The 5th Wave

53

YOU SAVED ME.

Lying in his arms that night with those words in my ears, and I’m thinking, Idiot, idiot, idiot. You can’t do this. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

The first rule: Trust no one. Which leads to the second rule: The only way to stay alive as long as possible is to stay alone as long as possible.

Now I’ve broken both.

Oh, they’re so clever. The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

The point is I had my chance and I didn’t do so well on my own. In fact, I sucked. I would have died if Evan hadn’t found me.

His body is pressed against my back, his arm is wrapped protectively around my waist, his breath a delicious tickle against my neck. The room is very cold; it would be nice to climb under the covers, but I don’t want to move. I don’t want him to move. I run my fingers along his bare forearm, remembering the warmth of his lips, the silkiness of his hair between my fingers. The boy who never sleeps, sleeping. Coming to rest upon the Cassiopeian shore, an island in the middle of a sea of blood. You have your promise, and I have you.

I can’t trust him. I have to trust him.

I can’t stay with him. I can’t leave him behind.

You can’t trust luck anymore. The Others have taught me that.

But can you still trust love?

Not that I love him. I don’t even know what love feels like. I know how Ben Parish made me feel, which can’t be put into words, or at least any words I know.

Evan stirs behind me. “It’s late,” he murmurs. “You’d better get some sleep.”

How did he know I’m awake? “What about you?”

He rolls off the bed and pads toward the door. I sit up, my heart racing, not sure exactly why. “Where are you going?”

“Going to look around a little. I won’t be long.”

After he leaves, I strip off my clothes and slip on one of his plaid lumberjack shirts. Val had been into the frilly sleepwear. Not my style.

I climb back into bed and pull the covers up to my chin. Dang, it’s cold. I listen to the quiet. Of the Evanless house, that is. Outside are the sounds of nature unleashed. The distant barking of wild dogs. The howl of a wolf. The screech of owls. It’s winter, the time of year when nature whispers. I expect a symphony of wild things once spring arrives.

I wait for him to come back. An hour goes by. Then two.

I hear the telltale creak again and hold my breath. I usually hear him come in at night. The kitchen door slamming. The heavy tread of his boots coming up the stairs. Now I hear nothing but the creaking on the other side of the door.

I reach over and pick up the Luger from the bedside table. I always keep it near me.

He’s dead was my first thought. It isn’t Evan outside that door; it’s a Silencer.

I slide out of bed and tiptoe to the door. Press my ear against the wood. Close my eyes to focus. Holding the gun in the proper two-handed grip, the way he taught me. Rehearsing every step in my head, like he taught me.

Left hand on knob. Turn, pull, two steps back, gun up. Turn, pull, two steps back, gun up…

Creeaaaaaak.

Okay, that’s it.

I fling open the door, take just one step back—so much for rehearsal—and bring up the gun. Evan jumps back and smacks against the wall, his hands flying up reflexively when he sees the muzzle glinting in front of his face.

“Hey!” he shouts. Eyes wide, hands up, like he’s been jumped by a mugger.

“What the hell are you doing?” I’m shaking with anger.

“I was coming back to—to check on you. Can you put the gun down, please?”

“You know I didn’t have to open it,” I snarl at him, lowering the gun. “I could have shot you through the door.”

“Next time I’ll definitely knock.” He gives me his trademark lopsided smile.

“Let’s establish a code for when you want to go all creeper on me. One knock means you’d like to come in. Two means you’re just stopping by to spy on me while I sleep.” His eyes travel from my face to my shirt (which happens to be his shirt) to my bare legs, lingering a breath too long before returning to my face. His gaze is warm. My legs are cold.

Then he knocks once on the jamb. But it’s the smile that gets him in.

We sit on the bed. I try to ignore the fact that I’m wearing his shirt and that shirt smells like him and he’s sitting about a foot away also smelling like him and also that there’s a hard little knot in the pit of my stomach like a smoldering lump of coal.

