I can’t sit here forever hunched over in a wet, miserable ball. If it’s my doom to be wet and miserable, I’m going to meet it standing up. I’ll test those doors. Just a little push to see if they’ll open. There can’t be anyone close on the other side, otherwise they’d have seen my light or noticed my shadow and pounced on me in the dark.
The artificial rain drips down my forehead, hangs from the ends of my hair, traces my jaw like a lover’s finger. Water squishes beneath my boots. My wounded hand has begun to sting, sting bad, a thousand tiny needles stabbing into my skin, and then I notice the burning sensation on my scalp. The feeling spreads. My neck, my back, my chest, my stomach, my face. My entire body is on fire. I stumble from the doors back to my cozy spot against the wall. Something is not right. The ancient part of my brain is screaming its lungs out. Something is not right.
I click on the penlight and shine it on my hand. Huge welts crisscross the skin. Fresh blood seeps from the shrapnel holes and quickly turns a deep, velvety purple, as if my blood is reacting to something in the water.
Something in the water.
The heat is nearly unbearable, like I’ve been doused with scalding-hot water, only the liquid falling on me isn’t hot. I shine the light on my other hand. It’s covered with bright, dime-sized red polka dots. Hastily—not panicky—I yank open the jacket, pull up my shirt, and see a starfield of crimson suns burning against a backdrop of pale pink.
I’ve got three options: stand here stupidly beneath the poisoned spray, stupidly bust through the frosted glass doors into God-knows-what, or wisely get out of this complex before my skin liquefies and sloughs off my bones.
I decide to go with Option Three.
My little light slices through the mist, cutting rainbows as I run. I bang into the stairwell, bounce against the wall, slip on the slick concrete, and tumble down to the landing. The penlight flies from my hand and winks out. Gotta get outside, outside, outside. Once there, I’ll strip off my clothes and roll naked in the dirt like a pig. Hot matchsticks pressing against my eyes, tears streaming down my cheeks, hot coals searing my mouth and throat, and every other inch of my body puckering up into pestilential boils.
What’s that, Cassie? What kind of boils?
Now I get it. Now I understand.
Cut the power. Open the floodgates. Unleash the pestilence. General Order Four is the invasion in microcosm, the acoustical version of the first three worldwide waves, same tune, different lyrics, and any intruder caught in their wake humanity’s avatar.
Which would be me. I am humanity.
Outside, outside, outside! I’m on the main floor, the main windowless floor based on my memory since I have no light and no glowing red exit sign to guide the way. Not in haste anymore. In full-bore panic.
Because I’ve been here before. I know what comes after the 3rd Wave.
84
SILENCER
TEN MILLENNIA ADRIFT.
Ten thousand years unbounded by space or time, stripped of the senses, pure thought, substance without form, motion without gesture, paralyzed force.
Then the dark split open and there was light.
Air filling its lungs. Blood moving through its veins. Imprisoned for ten millennia inside its limitless mind, now finite. Now free.
It climbs the stairs toward the surface.
Red light pulsing. Siren blaring. A human voice assaulting its ears:
“GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW IN EFFECT. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO REPORT TO YOUR DESIGNATED SECURE AREA.”
It rises from the deep.
The door above bangs open and a troop of the mammalian vermin thunders toward it. Juveniles carrying weapons. In the confined space of the stairwell, their human stench is overwhelming.
“What are you, fucking deaf?” one of them shouts. The voice is grating, the sound of their language ugly. “We’re GO-Four, dipshit! Get your ass back down into that bunk—”
It snaps the juvenile’s neck. The others it kills with equal efficiency and speed. Their bodies gather around its feet. Broken necks, burst hearts, shattered skulls. In the instant before they died, perhaps they looked into its eyes, blank and unblinking, a shark’s eyes, the soulless predator rising from the depths.
“THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE.”
The stairwell plunges into darkness. An ordinary human would be sightless. Its human container, though, is not ordinary.
It has been enhanced.
In the first-floor hallway of the command center, the sprinkler system bursts to life. The Silencer lifts its face and drinks the lukewarm spray. It has not tasted water in ten millennia, and the sensation is both jarring and exhilarating.
The corridor is deserted. The vermin have retreated into safe rooms, where they will remain until the two intruders have been silenced.
Silenced by the inhuman thing inside this human body.