Not this time, Parish, you zombie son of a bitch. This time you break the chain, you cut the noose. You save those kids no matter what.
I will kill them as they funnel down the chute. I’ll kill them all. Doesn’t matter that they’re no different from me. Doesn’t matter they’re trapped in the same goddamned game, bound like me to play a part they did not choose. I will kill them one by one.
Absolute dark. Absolute certainty.
The explosion knocks me off my feet. I fly backward; my head crashes against stone; the universe spins like a top. The air boils with the sound of rock smashing against rock as the entrance collapses.
The mask got knocked sideways when I hit, and I take a huge breath of noxious gas. A knife plunges into my lungs, fire fills my mouth. I roll to my side, gagging and coughing.
I lost the rifle in my fall. I sweep the area around me, can’t find it, never mind, doesn’t matter, know what matters, hauling myself to my feet, yanking the mask back into place and tasting pulverized rock on my tongue, limping back the way I came, one hand searching the darkness, the other gripping my sidearm, knowing what’s coming next because I called it and Ringer knew I called it, that’s probably second, and I’m screaming through the mask, “Don’t move, Nugget! Don’t move!” but I don’t think anybody can hear my voice but me.
The second explosion hits at the back entrance, and I stay on my feet though the floor ripples and stalactites break loose and smash down, a big one missing my head by a couple of inches. I can hear Nugget faintly calling my name. I lock in on the sound and follow it back to the crevice. I pull him out.
“They’ve sealed us in,” I gasp. My throat burns. I’ve swallowed fire. “Where’s Megan?”
“She’s okay.” I can feel him shaking. “She’s got Bear.”
I call to her. A tiny voice muffled by a gas mask comes back. Nugget’s clutching my jacket with both hands like the dark might snatch me away if he lets go.
“We shouldn’t have stayed here,” Nugget cries.
Out of the mouths of babes, but there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. We rolled the dice that Bob’s chopper would draw them off, and we lost. The bomber’s gotta be on its way with a payload that will turn this 250,000-year-old cave into a swimming pool two miles long and a hundred feet deep.
We’ve got minutes.
I take Nugget by the shoulders. Squeeze hard. “Two things, Private,” I tell him. “We need light and we need explosives.”
“But Ringer took all the bombs with her!”
“So we’ll make another one, real quick.”
We shuffle toward the weapons chamber, Nugget leading the way, my hands still on his shoulders. I steady him, he steadies me, the chain that binds us, the chain that sets us free.
75
SOMETHING I’M FORGETTING. What is it?
Nugget bends low over his task. The chamber’s choked with smoke and dust; it’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in heavy fog, not unlike this whole freaking invasion. The familiar blasted into a million pieces, an impossible jumble where no piece seems to fit with another. The enemy is within us. The enemy is not. They’re down here, they’re up there, they’re nowhere. They want the Earth, they want us to have it. They came to wipe us out, they came to save us. And the shattered truth forever receding from your grasp, the only certainty is uncertainty, and Vosch reminding me of the one truth worth hanging on to: You’re going to die. You’re going to die, and there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do to stop it. That was true before they came and it’s still true: The only certainty is uncertainty, except your own death, that’s damn certain.
His fingers are shaking. His breath is loud and fast inside the mask. One wrong move and he blows us both up. My life is now in the hands of a kindergartner.
Screwing on the blasting cap. Attaching the fuse. Sullivan might be upset he’s forgotten his ABCs, but at least the little SOB knows how to make a bomb.
“Got it?” I ask.
“Got it!” He holds up the device triumphantly. I take it from him. Oh Jesus, I hope so.
Something I’m forgetting. Something important. What could it be?
76
NOW ON TO the next impossible dilemma: bust through the back door or the front?
One bomb. One chance. I leave Nugget with Megan and check the rear entrance first. A wall of rock maybe six feet thick, if I’m remembering my landmarks right. Then returning the length of the cave to the front entrance. Moving too damn slow. Taking too damn long. Finally there, I find exactly what I expected to find: another rock wall, who knows how thick, and no way of telling if this is the better way out.
Oh, screw it.
I jam the PVC pipe into the deepest, highest crack I can reach. The fuse seems too short; I might not have time to reach a safe distance.
The certainty of uncertainty.