I want him to touch me again. I want to feel his hands, as soft as clouds. But I’m afraid if he touches me, all seven billion billion billion atoms that make up my body will blow apart and scatter across the universe.

“Is he alive?” he whispers. That sad, desperate look is back. What happened out there? Why is he thinking about Sams?

I shrug. How can I know the answer to that?

“I knew when Lauren was. I mean, I knew when she wasn’t.” Picking at the quilt, running his fingers over the stitching, tracing the borders of the patches like he’s tracing the path on a treasure map. “I felt it. It was just me and Val then. Val was pretty sick, and I knew she didn’t have much time. I knew the timing, almost down to the hour: I’d been through it six times.”

It takes him a minute to go on. Something’s really spooked him. His eyes won’t stay still. They dart about the room, as if trying to find something to distract him—or maybe the opposite, something to ground him in the moment. This moment with me. Not the moment he can’t stop thinking about.

“One day I was outside,” he says, “hanging up some sheets to dry on the clothesline, and this weird feeling came over me. Like something had popped me in the chest. I mean, it was totally physical, not mental, not a little voice inside my head telling me… telling me that Lauren was gone. It felt like someone had punched me hard. And I knew. So I dropped the sheet and hauled ass to her house…”

He shakes his head. I touch his knee, then pull my hand back quickly. After the first touch, touching becomes too easy.

“How’d she do it?” I ask. I don’t want to make him go someplace he’s not ready to go. So far he’s been an emotional iceberg, two-thirds hidden beneath the surface, listening more than he talks, asking more than he answers.

“Hung herself,” he says. “I took her down.” He looks away. Here with me, there with her. “Then I buried her.”

I don’t know what to say. So I don’t say anything. Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.

“I think that’s the way it is,” he says after a minute. “When you love someone. Something happens to them, and it’s a punch in the heart. Not like a punch in the heart; a real punch in the heart.” He shrugs and laughs softly to himself. “Anyway, that’s what I felt.”

“And you think since I haven’t felt it, Sammy must be alive?”

“I know.” He shrugs and gives an embarrassed laugh. “It’s stupid. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“You really loved her, didn’t you?”

“We grew up together.” His eyes glow at the memory. “She was over here or I was over at her house. Then we got older and she was always over here or I was always over there. When I could sneak away. I was supposed to be helping my dad on the farm.”

“That’s where you went tonight, isn’t it? Lauren’s house.”

A tear falls onto his cheek. I wipe it away with my thumb, the way he wiped my tears away on the night I asked him if he believed in God.

He leans forward suddenly and kisses me. Just like that.

“Why did you kiss me, Evan?” Talking about Lauren, then kissing me. It feels weird.

“I don’t know.” He ducks his head. There’s enigmatic Evan, taciturn Evan, passionate Evan, and now shy little boy Evan.

“The next time you better have a good reason,” I tease him.

“Okay.” He kisses me again.

“Reason?” I ask softly.

“Um. You’re really pretty?”

“That’s a good one. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s good.”

He cups my face in his soft hands, and then leans in for a third kiss that lingers, igniting the simmering lump in my belly, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and do a little happy dance.

“It is true,” he whispers, our lips brushing.

We fall asleep in the same spooning position we were in a few hours before, the palm of his hand pressing just below my neck. I wake in the dead hours of the night, and for a second I’m back in the woods inside my sleeping bag, just me, my teddy bear, and my M16—and some stranger pressing his body into mine.

No, it’s okay, Cassie. It’s Evan, the one who saved you, the one who nursed you back to health, and the one who’s willing to risk his life so you can keep some ridiculous promise. Evan, the noticer who noticed you. Evan, the simple farm boy of the warm, gentle, soft hands.

My heart skips a beat. What kind of farm boy has soft hands?

I ease his hand away from my chest. He stirs, sighing against my neck. Now the hairs tickled by his lips dance a different kind of jig. I lightly brush my fingertips over his palm. Soft as a baby’s bottom.

Okay, don’t panic. It’s been a few months since he did any farm work. And you know how nice his cuticles are… but can years of calluses be wiped away by a few months off hunting in the woods?

