the price?
“Zombie, there’s no time.”

“No time for what?”

He heard it then; they all heard it; it had come within range of normal human hearing. The chopper.

“Holy shit,” Sullivan gasped. “What have you done?
What the hell have you done?
”

I ignore her. Only Zombie matters. “They don’t want us,” I tell him. “They want him. We can’t let them have him, Zombie.”

If Zombie would just dip his head a half inch. That’s all I need, half an inch. The 12th System will do the rest.

I’m sorry, Zombie. There’s no time.

The hub locks in. I let loose the round. The bullet smashes into Zombie’s thigh.

He’s supposed to go down to clear the way for the next round—the kill shot to Evan Walker’s head. He doesn’t.

Instead, he falls back into Walker’s chest and Walker wraps his arms around him, holding him up or using him as a human shield. Beneath the faint sound of the rotors outside, an even fainter sound, the
thu-wapp
of a parachute deploying. Then another. Then another.
Thu-wapp, thu-wapp, thu-wapp, thu-wapp, thu-wapp.
Five in all.

It hits me I’ve been appealing to the wrong person.

“Drop him,” I say to Evan Walker. “If you care at all about what happens to Cassie,
drop him.
”

But he doesn’t and now I’m out of time. Drawn out any further, this stalemate will cost all our lives.

The 5th Wave is coming.