She nods. “No green.” Watching me with those dark eyes like knives cutting deep.
“Maybe he’s not the shooter…,” I try.
“Saw his weapon,” she says. “Sniper rifle.”
So why doesn’t he glow green? The ones on the street lit up, and they were farther away than he is. Then I think it doesn’t matter if he glows green or purple or nothing at all: He’s trying to kill us, and we can’t move until he’s neutralized. And we have to move before the one who got away comes back with reinforcements.
“Aren’t they smart?” Ringer mutters, like she’s read my mind. “Put on a human face so no human face can be trusted. The only answer: Kill everyone or risk being killed by anyone.”
“He thinks we’re one of them?”
“Or decided it doesn’t matter. Only way to be safe.”
“But he fired on us—not on the three right below him. Why would he ignore the easy shots to take the impossible one?”
Like me, she doesn’t have an answer to that question. Unlike me, it’s not high on her list of problems to be resolved. “Only way to be safe,” she repeats pointedly. I look over at Poundcake, who’s looking back at me. Waiting for my decision, but there really isn’t a decision to make.
“Can you take him from here?” I ask Ringer.
She shakes her head. “Too far away. I’d just give away our position.”
I scoot over to Poundcake. “Stay here. In ten minutes, open up on him to cover our crossing.” Staring up at me all doe-eyed and trusting. “You know, Private, it’s customary to acknowledge an order from your commanding officer.” Poundcake nods. I try again: “With a ‘yes, sir.’” He nods again. “Like, out loud. With words.” Another nod.
Okay, at least I tried.
When Ringer and I join the others, Oompa’s body is gone. They stashed him in one of the cars. Flint’s idea. Very similar to his idea for the rest of us.
“We’ve got good cover in here. I say we hunker down in the cars until pickup.”
“Only one person’s vote counts in this unit, Flint,” I tell him.
“Yeah, and how’s that working out for us?” he says, thrusting his chin toward me, mouth curled into a sneer. “Oh, I know. Let’s ask Oompa!”
“Flintstone,” Ringer says. “At ease. Zombie’s right.”
“Until you two walk into an ambush, and then I guess he’s wrong.”
“At which point you’re the C.O., and you can make the call,” I snap. “Dumbo, you’ve got Teacup duty.” If we can pry her off Ringer. She’s pasted herself back onto Ringer’s leg. “If we’re not back in thirty minutes, we’re not coming back.”
And then Ringer says, because she’s Ringer, “We’re coming back.”
59
THE TANKER’S BURNED down to its tires. Crouching in the pedestrian entrance to the garage, I point at the building across the street glowing orange in the firelight.
“That’s our entry point. Third window from the left-hand corner, completely busted out, see it?”
Ringer nods absently. Something’s on her mind. She keeps fiddling with the eyepiece, pulling it away from her eye, pushing it back again. The certainty she showed in front of the squad is gone.
“The impossible shot…,” she whispers. Then she turns to me. “How do you know when you’re going Dorothy?”
I shake my head. Where’s this coming from? “You’re not going Dorothy,” I tell her, and punctuate it with a pat on the arm.
“How can you be sure?” Eyes darting back and forth, restless, looking for somewhere to light. The way Tank’s eyes danced before he popped. “Crazy people—they never think they’re crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them.”
There’s a desperate, very un-Ringerlike look in her eyes.
“You’re not crazy. Trust me.”
Wrong thing to say.
“Why should I?” she shoots back. It’s the first time I’ve heard any emotion out of her. “Why should I trust you, and why should you trust me? How do you know I’m not one of them, Zombie?”
Finally, an easy question. “Because we’ve been screened. And we don’t light up in each other’s eyepieces.”
She looks at me for a very long moment, then she murmurs, “God, I wish you played chess.”
