Kistner closes the door. I wrap my fingers around Kistner’s wrists.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Step three: wet willy.
As Kistner pulls back, I drive forward with my legs, slamming my shoulder into his narrow chest, knocking him backward into the concrete wall. Then I yank him forward, pivot behind him, and pull his arm up high behind his back. That forces him to his knees in front of the toilet. I grab a handful of his hair, shove his face into the water. Kistner is stronger than he looks, or I’m a lot weaker than I thought. It seems to take forever for him to pass out.
I let go and stand back. Kistner does a slow roll and flops onto the floor. Shoes, pants. Pulling him upright to yank off the shirt. The shirt’s going to be too small, the pants too long, the shoes too tight. I rip off my gown, toss it into the shower stall, pull on Kistner’s scrubs. The shoes take the longest. Way too small. A sharp pain shoots through my side as I struggle to put them on. Looking down, I see blood seeping through the bandaging. What if I bleed through the shirt?
A thousand ways. Focus on the one way.
Drag Kistner into the stall. Fling the curtain closed. How long will he be out? Doesn’t matter. Keep moving. Don’t think ahead.
Step four: the tracker.
I hesitate at the door. What if someone saw Kistner come in and now sees me, dressed as Kistner, coming out?
Then you’re done. He’s going to kill you anyway. Okay, don’t just die, then. Die trying.
The operating room doors are the length of a football field away, past rows of beds and through what seems like a mob of orderlies and nurses and lab-coated doctors. I walk as quickly as I can toward the doors, favoring my injured side, which throws off my stride but it can’t be helped; for all I know, Vosch has been tracking me and he’s wondering why I’m not going back to my bunk.
Through the swinging doors, now in the scrub room, where a weary-looking doctor is soaped up to his elbows, preparing for surgery. He jumps when I come in.
“What are you doing in here?” he demands.
“I was looking for some gloves. We’ve run out up front.”
The surgeon jerks his head toward a row of cabinets on the opposite wall.
“You’re limping,” he says. “Are you hurt?”
“I pulled a muscle getting a fat guy to the john.”
The doctor rinses the green soap from his forearms. “You should have used a bedpan.”
Boxes of latex gloves, surgical masks, antiseptic pads, rolls of tape. Where the hell is it?
I can feel his breath against the back of my neck.
“There’s the box right in front of you,” he says. The guy’s giving me a funny look.
“Sorry,” I say. “Haven’t had much sleep.”
“Tell me about it!” The surgeon laughs and elbows me square in the gunshot wound. The room spins. Hard. I grit my teeth to keep from screaming.
He hurries through the inner doors to the operating theater. I move down the row of cabinets, throwing open doors, rummaging through the supplies, but I can’t find what I’m looking for. Light-headed, out of breath, my side throbbing like hell. How long will Kistner stay out? How long before someone ducks in for a piss and finds him?
There’s a bin on the floor beside the cabinets labeled HAZARDOUS WASTE—USE GLOVES IN HANDLING. Yank off the top and, bingo, there it is with wads of bloody surgical sponges and used syringes and discarded catheters.
Okay, so the scalpel’s coated in dried blood. I guess I could sterilize it with an antiseptic wipe or wash it in the sink, but there’s no time, and a dirty scalpel is the least of my worries.
Lean against the sink to steady yourself. Push your fingers against your neck to locate the tracker under the skin, and then press, don’t slice, the dull, dirty blade into your neck until it splits open.
79
STEP FIVE: NUGGET.
A very young-looking doctor hurries down the corridor toward the elevators, wearing a white lab coat and a surgical mask. Limping, favoring his left side. If you pulled open his white coat, you might see the dark red stain on his green scrubs. If you pulled down his collar, you might also see the hastily applied bandage on his neck. But if you tried to do either of these things, the young-looking doctor would kill you.
Elevator. Closing my eyes as the car descends. Unless somebody’s conveniently left a golf cart unattended by the front doors, walking distance to the yard is ten minutes. Then the hardest part, finding Nugget among the fifty-plus squads bivouacked there and getting him out without waking anybody. So maybe half an hour to seek and snatch. Another ten or so to slip over to the Wonderland hangar where the buses unload. This is where the plan begins to break down into a series of wild improbabilities: stowing away on an empty bus, overcoming the driver and any soldiers on board once we’re clear of the gate, and then when, where, and how to dump the bus and take off on foot to rendezvous with Ringer?
