The Infinite Sea (5 page)

8

THE OLD HOTEL
swarmed with vermin. The cold had killed off the cockroaches, but other pests survived, especially bedbugs and carpet beetles. And they were hungry. Within a day, all of us were covered with bites. The basement belonged to the flies, where corpses had been brought during the plague. By the time we checked in, most of the flies had died off. So many dead flies that their black husks crunched beneath our feet when we went down there the first day. That was also the last day we went into the basement.

The entire building reeked of rot, and I told Zombie that opening the windows would help dissipate the smell and kill off some of the bugs. He said he’d rather get bit and gag than freeze to death. As he smiled to drench you in his irresistible charm.
Relax, Ringer. It’s just another day in the alien wild.

The bugs and the smell didn’t bother Teacup. It was the rats that drove her crazy. They had chewed their way into the walls, and at night their gnawing and scratching kept her (and therefore me) awake. She tossed and turned, whined and bitched and generally obsessed, because practically any other thoughts about our situation ended up in a bad place. In a vain attempt to distract her, I began teaching her chess, using a towel for a board and coins for the pieces.

“Chess is a stupid game for stupid people,” she informed me.

“No, it’s very democratic,” I said. “Smart people play, too.”

Teacup rolled her eyes. “You want to play just so you can beat me.”

“No, I want to because I miss playing it.”

Her mouth dropped open. “
That’s
what you miss?”

I spread the towel on the bed and positioned the coins. “Don’t decide how you feel about something before you try it.” I was around her age when I began. The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

“Pennies are pawns,” I told her. “Nickels are rooks, dimes are knights and bishops, quarters are kings and queens.”

She shook her head. Ringer is an idiot. “How can dimes and quarters be both?”

“Heads: knights and kings. Tails: bishops and queens.”

The coolness of the ivory. The way the felt-covered bases slid over the polished wood, like whispered thunder crashing. My father’s face bent over the board, lean and unshaven, red-eyed and purse-lipped, encrusted with shadows. The sickly sweet smell of alcohol and fingers that thrummed like hummingbirds’ wings.

It’s called the game of kings, Marika. Would you like to learn how to play?

“It’s the game of kings,” I said to Teacup.

“Well, I’m not a king.” She crossed her arms. So
over
me. “I like checkers.”

“Then you’ll love chess. Chess is checkers on steroids.”

My father tapping his chipped nails on the tabletop. The rats scratching inside the walls.

“Here’s how the bishop moves, Teacup.”

This is how the knight moves, Marika.

She jammed a stale piece of gum into her mouth and chewed angrily as the dry shards crumbled. Minty breath. Whiskey breath.
Scratch, scratch, tap, tap.

“Give it a chance,” I begged her. “You’ll love it. I promise.”

She grabbed the corner of the towel. “Here’s what I feel.” I saw it coming, but still flinched when she flung the towel and the coins exploded into the air. A nickel popped her in the forehead and she didn’t even blink.

“Ha!” Teacup shouted. “I guess that’s checkmate, bitch!”

Reacting without thinking, I slapped her. “Don’t ever call me that.
Ever.
”

The cold made the slap more painful. Her bottom lip poked out, her eyes welled up, but she didn’t cry.

“I hate you,” she said.

“I don’t care.”

“No, I hate you, Ringer. I hate your fucking guts.”

“Cussing doesn’t make you grown-up, you know.”

“Then I guess I’m a baby. Shit, shit, shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” She started to touch her cheek. She stopped herself. “I don’t have to listen to you. You aren’t my mother or my sister or
anybody.
”

“Then why have you been latched on to me like a pilot fish since we left camp?”

Now a tear did fall, a single drop that trailed down her scarlet cheek. She was so pale and thin, her skin as luminescent as one of my father’s chess pieces. I was surprised the slap hadn’t shattered her into a thousand bits. I didn’t know what to say or how to unsay what had been said, so I said nothing. Instead, I laid a hand on her knee. She pushed my hand away.

“I want my gun back,” she said.

“Why do you want your gun back?”

“So I can shoot you.”

“Then you’re definitely not getting your gun back.”

“Can I have it back to shoot all the rats?”

I sighed. “We don’t have enough bullets.”