Our ten minutes are up. Above us, Poundcake opens up on the rooftop across the street; the sniper immediately returns fire; and we go. We’re barely off the curb when the asphalt explodes in front of us. We split up, Ringer zipping off to the right, me to the left, and I hear the whine of the bullet, a high-pitched sandpapery sound, about a month before it tears open the sleeve of my jacket. The instinct burned into me from months of drilling to return fire is very hard to resist. I leap onto the curb and in two strides I’m pressed hard against the comforting cold concrete of the building. That’s when I see Ringer slip on a patch of ice and fall face-first toward the curb. She waves me back. “No!” A round bites off a piece of the curbing that rakes across her neck. Screw her no. I bound over to her, grab her arm, and sling her toward the building. Another round whizzes past my head as I backpedal to safety.
She’s bleeding. The wound shimmers black in the firelight. She waves me on, Go, go. We trot along the side of the building to the broken window and dive inside.
Took less than a minute to cross. Felt like two hours.
We’re inside what used to be an upscale boutique. Looted several times over, full of empty racks and broken hangers, creepy headless mannequins and posters of overly serious fashion models on the walls. A sign on the service counter reads, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE.
Ringer’s scrunched into a corner of the room with good angles on the windows and the door coming in from the lobby. A hand on her neck, and that hand is gloved in blood. I have to look. She doesn’t want me to look. I’m like, “Don’t be stupid, I have to look.” So she lets me look. It’s superficial, between a cut and a gouge. I find a scarf lying on a display table and she wads it up and presses it against her neck. Nods at my torn sleeve.
“Are you hit?”
I shake my head and ease down on the floor beside her. We’re both pulling hard for air. My head swims with adrenaline. “Not to be judgmental, but as a sniper, this guy sucks.”
“Three shots, three misses. Makes you wish this was baseball.”
“A lot more than three,” I correct her. Multiple tries at the targets, and the only true hit a superficial wound to Teacup’s leg.
“Amateur.”
“He probably is.”
“Probably.” She bites off the word.
“He didn’t light up and he’s no pro. A loner defending his turf, maybe hiding from the same guys we came after. Scared shitless.” I don’t add like us. I’m only sure about one of us.
Outside, Poundcake continues to occupy the sniper. Pop-pop-pop, a heavy quiet, then pop-pop-pop. The sniper responds each time.
“Then this should be easy,” Ringer says, her mouth set in a grim line.
I’m a little taken aback. “He didn’t light up, Ringer. We don’t have authorization to—”
“I do.” Pulling her rifle into her lap. “Right here.”
“Um. I thought our mission was to save humanity.”
She looks at me out of the side of her uncovered eye. “Chess, Zombie: defending yourself from the move that hasn’t happened yet. Does it matter that he doesn’t light up through our eyepieces? That he missed us when he could have taken us down? If two possibilities are equally probable but mutually exclusive, which one matters the most? Which one do you bet your life on?”
I’m nodding at her, but not following her at all. “You’re saying he still could be infested,” I guess.
“I’m saying the safe bet is to proceed as if he is.”
She pulls her combat knife from its sheath. I flinch, remembering her Dorothy remark. Why did Ringer pull out her knife?
“What matters,” she says thoughtfully. There’s a terrible stillness to her now, a thunderhead about to crack, a steaming volcano about to blow. “What matters, Zombie? I was always pretty good at figuring that out. Got a lot better at it after the attacks. What really matters? My mom died first. That was bad—but what really mattered was I still had my dad, my brother, and baby sister. Then I lost them, and what mattered was I still had me. And there wasn’t much that mattered when it came to me. Food. Water. Shelter. What else do you need? What else matters?”
This is bad, halfway down the road to being really bad. I have no idea where she’s going with this, but if Ringer goes Dorothy on me now, I’m screwed. Maybe the rest of my crew with me. I need to bring her back into the present. Best way is by touch, but I’m afraid if I touch her she’ll gut me with that ten-inch blade.
“Does it matter, Zombie?” She cranes her neck to look up at me, turning the knife slowly in her hands. “That he shot at us and not the three Teds right in front of him? Or that when he shot at us he missed every time?” Turning the knife slowly, the tip denting her finger. “Does it matter that they got everything up and running after the EMP attack? That they’re operating right underneath the mothership, gathering up survivors, killing infesteds and burning their bodies by the hundreds, arming and training us and sending us out to kill the rest? Tell me that those things don’t matter. Tell me the odds are insignificant that they aren’t really them. Tell me what possibility I should bet my life on.”