What if you have to wait for the bus? Where are you going to hide?
I don’t know.
And once you’re on the bus, how long will you have to wait? Thirty minutes? An hour?
I don’t know.
You don’t know? Well, here’s what I know: It’s too much time, Zombie. Somebody’s going to sound the alarm.
She’s right. It is too much time. I should have killed Kistner. It had been one of the original steps:
Step four: kill Kistner.
But Kistner isn’t one of them. Kistner’s just a kid. Like Tank. Like Oompa. Like Flint. Kistner didn’t ask for this war and he didn’t know the truth about it. Maybe he wouldn’t have believed me if I told him the truth, but I never gave him that chance.
You’re soft. You should have killed him. You can’t rely on luck and wishful thinking. The future of humanity belongs to the hardcore.
So when the elevator doors slide open to the main lobby, I make a silent promise to Nugget, the promise I didn’t make to my sister, whose locket he wears around his neck.
If anyone comes between you and me, they’re dead.
And the minute I make that promise, it’s like something in the universe decides to answer, because the air raid sirens go off with an eardrum-busting scream.
Perfect! For once things are going my way. No crossing the length of the camp now. No sneaking into the barracks searching for the Nugget in a haystack. No race to the buses. Instead, a straight shot down the stairwell to the underground complex. Grab Nugget in the organized chaos of the safe room, hide out until the all-clear sounds, and then on to the buses.
Simple.
I’m halfway to the stairs when the deserted lobby lights up in a sickly green glow, the same smoky green that danced around Ringer’s head when I slipped on the eyepiece. The overhead fluorescents have cut off, standard procedure in a drill, so the light isn’t coming from inside, but from somewhere in the parking lot.
I turn around to look. I shouldn’t have.
Through the glass doors, I see a golf cart racing across the parking lot, heading toward the airfield. Then I see the source of the green light sitting in the covered entranceway of the hospital. Shaped like a football, only twice as big. It reminds me of an eye. I stare at it; it stares back at me.
Pulse…Pulse…Pulse…
Flash, flash, flash.
Blinkblinkblink.
80
THE SIREN’S BLARE is so loud, I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck vibrating.
I am scooting backward toward the main duct, away from the armory, when I stop.
Cassie, it’s the armory.
Back to the grate, through which I stare for a full three minutes, scanning the room below for any sign of movement while the siren pounds against my ears, making it very difficult to concentrate, thank you, Colonel Vosch.
“Okay, you damn bear,” I mumble with my swollen tongue. “We’re going in.”
I slam the heel of my bare foot into the grate. Eich! It pops open with one kick. When I quit karate, Mom asked why, and I said it just didn’t challenge me anymore. That was my way of saying I was bored, which you were not allowed to say in front of my mother. If she heard you complain that you were bored, you found yourself with a dust rag in your hand.
I drop into the room. Well, more a medium-size warehouse than a room. Everything an alien invader might need to run a human extermination camp. Against that wall you have your Eyes, several hundred of them, stacked neatly in their own specially designed cubby. On the opposite wall, rows and rows of rifles and grenade launchers and other weaponry that I would have no clue what to do with. Smaller weapons over there, semiautomatics and grenades and ten-inch-long combat knives. There’s a wardrobe section, too, representing every branch of the service and every possible rank, with all the gear to go with it, belts and boots and the military version of the fanny pack.
And me like a kid in a candy shop.
First, off comes the white jumpsuit. I pull the smallest set of fatigues I can find and put them on. Slip on the boots.
Time to gear up. A Luger with a full clip. A couple of grenades. M16? Why not? If you’re going to play the part, look the part. I drop a couple extra clips into my fanny pack. Oh, look, my belt even has a holster for one of those ten-inch, wicked-looking knives! Hi there, ten-inch, wicked-looking knife.
There’s a wooden box beside the gun cabinet. I peek inside and see a stack of gray metal tubes. What are these, some kind of stick-grenade? I pick one up. It’s hollow and threaded at one end. Now I know what it is.