Also why, after six weeks flat on my back with very little food and a burst of intense physical activity, I’m not even out of breath.
I insert the tiny pellet from my neck into Jumbo’s. Track me now, Commander Asshole.
Fresh jumpsuit from the stack under the sink. Shoes: Claire’s feet are too small; Jumbo’s much too large. I’ll work on shoes later. The big kid’s leather jacket might come in handy, though. The jacket hangs on me like a blanket, but I like the extra room in the sleeves.
There’s something I’m forgetting. I glance around the small room. The kill switch, that’s it. The screen got cracked in the melee, but the device still works. A number glows above the flashing green button. My number. I swipe my thumb over the display and the screen fills with numbers, hundreds of sequences representing every recruit on the base. I swipe again to return to my number, tap on it, and a map pops up showing my implant’s precise location. I zoom out and the screen fills with tiny, glowing green dots: the location of every implanted soldier in the entire base. Jackpot.
And checkmate. With a swipe of my thumb and a tap of my finger, I can highlight all the numbers. The button on the bottom of the device will light up. A final tap and every recruit neutralized, gone. I can practically stroll out.
I can—if I’m willing to step over several hundred corpses of innocent human beings, kids who are no less victims than I am, whose sole crime is the sin of hope. If the wage of sin is death, then virtue is a vice now: A defenseless, starving child lost in a wheat field is given shelter. A wounded soldier cries out for help behind a row of beer coolers. A little girl shot by mistake is delivered to her enemies in order to save her.
And I don’t know which is more inhuman: the alien beings that created this new world or the human being who considers, if only for an instant, pressing the green button.
Three large clumps of stationary dots hover on the right side of the screen: the sleeping. A dozen isolated individuals on the periphery: sentries. Two in the middle: mine in Jumbo’s neck, his in my mouth. Another three or four very close, on the same floor: the sick and injured. One floor down, the ICU, where only one green sphere glows. So: barracks, observation posts, hospital. A couple of the sentry dots are manning the magazine building. I won’t have to guess which two. I’ll know in a few minutes.
Come on, Razor, let’s go. I’ve got one last promise to keep.
Watching the gusher pour from the broken pipe.
69
“DO YOU PRAY?” Razor asked me after an exhausting night of chaseball, while he packed up the game board and pieces.
I shook my head. “Do you?”
“Damn right I do.” Nodding his head emphatically. “No atheists in foxholes.”
“My father was one.”
“A foxhole?”
“An atheist.”
“I know that, Ringer.”
“How did you know my father was an atheist?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then why did you ask if he was a foxhole?”
“I didn’t. It was a freaking—” He smiled. “Oh, I get it. I know what you’re doing. The disturbing thing to me is why. Like you’re not trying to be funny but trying to prove how superior you are. Or think you are. You’re not either. Funny or superior. Why don’t you pray?”
“I don’t like putting God on the spot.”
He picked up the queen and examined her face. “You ever checked her out? She is one scary-looking she-bitch.”