The Last Star

by Rick Yancey

  “THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE.”

  I shove open the door.

  Total darkness smashes down.

  82

  NO LIGHT. NO SIREN. No voice so soothing, it’s unnerving. Total dark, utter silence. My first thought is that Ringer must have cut the power. My next thought is how odd that would be, since we never discussed cutting the power. My third thought? Same as the one on the chopper: Ringer’s a plant, a double agent, working with Vosch to accomplish his nefarious scheme for total world domination. Probably a power-sharing arrangement: Very well, it’s decided. You will control all territory west of the Mississippi . . .

  I dig into my pockets for the penlight. I know I grabbed one. I specifically remember checking the batteries before tucking it away. In my panic—okay, not panic, haste, I am in haste—I pull out a power bar and thumb the switch that is not there. Damn you and your damn bars, Ben Parish! I hurl the bar into the void.

  I’m not disoriented. I know where I am. Straight ahead is the walkway to the command center. I can hunt for the light as I go. No biggie. Once I’m in the center, there’re a couple of heavily manned checkpoints to pass, several steel doors with electronic locks to breach, four flights of stairs, a mile-long hallway terminating at a green door, which I won’t be able to tell is green unless I can find my fucking penlight.

  I shuffle forward, one hand sweeping the air in front of me, the other patting, digging, fumbling, and clawing at my fatigues. Too many pockets. Too many damn pockets. My breath a tornado ripping across the prairie. My heart a freight train rumbling down the tracks. Should I stop and empty all my pockets? Wouldn’t I end up saving time? I keep moving, part of me marveling at the fact that something like losing a penlight could throw me.

  Chill, Cassie. In situations like this, darkness is your friend.

  Unless they’ve got IR, which of course they do. They’ve blinded me; they’re sure as hell not blind.

  I keep moving. In haste. Not panic.

  Halfway across the walkway now. I know I’m halfway across because I find the light and click on the damned elusive thing. The beam hits the frosted glass doors straight ahead, a blurry blob of shininess. I draw my sidearm. On the other side of those doors is the first checkpoint. I know this for a fact—or a Ringer-supplied fact. It’s also our rendezvous spot, basically because this is as far as I was going to get as a non-enhanced, ordinary mortal.

  The command center is the most heavily fortified building on base, manned by elite troops and protected by state-of-the-art surveillance technology. After she set off her last diversionary IED, Ringer was hitting the center from the opposite end (penetrating was the word she used, which made me feel all icky) and meeting me here, after Ringer did what Ringer does best: kill people.

  Are you killing Vosch before meeting me? I asked.

  If I find him first.

  Well, don’t go out of your way. The quicker we can get to Wonderland . . .

  And she gave me a look like, Don’t tell me. So I responded with a look that said, I’m telling you.

  Nothing to do now but wait. I sidestep to the wall. Switch out the handgun for the rifle. Try not to worry about where she is, if she is, and what’s taking her so long. Also, I need to pee.

  So when I hear you set off the fifth bomb . . .

  Fourth. I’m holding the fifth in reserve.

  Reserve for what?

  I’m going to stuff it in his mouth and light it.

  She said it with no emotion. No hate or satisfaction or anticipation or anything. Sure, she says most things unemotionally, but this was one of those things where you expect a little passion to permeate.

  You must really hate him.

  Hate isn’t the answer.

  I didn’t ask a question.

  It isn’t hate and it isn’t rage, Sullivan.

  Okay, then. What is the answer? Feeling like I’ve been manipulated into asking the question.

  She turned away.

  I wait beside the frosted glass doors. The minutes crawl. Dear God, how long could it take a superhuman WMD to overcome a few guards and foil a high-tech security system? After the furious rush to reach this spot, nothing. I’d be bored out of my mind if I wasn’t already scared out of it. Where the hell is Ringer?

  Click. I turn off the light to save the batteries. The unfortunate by-product of my thriftiness is that darkness returns. Click. On. Click. Off. Click, click, click, click.

  Hissssss. I hear the sound before I feel the water.

  It’s raining.