Hunting in the woods…

I dip my head slightly to sniff his fingers. It’s probably my overactive imagination, but do I detect the acrid, metallic smell of gunpowder? When did he fire a gun? He hadn’t gone hunting tonight, just to visit Lauren’s grave.

Lying wide awake in his arms as dawn breaks, feeling his heart beating against my back while my own heart pushes against his hand.

You must be a lousy hunter. You hardly ever come back with anything.

I’m actually very good.

You just don’t have the heart to kill?

I have the heart to do what I have to do.

What do you have the heart to do, Evan Walker?

54

THE NEXT DAY is agony.

I know I can’t confront him. Way too risky. What if the worst is true? That there is no Evan Walker farm boy, only Evan Walker human traitor—or the unthinkable (one word that pretty much sums up this alien invasion): Evan Walker, Silencer. I tell myself this last possibility is ridiculous. A Silencer wouldn’t nurse me back to health—much less give me nicknames and play snuggles in the dark. A Silencer would just—well, silence me.

Once I take that irreversible step of confronting him, it’s pretty much game over. If he isn’t who he claims to be, I’d be giving him no choice. Whatever his reason for keeping me alive, I don’t think I’d stay alive very long if he thought I knew the truth.

Go slow. Work it out. Don’t tear through it like you always do, Sullivan. Not your style, but you gotta be methodical for once in your life.

So I pretend nothing’s wrong. Over breakfast, though, I work the conversation around to his pre-Arrival days. What kind of work did he do around the farm? Name it, he says. Drove the tractor, baled hay, fed the animals, repaired equipment, strung barbed wire. My eyes on his hands while my mind makes excuses for him. He always wore gloves is the best one, but I can’t think of a natural-sounding way to ask. So, Evan, you have such soft hands to have grown up on a farm. You must have worn gloves all the time and been even more into hand lotion than most guys, huh?

He doesn’t want to talk about the past; it’s the future he’s worried about. He wants details about the mission. Like every footstep between the farmhouse and Wright-Patterson has to be mapped out, every contingency considered. What if we don’t wait till spring and another blizzard hits? What if we find the base abandoned? How do we pick up Sammy’s trail then? When do we say enough is enough and give up?

“I’ll never give up,” I tell him.

I wait for nightfall. I was never very good at waiting, and he notices my restlessness.

“You’re going to be okay?” Standing by the kitchen door, rifle dangling from his shoulder. Cupping my face tenderly in those soft hands. And me gazing upward into those puppy-dog eyes, brave Cassie, trusting Cassie, mayfly Cassie. Sure, I’ll be fine. You go out and bag a few people, and I’ll pop some corn.

Then locking the door behind him. Watching him step lightly off the back porch and trot toward the trees, heading west, toward the highway, where, as everyone knows, fresh game like deer and rabbit and Homo sapiens like to congregate.

I tear through every room. Four weeks locked up inside it like someone under house arrest, you think I would have poked around a little.

What do I find? Nothing. And a lot.

Family photo albums. There’s baby Evan in the hospital wearing the striped newborn hat. Toddler Evan pushing a plastic lawnmower. Five-year-old Evan sitting on a pony. Ten-year-old Evan on the tractor. Twelve-year-old Evan in a baseball uniform…

And the rest of his family, including Val—I pick her out right away, and seeing the face of the girl who died in his arms and whose clothes I’ve taken brings the whole shitty thing back to me, and suddenly I’m like the lowest person left on Earth. Seeing his family in front of the Christmas tree, gathered around birthday cakes, hiking along a mountain trail, forces it down my throat: the end of Christmas trees and birthday cakes and family vacations and the ten thousand other taken-for-granted things. Each photograph the tolling of a bell, a timer clicking down to the end of normal.

And she’s in some of the pictures, too. Lauren. Tall. Athletic. Oh, and blond. Of course, she would have to be. They make a very attractive couple. And in more than half the pictures, she isn’t looking at the camera; she’s looking at him. Not the way I would look at Ben Parish, all squishy around the eyes. She looks at Evan fiercely, like, This here? It’s mine.

