And I can’t take it anymore.
Even as my body grows stronger, my spirit begins to crumple.
I really don’t get it. What’s the point? Not their point; that’s been pretty damn clear from the beginning.
I mean what’s the point of us anymore? I’m sure if we didn’t cluster again, they’d have another plan, even if that plan were using infested assassins to take us out one stupid, isolated human at a time.
There’s no winning. If I had somehow saved my sister, it wouldn’t have mattered. I would have bought her another month or two tops.
We’re the dead. There’s no one else now. There’s the past-dead and the future-dead. Corpses and corpses-to-be.
Somewhere between the basement room and this room, I lost Sissy’s locket. I wake up in the middle of the night, my hand clutching empty air, and I hear her screaming my name like she’s standing two feet away, and I’m furious, I’m pissed as hell, and I tell her to shut up, I lost it, it’s gone. I’m dead like her, doesn’t she get it? A zombie, that’s me.
I stop eating. I refuse my meds. I lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, waiting for it to be over, waiting to join my sister and the seven billion other lucky ones. The virus that was eating me has been replaced by a different disease that’s even more hungry. A disease with a kill rate of 100 percent. And I tell myself, Don’t let them do it, man! This is part of their plan, too, but it doesn’t do any good. I can give myself pep talks all day long; it doesn’t change the fact that the moment the mothership appeared in the sky, it was game over. Not a matter of if, but when.
And right when I reach the point of no return, when the last part of me able to fight is about to die, as if he’s been waiting all this time for me to reach that point, my savior appears.
The door opens and his shadow fills the space—tall, lean, hard-edged, as if his shadow were cut from a slab of black marble. That shadow falls over me as he walks toward the bed. I want to look away, but I can’t. His eyes—cold and blue as a mountain lake—pin me down. He comes into the light, and I can see his short-cropped sandy hair and his sharp nose and his thin lips drawn tight in a humorless smile. Crisp uniform. Shiny black boots. The officer insignia on his collar.
He looks down at me in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment. Why can’t I look away from those ice-blue eyes? His face is so chiseled it looks unreal, like a wood carving of a human face.
“Do you know who I am?” he asks. His voice is deep, very deep, a voice-over-on-a-movie-preview deep. I shake my head. How the hell could I know that? I’d never seen him before in my life.
“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vosch, the commander of this base.”
He doesn’t offer me his hand. He just stares at me. Steps around to the end of the bed, looks at my chart. My heart is pounding hard. It feels like I’ve been called to the principal’s office.
“Lungs good. Heart rate, blood pressure. Everything’s good.” He hangs the chart back on the hook. “Only everything isn’t good, is it? In fact, everything is pretty damn bad.”
He pulls a chair close to the bed and sits down. The motion is seamless, smooth, uncomplicated, like he’s practiced it for hours and gotten sitting down to an exact science. He adjusts the crease in his pants into a perfectly straight line before he goes on.
“I’ve seen your Wonderland profile. Very interesting. And very instructive.”
He reaches into his pocket, again with so much grace that it’s more like a dance move than a gesture, and pulls out Sissy’s silver locket.
“I believe this is yours.”
He drops it on the bed next to my hand. Waits for me to grab it. I force myself to lie still, I’m not sure why.
His hand returns to his breast pocket. He tosses a wallet-size photo into my lap. I pick it up. There’s a little blond kid around six, maybe seven. With Vosch’s eyes. Being held in the arms of a pretty lady around Vosch’s age.
“You know who they are?”
Not a hard question. I nod. For some reason, the picture bothers me. I hold it out for him to take back. He doesn’t.
“They’re my silver chain,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.
“They didn’t have to do it this way, you know. Have you thought about that? They could have taken their own sweet time killing us—so why did they decide to kill us so quickly? Why send down a plague that kills nine out of every ten people? Why not seven out of ten? Why not five? In other words, what’s their damn hurry? I have a theory about that. Would you like to hear it?”
No, I think. I wouldn’t. Who is this guy, and why is he here talking to me?
“There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can you imagine seven billion of anything? I have trouble doing it. It pushes the limits of our ability to comprehend. And that’s exactly why they did it. Like running up the score in football. You played football, right? It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.”
He takes the photograph and slips it back into his pocket. “So I don’t think about the 6.98 billion people. I think about just two.”
He nods toward Sissy’s locket. “You left her. When she needed you, you ran. And you’re still running. Don’t you think it’s time you stop running and fight for her?”
I open my mouth, and whatever I meant to say comes out as, “She’s dead.”
He waves his hand in the air. I’m being stupid. “We’re all dead, son. Some of us are just a little further along than others. You’re wondering who the hell I am and why I’m here. Well, I told you who I am, and now I’m going to tell you why I’m here.”
“Good,” I whisper. Maybe after he tells me, he’ll leave me alone. He’s weirding me out. Something about the way he looks at me with that icy stare, the—there’s no other word for it—hardness of him, like he’s a statue come to life.
“I’m here because they’ve killed almost all of us, but not all of us. And that’s their mistake, son. That’s the flaw in their plan. Because if you don’t kill all of us all at once, whoever’s left are not going to be the weak ones. The strong ones—and only the strong ones—will survive. The bent but unbroken, if you know what I mean. People like me. And people like you.”
I’m shaking my head. “I’m not strong.”
“Well, that’s where you and I will have to disagree. You see, Wonderland doesn’t just map out your experiences; it maps out you. It tells us not just who you are, but what you are. Your past and your potential. And your potential, I kid you not, is off the charts. You are exactly what we need at exactly the time we need it.”
He stands up. Towering over me. “Get up.”
Not a request. His voice is as rock hard as his features. I heave myself onto the floor. He brings his face close to mine and says in a low, dangerous voice, “What do you want? Be honest.”
“I want you to leave.”
“No.” Shaking his head sharply. “What do you want?”
I feel my lower lip poking out, like a tiny kid about to collapse completely. My eyes are burning. I bite down hard on the edges of my tongue and force myself not to look away from the cold fire in his eyes.
“Do you want to die?”
Do I nod? I can’t remember. Maybe I did, because he says, “I’m not going to let you. So now what?”
“So I guess I’m going to live.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to die. You’re going to die, and there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do to stop it. You, me, everyone left on this big, beautiful blue planet is going to die and make way for them.”
He’s cut right to the heart of it. It’s the perfect thing to say at the perfect moment, and what he’s been trying to get out of me suddenly explodes.
“Then what’s the point, huh?” I shout into his face. “What’s the f**king point? You have all the answers, so you tell me, because I have no idea anymore why I should give a damn!”
He grabs me by the arm and slings me toward the window. He’s beside me in two seconds and flings open the curtain. I see the school buses idling beside the hangar and a line of children waiting to go inside.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” he snarls. “Ask them why you should give a damn. Tell them there’s no point. Tell them you want to die.”
He grabs my shoulders and whirls me around to face him. Slaps me hard in the chest.
“They’ve flipped the natural order on us, boy. Better to die than live. Better to give up than fight. Better to hide than face. They know the way to break us is to kill us first here.” Slapping my chest again. “The final battle for this planet will not be fought over any plain or mountain or jungle or desert or ocean. It will happen here.” Popping me again. Hard. Pop, pop, pop.
And I’m totally gone by this point, giving in to everything I’ve bottled up inside since the night my sister died, sobbing like I’ve never cried before, like crying is something new to me and I like the way it feels.