I take the stairs two at a time till I reach the third level, where I find the unit crouched behind the first line of cars, several feet back from the wall that faces the sniper’s building. Dumbo is kneeling beside Teacup, working on her leg. Her fatigues are ripped, and I can see an ugly red gash where a bullet tore across her calf. Dumbo slaps a dressing over the wound, hands her off to Ringer, then rushes over to Oompa. Flintstone is shaking his head at me.
“Told you we should abort,” Flint says. His eyes glitter with malice. “Now look.”
I ignore him. Turn to Dumbo. “Well?”
“It’s not good, Sarge.”
“Then make it good.” I look over at Teacup, who’s buried her head into Ringer’s chest, whimpering softly.
“It’s superficial,” Ringer tells me. “She can move.”
I nod. Oompa down. Teacup shot. Flint ready to mutiny. A sniper across the street and a hundred or so of his best friends on their way to the party. I’ve got to come up with something brilliant and come up with it quickly. “He knows where we are, which means we can’t camp here long. See if you can take him.”
She nods, but she can’t peel Teacup off her. I hold out my hands wet with Oompa’s blood: Give her to me. Delivered, Teacup squirms against my shirt. She doesn’t want me. I jerk my head toward the street and turn to Poundcake, “Cake, go with Ringer. Take the SOB out.”
Ringer and Poundcake duck between two cars and disappear. I stroke Teacup’s bare head—somewhere along the way she lost her cap—and watch Dumbo gingerly pull on the fragment in Oompa’s back. Oompa howls in agony, his fingers clawing at the ground. Unsure, Dumbo looks up at me. I nod. It’s gotta come out. “Quick, Dumbo. Slow makes it worse.” So he yanks.
Oompa folds in on himself, and the echoes of his screams rocket around the garage. Dumbo tosses the jagged piece of metal to one side and shines his light on the gaping wound.
Grimacing, he rolls Oompa onto his back. His shirtfront is soaked. Dumbo rips the shirt open, exposing the exit wound: The shrapnel had entered through his back and slammed through to the other side.
Flint turns away, crawls a couple feet, and his back arches as he vomits. Teacup gets very still watching all this. She’s going into shock. Teacup, the one who screamed the loudest during mock charges in the yard. Teacup, the bloodthirstiest, the one who sang the loudest in P&D. I’m losing her.
And I’m losing Oompa. As Dumbo presses wadding against the wound in Oompa’s gut, trying to stem the flow, his eyes seek out mine.
“What are your orders, Private?” I ask him.
“I—I am not to—to…”
Dumbo tosses the blood-soaked dressing away and presses a fresh patch against Oompa’s stomach. Looking into my face. Doesn’t have to say anything. Not to me. Not to Oompa.
I ease Teacup from my lap and kneel beside Oompa. His breath smells like blood and chocolate.
“It’s because I’m fat,” he chokes out. He starts to cry.
“Stow that shit,” I tell him sternly.
He whispers something. I bring my ear close to his mouth. “My name is Kenny.” Like it’s a terrible secret he’s been afraid to share.
His eyes roll toward the ceiling. Then he’s gone.
58
TEACUP’S LOST IT. Hugging her legs, forehead pressed against her upraised knees. I call over to Flint to keep an eye on her. I’m worried about Ringer and Poundcake. Flint looks like he wants to kill me with his bare hands.
“You’re the one who gave the order,” he snarls. “You watch her.”
Dumbo is cleaning his hands of Oompa’s—no, Kenny’s—blood. “I got it, Sarge,” he says calmly, but his hands are shaking.
“Sarge,” Flint spits out. “That’s right. What now, Sarge?”
I ignore him and scramble toward the wall, where I find Poundcake squatting beside Ringer. She’s on her knees, peeking over the edge of the wall toward the building across the street. I lower myself beside her, avoiding Poundcake’s questioning look.
“Oompa’s not screaming anymore,” Ringer says without taking her eyes off the building.
“His name was Kenny,” I say. Ringer nods; she gets it, but it takes Poundcake a minute or two more. He scoots away, putting distance between us, and presses both hands against the concrete, takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“You had to, Zombie,” Ringer says. “If you hadn’t, we might all be Kenny.”
That sounds really good. It sounded good when I said it to myself. Looking up at her profile, I wonder what Vosch was thinking, pinning the stripes on my collar. The commander promoted the wrong squad member.
“Well?” I ask her.
She nods across the street. “Pop goes the weasel.”
I slowly rise up. In the light of the dying fire, I can see the building: a facade of broken windows, peeling white paint, and the roof one story higher than us. A vague shadow that might be a water tower up there, but that’s all I see.
“Where?” I whisper.
“He just ducked down again. Been doing that. Up, down, up, down, like a jack-in-the-box.”
“Just one?”
“Only one I’ve seen.”
“Does he light up?”
Ringer shakes her head. “Negative, Zombie. He doesn’t read infested.”
I chew on my bottom lip. “Poundcake see him, too?”