I put the albums away. My paranoia is fading. So he has soft hands, so what? Soft hands are a nice thing. I build a roaring fire to heat up the room and push back the shadows that crowd in on me. So his fingers smell like gunpowder after visiting her grave, so what? There are wild animals running around everywhere. And it wasn’t the kind of moment where you go, Yeah, I went to her grave. Had to shoot a rabid dog coming back, by the way. Ever since he found you, he’s taken care of you, kept you safe, been there for you.

But no matter how much I lecture myself, I can’t calm down. I’m missing something. Something important. I pace back and forth in front of the fireplace, shivering despite the roaring flames. It’s like having an itch you can’t scratch. But what could it be? I know in my gut I’m not going to find anything incriminating, even if I tear through every inch of the house.

But you haven’t searched everywhere, Cassie. You haven’t looked in the one place he wouldn’t expect you to look.

I limp into the kitchen. Not much time now. Grab a heavy jacket from the hook by the door and a flashlight from the cupboard, tuck the Luger into my waistband, and step outside into the bitter cold. Clear sky, the yard bathed in starlight. I try not to think about the mothership a few hundred miles over my head as I shuffle toward the barn. I don’t click on the light until I step inside.

The smell of old manure and mildewed hay. The scampering of rats’ feet on the rotting boards over my head. I swing the light around, over the empty stalls and across the dirt floor, into the hayloft. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, but I keep looking. In every creepy movie ever made, the barn is the prime nesting ground for the things you don’t know you’re looking for and always regret finding.

I find what I’m not looking for under a pile of ratty blankets heaped against the back wall. Something long and dark glinting in the circle of light. I don’t touch it. I reveal it, tossing aside three blankets to reach its resting place.

It’s my M16.

I know it’s mine. I can see my initials in the stock: C.S., scratched there one afternoon while I hid in the little tent in the woods. C.S. for Completely Stupid.

I’d lost it on the median when the Silencer struck from the woods. Left it there in my panic. Decided I couldn’t go back for it. Now here it is, in Evan Walker’s barn. My bestie had found its way back to me.

Do you know how to tell who the enemy is in wartime, Cassie?

I back away from it. Back away from the message it sends. Back all the way to the door while I keep the light shining on its glossy black barrel.

Then I turn and run smack into his rock-hard chest.

55

“CASSIE?” HE SAYS, grabbing my arms to keep me from falling straight back onto my butt. “What are you doing out here?” He glances over my shoulder into the barn.

“I thought I heard a noise.” Dumb! Now he might decide to investigate. But it’s the first thing that pops into my head. Blurting out first thoughts is something I really should work on—if I live past the next five minutes. My heart is pounding so hard, I can feel my ears ringing.

“You thought you…? Cassie, you shouldn’t come out here at night.”

I nod and force myself to look into his eyes. Evan Walker is a noticer. “I know, it was stupid. But you’d been gone a long time.”

“I was stalking some deer.” He’s a big, Evan-shaped shadow in front of me, a shadow with a high-powered rifle against the backdrop of a million suns.

I bet you were. “Let’s go inside, okay? I’m freezing to death.”

He doesn’t move. He’s looking into the barn.

“I checked it out,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Rats.”

“Rats?”

“Yeah. Rats.”

“You heard rats? In the barn? From inside the house?”

“No. How could I hear rats from there?” An exasperated roll of the eyes would be good right about now. Not the nervous laugh that escapes instead. “I came out on the porch for some fresh air.”

“And you heard them from the porch?”

“They were very big rats.” Flirty smile! I whip out what I hope passes for one of those, then I hook my arm through his and pull him toward the house. It’s like trying to move a concrete pole. If he goes inside the barn and sees the exposed rifle, it’s over. Why the hell didn’t I cover up the rifle?

“Evan, it’s nothing. I got spooked, that’s all.”

“Okay.”