  83

  CLICK. I SHINE THE LIGHT toward the ceiling. The sprinklers are running at full throttle. Cool water spatters my upturned face.

  Great. One of Ringer’s bombs must have triggered the system.

  I’m soaked in minutes. It totally isn’t fair, I know, but I blame her. I’m wet, I’m cold, I’m hyped on adrenaline, and now I really have to pee.

  And still no Ringer.

  How long do I wait for you?

  I don’t know how long it will take.

  Sure, but at some point, won’t it be obvious you’re not coming?

  That would be the point when you stop waiting, Sullivan.

  Well, right. I’m really regretting not popping her in the nose when I had the chance. Wait. I did pop her in the nose when I had the chance. Good. One less thing.

  I can’t sit here forever hunched over in a wet, miserable ball. If it’s my doom to be wet and miserable, I’m going to meet it standing up. I’ll test those doors. Just a little push to see if they’ll open. There can’t be anyone close on the other side, otherwise they’d have seen my light or noticed my shadow and pounced on me in the dark.

  The artificial rain drips down my forehead, hangs from the ends of my hair, traces my jaw like a lover’s finger. Water squishes beneath my boots. My wounded hand has begun to sting, sting bad, a thousand tiny needles stabbing into my skin, and then I notice the burning sensation on my scalp. The feeling spreads. My neck, my back, my chest, my stomach, my face. My entire body is on fire. I stumble from the doors back to my cozy spot against the wall. Something is not right. The ancient part of my brain is screaming its lungs out. Something is not right.

  I click on the penlight and shine it on my hand. Huge welts crisscross the skin. Fresh blood seeps from the shrapnel holes and quickly turns a deep, velvety purple, as if my blood is reacting to something in the water.

  Something in the water.

  The heat is nearly unbearable, like I’ve been doused with scalding-hot water, only the liquid falling on me isn’t hot. I shine the light on my other hand. It’s covered with bright, dime-sized red polka dots. Hastily—not panicky—I yank open the jacket, pull up my shirt, and see a starfield of crimson suns burning against a backdrop of pale pink.

  I’ve got three options: stand here stupidly beneath the poisoned spray, stupidly bust through the frosted glass doors into God-knows-what, or wisely get out of this complex before my skin liquefies and sloughs off my bones.

  I decide to go with Option Three.

  My little light slices through the mist, cutting rainbows as I run. I bang into the stairwell, bounce against the wall, slip on the slick concrete, and tumble down to the landing. The penlight flies from my hand and winks out. Gotta get outside, outside, outside. Once there, I’ll strip off my clothes and roll naked in the dirt like a pig. Hot matchsticks pressing against my eyes, tears streaming down my cheeks, hot coals searing my mouth and throat, and every other inch of my body puckering up into pestilential boils.

  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.

  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 gues
sing 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.

  “Your name is Benjamin Thomas Parish,” she informs me. “Aka Zombie, former recruit and current sergeant of Squad 53, which went Dorothy last fall and has been on the run ever since the operation you led that took out Camp Haven. Your former squad is dead or MIA, with the exception of the private whose picture I just showed you. Marika Kimura, aka Ringer, who has commandeered one of our choppers and is now on a heading due north of this position. We think we know where she’s going, but we would like to know why and what she intends to do once she gets there.”

  She waits. I’m thinking the pause has been offered for me to fill in the silence. Ringer’s full name is Marika Kimura. Why did I have to learn her first and last name from total strangers?

  The silence drags out. She’s giving off the vibe that she could wait forever, even though we both know she doesn’t have that long.

  “I’m not Dorothy,” I finally say. “One of us is, but it isn’t me.”

  She shakes her head. “Dude, you’re so far off the reservation, I can’t see you with a frickin’ telescope.” She grabs my chin with those long fingers and squeezes. Hard. “I don’t have the patience for this shit and you don’t have the time. What’s the plan, Sergeant Zombie? What’s Ringer’s game?”

  Damn, she’s strong. I have some trouble opening my mouth to talk. “Chess.”

  She holds on to my chin for another second, then lets go with a disgusted snort. She motions toward the front door of the farmhouse and two figures emerge, one tall, the other short—Nugget-sized short.