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.
Nugget did have a mini freakout during his first air raid drill. Like the rest of us, he had no idea it was coming, but unlike the rest of us, he had no idea what the hell was going on.
It happens once a month and always in the middle of the night. The sirens scream so loud, you can feel the floor shaking under your bare feet as you stumble around in the dark, yanking on jumpsuit and boots, grabbing your M16, racing outside as all the barracks empty out, hundreds of recruits pouring across the yard toward the access tunnels that lead underground.
I was a couple of minutes behind the squad because Nugget was hollering his head off and clinging to me like a monkey to his momma, thinking any minute the alien warships would start dropping their payloads.
I shouted at him to calm down and follow my lead. It was a waste of breath. Finally I just picked him up and slung him over my shoulder, rifle clutched in one hand, Nugget’s butt in the other. As I sprinted outside, I thought of another night and another screaming kid. The memory made me run harder.
Into the stairwell, down the four flights of stairs awash in yellow emergency light, Nugget’s head popping against my back, then through the steel-reinforced door at the bottom, down a short passageway, through the second reinforced door, and into the complex. The heavy door clanged shut behind us, sealing us inside. By now he had decided he might not be vaporized after all, and I could set him down.
The shelter is a confusing maze of dimly lit intersecting corridors, but we’ve been drilled so much, I could find my way to our station with my eyes closed. I yelled over the siren for Nugget to follow me and I took off. A squad heading in the opposite direction thundered past us.
Right, left, right, right, left, into the final passageway, my free hand gripping the back of Nugget’s neck to keep him from falling back. I could see my squad kneeling twenty yards from the back wall of the dead-end tunnel, their rifles trained at the metal grate that covers the airshaft leading to the surface.
And Reznik standing behind them, holding a stopwatch.
Crap.
We missed our time by forty-eight seconds. Forty-eight seconds that would cost us three days of free time. Forty-eight seconds that would drop us another place on the leaderboard. Forty-eight seconds that meant God knows how many more days of Reznik.
Back in the barracks now, we’re all too hyped up to sleep. Half the squad is pissed at me, the other half is pissed at Nugget. Tank, of course, blames me.
“You should have left him behind,” he says. His thin face is flushed with rage.
“There’s a reason we drill, Tank,” I remind him. “What if this had been the real thing?”
“Then I guess he’d be dead.”
“He’s a member of this squad, same as the rest of us.”
“You still don’t get it, do you, Zombie? It’s freakin’ nature. Whoever’s too sick or weak has to go.” He yanks off his boots, hurls them into his locker at the foot of the bunk. “If it was up to me, we’d throw all of ’em into the incinerator with the Teds.”
“Killing humans—isn’t that the aliens’ job?”
His face is beet red. He pounds the air with his fist. Flintstone makes a move to calm him down, but Tank waves him away.
“Whoever’s too weak, too sick, too old, too slow, too stupid, or too little—they GO!” Tank yells. “Anybody and everybody who can’t fight or support the fight—they’ll just drag us down.”
“They’re expendable,” I shoot back sarcastically.
“The chain is only as strong as the weakest link,” Tank roars. “It’s frickin’ nature, Zombie. Only the strong survive!”
“Hey, come on, man,” Flintstone says to him. “Zombie’s right. Nugget’s one of the crew.”
“You get off my case, Flint,” Tank shouts. “All of you! Like it’s my fault. Like I’m responsible for this shit!”
“Zombie, do something,” Dumbo begs me. “He’s going Dorothy.”
Dumbo’s referring to the recruit who snapped on the rifle range one day, turning her weapon on her own squad members. Two people were killed and three seriously injured before the drill sergeant popped her in the back of the head with his sidearm. Every week there’s a story about someone “going Dorothy,” or sometimes we say “off to see the wizard.” The pressure gets to be too much, and you break. Sometimes you turn on others. Sometimes you turn on yourself. Sometimes I question the wisdom of Central Command, putting high-powered automatic weapons into the hands of some seriously effed-up children.
“Oh, go screw yourself,” Tank snarls at Dumbo. “Like you know anything. Like anybody knows anything. What the hell are we doing here? You want to tell me, Dumbo? How about you, squad leader? Can you tell me? Somebody better tell me and they better tell me right now, or I’m taking this place out. I’m taking all of it and all of you out, because this is seriously messed up, man. We’re going to take them on, the things that killed seven billion of us? With what? With what?” Pointing the end of his rifle at Nugget, who’s clinging to my leg. “With that?” Laughing hysterically.
Everybody goes stiff when the gun comes up. I hold up my empty hands and say as calmly as I can, “Private, lower that weapon right now.”
“You’re not the boss of me! Nobody’s the boss of me!” Standing beside his bunk, the rifle at his hip. On the yellow brick road, all right.
