Nugget doesn’t say a word. He watches me work down the line, keeping right beside me as I sidestep to the next body. The hangar is ventilated, but the smell is overpowering. Like any omnipresent smell—or rather, like anything omnipresent—you get used to it; you stop smelling it after a while.
Same is true for your other senses. And your soul. After you’ve seen your five hundredth dead baby, how can you be shocked or sickened or feel anything at all?
Beside me, Nugget is silent, watching.
“Tell me if you’re going to be sick,” I tell him sternly. It’s horrible throwing up in your suit.
The overhead speakers pop to life, and the tunes begin. Most of the guys prefer rap while they process; I like to mix it up with a little heavy metal and some R&B. Nugget wants something to do, so I have him carry the ruined clothes to the laundry bins. They’ll be burned with the processed corpses later that night. Disposal happens next door, in the power plant incinerator. They say the black smoke is from the coal and the gray smoke is from the bodies. I don’t know if that’s true.
It’s the hardest processing I’ve done. I’ve got Nugget, my own bodies to process, and the rest of the squad to keep an eye on, because there’s no drill sergeants or any adult period inside the processing hangar, except the dead ones. Just kids, and sometimes it’s like at school when the teacher is suddenly called out of the room. Things can get crazy.
There’s little interaction among the squads outside P&D. The competition for the top slots on the leaderboard is too intense, and there’s nothing friendly about the rivalry.
So when I see the fair-skinned, dark-haired girl wheeling corpses from Poundcake’s table to the disposal area, I don’t go over and introduce myself and I don’t grab one of her team members to ask her name. I just watch her while I dig my fingers through the pockets of dead people. I notice she’s directing traffic at the door; she must be the squad leader. At the midmorning break, I pull Poundcake aside. He’s a sweet kid, quiet, but not in a weird way. Dumbo has a theory that one day the cork will pop and Poundcake won’t stop talking for a week.
“You know that girl from Squad Nineteen working at your table?” I ask him. He nods. “Know anything about her?” He shakes his head. “Why am I asking you this, Cake?” He shrugs. “Okay,” I say. “But don’t tell anyone I asked.”
By the fourth hour on the line, Nugget’s not too steady on his feet. He needs a break, so I take him outside for a few minutes, where we sit against the hangar door and watch the black and gray smoke billowing beneath the clouds.
Nugget yanks off his hood and leans his head against the cold metal door, his round face shiny with sweat.
“They’re just people,” I say again, basically because I don’t know what else to say. “It gets easier,” I go on. “Every time you do it, you feel it a little less. Until it’s like—I don’t know—like making your bunk or brushing your teeth.”
I’m all tense, waiting for him to lose it. Cry. Run. Explode. Something. But there’s just this blank, faraway look in his eyes, and suddenly I’m the one about to explode. Not at him. Or at Reznik for making me bring him. At them. At the bastards who did this to us. Forget about my life—I know how that ends. What about Nugget’s? Five frigging years old, and what’s he got to look forward to? And why the hell did Commander Vosch assign him to a combat unit? Seriously, he can’t even lift a rifle. Maybe the idea is to catch ’em young, train ’em from the ground up. So by the time he’s my age you don’t have a stone-cold killer, but an ice-cold one. One with liquid nitrogen for blood.
I hear his voice before I feel his hand on my forearm. “Zombie, are you okay?”
“Sure, I’m fine.” Here’s a strange turn of events, him worried about me.
A large flatbed pulls up to the hangar door, and Squad 19 begins loading bodies, tossing them onto the truck like relief workers heaving sacks of grain. There’s the dark-haired girl again, straining at the front end of a very fat corpse. She glances our way before going back inside for the next body. Great. She’ll probably report us for goofing off to knock a few points off our score.
“Cassie says it won’t matter what they do,” Nugget says. “They can’t kill all of us.”
“Why can’t they?” Because, kid, I’d really, really like to know.
“Because we’re too hard to kill. We’re invista…investra…invinta…”
“Invincible?”
“That’s it!” With a reassuring pat on my arm. “Invincible.”
Black smoke, gray smoke. And the cold biting our cheeks and the heat from our bodies trapped inside our suits, Zombie and Nugget and the brooding clouds above us and, hidden above them, the mothership that gave birth to the gray smoke and, in a way, to us. Us too.
46
EVERY NIGHT NOW Nugget crawls into my bunk after lights-out to say his prayer, and I let him stay until he falls asleep. Then I carry him back to his bunk. Tank threatens to turn me in, usually after I give him an order he doesn’t like. But he doesn’t. I think he secretly looks forward to prayer time.
It amazes me how quickly Nugget has adjusted to camp life. Kids are like that, though. They can get used to practically anything. He can’t lift a rifle to his shoulder, but he does everything else, and sometimes better than the older kids. He’s faster than Oompa on the obstacle course and a quicker study than Flintstone. The one squad member who can’t stand him is Teacup. I guess it’s jealousy: Before Nugget came, Teacup was the baby of the family.