She nods. “No green.” Watching me with those dark eyes like knives cutting deep.
“Maybe he’s not the shooter…,” I try.
“Saw his weapon,” she says. “Sniper rifle.”
So why doesn’t he glow green? The ones on the street lit up, and they were farther away than he is. Then I think it doesn’t matter if he glows green or purple or nothing at all: He’s trying to kill us, and we can’t move until he’s neutralized. And we have to move before the one who got away comes back with reinforcements.
“Aren’t they smart?” Ringer mutters, like she’s read my mind. “Put on a human face so no human face can be trusted. The only answer: Kill everyone or risk being killed by anyone.”
“He thinks we’re one of them?”
“Or decided it doesn’t matter. Only way to be safe.”
“But he fired on us—not on the three right below him. Why would he ignore the easy shots to take the impossible one?”
Like me, she doesn’t have an answer to that question. Unlike me, it’s not high on her list of problems to be resolved. “Only way to be safe,” she repeats pointedly. I look over at Poundcake, who’s looking back at me. Waiting for my decision, but there really isn’t a decision to make.
“Can you take him from here?” I ask Ringer.
She shakes her head. “Too far away. I’d just give away our position.”
I scoot over to Poundcake. “Stay here. In ten minutes, open up on him to cover our crossing.” Staring up at me all doe-eyed and trusting. “You know, Private, it’s customary to acknowledge an order from your commanding officer.” Poundcake nods. I try again: “With a ‘yes, sir.’” He nods again. “Like, out loud. With words.” Another nod.
Okay, at least I tried.
When Ringer and I join the others, Oompa’s body is gone. They stashed him in one of the cars. Flint’s idea. Very similar to his idea for the rest of us.
“We’ve got good cover in here. I say we hunker down in the cars until pickup.”
“Only one person’s vote counts in this unit, Flint,” I tell him.
“Yeah, and how’s that working out for us?” he says, thrusting his chin toward me, mouth curled into a sneer. “Oh, I know. Let’s ask Oompa!”
“Flintstone,” Ringer says. “At ease. Zombie’s right.”
“Until you two walk into an ambush, and then I guess he’s wrong.”
“At which point you’re the C.O., and you can make the call,” I snap. “Dumbo, you’ve got Teacup duty.” If we can pry her off Ringer. She’s pasted herself back onto Ringer’s leg. “If we’re not back in thirty minutes, we’re not coming back.”
And then Ringer says, because she’s Ringer, “We’re coming back.”
59
THE TANKER’S BURNED down to its tires. Crouching in the pedestrian entrance to the garage, I point at the building across the street glowing orange in the firelight.
“That’s our entry point. Third window from the left-hand corner, completely busted out, see it?”
Ringer nods absently. Something’s on her mind. She keeps fiddling with the eyepiece, pulling it away from her eye, pushing it back again. The certainty she showed in front of the squad is gone.
“The impossible shot…,” she whispers. Then she turns to me. “How do you know when you’re going Dorothy?”
I shake my head. Where’s this coming from? “You’re not going Dorothy,” I tell her, and punctuate it with a pat on the arm.
“How can you be sure?” Eyes darting back and forth, restless, looking for somewhere to light. The way Tank’s eyes danced before he popped. “Crazy people—they never think they’re crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them.”
There’s a desperate, very un-Ringerlike look in her eyes.
“You’re not crazy. Trust me.”
Wrong thing to say.
“Why should I?” she shoots back. It’s the first time I’ve heard any emotion out of her. “Why should I trust you, and why should you trust me? How do you know I’m not one of them, Zombie?”
Finally, an easy question. “Because we’ve been screened. And we don’t light up in each other’s eyepieces.”
She looks at me for a very long moment, then she murmurs, “God, I wish you played chess.”
Our ten minutes are up. Above us, Poundcake opens up on the rooftop across the street; the sniper immediately returns fire; and we go. We’re barely off the curb when the asphalt explodes in front of us. We split up, Ringer zipping off to the right, me to the left, and I hear the whine of the bullet, a high-pitched sandpapery sound, about a month before it tears open the sleeve of my jacket. The instinct burned into me from months of drilling to return fire is very hard to resist. I leap onto the curb and in two strides I’m pressed hard against the comforting cold concrete of the building. That’s when I see Ringer slip on a patch of ice and fall face-first toward the curb. She waves me back. “No!” A round bites off a piece of the curbing that rakes across her neck. Screw her no. I bound over to her, grab her arm, and sling her toward the building. Another round whizzes past my head as I backpedal to safety.
She’s bleeding. The wound shimmers black in the firelight. She waves me on, Go, go. We trot along the side of the building to the broken window and dive inside.
Took less than a minute to cross. Felt like two hours.
We’re inside what used to be an upscale boutique. Looted several times over, full of empty racks and broken hangers, creepy headless mannequins and posters of overly serious fashion models on the walls. A sign on the service counter reads, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE.