He shoves the barn door closed, and we head back to the farmhouse, his arm draped protectively over my shoulders. He lets the arm fall when we reach the door.

Now, Cassie. Quick side step to the right, Luger from your waistband, proper two-handed grip, knees slightly bent, squeeze, don’t pull. Now.

We step inside the warm kitchen. The opportunity passes.

“So I take it you didn’t bag any deer,” I say casually.

“No.” He leans the rifle against the wall, shrugs out of his coat. His cheeks are bright red from the cold.

“Maybe you shot at something else,” I say. “Maybe that’s what I heard.”

He shakes his head. “I didn’t shoot at anything.” He blows on his hands. I follow him into the great room, where he bends in front of the fireplace to warm his hands. I’m standing behind the sofa a few feet away.

My second chance to take him down. Hitting him from this close would not be a challenge. Or it wouldn’t be if his head resembled an empty can of creamed corn, the only kind of target I was used to.

I pull the gun from my waistband.

Finding my rifle in his barn didn’t leave me with many options. It was like being under that car on the highway: hide or face. Doing nothing about it, pretending everything was fine between us, accomplished nothing. Shooting him in the back of the head would accomplish something—it would kill him—but after the Crucifix Soldier, it had become one of my priorities never to kill another innocent person. Better to show my hand now while that hand holds a gun.

“There’s something I should tell you,” I say. My voice is shaking. “I lied about the rats.”

“You found the rifle.” Not a question.

He turns. With his back to the fire, his face is in shadow; I can’t read his expression, but his tone is casual. “I found it a couple of days ago off the highway—remembered you said you dropped one when you ran—then I saw those initials and I figured it had to be yours.”

For a minute I don’t say anything. His explanation makes perfect sense. I just didn’t expect him to jump right into it like that.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I finally ask.

He shrugs. “I was going to. Guess I forgot. What are you doing with that gun, Cassie?”

Oh, I was thinking about blowing your head off, that’s all. Thought you might be a Silencer or maybe a traitor to your species or something along those lines. Ha-ha!

I follow his eyes to the weapon in my hand, and suddenly I feel like bursting into tears.

“We have to trust each other,” I whisper. “Don’t we?”

“Yes,” he says, moving toward me now. “We do.”

“But how… how do you make yourself trust someone?” I say. He’s beside me now. He doesn’t reach for the gun. He’s reaching for me with his eyes. And I want him to catch me before I fall too far away from the Evan-I-thought-I-knew, who saved me to save himself from falling. He’s all I’ve got now. He’s my itty-bitty bush growing out of the cliff that I cling to. Help me, Evan. Don’t let me fall. Don’t let me lose the part of me that makes me human.

“You can’t make yourself believe anything,” he answers softly. “But you can let yourself believe. You can allow yourself to trust.”

I nod, looking up into his eyes. So chocolaty warm. So melty and sad. Damn it, why does he have to be so damn beautiful? And why do I have to be so damn aware of it? And how is my trusting him any different from Sammy’s taking the soldier’s hand before climbing onto that bus? The weird thing is his eyes remind me of Sammy’s—filled with a longing to know if everything will be all right. The Others answered that question with an unequivocal no. So what does that make me if I give Evan the same answer? “I want to. Really, really bad.”

I don’t know how it happened, but my gun is now in his hand. He takes my hand and leads me around to the sofa. Sets the gun on top of Love’s Desperate Desire, sits close to me, but not too close, and rests his elbows on his knees. He rubs his large hands together as if they’re still cold. They’re not; I had just held one.

“I don’t want to leave here,” he confesses. “For a lot of reasons that seemed very good until I found you.” He claps his hands together softly in frustration; it isn’t coming out right. “I know you didn’t ask to be my reason for going on with… with everything. But from the moment I found you…” He turns and grabs my hands in his, and suddenly I’m a little scared. His grip is hard, his eyes swim with tears. It’s like I’m holding him back from tumbling over the edge of a cliff.

“I had it all wrong,” he says. “Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn’t. To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.”