On the ninety-ninth push-up, Reznik shoves me down with his heel. I fall hard on my chest, roll my cheek against the asphalt, and there’s his puffy face and tiny pale eyes an inch from mine.
Ninety-nine; one short. The bastard.
“Private Zombie, you are a disgrace to the species. I’ve hacked up lugies tougher than you. You make me think the enemy was right about the human race. You should be ground up for slop and passed out a hog’s shithole! Well, what are you waiting for, you stinking bag of regurgitated puke, an effing invitation?”
My head rolls to one side. An invitation would be nice, thank you, sir. I see a girl around my age standing with her squad, her arms folded across her chest, shaking her head at me. Poor Zombie. She isn’t smiling. Dark eyes, dark hair, skin so fair it seems to be glowing in the early-morning light. I have the feeling I know her from somewhere, though this is the first time I remember seeing her. There are hundreds of kids being trained for war and hundreds more arriving every day, handed blue jumpsuits, assigned to squads, packed into the barracks ringing the yard. But she has the kind of face you remember.
“Get up, you maggot! Get up and give me a hundred more. One hundred more, or by God I will rip out your eyeballs and hang them from my rearview like a pair of fuzzy dice!”
I’m totally spent. I don’t think I’ve got enough left for even one more.
Reznik doesn’t give a crap about what I think. That’s the other thing it took me a while to understand: They not only don’t care what I think—they don’t want me to think.
His face is so close to mine, I can smell his breath. It smells like spearmint.
“What is it, sweetheart? Are you tired? Do you want nappy-time?”
Do I have at least one push-up left in me? If I can do just one more, I won’t be a total loser. I press my forehead against the asphalt and close my eyes. There is a place I go, a space I found inside me after Commander Vosch showed me the final battlefield, a center of complete stillness that isn’t touched by fatigue or hopelessness or anger or anything brought on by the coming of the Big Green Eye in the Sky. In that place, I have no name. I’m not Ben or Zombie—I just am. Whole, untouchable, unbroken. The last living person in the universe who contains all human potential—including the potential to give the biggest ass**le on Earth just one more.
And I do.
43
NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING special about me.
Reznik is an equal-opportunity sadist. He treats the six other recruits of Squad 53 with the same savage indecency. Flintstone, who’s my age, with his big head and bushy unibrow; Tank, the skinny, quick-tempered farm boy; Dumbo, the twelve-year-old with the big ears and quick smile that disappeared quickly during the first week of basic; Poundcake, the eight-year-old who never talks, but who’s our best shot by far; Oompa, the chubby kid with the crooked teeth who’s last in every drill but first in chow line; and finally the youngest, Teacup, the meanest seven-year-old you’ll ever meet, the most gung ho of all of us, who worships the ground Reznik walks on, no matter how much she’s screamed at or kicked around.
I don’t know their real names. We don’t talk about who we were before or how we came to the camp or what happened to our families. None of that matters. Like Ben Parish, those guys—the pre-Flintstone, pre-Tank, pre-Dumbo, etc.—they’re dead. Tagged, bagged, and told we are the last, best hope for humanity, we are the new wine poured into old skins. We bonded through hatred—hatred of the infesteds and their alien masters, sure, but also our fierce, uncompromising, unadulterated hatred of Sergeant Reznik, our rage made all the more intense by the fact that we could never express it.
Then the kid named Nugget was assigned to Barracks 10, and one of us, like an idiot, couldn’t hold it inside any longer, and all the bottled-up fury exploded free.
I’ll give you one guess who that idiot was.
I couldn’t believe it when that kid showed up at roll call. Five years old tops, lost in his white jumpsuit, shivering in the cold morning air of the yard, looking like he was going to be sick, obviously scared out of his mind. And here comes Reznik with his hat pulled low over his beady eyes and his boots shined to a mirror finish and his voice perpetually hoarse from screaming, shoving his pasty, pockmarked grill down into the poor kid’s face. I don’t know how the little squirt kept from soiling himself.
Reznik always starts out slow and soft and builds to a big finish, the better to lull you into thinking he might be an actual human being.
“Well, what do we have here? What have they sent us from central casting—is this a hobbit? Are you a magical creature from a storybook realm come to enchant me with your dark magic?”
