“Not for long! You won’t get within a hundred miles of the base.” His panicky voice fills the little chamber, which smells of chemicals and old blood. “They know where you are—there’s a fucking GPS on that chopper—and they’re coming after you with everything they’ve got.”
Ringer looks up at him. A flip of the bangs. A flash of the dark eyes. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
“How much longer?” I ask her. Everything depends on our reaching the base before sunrise.
“A couple more and we’ll be ready.”
“Yeah!” Bob shouts. “Get ready! Say your prayers, because it’s goin’ down, Dorothy!”
“She’s not a Dorothy!” Sam shouts at him. “You’re a Dorothy!”
“You shut the fuck up!” Bob yells back.
“Hey, Bob,” I call over to him. “Leave my brother alone.”
Bob’s all balled up in the corner, quivering, sweating, the buttload of morphine apparently not enough. He couldn’t be older than twenty-five. Young by pre-Arrival standards. Middle-aged by the new ones.
“What’s gonna stop me from crashing us into a fucking cornfield, huh?” he demands. “Whatcha gonna do—punch out my other eye?” Then he laughs.
Ringer ignores him, which throws gas on Bob’s fire.
“Not that it matters. Not that you have a chance in hell. They’ll cut you down the minute we land. They’ll carve you up like fucking Halloween pumpkins. So make your little bombs and hatch your little plots; you’re all dead meat.”
“You’re right, Bob,” I tell him. “That pretty much sums it up.”
I’m not being snarky (for once). I mean every word. Assuming he doesn’t crash us into a cornfield, assuming we aren’t shot down by the armada that’s surely on its way, assuming we aren’t captured or killed inside the camp by the thousands of soldiers who will be expecting us, assuming by some miracle Evan is still alive and by some bigger miracle I find him, and assuming Ringer kills Vosch, the closest thing our species has to the indestructible cockroach, we still have no exit strategy. We’re buying a one-way ticket to oblivion.
And those tickets don’t come cheap, I think while I watch my Sams put the finishing touches on a bomb.
Oh, Sam. Crayons and coloring books. Construction paper and glue. Teddy bears and footy pajamas, swing sets and storybooks and everything else we knew you’d leave behind, though not this soon, not this way. Oh, Sam, you have the face of a child but the eyes of an old man.
I was too late. I risked everything to rescue you from the end, but the end already had you.
I push myself to my feet. Everybody looks at me except Sam. He’s humming softly, slightly off-key. Theme music to build explosives by. He’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time.
“I need to talk to Sam,” I tell Ringer.
“That’s fine,” she says. “I can spare him.”
“I wasn’t asking for permission.”
I grab his wrist and pull him from the chamber, into the narrow corridor, up the path toward the surface until I’m sure they can’t hear us. Fairly sure, anyway. Ringer can probably hear a butterfly beating its wings in Mexico.
“What is it?” he asks, frowning, or maybe-frowning. I didn’t bring a light; I can barely see his face.
That’s a damn good question, kid. Once again, here I go, half-cocked and winging it. This should be a speech weeks in the making.
“You know I’m doing this for you,” I tell him.
“Doing what?”
“Leaving you.”
He shrugs. Shrugs! “You’re coming back, aren’t you?”
There it is: the invitation to a promise I cannot make. I take his hand and say, “Remember that summer you chased the rainbow?” He looks up at me, utterly baffled. “Well, maybe not. I think you were still in diapers. We were in the backyard and I had the sprayer. When the sunlight hit the water . . . you know, a rainbow. And I was making you chase it. Telling you to catch the rainbow . . .” I’m about to let loose with some waterworks of my own. “Kind of cruel when I think about it.”
“Why are you thinking about it, then?”
“I just don’t want . . . I don’t want you to forget things, Sam.”
“Things like what?”
“You need to remember it wasn’t always like this.” Making bombs and hiding in caves and watching everyone you know die.
“I remember things,” he argues. “I remember what Mommy looked like now.”
“You do?”
He nods emphatically. “I remembered right before I shot that lady.”
Something in my expression must give me away. I’m guessing a mixture of shock and horror and a sadness that has no bottom. Because he turns on his heel and barrels back to the weapons chamber only to return after a minute with Bear in his arms.
Oh, that goddamned bear.
“No, Sams,” I whisper.
“He brought you luck last time.”
“He’s . . . he’s Megan’s now.”
“No, he’s mine. He’s always been mine.” Holding him out to me.