“Then we poison them.”

“With what?”

She threw up her hands. “Okay, so we set the hotel on fire and burn them all up!”

“That’s a great idea, only we happen to be living here, too.”

“Then they’re gonna win. Against us. A bunch of
rats.
”

I shook my head. I didn’t follow her. “Win—how?”

Her eyes widened in disbelief. Ringer the moron. “Listen to them! They’re
eating
it. And pretty soon we won’t be living here because there won’t be any
here
to live in!”

“That’s not winning,” I pointed out. “They wouldn’t have a home, either.”

“They’re
rats,
Ringer. They can’t think that far ahead.”

Not just the rats,
I thought that night after she finally fell asleep next to me. I listened to them inside the walls, chewing, scratching, screeching. Eventually, with the help of weather, insects, and time, the old hotel would collapse. In another hundred years, only the foundation would remain. In a thousand, nothing at all. Here or anywhere. It would be as if we had never existed. Who needs the kind of bombs used at Camp Haven when they can turn the elements themselves against us?

Teacup was pressed tight against me. Even under mounds of covers, the cold squeezed hard. Winter: a wave they didn’t have to engineer. The cold would kill off thousands more.

Nothing that happens is insignificant, Marika,
my father told me during one of my chess lessons.
Every move matters. Mastery is in understanding how much each time, every time.

It nagged at me. The problem of rats. Not Teacup’s problem. Not the problem
with
rats. The problem
of
rats.

9

I SEE THE CHOPPERS
closing in through the leafless branches clothed in white, three black dots against the gray. I have seconds.

Options
:

Finish Teacup and take my chances against three Black Hawks equipped with Hellfire missiles.

Leave Teacup to be finished by them—or worse, saved.

One last option: Finish both of us. A bullet for her. A bullet for me.

I don’t know if Zombie is okay. I don’t know what—if anything—drove Teacup from the hotel. What I do know is our deaths may be his only chance to live.

I will myself to squeeze the trigger. If I can fire the first round, the second will be much easier. I tell myself it’s too late—too late for her and too late for me. There’s no avoiding death, anyway. Isn’t that the lesson they’ve been hammering into our heads for months? No hiding from it, no running from it. Put it off for a day, and death will surely find you tomorrow.

She looks so beautiful, not even real, nestled in a bower of snow, her dark hair shimmering like onyx, her expression in sleep the indescribable serenity of an ancient statue.

I know that killing both of us is the only option with the least risk to the most people. And I think of rats again and how sometimes, to pass the interminable hours, Teacup and I would plot our campaign against the vermin, stratagems and tactics, waves of attack, each more ridiculous than the last, until she dissolved into hysterical laughter, and I gave her the same speech I gave Zombie on the firing range, the same lesson that now comes home to me, the fear that binds killer to prey and the bullet connecting both as if by a silver cord. Now I am the killer
and
the prey, a circle of a completely different kind, and my mouth has gone dry as the sterile air, my heart as cold: The temperature of true rage is absolute zero, and mine is deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe.

So it isn’t hope that makes me slip the sidearm back into its holster. It isn’t faith and it sure isn’t love.

It’s rage.

Rage, and the fact that I have a dead recruit’s implant still lodged between my cheek and gums.

10

I LIFT HER UP
. Her head falls against my shoulder. We take off through the trees. A Black Hawk thunders overhead. The other two choppers have split off, one to the east, one to the west, cutting off any escape. The high, thin branches bend. Snow whips sideways into my face. Teacup weighs nothing; I could be carrying a wad of discarded clothes.

We come out of the trees as a Black Hawk roars in from the north. The blast of air whips my hair with cyclonic fury. The chopper hovers above us and now we are motionless, standing in the middle of the road. No more running. No more.

I lower Teacup to the blacktop. The helicopter is so close, I can see the black visor of the pilot and the open door to the hold and the cluster of bodies inside, and I know I’m in the middle of a half dozen sights, me and the little girl at my feet. And every second that passes means I’ve survived that second and, with each second, the increased probability I’ll survive the next. It might not be too late, not for me, not for her, not yet.

I do not glow in their eyepieces. I am one of them. I must be, right?

I sling the rifle from my shoulder and slip my finger through the trigger guard.