Reznik was just getting warmed up, and already the kid was fighting back tears. Fresh off the bus after going through God-knows-what on the outside, and here’s this crazy middle-aged man pouncing on him. I wondered how he was processing Reznik—or any of this craziness they call Camp Haven. I’m still trying to deal, and I’m a lot older than five.
“Oh, this is cute. This is so precious, I think I might cry! Dear God, I’ve dunked chicken nuggets bigger than you in my little plastic cup of spicy barbecue sauce!”
Ratcheting up the volume as he brought his face closer to the kid’s. And the kid holding up surprisingly well, flinching, eyes darting back and forth, but not moving an inch when I knew he must be thinking about taking off across the yard, just running until he couldn’t run anymore.
“What’s your story, Private Nugget? Have you lost your mommy? Do you want to go home? I know! Let’s close our eyes and make a wish and maybe Mommy will come and take us all home! Wouldn’t that be nice, Private Nugget?”
And the kid nodded eagerly, like Reznik had asked the question he’d been waiting to hear. Finally, somebody got to the point! Lifting up his big teddy-bear eyes into the drill sergeant’s beady ones…it was enough to break your heart. It was enough to make you scream.
But you don’t scream. You stand perfectly still, eyes forward, hands at your sides, chest out, heart breaking, watching it out of the corner of your eye while something comes loose inside you, uncoiling like a rattlesnake striking. Something you’ve been holding in for a long time as the pressure built. You don’t know when it’s going to blow, you can’t predict it, and when it happens there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
“Leave him alone.”
Reznik whipped around. No one made a sound, but you could hear the inward gasp. On the other side of the line, Flintstone’s eyes were wide; he couldn’t believe what I just did. I couldn’t, either.
“Who said that? Which one of you scum-sucking maggots just signed his own death warrant?”
Striding down the line, face red with fury, hands clinched into fists, knuckles bone white.
“Nobody, huh? Well, I’m going to fall on my knees and cover my head, because the Lord God his holy self has spoken to me from on high!”
He stopped in front of Tank, who was sweating through his jumpsuit though it was about forty degrees outside. “Was it you, puckerhole? I will tear your arms off!” He brought his fist back to punch Tank in the groin.
Cue the idiot.
“Sir, I said it, sir!” I shouted.
Reznik’s about-face was slow this time. His journey over to me took a thousand years. In the distance, a crow’s harsh call, but that was the only sound I heard.
He stopped just inside my range of vision, not directly in front of me, and that wasn’t good. I couldn’t turn toward him. I had to keep my eyes forward. Worst of all, I couldn’t see his hands; I wouldn’t know when—or where—the blow would land, which meant I wouldn’t know when to brace for it.
“So Private Zombie is giving the orders now,” Reznik said, so softly I could barely hear him. “Private Zombie is Squad Fifty-three’s very own catcher in the f**king rye. Private Zombie, I think I have a crush on you. You make me weak in the knees. You make me hate my own mother for giving birth to a male child, so now it’s impossible for me to have your babies.”
Where was it going to land? My knees? My crotch? Probably the stomach; Reznik has a soft spot for stomachs.
Nope. It was a chop to my Adam’s apple with the side of his hand. I staggered backward, fighting to stay upright, fighting to keep my hands at my sides, not going to give him the satisfaction, not going to give him an excuse to hit me again. The yard and the barracks were ringing, then jiggled and melted a little as my eyes filled with tears—of pain, sure, but of something else, too.
“Sir, he’s just a little kid, sir,” I choked out.
“Private Zombie, you have two seconds, exactly two seconds, to seal that sewer pipe posing as a mouth, or I will incinerate your ass with the rest of the infested alien sons of bitches!”
He took a deep breath, revving up for the next verbal barrage. Having completely lost my mind, I opened my mouth and let the words come out. I’ll be honest: Part of me was filled with relief and something that felt a hell of a lot like joy. I had kept the hate inside for too long.
“Then the senior drill instructor should do it, sir! The private really doesn’t care, sir! Just—just leave the kid alone.”
Total silence. Even the crow stopped fussing. The rest of the squad had stopped breathing. I knew what they were thinking. We’d all heard the story about the lippy recruit and the “accident” on the obstacle course that put him in the hospital for three weeks. And the other story about the quiet ten-year-old who they found in the showers strung up with an extension cord. Suicide, the doctor said. A lot of people weren’t so sure.