What’s that, Cassie? What kind of boils?
Now I get it. Now I understand.
Cut the power. Open the floodgates. Unleash the pestilence. General Order Four is the invasion in microcosm, the acoustical version of the first three worldwide waves, same tune, different lyrics, and any intruder caught in their wake humanity’s avata
r.
Which would be me. I am humanity.
Outside, outside, outside! I’m on the main floor, the main windowless floor based on my memory since I have no light and no glowing red exit sign to guide the way. Not in haste anymore. In full-bore panic.
Because I’ve been here before. I know what comes after the 3rd Wave.
84
SILENCER
TEN MILLENNIA ADRIFT.
Ten thousand years unbounded by space or time, stripped of the senses, pure thought, substance without form, motion without gesture, paralyzed force.
Then the dark split open and there was light.
Air filling its lungs. Blood moving through its veins. Imprisoned for ten millennia inside its limitless mind, now finite. Now free.
It climbs the stairs toward the surface.
Red light pulsing. Siren blaring. A human voice assaulting its ears:
“GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO REPORT TO YOUR DESIGNATED SECURE AREA.”
It rises from the deep.
The door above bangs open and a troop of the mammalian vermin thunders toward it. Juveniles carrying weapons. In the confined space of the stairwell, their human stench is overwhelming.
“What are you, fucking deaf?” one of them shouts. The voice is grating, the sound of their language ugly. “We’re GO-Four, dipshit! Get your ass back down into that bunk—”
It snaps the juvenile’s neck. The others it kills with equal efficiency and speed. Their bodies gather around its feet. Broken necks, burst hearts, shattered skulls. In the instant before they died, perhaps they looked into its eyes, blank and unblinking, a shark’s eyes, the soulless predator rising from the depths.
“THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE.”
The stairwell plunges into darkness. An ordinary human would be sightless. Its human container, though, is not ordinary.
It has been enhanced.
In the first-floor hallway of the command center, the sprinkler system bursts to life. The Silencer lifts its face and drinks the lukewarm spray. It has not tasted water in ten millennia, and the sensation is both jarring and exhilarating.
The corridor is deserted. The vermin have retreated into safe rooms, where they will remain until the two intruders have been silenced.
Silenced by the inhuman thing inside this human body.
In the downpour, the wet jumpsuit quickly molds to its powerful physique. It is unburdened by this body’s history; it has no memory of childhood or the farm where its shell was raised, no recollection of the human family who loved and nurtured it, the same who died, one by one, while it stood by and did nothing.
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.